Latrinsorm
02-27-2016, 01:47 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqAvvwu0kMU
I remember us having some Protomen fans here and so I thought I'd bring Act II to their attention, because it is very good and because I find Dr. Wily's character motivation very interesting. The rest of this post will be me going into that at great length, including spoilers.
.
In Act I, Wily has no lyrics and he is mentioned only briefly. Hope Rides Alone tells us:
"No one was left who could remember how it had happened,
how the world had fallen under darkness.
At least no one who would do anything.
No one who would oppose the robots.
No one who would challenge their power,
or so Dr. Wily believed..."
"Light was a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas.
Ideas forbidden in Wily's society."
"And so Light worked, far into the night, when the watchful eyes of Wily's robots weren't upon him."
"built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots."
"And as the smoke cleared!
Wily rose above the countless robots remaining. Protoman was wounded, low on energy, struggling to remain standing as Wily ordered the final attack.
The death of Protoman."
He's never mentioned again in the lyrics (not counting Due Vendetta), but in addition to lyrics the Protomen include narration in their liner notes. From Vengeance:
"Standing between the sea of men and Megaman's final purpose is an army of robots, commanded by one leader. This is not Dr. Wily. Wily has no power on a field of battle. This is Wily's second in command."
And finally from The Sons of Fate:
"Dr. Wily stood high above the robots, high above the crowd of men, high above their broken heroes. With a wave of his hand, the robot army had their orders. They advanced on the crowd to punish them for their thoughts of rebellion. Men fell in waves. Those most eager to watch the bloodshed were the first victims of the slaughter."
Everything in Act I is clearly unsympathetic towards Wily, and we should keep that in mind. Still, I think there are interesting points to consider:
1. Wily does not believe that no one can challenge his power, but the robots' power.
2. Ideas forbidden in Wily's society... forbidden by whom?
3. Wily's army of evil robots, not evil Wily's army of robots.
4. Even in the slaughter, we get no information about Wily's intent. Does waving his hand mean he wants the army to kill, or does waving his hand mean "do whatever you want"?
.
Now, Act II is a prequel to Act I. Dr. Albert Wily has a significant speaking role, but in Intermission we first get a letter from Dr. Thomas Light to his dearest Emily Stanton. Obviously this is an even more unreliable source than the narrator of Act I, but here are the claims:
"I fear I've built a great and powerful evil. Or rather, together, Albert and I have built it. I know that I am to blame. I allowed Albert to persuade me to change the designs."
"Albert convinced me that even with the new Geological Unmanned Terraforming System we designed, the task of extracting the ore is still too dangerous for a human. He plans to completely replace human workers in the mining sector."
"What is worse, the latest prototypes have been revised to carry small firearms."
"I will speak to him tonight on the matter. Perhaps I can persuade him to scrap the whole project."
Yes! Socioeconomics is a major factor in Act II! I was as surprised as you. We'll go into it more later, but I feel like the only reasonable reaction to describing the program as "a great and powerful evil" is "grow up, Dr. Light." The atom bomb is a great and powerful evil. You built a self checkout kiosk. Small firearms or no, let's tone down the rhetoric a little.
Anyway, in The Good Doctor we learn that Dr. Light's father died working the unspecified mines. Working in a mine is apparently as insanely dangerous in the Protomen reality as it is in real life, and he has a personal connection to the ramifications of that danger, but apparently he feels the unspecified system he designed to make mining easier? safer? less necessary? is plenty and unmanned mining is terrible because they took our jobs. Wily has a dramatically different perspective:
"Tom, listen to yourself, then listen carefully to me.
If you replace the working parts, you get a different machine.
The man who turns the wheels, they will follow
Anywhere he leads.
"They've waited so long for this day
There is no price they wouldn't pay
For someone else to lead them
Don't turn your back on me!"
Light (Wily)
"I only want to help.
(You are a fool.) You underestimate the character of man.
(They are weaker than you think) You think that they'll surrender if you bind their working hands.
But they are strong (Just wait and see.)
We will build cities in a day. (Men would cower at the sight.)
We will build towers to the heavens. (Man was not built for such a height.)
We will be heroes. (We will build heroes.)"
"Thomas:
Men sleep tonight with hands of bone. They will awake with hands of steel.
And with these hands we will destroy. And with these hands we will rebuild.
