Batista's Tragic Fate.
When is a choice actually a choice?
It sounds like a question for your intro philosophy course, but for a question that seems like it should have an obvious answer, the more you think about it the more the answer eludes you. As much as we would like to believe we make our choices entirely out of our own free will, a lot of our choices are defined just as much by circumstances as they are by our free will. If I put a gun to your head you technically still have a choice. You can choose to let yourself get shot in the head, or to comply with my request. However, the context in which that choice is made still matters. You probably would have made a different choice under different circumstances.
Ishida Sui uses a lot of meta-textual elements in his stories. His manga also function as commentaries on aspects of literary theory. They function both as stories, but also they are about the medium of storytelling. In Choujin X, Batista is not only a character who suffers from a tragic fate, he also uses the idea of "fate" as a lens for Ishida to provide insight on the ideas of free will and individual agency.
He does this primarily through setting up an oedipal tragedy with Batista's character.
Freud Can't Keep Getting Away With It
Oedipus Rex was a particular fascination of the pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. In his work "The Interpretation of Dreams" Freud put forward what is called the "Oedipus Complex", the idea that young boys subconsciously desire to kill their fathers, and replace them so they will be the sole beneficiaries of their mother's love.
The incest angle is the reading that usually jumps out as most people, but Freud saw the play as symbolic of many things, such as the conflict between the mind and the subconscious, or free will and fate. Oedipus is a highly influential play, classic works like Dune follow the story's tragic framework featuring a main character who is unable to avert his prophesied future, inadvertently kills his father, and whose story ends with him deciding to blind himself and leave the throne to wander in the desert.
An Oedipal tragedy is in its most basic framework, a story where a protagonist's attempts to avert their fate, end up causing their tragic downfall instead. In the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is born a prince of Thebes and prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother. His parent's try to kill him at birth, only for him to be adopted. As an adult Oedipus learns of his fate, and tries to avert it by leaving his adopted family, who he believes are his natural family. In the process of leaving home he meets his biological father on the road and kills him. Then he solves the Sphinxes riddle at Thebes, frees the city from the Sphinx, and then is declared king of the city and marries the widowed queen his own mother.
Oedipus is an interesting twist on a tragic hero in many ways, the first that he commits most of his misdeeds unknowingly. The tragic downfall of most Greek heroes is brought about by Hubris, the idea that the hero knows more than the gods and therefore needs to be humbled. The only hubris Oedipus really commits is thinking he can defy his fate, once it's been told to him by the oracle. Who wouldn't try to avoid such a disgusting fate, though? Perhaps that is hubris in its own way, thinking that we have more control over our lives than we really do.
When is a choice actually a choice?
If Oedipus had known Jocasta was his mother he never would have touched her. The moment he finds out, he abdicates the throne and seeks atonement by wandering the desert. Oedipus's sin of killing his father and sleeping with his mother was largely determined by circumstances that were out of his control, so how responsible is he?
Even in the way Oedipus Rex is told to us as a story, his fate is already sealed. The main action of the story is Oedipus trying to find out the cause of a plague affecting Thebes, only to find out that he was the cause of the plague by the end of the story because he committed incest. Oedipus actual crimes are told to us in flash back as Oedipus is discovering the truth of the past in his search for the plague's culprit. Perhaps the most uncomfortable twist in Oedipus Rex is not the surprise incest, but the idea that you can easily become the villain in someone else's story without even realizing it.
The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psychoanalysis*) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, and that he is the son of the murdered man and Jocasta. [*the plot-narrative of Oedipus may thus be compared not only to a detective story but to a psychoanalytic interrogation] Shocked by the abominable crime which he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus blinds himself, and departs from his native city. The prophecy of the oracle has been fulfilled. The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate; its tragic effect depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to the divine will, and the perception of one's own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn from the tragedy.
Freud is capable of coming to deeply insightful analysis and then jumping to batshit conclusions. That is to say, Oedipus is relatably flawed not because we all secretly desire our mothers, but because we like Oedipus can be the cause of our own problems without even realizing it.
If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus . . . . [In Freud's psychoanalytic reading, the conflict between the individual soul's freedom and the will of the gods shifts to a psychological struggle between the child and its parental environment] And there actually is a motive in the story of King Oedipus which explains the verdict of this inner voice. His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him.
Our hubris may be just like Oedipus in assuming that we have control over our lives, and the ability to overcome things like fate just require a strong enough willpower. The idea that we are completely in control of our lives may just be a comforting delusion, in the face of a world that's too complicated for our brains to comprehend.
I think it's a tendency to ignore the roles that circumstances play in who we are, because we like to believe that identity is fixed and self-determined because the idea that who we are is heavily influenced by situations and other people challenges the notion that we are in control.
