Fatal Frame meta for Fandom_Level, level 1

[estirose]

I'm doing five levels (40 metas) for Fandom_Level. I figured it would be a change from writing fic.

Here are the metas I'm using to clear level 1. Note that these are all spoilery for the games.

1: Abduction as Seduction, or an alternate view of Mafuyu's motivations at the end of Fatal Frame I.
2: Amnesia, or the awareness of ghosts in the games.
3: Angst, which pretty much describes the whole game for players, characters, and ghosts.
4: Alternate Universes, which ponders how the various game endings can be thought of as semi-canonical alternate universes.
5: Bad Boys, or why Itsuki's good idea to rebel ultimately caused everything to go wrong.
6: Blindness, or tactics of the blind and blinding ghosts of the game.
7: Girls, or a discussion on International Womens' day of why I like the Fatal Frame games.
8: Blood, and how it's used to great effect in the games.

Also, thank you to the people who maintain the wiki at "Beyond the Camera's Lens", which I've found very useful for checking my facts.

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Meta 5: Bad Boy/Rebel

[estirose]

For Want of a Nail, or maybe why being a rebel and stopping a sacrifice is a bad idea. 783 words.

The Fatal Frame universe is full of people doing bad things for what they consider to be good reasons. There's the Himuro family in the first game and the villagers of Minakami in the second, who sacrifice humans, the Kuze shrine maidens, who cause the pain and agony of the surrounding area to be inked on one (willing) sacrifice, and You Haibara, who does unethical experiments to save his sister, even getting to the point of kidnapping little girls to participate in a ceremony that might heal her.

But there are those who rebel against the whole thing, and make things worse. And the biggest offender is the character of Itsuki Tachibana of the second Fatal Frame game. When you meet Itsuki, he's trapped in a jail, the town storehouse. He wants what Mio wants, which is to save her sister and get the heck out of there. He's pretty much the only non-hostile ghost in the whole game that's not a vanishing or hidden ghost. And he provides clues to help Mio and the player get out of the terrifying experience.

As Mio and the player start unraveling clues, however, we learn more about his motivations, and his ultimate responsibility for Mio and Mayu being caught up in the situation.

We start getting clues as to Itsuki's feelings through his conversations with Mio. But it's when we get to chapter 4 that we find out what's going on; Butterfly Diary 3 is the first one that indicates that Itsuki is planning on getting Sae and Yae out of there. At the end of the chapter, we get a flashback of Itsuki getting Yae and Sae to run away from the village. Unfortunately, Sae falls over a ledge and is ultimately caught.

Other clues are present in the diaries as well. Ryozo Munakata's entries indicate that Itsuki intended to have him get Sae and Yae to safety - a fact that he didn't realize until he was already in the village and Itsuki was warning him to leave through Yae. He also notes that Itsuki has been terrified of the ceremony since they were both children, which might explain why Itsuki was so keen on not having Yae and Sae go through the ceremony.

In fact, Itsuki's own diaries, the Bound Diaries (or String-Bound Diaries, depending on which version of the game you play), state that he first intends to go through the ceremonies to save Sae and Yae from doing so, in the first diary. If that fails, he intends to go get them out of the village. He's dismayed that his friend Ryozo Munakata comes in response to his letter, per the third diary, because he knows that he'll be used as a Kusabi sacrifice. He makes no comment in his own diaries about Ryozo getting out of there, but he does indicate in his last entry, Diary V, that he's intending to escape and to get the crests so that Yae and Sae can escape.

So, his own motivation is to save Yae from having to kill her sister like he had to do with his brother. He wants to save her from the fate he's been scared about from childhood. His fear is so encompassing that he doesn't seem to consider what will happen if Yae and Sae's ceremony doesn't take place, or goes wrong. In his fear, he rebels and puts their welfare above everybody else's - including his nearly-blind sister Chitose's.

It's because he gets Yae to escape that Sae comes back, fueled by the Abyss' hate. Sae wanted to die by her sister's hand, per her diary entry, and the Abyss took the improper ceremony of hanging her alone, and her own desperation to see the ritual done correctly, to use her to destroy everything. Because Yae was gone, the village became trapped in its own time loop, Sae and Seijiro Makabe were resurrected as evil ghosts, and a lot of other people, such as Miyako Sudo, her boyfriend Masumi, and the Drowned Woman, got caught up in the village's curse. For want of a nail, Yae, everything fell apart. And Yae likely wouldn't have left if Itsuki hadn't gotten her to.

So, in rebelling, in trying to save Yae and Sae, Itsuki messed up everything. The whole thing that Mio and Mayu go through are all his fault. In some ways, in helping Mio get through some of the ordeals, he does help a little in remedying what he did. But he doesn't do it consciously. He's still trying to save Yae and Sae. He still doesn't realize what he did. He rebelled, and in a dark, terrible way, his entire village paid the price.