A Schizoanalysis of Everhood 2 - Slime Sex, DMT Jesters and the Denial of Enlightenment.
This originally started as my thoughts and critics of Everhood 2 as a whole, but the more I ruminated on the characters and what's presented in the story, the more I found myself entranced in the interpretation of what the game is trying to tell you.
In short, I believe Everhood 2 is about denial of Enlightenment.
If Everhood 1 shares a view on Buddhism, accepting death and achieving Enlightenment, Everhood 2 does the opposite and instead shows you all the ways people lose themselves in their journey to ascending.
This is a point that gets repeated again, and again, and again, and again.
You are here. You are still here. Why?
It never ends in Everhood.
Everything in Everhood 2 is related to the Light Being and the Shade, they are the true 'God' of the world, and the world is their consciousness.
That 'world' is meant for the Light Being's ascension, their Enlightenment - But that never happens. There is no "Good Ending" in Everhood 2. You cannot go alone on your Crusade of Death, despite what Evren tells you. The Gnomes and the Mushrooms tell you this is Just one More Adventure, yet you can never complete it.
Why?
It never ends in Everhood -Â A Lost Soul's Disorder
Think about all the characters Shade uses as puppets. Bobo "Becomes God" by drinking the "Elixir of Truth". Riley "Becomes God" just by requesting it. All these characters try to achieve Enlightenment by taking the easy route, skipping the path altogether. There is never a journey like the one Red/Pink goes through in Everhood 1's "True Ending". The Light Being is the light being too disordered to achieve enlightenment.
Lucy is a representation of hedonism, indulgent sexuality. She is locked away in one of the areas you can first meet her. Repressed. "The repression of sexual desires can lead to neuroses, and what is repressed often emerges in dreams, art, or perversions." Taboo urges, vices of the soul that get in the way of enlightenment, that feeds the creation of the Shadow-Self.
It never ends in Everhood -Â The Longing of Self-Destruction
The Identity of the Shade.
I think most people agree on what the Shade represents. They are the counterpart of the Light Being, the second-half in Duality, Chris Nordgren's self-insert, and finally - They are the Shadow-Self. What I also believe, is that they're the Narrator from Everhood 1 - The one that delivers the Absolute Truths. Why?, This specific ending from Everhood 1 is where it's most apparent..
55 seconds · Clipped by HorderLock · Original video "Secret ending, Secret cat NPC, secret cat god boss fight, and Secret Absolute Truth - E
Some people come off from Everhood 2 believing the Shade's words.
While "Evil" as a concept can have a variety of meanings, Shade is absolutely the Antagonist, and as the Shadow-Self. All he does is to impede the Light Being from achieving Enlightenment, this is his role in the narrative, and the message of Everhood 2. He is the barrier that keeps 'Duality' from becoming 'Oneness'. When fighting "Scary Shade", Shade symbolically and literally tells the player that the only two outcomes for the search for Enlightenment - For a "satisfying ending" - Are either Insanity, or Stagnation.
He does this while holding a pendulum clock, mind you, because it's hypnosis. It's a conclusion he has to convince the player of, because that is his role as the Shadow-Self.
He is in line with the Homunculi. Tricksters, Jesters, Opportunists. They are not living beings, not humans or higher beings. Their realm is the chaotic in-between of different planes of existence and states of being. For those familiar with the idea of DMT Jesters, they are basically that. Thriving on interrupting the human experience. Just like the Shade represents eternal vanity, distractions from completing your goals and reaching true enlightenment.
And why does he mock Sam so?
Sam is afraid of Fate. Afraid of Darkness. Afraid of what he's meant to become.
"I know this place." "That place scares me..."
Sam being afraid of darkness is representing that he is afraid of confronting his own Shadow-Self, afraid of his own Shade. It's another Denial of Enlightenment.
If we want to be pedantic, what does the Shade say he is in his boss-fight? "I am the end of all your dreams" "I am the need in you for more."Â
If you want to be a downer, you could say the Shade wins in Everhood 2 because it exists out of principle. His existence, and the game's existence as a whole is like telling the player "Why are you playing a game instead of reaching Enlightenment?"
It never ends in Everhood -Â Limitless Self-Discovery
Let's pose a question. If Everhood 2's world is the Light Being's consciousness, why does Evren say she created the world? Why does she say that God made her create it, and why does she stand in our way even when "Destroying the World" is something the Light Being can never achieve in the first place? "This is how it usually goes for you "light beings". You wander around these realms, and after a certain amount of time, you start daydreaming. The human experience has a tendency to numb you with physical restraints, such as: Ears, Mouths, Nose, Eyes... It can take some time to dissociate from these phantom illusions. But soon enough, these mirages fade and you are left with nothing but the mind."
Evren has a striking resemblance to the Lost Spirits, and as we are told in Everhood 1, becoming a Lost Spirit tends to happen after dying and remembering something from your life. And like Raven continues his monologue about Light Beings...
The only way that Evren can have created the world, this Consciousness, is if it belonged to her in the first place. The Id, the Ego and the Superego.
"In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego, which mediates between the id's desires and the superego's moral constraints, might strive to weaken or even "kill" the superego to reduce internal conflict and allow for more unrestrained expression of the id's impulses..."Â This is the reason I propose Evren wants to kill the Light Being - And even when she fails at that, the death of the Ego still allows the Shade to win at the end.
It never ends in Everhood -Â The Labyrinth of the Soulless Dimension
In the end (Which may I remind you, nevers), what does this mean for Everhood 2? I still think the game was rushed for anniversary release, but I stand by the point that it was always meant as an "opposite" to Everhood 1, a counter-point, and a continuation of the theme that the "Quests never End!". It's a reflection of Backwards Obsession players had with the first Everhood, and a reflection of how one can fail to reach Enlightenment. If Everhood 1 was about letting go of your body, of accepting Death, and having a Buddha telling you how to achieve Enlightenment, then Everhood 2 with it's mechanical, facsimile of Buddha shows you what happens when you try to skip the steps, how stumbling into your own vices and failing to reach Enlightenment may look like. There was no point in reinforcing the message of the first game, so if what they were going for is even near to what I proposed here, I think it was a clever way of going about it. The souls of Everhood, created by the Godmachine/Shade/Chris Nordgen as they may be, residing in the Sludge of Everhood's 2 reality, still can ascend in their own timeline. Pink can still learn to move on, or he can find purpose anew in becoming a Soul Weapon - As temporary as that may be...
