mintsui:

perfectharmonyloveschaos:

The Zen Garden

Okay so one detail (of many) I found in Detroit to be not just creepy, but down right unsettling story-wise and traumatizing for the character(s) involved is the Zen Garden, or more so, what it represents and how it can be perceived throughout the game.

For one,we always meet any new Connor there. This is a brand new, straight outta’ Cyberlife boi ready to do his job and happy to do so. Eager, even, to surpass the Connor before him. But… how does each Connor identify? Are they all different, separate Connor’s or just one entity (like Jerry) that share multiple vessels?  And for another thing,with the introduction of a new Connor (or death of an old one, if you wanna see it that way) comes a very sinster addition to the zen garden.

Graves.

I don’t mean like a little nudge or mark like a machine would be treated, simply something in need of replacing… no, I mean fully-fledged Graves.

The zen garden, in a single chapter and slight mistake by the player, by a Connor, completely changes forever. It isn’t just a pretty, calm garden ‘far away from the noise of the world’ as Amanda says. It is much darker, much more twisted than that.

It’s a graveyard.

A graveyard marking every lost Connor, every mistake and blunder made that lead to  life or death, an increased relationship bar or software instability recorded. The zen garden is meant to be a comfort to Connor, a place to update and be looked over, to be studied and to learn and be critiqued.

Whenever Connor fails – be it in locating Jericho, being destroyed in Cyberlife tower or during Markus’s speech – Connor is brought to the zen Garden. Whether as a ‘new’ Connor told to be better, do better, not die because it hinders the investigation… or to be killed, be left as an empty, kneeling corspe in the snow or to watch his body kill Android kind’s only hope either by raising a gun or giving up.

It is his grave.

A graveyard disguised as a beautiful garden the moment Connor first steps foot there. And, if you were to say that every Connor is the same person – same memories, same appearance, same mind – than those graves are even more. They show Connor his death, they remind him of every event, every bullet to the head or slip on a roof. Connor remembers them all.

Cyberlife lets him remember… they make sure he is obedient, he is afraid and eager not to complete his mission, but to avoid opening his eyes in that damn garden and finding another stone. They made him deviant. They made it so he would be afraid.

Funny. I was just playing the Zen Garden sections in order to look for details last night. It’s easily the best set in the game, the most symbolic and poignant. I wish it was utilized more. The only thing I’d gotten out of it during my first few playthroughs is that the garden gets worse the more unstable – and therefore deviant and bad – Connor’s software gets. He’s really not supposed to fail. He’s not supposed to take the choices that hinder his investigation (and many players do). The first scene in “Last Chance, Connor” is the boy literally walking on thin ice, and serves to establish a power dynamic that may have by then been forgotten: his investigation is all that matters, it’s not his place to ask questions, and he will be destroyed if he fails.

The graves are a constant reminder of that.

And it’s weird. Why are they even there? It’s not like a machine can grieve. Or fear.

They know. They fucking know. They put them there to torture him. And Connor, that poor boy, is stuck there, talking to Amanda, who – most unsettlingly – both threatens and reassures him. He tells her that he is of no importance. Because that’s what he’s expected to say. Because Connor is a tool, not a person. His mission is to obey.

The Zen Garden is a terrifying, awful place. 

(But maybe there is a possibility he can claw his way out.)