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eaglefairy · 2 months

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I have no liveblog to offer this weekend, so instead please take 2000 words of Meyneth analysis because I have opinions and I'm no longer afraid to share them. Summary: According to the canon of xenoblade 1, Meyneth is either an existentially less powerful god than Zanza, or her stated morals are in direct conflict with the actions she takes within the plot of the game. I walk through the reasons the former is at most implied by the game while being contradicted by the game's events and lore and what about Meyneth's characterization points towards the latter explanation. Huge thanks to @likestoimagine16 for chatting with me about this and looking this over before I posted it, it was super fun!

(Before we begin, a note: all of the following analysis is based solely on the canon of Xenoblade 1. I will not be incorporating any potentially relevant information from 2, Future Connected, or Future Redeemed. Anything from after the first game is just not true to who Meyneth is or to the characterizations of the people surrounding her in 1.)

Introduction For all of her stated importance in-game as the Mechonis's soul, Meyneth really does not do a lot during the game. The sum total of her actions are as follows:

Speaks to Zanza at Prison Island, begging him to cease their war and let the living be at peace

Saves the party from Egil at Galahad Fortress

Briefly acts from within Fiora to guard the party from Gadolt after his boss fight, but does not speak

Reveals herself properly for the first time in Agniratha and exposits the history of the Machina to the party

Saves the party from the explosion and holds them in the air long enough for Miqol to catch them

Battles Zanza at Mechonis Core and dies

At first glance, this doesn't seem too terrible. Zanza also doesn't actively do a ton over the course of the game; in fact, he probably does fewer discrete actions as himself than Meyneth does. There is one big difference between them, though: Zanza is inactive because he has a plan. He's controlling the narrative via the passage of fate, making him extremely active even if the party and player don't know he's there. Meyneth, on the other hand, is almost entirely reactive to what Zanza is doing and gives us no indication that she has any sort of plan to fight him. The most she does directly as a means of fighting him is ask to talk to him at Prison Island (which Zanza immediately rebuffs) and then debate him on philosophy before dying at Mechonis Core.

Option 1: Weaker God I can see two potential explanations for this inaction. Option one: she’s just less powerful than him, and so any attempt by her to fight him is immediately doomed to fail. There are some things in-game that support this. Most strikingly to me, she and Alvis never directly interact. For a while I was concerned that they never directly acknowledge each other’s existence at all, leaving open the possibility that Meyneth doesn’t know Alvis exists*. Alvis does have a single line of thought immediately pre-Mechonis Core where he acknowledges that it’s Meyneth residing within Fiora. However, Meyneth herself never acknowledges Alvis. If only Zanza has direct access to Alvis’s power in Providence, that would in fact make Meyneth significantly less powerful and extremely disadvantaged against him.

*To be clear, I don’t actually think this is the case. Based on everything else in the game, it would be absurd if Meyneth didn’t know about Alvis. Where else could she possibly get her divine power from? However, I do think it’s notable that the writers didn’t consider it necessary or narratively valuable to show Alvis and Meyneth interacting as an overall indicator of her status in the narrative, so I’m pointing it out here.

However, very little else in the game supports this. Both Zanza and Meyneth have titan bodies, they seem to be about evenly matched within those bodies given that the battle at the beginning of the game ended in a standstill draw and not Zanza winning right then and there, and both Zanza and Meyneth seem to have created successful civilizations of people on their titan bodies.

If anything, Meyneth might have been “better” at it, as the Machina worship her directly while neither the Homs nor the High Entia know of Zanza. The Homs do hold the Monado in reverence as the fabled sword of the Bionis that can cut through Mechon and they have their funerary rites centered on the Bionis, but neither of those require a direct knowledge of Zanza of the kind we see the Machina have of Meyneth. The High Entia I find even more interesting; while it would make sense for them to have intentionally erased the cultural knowledge of Zanza after the first battle of the titans when they sealed Arglas and the Monado away, there’s no evidence of that cultural knowledge ever existing, considering there are multiple side quests concerning High Entian history and not a hint of Zanza’s presence as an object of worship. (Would the Valak Mountain War God count as an aspect of Zanza in this sense? Interesting idea to think about…)

Additionally, Zanza says “Now that I have both Monados, I should be at one with the passage of fate,” during one of the cutscenes before the final boss fight. That implies that Meyneth’s presence in this world as the bearer of a Monado interfered with his control over the passage of fate (which is corroborated by Shulk interfering with Zanza’s sight during the final battle). That in turn suggests that Meyneth had some amount of power over fate as a god, if we believe control over fate to be something that can be divided as Zanza alludes to in his dialogue. All of this leads me to believe that if Meyneth is a weaker god than Zanza, it doesn’t affect any of her actions in the backstory or during the events of the game.