Albert:
And we will stand above our city,
rising high above her streets.
From tops of buildings we will look
at all that lies beneath our feet.
And we will raise our hands above us,
cold steel shining in the sun,
and with these hands that will not bleed,
your father's battle will be won!"
There's a LOT going on here, and to me it all adds up to one thing: Wily is not seeking power for power's sake, he doesn't want to be the most powerful man in the world. He is a transhumanist. He looks at humans and sees fear, obedience, and in general the arbitrary constraints imposed by a fickle, openly antagonistic designer (God, nature, ourselves, take your pick). There is no price men wouldn't pay for someone else to lead them, men will cower at the sight of technological progress, men were not built for the heavens... and look again at the last stanza. We will raise our cold steel hands. I don't think he's being poetic, I think he literally means cyberneticization, and definitely not in the "okay gimme a laser eye and a rocket foot let's have some laughs" sense, but in the evolutionary sense. Neanderthals didn't die out because we went around murdering them, but because we survived what they couldn't. Think how much more dramatic survival of the fittest becomes when we cross the border between biology and technology.
.
Note also that Wily uses the first person plural, but I doubt very much he is referring to himself and Light given what happens next: The Father of Death. Emily is going to Thomas' house, and she finds...
"A man was bent over the desk rummaging through the drawers frantically. It was Albert Wily. He turned, startled, and looked at Emily; the hint of a smile crossed his face."
"Emily: What are you doing here? (Albert: Let me take you away.)
I'm not going anywhere. (He will be nothing when this runs its course.)
He will be everything that a man
is supposed to be."
"Albert Wily's eyes grew cold as Emily's rejection of him became clear. He turned to the machine standing at the door and quickly slid his finger across his own throat. The robot moved silently towards Emily as Wily slid through the window, onto the fire escape, and into the streets below."
The robot kills Emily, yadda yadda yadda.
This part doesn't make a lot of sense, either in my weird theories or in the work itself. What is Wily looking for, and why would he be frantic? Light has already turned on the machines, both men have said they believe there is no going back. Even if Wily was lying and there was something critical in the drawers, he leaves without any further searching after he finds Emily, and I'm reasonably sure she couldn't fit into a desk drawer. Why go himself in the first place when he's got robots to do his bidding?
Anyway, the rest of it suggests on first reading that Wily is into Emily, but I don't think that's it at all. Look again at the dialogue: "He will be nothing when this runs its course" "He will be everything that a man is supposed to be". Wily will go on to frame Light for Emily's murder and rig the trial so that Light is found not guilty, but that's clearly not part of his plan at first, so Light will be "nothing" in some other way... what if Wily is again referring to the end of humanity? We know Light opposes robots taking man's jobs, clearly Light will also oppose robots taking man's place in the ecosphere. What if Emily knows all about Wily's transhumanist streak, and her "rejection" is phrased not as romantic but philosophical... a man is supposed to be. She (like we) sees humanity as ordained, as intended. Wily sees us as a stepping stone, just another link in the chain, no more worthy of sacralization than homo ergaster before us.
.
Wily's last lines are in The Hounds.
"Albert Wily was born for this moment. He answered the reporters' eager questions about the disappearance of his partner calmly and evenly with the story he'd rehearsed. Inside he was teeming with contempt for these men who were turning the story from the real headline: the unveiling of his newest marvel. ... No matter. Soon these men and their questions would be obsolete."
"What kind of man builds a machine to kill a girl?
No he did not use his hands.
Like a smart man, he used a tool."
Note that one translation of homo sapiens is "smart man", and that a traditional (though long abandoned) definition of humans involved tool use! Wily steps away from the reporters and speaks to himself:
"There is a flame that I've been fanning. There is a fire waiting to catch.
There is a hell that has been building from the moment we first met.
If there ever was a time, if there ever was a chance,
to undo the things I've done and wash these bloodstains from my hands,
it has passed and been forgotten. These are the paths that we must take,
'cause you and I, Tom, we are men and we can bend and we can break.
If you think that you can run, if you think that you can stand,
well you forget who turned this city on, you forget who plugged this city in!
They'll not switch it off again."