All of this to ask the question.
When is a choice not a choice?
Did Batista Do Anything Wrong?
Oedipus is not as relatable to us in a modern day context, because our cultural values have shifted from the days of the grecians and their beliefs in prophecies in fixed fates. However, in Choujin X, prophecy and the ability of some Choujins to see a pre-determined future is a major element of both the theme, and worldbuilding.
Tokyo Ghoul is a work where one of the characters was an author who wrote a novel inside of the story itself, based off of the main character Kaneki. A work where Furuta Nimura basically told the audience the plot of the last arc in chapter 101, and said it would be a film written, and directed by him. Ishida's stories often act as commentary upon storytelling itself as a medium, and in Choujin X we seem to be exploring the idea of being a "chosen one", and the idea of existing in a pre-determined narrative role in general.
Batista, like Oedipus is told that in the future that he's going to commit terrible crimes and as any decent person would, does everything one can reasonably expect of him to prevent the future. In a story where Choujins are generally seen as selfish individuals with a screw less, who possess a certain complex that make them try to acquire as much power as possible Batista is presented as going against the norm by being willing to relinquish power for selfless reasons.
Tokio the main character of the manga, is a little like Spiderman without Uncle Ben's death. He's given a lot of power, but without the soulcrushing responsibility that makes Peter Parker into Spiderman. In general this story also borrows a lot from Nitzeschean ideology, especially for the concept of the Overman, or Ubermensch, which has an in-world counterpart called the "X", the strongest Choujin in a generation that goes on to define history and get everyone swept up in their story. Choujins are a bit like ghouls in Ishida's previous works, but instead of being second class citizens instead they're granted special privileges and some who work for Yamato Mori even believe themselves to be above the law and existing in a different category of people. For a lot of other Choujin it's more like with Great Power, comes Great Irresponsibility.
In the context of this story, Batista is sacrificing a lot. He's basically giving up all of his status, his institutional power, and his chance to stand out and be someone great because of a prophecy that he might hurt someone in the future. He's also essentially sacrificing his own agency, and his ability to determine the course of his life for the greater good. It's selfless and specifically it's selfless in a way the main character isn't because Tokio is on the opposite path, he is trying to gain as much power as possible because he no longer wants to feel like one of the unimportant masses.
Batista's backstory contains numerous references to Oedipus and the ideas of a pre-determined fate. When speaking with Hartley he talks of a "closed system", an idea in chemistry where a system is not allowed to exchange matter with its surrounding.
Batista uses that concept for the idea of a pre-determined future. He clearly resents Yamato Mori's over-reliance on prophecies. For all the usefulness these visions have in foreseeing and averting future disasters it also makes them unable to adapt to change. It's clear what the metaphor means, by not trying to change the future and instead following it to the letter they're actually limiting the number of possible futures. We're shown in later flashbacks there's a darker side to prophecies, Sora sees Anitise losing control of his powers in the future leading to a big disaster and her only way of averting it is to just kill Anitise. To snipe the problem before it even turns into a problem. Which eventually escalates into a genocide of Anitise's country, and the execution of every single one of his blood descendants. She didn't attempt say, diplomacy, or warning Anitise about her visions, because when you've got a trolley, then everything looks like a trolley problem.
Yamato Mori eager to treat symptoms and not actual causes, just got rid of the faulty seer and replaced her with a new one. Not much has really changed of their metholodgy. They're still a militarized peacekeeping force. They still employ the same kind of cold utilitarianism that Sora did, they've just switched to a slightly less unstable seer.
When Batista is cast out the flaws of Yamato Mori become apparent to him. In this organization power and acclaim as a Choujin is what gets you respect, not intellectual pursuits like research. The organization is set in their ways, and resistant to change. Their over-reliance on prophecies is just but one symptom of that. They are peacekeepers after all in a world without states or governments, they exist to maintain a status quo.
Hartley's words of encouragement to Batista "you're pursuing a wonderful future that no one has foreseen", is a wonderful summary of Yamato Mori's inflexibility. Instead of trying to create a new future that nobody has foreseen, instead of the future being a thing of limitless possibility, their reliance on prophecy and pre-destination has actually severely limited their perpsective on the future.
Batista's motivations are selfless at this point in the story. He gives up power and control over his own life so he will not hurt people. Though he can no longer be a choujin, he tries to help Yamato Mori with his research into artificially creating more Choujin so Yamato Mori will have expanded numbers and less Choujin will be hurt. He's not entirely selfless, he clearly resents his place in life. It's pretty natural to feel resentment though when you make this life altering sacrifice, and you reward is that people look down on you, and dismiss your ideas because you can't bench press a semi-truck.