Option 2: Weaker Writing That leaves the other option: a writing flaw in which Meyneth’s stated character does not align with her actions and morals within the game. We’ve been through her actions, but what are her stated morals? She believes in the right of life to self-determination. She sees Zanza’s actions specifically as directly in conflict with said stated right, and potentially the existence of gods as a whole. Most of all, she believes in peace to the exclusion of things such as revenge or justice. She (and the other Machina) want Egil to give up his plan of revenge and live in peace with them to heal from what Zanza has done. When she’s speaking to Zanza telepathically on Prison Island, she asks him how many more he’ll kill and then tells him she’s there to talk. Even when they’re battling in Mechonis Core, Meyneth is more focused on arguing against his philosophy and telling him that gods should not interfere with the lives of their people.

This is the heart of the problem. Meyneth is portrayed as an unconditionally good character, Zanza’s rival in every way who wants mortal lives to be lived in peace, not under the tyranny of gods. However, her actions and apparent values within the game make her near criminally passive against a god who fundamentally does not care about any of that. Zanza creates and destroys all life in order to sustain his own existence (and I have to assume also Meyneth’s? If she’s figured out the secret to divine immortality and hasn’t shared it with Zanza to make him stop that just makes her even worse, so…). Narrative choices are narrative choices, but that Meyneth would still be at the “I can fix him” stage after who knows how many cycles of this is a narrative choice that strains my disbelief.

Characters choosing to adhere to their morals even when it puts them at a disadvantage against their enemies is not a bad thing; however, having her hold to pacificism to this extent just makes her seem selfish and callous. It is simply incompatible with her stated goal of opposing Zanza when Zanza’s actions are so extreme. And to be clear, her choice to continue to try and talk Zanza down wouldn’t be so bad if the narrative didn’t absolutely stonewall her for it. It’s very clear that Zanza is not open to negotiation, and Shulk doesn’t win by convincing him that living beings have inherent value outside of the resource they are to him. It just makes Meyneth look silly to keep trying to talk the genocidal maniac down from doing genocide.

Objections Before I conclude, I want to take a moment to address some objections I could see to what I’ve laid out here so far. First, as far as her actions go, Meyneth does have Vanea place her into Fiora with the stated intent to get closer to Shulk, but it’s still unclear what the end goal was there. Was it to counterbalance Zanza’s influence on Shulk as the wielder of the Monado? If so, Meyneth does remarkably little towards that goal. The party isn’t ascending the Mechonis because of anything Meyneth said to them, they’re going up to fight Egil. They don’t even know Meyneth is there until Agniratha, and the exposition there is mostly delivered by hologram. Meyneth never directly interacts with Shulk about anything, let alone the cycle of war, which I feel is the bare minimum action if her goal is to erode Zanza’s influence on Shulk.

Notably, there are some suggestions in-game that imply peace with Zanza could be possible. While I wouldn’t believe Zanza’s definition of “friendship” that he says he longed for at the end of the game to be reliable or at all similar to what friendship actually is, Alvis does repeat that Zanza wanted friendship and I’m much more inclined to take him at his word. After the final battle, Alvis says that Zanza’s future and the desires of the party (and by extension Meyneth) could have coexisted, “but that time has passed”. However, the game doesn’t indicate exactly when the time passed; the timing certainly implies that it was Zanza’s death that ended the possibility, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been earlier.

In addition, we’re given no indication of how likely that event was. Given that nothing else in the game supports Zanza’s world being compatible with the freedom of mortal lives, I find it likely that the chance was infinitesimally small, something never quite impossible but extremely unlikely nonetheless. While this does open up the possibility that Meyneth was justified in continuing to try to talk to him, the way it’s tossed in at the last second and is only told to us, never shown in any way throughout the game (through, say, High Entian legends or any kind of relationships between Zanza and his disciples) make me more inclined to believe it’s a last-second effort to add false depth to Zanza’s character.

Conclusion Overall, Meyneth suffers from a lack of focus that is sadly common to many of the female characters in xenoblade 1. A lack of insight as to her inner thoughts combined with her extreme pacificism make for a narratively weak character who seems to be either fundamentally weaker in-story than her sworn nemesis or so committed to talking to him and making him realize the error of his ways that it literally gets her killed. I find it most likely that the writers simply intended for her to be weaker than Zanza for unspecified reasons: disappointing, but not surprising.

What gets to me the most is that it didn’t have to be this way. Even if she were just as strong as Zanza and/or more willing to fight against him, she would still have a significant disadvantage against him that sets the ground for the conflict seen in the game: her care for the lives and wills of mortals. Her care to minimize collateral damage in the form of mortal lives will always give Zanza the upper hand in battle, whether directly in the form of attacking mortals being another way to hurt Meyneth or indirectly in the fact that Zanza has no qualms about manipulating mortals to do his will, while Meyneth likely would consider such a thing to be immoral and avoid it. That, to me, would be a far more interesting setup than what we got in-game.

If you made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading! Please drop a comment or leave some tags, I'd love to keep discussing this.

#original tag #xenoblade chronicles #xenoblade chronicles 1 #meyneth #fandom meta #my writing

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