Okay. This is an amazing soliloquy to go out on. Wily takes very little agency over his actions, and again, not in the "hee hee hee i'm so bad neener neener" supervillain sense that you might expect from Captain Eyebrows with the skull castle. From his perspective it's as inevitable and as painful as fish crawling out on land. He recognizes his guilt, recognizes he can never wash the bloodstains from his hands, but it's in a distant sense.
And that's it! He has no more lines. He doesn't unleash an army of ambulatory killing machines. He doesn't overthrow the government. How the World Fell Under Darkness tells us:
"Morning after morning, the men and women of the city awoke to find a bright new world. Everything was remade. Made better. Made brighter. The streets were swept. The undesirables, the homeless, the criminal element of the city, systematically vanished.
The single screen on top of the tower sent out signals to the now hundreds of satellite screens. The factories were fully automated. The mines run entirely by machine. The men that found themselves suddenly living lives of leisure crowded the bars, slowly imbibing the generous severances they'd received, not so much as a single ill word grumbled towards their replacements. The city was a bright and shining beacon of light... a steel-plated heaven."
Things go bad, obviously, and maybe I'm overly influenced by Childhood's End, but all I'm saying is everything dies. Humanity is going to die. Wily could very easily have chosen to send Fire Man out there to torch a bunch of orphanages, had Guts Man punch out the army, etc. Instead he gives us peace and long life. He also has a secret police and doesn't tolerate dissent: I'm not saying he's nice. I'm just saying this is another example of him being transhumanist, no more totalitarian than crating your dog.
"A generation grew up inside the metal hands that gently circled the neck of the city. Some of them grew up hating the city, fearing the machines. There was one boy in particular. His name was Joe."
"Joe: We're given only what we need.
There's gotta be something better, Something that feels more alive."
Not to belabor the point made about mining, but grow up Joe. Millions of children starve to death every year in the pre-robot world. By your own admission Wily solves that and you want to cry about ennui? Give me a break. I'm not saying the whole murdering dissenters thing is justified, I'm just pointing out again that Wily didn't need to create a post-scarcity world to take power. He went out of his way to make our lives easy, and not to pacify us: we pose absolutely no threat to his army of unstoppable killing machines.
.
So, in conclusion. Wily's behavior and language is inconsistent with both genocide and totalitarianism. I feel that transhumanism is the most coherent explanation, and a more interesting motive than Wily gets in the games.
I remember us having some Protomen fans here and so I thought I'd bring Act II to their attention, because it is very good and because I find Dr. Wily's character motivation very interesting. The rest of this post will be me going into that at great length, including spoilers.
.
In Act I, Wily has no lyrics and he is mentioned only briefly. Hope Rides Alone tells us:
"No one was left who could remember how it had happened,
how the world had fallen under darkness.
At least no one who would do anything.
No one who would oppose the robots.
No one who would challenge their power,
or so Dr. Wily believed..."
"Light was a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas.
Ideas forbidden in Wily's society."
"And so Light worked, far into the night, when the watchful eyes of Wily's robots weren't upon him."
"built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots."
"And as the smoke cleared!
Wily rose above the countless robots remaining. Protoman was wounded, low on energy, struggling to remain standing as Wily ordered the final attack.
The death of Protoman."
He's never mentioned again in the lyrics (not counting Due Vendetta), but in addition to lyrics the Protomen include narration in their liner notes. From Vengeance:
"Standing between the sea of men and Megaman's final purpose is an army of robots, commanded by one leader. This is not Dr. Wily. Wily has no power on a field of battle. This is Wily's second in command."
And finally from The Sons of Fate:
"Dr. Wily stood high above the robots, high above the crowd of men, high above their broken heroes. With a wave of his hand, the robot army had their orders. They advanced on the crowd to punish them for their thoughts of rebellion. Men fell in waves. Those most eager to watch the bloodshed were the first victims of the slaughter."
Everything in Act I is clearly unsympathetic towards Wily, and we should keep that in mind. Still, I think there are interesting points to consider:
1. Wily does not believe that no one can challenge his power, but the robots' power.
2. Ideas forbidden in Wily's society... forbidden by whom?
3. Wily's army of evil robots, not evil Wily's army of robots.
4. Even in the slaughter, we get no information about Wily's intent. Does waving his hand mean he wants the army to kill, or does waving his hand mean "do whatever you want"?
.
