Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Stray Gods: The Roleplaying musical, a well as content related to PTSD and suicide.
I hate making decisions. It’s a personality flaw that I’ve become quite comfortable living in. With every choice, there’s so much potential for things to go wrong that it’s often so much easier to just sit and do nothing, because if things start to crumble around you (and they will), hey, at least it isn’t because of that thing you did! It’s because of that thing youdidn’tdo! My high-concept-sitcom-obsessed brain hyperfixates on characters like Abed Nadir from Community, who’s always wondering “what’s going on in all those other timelines,” or Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place, who literally undecides himself to death and into an iteration of hell.
These are my people. I’m one of them.
And yet, somehow, I adoreStray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, a visual novel with gameplay that centers on forcing me to make tough decisions that will affect the lives of everyone around me but gives me a painfully short time limit to make each one, resulting in snap judgments that I immediately fear I’m going to regret. I gave itone of the highest review scores on the Internet, if my love for this game wasn’t clear enough, which I think really says a lot about its quality given how much it forced me out of my comfort zone.
Still, there was this one part that got a little too uncomfortable, to the point where, even in the end, having played the scene through in a lot of different ways, I still can’t help but walk away from it feeling like some sort of villain. I’m talking about Aphrodite’s party.
If you’re not familiar with the backstory of Stray Gods… no, you know what? Go play it. It’ll take about eight hours with light snacks and bathroom breaks. Just leave the tab open; we’ll still be here.
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Ah, fine, I suppose I should give context for those not in the know,but I’m serious about that spoiler warning. Stray Gods takes place in a world where the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon, here called Idols, walk hidden among us in modern society. Each Idol bears inside them something called an eidolon, which contains their essence and memory and magical powers. While powerful and functionally immortal, their bodies can become mortally wounded, and each Idol can pass their eidolon onto a mortal of their choosing, who will immediately gain their powers and, eventually, the memories of everyone to bear the eidolon before them (which is the situation you find yourself in as the newly minted last Muse). Sometimes, Idols even choose to die and pass the proverbial torch … or not pass the torch and let their line end.
Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is one of the highest-ranking Idols—one of just four in The Chorus, a holy congress or parliament, if you will—and it’s not until after you’ve arrived at her party that another god tells you that this is her way of saying goodbye yet again. But she’s so much more than just her job; she’s a beloved figure among all the idols, none moreso than her son, Eros. And it’s with the uncharacteristically maudlin God of Sex that the tale really starts to get uncomfortable.
Eros tells you how this death is just another link in an endless chain for his mother. Each incarnation of Aphrodite only lasts 20 years before the night terrors and PTSD flashbacks take her. She’s tried everything, from magic to medicine to human therapy, and nothing ever sticks, so he’s begging you to use your magical, musical powers of persuasion to make her break the cycle; to stay and fight and try to get better.
Aphrodite enters her party with great fanfare and a brimming smile masking all that pain, and she’s so pleased you’re there to sing her to sleep, since your predecessor, Calliope, who previously refused to come to these parties on moral principle. Then the song begins, and while her flamboyant attitude had me expecting some high-octane jazz number, instead I’m led in with hand drums slowly thumping out a mournful, militaristic beat, and the following lyrics:
“We let them rise. We let it happen. We waited far too long. We thought we shouldn’t intervene. We were wrong. We were wrong.”
And now I’m expecting to hear of some epic battle of gods versus titans, or a civil war atop Olympus, but as the song unravels, the story gets even more twisted and tied into our world, and the gods' reason for leaving their homeland starts to take shape.
Ares, God of War, sat out the first world war among the humans, but he’d be damned if he’d miss the second, so he joined the Nazis and sold out his own people. Then they took Aphrodite, making her a prisoner and planning to exploit her power for their own selfish means. And yet it was her husband, Haephestus, a man she “abhorred,” who saved her, “made a deal with our enemy’s enemy, made a secret weapon so my captors let me go.” (That’d be the atom bomb. Way more interesting story than Oppenheimer, but I digress.)
But Heaphestus never returned. That was the deal. He’s now the weaponsmith of whichever allied government he bargained with, and he’s not coming back. Survivor’s guilt; refugee status, PTSD: that’s a lot of burdens for Aphrodite to bear. I get it. I’ve only dealt with one of those things, and even I’ve had times when I didn’t want to carry on anymore. The scene and the song hit close to home, and they don’t pull their punches; they land them right in you gut. But Aphrodite can survive this quasi-suicide, and she’s done it many times, just to forget her pain for a while, even if it hurts the ones she loves.
On my first playthrough, I tried hard to distract her, to focus on the good aspects of her life, her strength and survival, and how her husband wouldn’t have wanted this for her. The conversation was two-sided—no outside interference—but in the end, when given the opportunity to use my powers to force her to see reason, I couldn’t do it, and I told her that I wouldn’t force her to do anything. I let her fall. I let it happen.Was I wrong?
I was dreading this scene on my second run through the game. I tried a less forceful approach; just let her talk through it herself. That’s when Eros intervened. He told her that her actions were taking away her problems for a little while, but he had to stay and live with the pain of losing her over and over.The crucial decision came, and this time, I flipped the stick decidedly to the left. I got mean. I yelled at her; told her to stop whining and to face the problems in front of her for the sake of her son. And I used my powers to do it. And she stayed. And I still felt so empty.
The last time a game made me feel this way—scratch that—theonlyother time a game has made me feel this way, I had lone-wandered my way right out ofFallout 3’s Capital Wasteland and into an even worse post-apocalyptic city: The Pitt (one of the game’s several impressive DLC add-ons).
The city is suffering from a plague that turns people into mindless, hideous monsters called trogs that wander the streets aimlessly, making horrible gurgling sounds (otherwise known as Pittsburgh Steelers fans,amI right?!?).
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Most humans who haven’t fully succumbed to the disease live as slaves, and so do you, once you’re caught. After earning my freedom, I burst into my former master’s home ready to kill him and liberate all my brothers and sisters, but then I saw her: a baby, completely immune to the contagion, and the only real hope for a cure for the people of The Pitt. But Ashur, the man I thought a cruel and wicked man, explains he needs to capture slaves to keep the economy going and buy him more time to perfect the cure, as the contagion has rendered the populace sterile. No new children means no new adults means no more workers, and he can’t save his empire without them, though he vows to free them if and when the cure is ready for healing the masses.
And that was how I justified slavery. I hated that choice, and I hated myself for making it. It made me queasy and ashamed, but in this extreme circumstance, it seemed like the best option, much in the same way that robbing the Goddess of Love of her free will and forcing her to live with the pain seemed like the right thing to do.
As for Aphrodite, I hope I did right by her. I really do. Maybe I damned her to unending psychological torture, but I want to believe she can save herself. “I think she’s working on it, and she’s aware of the risks.” That’s what the main character’s counselor says in the epilogue of my favoritenon-video game musical, Next to Normal, but it applies here too, as do that character’s final sung words in the show:“And you find some way to survive, and you find out you don’t have to be happy at all to be happy you’re alive.”
That is my hope for you, Aphrodite, and I pray I made the right choice.
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