Now, Act II is a prequel to Act I. Dr. Albert Wily has a significant speaking role, but in Intermission we first get a letter from Dr. Thomas Light to his dearest Emily Stanton. Obviously this is an even more unreliable source than the narrator of Act I, but here are the claims:
"I fear I've built a great and powerful evil. Or rather, together, Albert and I have built it. I know that I am to blame. I allowed Albert to persuade me to change the designs."
"Albert convinced me that even with the new Geological Unmanned Terraforming System we designed, the task of extracting the ore is still too dangerous for a human. He plans to completely replace human workers in the mining sector."
"What is worse, the latest prototypes have been revised to carry small firearms."
"I will speak to him tonight on the matter. Perhaps I can persuade him to scrap the whole project."
Yes! Socioeconomics is a major factor in Act II! I was as surprised as you. We'll go into it more later, but I feel like the only reasonable reaction to describing the program as "a great and powerful evil" is "grow up, Dr. Light." The atom bomb is a great and powerful evil. You built a self checkout kiosk. Small firearms or no, let's tone down the rhetoric a little.
Anyway, in The Good Doctor we learn that Dr. Light's father died working the unspecified mines. Working in a mine is apparently as insanely dangerous in the Protomen reality as it is in real life, and he has a personal connection to the ramifications of that danger, but apparently he feels the unspecified system he designed to make mining easier? safer? less necessary? is plenty and unmanned mining is terrible because they took our jobs. Wily has a dramatically different perspective:
"Tom, listen to yourself, then listen carefully to me.
If you replace the working parts, you get a different machine.
The man who turns the wheels, they will follow
Anywhere he leads.
"They've waited so long for this day
There is no price they wouldn't pay
For someone else to lead them
Don't turn your back on me!"
Light (Wily)
"I only want to help.
(You are a fool.) You underestimate the character of man.
(They are weaker than you think) You think that they'll surrender if you bind their working hands.
But they are strong (Just wait and see.)
We will build cities in a day. (Men would cower at the sight.)
We will build towers to the heavens. (Man was not built for such a height.)
We will be heroes. (We will build heroes.)"
"Thomas:
Men sleep tonight with hands of bone. They will awake with hands of steel.
And with these hands we will destroy. And with these hands we will rebuild.
Albert:
And we will stand above our city,
rising high above her streets.
From tops of buildings we will look
at all that lies beneath our feet.
And we will raise our hands above us,
cold steel shining in the sun,
and with these hands that will not bleed,
your father's battle will be won!"
There's a LOT going on here, and to me it all adds up to one thing: Wily is not seeking power for power's sake, he doesn't want to be the most powerful man in the world. He is a transhumanist. He looks at humans and sees fear, obedience, and in general the arbitrary constraints imposed by a fickle, openly antagonistic designer (God, nature, ourselves, take your pick). There is no price men wouldn't pay for someone else to lead them, men will cower at the sight of technological progress, men were not built for the heavens... and look again at the last stanza. We will raise our cold steel hands. I don't think he's being poetic, I think he literally means cyberneticization, and definitely not in the "okay gimme a laser eye and a rocket foot let's have some laughs" sense, but in the evolutionary sense. Neanderthals didn't die out because we went around murdering them, but because we survived what they couldn't. Think how much more dramatic survival of the fittest becomes when we cross the border between biology and technology.
.
Note also that Wily uses the first person plural, but I doubt very much he is referring to himself and Light given what happens next: The Father of Death. Emily is going to Thomas' house, and she finds...
"A man was bent over the desk rummaging through the drawers frantically. It was Albert Wily. He turned, startled, and looked at Emily; the hint of a smile crossed his face."
"Emily: What are you doing here? (Albert: Let me take you away.)
I'm not going anywhere. (He will be nothing when this runs its course.)
He will be everything that a man
is supposed to be."
"Albert Wily's eyes grew cold as Emily's rejection of him became clear. He turned to the machine standing at the door and quickly slid his finger across his own throat. The robot moved silently towards Emily as Wily slid through the window, onto the fire escape, and into the streets below."
The robot kills Emily, yadda yadda yadda.
This part doesn't make a lot of sense, either in my weird theories or in the work itself. What is Wily looking for, and why would he be frantic? Light has already turned on the machines, both men have said they believe there is no going back. Even if Wily was lying and there was something critical in the drawers, he leaves without any further searching after he finds Emily, and I'm reasonably sure she couldn't fit into a desk drawer. Why go himself in the first place when he's got robots to do his bidding?
Anyway, the rest of it suggests on first reading that Wily is into Emily, but I don't think that's it at all. Look again at the dialogue: "He will be nothing when this runs its course" "He will be everything that a man is supposed to be". Wily will go on to frame Light for Emily's murder and rig the trial so that Light is found not guilty, but that's clearly not part of his plan at first, so Light will be "nothing" in some other way... what if Wily is again referring to the end of humanity? We know Light opposes robots taking man's jobs, clearly Light will also oppose robots taking man's place in the ecosphere. What if Emily knows all about Wily's transhumanist streak, and her "rejection" is phrased not as romantic but philosophical... a man is supposed to be. She (like we) sees humanity as ordained, as intended. Wily sees us as a stepping stone, just another link in the chain, no more worthy of sacralization than homo ergaster before us.
.
Wily's last lines are in The Hounds.
"Albert Wily was born for this moment. He answered the reporters' eager questions about the disappearance of his partner calmly and evenly with the story he'd rehearsed. Inside he was teeming with contempt for these men who were turning the story from the real headline: the unveiling of his newest marvel. ... No matter. Soon these men and their questions would be obsolete."
"What kind of man builds a machine to kill a girl?
No he did not use his hands.
Like a smart man, he used a tool."
Note that one translation of homo sapiens is "smart man", and that a traditional (though long abandoned) definition of humans involved tool use! Wily steps away from the reporters and speaks to himself:
"There is a flame that I've been fanning. There is a fire waiting to catch.
There is a hell that has been building from the moment we first met.
If there ever was a time, if there ever was a chance,
to undo the things I've done and wash these bloodstains from my hands,
it has passed and been forgotten. These are the paths that we must take,
'cause you and I, Tom, we are men and we can bend and we can break.
If you think that you can run, if you think that you can stand,
well you forget who turned this city on, you forget who plugged this city in!
They'll not switch it off again."
Okay. This is an amazing soliloquy to go out on. Wily takes very little agency over his actions, and again, not in the "hee hee hee i'm so bad neener neener" supervillain sense that you might expect from Captain Eyebrows with the skull castle. From his perspective it's as inevitable and as painful as fish crawling out on land. He recognizes his guilt, recognizes he can never wash the bloodstains from his hands, but it's in a distant sense.
And that's it! He has no more lines. He doesn't unleash an army of ambulatory killing machines. He doesn't overthrow the government. How the World Fell Under Darkness tells us:
"Morning after morning, the men and women of the city awoke to find a bright new world. Everything was remade. Made better. Made brighter. The streets were swept. The undesirables, the homeless, the criminal element of the city, systematically vanished.
The single screen on top of the tower sent out signals to the now hundreds of satellite screens. The factories were fully automated. The mines run entirely by machine. The men that found themselves suddenly living lives of leisure crowded the bars, slowly imbibing the generous severances they'd received, not so much as a single ill word grumbled towards their replacements. The city was a bright and shining beacon of light... a steel-plated heaven."
Things go bad, obviously, and maybe I'm overly influenced by Childhood's End, but all I'm saying is everything dies. Humanity is going to die. Wily could very easily have chosen to send Fire Man out there to torch a bunch of orphanages, had Guts Man punch out the army, etc. Instead he gives us peace and long life. He also has a secret police and doesn't tolerate dissent: I'm not saying he's nice. I'm just saying this is another example of him being transhumanist, no more totalitarian than crating your dog.
"A generation grew up inside the metal hands that gently circled the neck of the city. Some of them grew up hating the city, fearing the machines. There was one boy in particular. His name was Joe."
"Joe: We're given only what we need.
There's gotta be something better, Something that feels more alive."
Not to belabor the point made about mining, but grow up Joe. Millions of children starve to death every year in the pre-robot world. By your own admission Wily solves that and you want to cry about ennui? Give me a break. I'm not saying the whole murdering dissenters thing is justified, I'm just pointing out again that Wily didn't need to create a post-scarcity world to take power. He went out of his way to make our lives easy, and not to pacify us: we pose absolutely no threat to his army of unstoppable killing machines.
.
So, in conclusion. Wily's behavior and language is inconsistent with both genocide and totalitarianism. I feel that transhumanism is the most coherent explanation, and a more interesting motive than Wily gets in the games.