Chapter 63 is titled "Hear the Newborn's Cry". Freud interpreted the Oedipus Complex as a natural part of a child's developmental psychology. Freud is again good at making observations, and the first to even think of studying child development.
The idea is that basically as an infant in most circumstances, your first experience with love and nurturing comes from your mother. You rely on your mother for unconditional love and support, and as an infant obviously not capable of taking care of yourself you envy anything that threatens to take away that maternal love. The modern version of this is attachment theory, the idea that relationships with our primary caretaker not only teach us how to connect with other people, but also affects the way we connect with people later on in life.
Both Psychoanalytic theory and attachment theory both posit the same idea though, that the connections we form with others have a significant role in shaping our personality. If you've read Tokyo Ghoul it's tragic backstory the manga, Ishida clearly tends to favor the nurture side of the argument. Ishida on a whole shows a lot of what makes his characters who they are, is circumstantial. Few characters in either of his story do bad things because they possess a deviant inner nature. In fact most characters are victims of circumstances, and when their circumstances change for the better so do they.
What's interesting about knowing this facet of Ishida's general work and the fact Choujin X recycles a lot of ideas from Tokyo Ghoul is that generally characters who are fated to do bad things have fixed natures. In Greek Tragedy, characters brought their fate upon themselves because of a hamartia, an internal flaw, an inner deviancy that makes their fate both unavoidable and deserved.
Even Oedipus possessed this Hamartia. Freud interpreted that Hamartia to be a subconscious desire to sleep with his mother.
For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate, but he who gives no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life. [lines 1166-68 in Oedipus the King]
However, if you want to be like normal and shit you can also look to Oedipus pride and the ignorance that stems from it. He is flawed before the audience even knows the secret sin he committed. He calls in Tiresias the blind prophet to find the cause of the city's plague. When Tiresias warns him he might be happier not knowing the answer, he angrily threatens the prophet, mocks him for being blind, and even in a fit of paranoia wonders if Creon is plotting against him. He's also the kind of person who would fly into a rage and murder someone over an argument on the side of the road, and not think twice about it. Oedipus did not know that Laius was his father, but he still had the prophecy over his head that he was going to kill his father and marry his mother and didn't think too deeply about the random guy he just killed before coming to Thebes.
In the ancient Greek context which the story was told, the author clearly thought Oedipus possessed the inner nature of someone who could kill his father and marry his mother regardless of the circumstances of his life. Now, does the same apply to Batista?
I can certainly sit here and outline Batista's flaws that were already there before his backstory. There are a lot of people who's wives die, and they don't go on to become mad scientists after all. Ely's patently uninterested in how Batista came to be the Noh Face, she even suggests they kill him in the past before he did anything wrong.
There is a certain comfort to that line of reasoning, we'd like to believe we just don't have it in us to do certain atrocities. That regardless of the circumstances pushing us, that it takes a certain special kind of deviant person capable of committing the kind of crimes that Batista has. That Batista has something in his nature that pushed him towards a more extreme reaction, and if we were in that exact circumstances, we could suffer as Batista did and make a more rational decision.
These ideas go hand in hand with control, and self-determination when it comes to forming our identities. If as humans we are as in control of our behavior as we would like to think we are, then being good, and not hurting others is just a matter of always making good choices.
But, when is a choice actually a choice?
Batista's character uses the concept of the chosen one, and pre-determination in storytelling to prompt us to ask these questions of ourselves. The chosen one is usually a power fantasy like Harry Potter, the Chosen one means you are different, and special, and you are meant for something greater. It is an escapist fantasy and a power fantasy of a sort because it's not really anything you did, it's just something you were born into therefore it's an internal quality of who you are.
Oedipus is as much of a chosen one as Harry Potter, it's just instead of an escapist fantasy, Oedipus's chosen fate is horrific. In both cases thought the inherent specialness of the chosen hero, or chosen villain in Oedipus case is not a product of the choices they made, or even who they are, but something entirely outside of their control. A chosen one seems to have as much choice in who they are, as a character in a novel. As a character no matter how relatable, complex and human they seem is ultimately just a plot device that the author has complete control over. To desire to be a character in a story in a way is to cede agency in order to have the comfort of a script to follow and a certainty of your importance.
If we analyze Batista simply by his choices, then at every crossroad on his road to hell paved with good intentions Batista always makes the selfless choice, sacrificing his ambitions and control over his life for the safety and security of everyone else.
Batista basically gave up two things he devoted years of his life to, training to become a choujin, then his role as a researcher in Yamato Mori. Imagine you have a high paying job after completing your doctorate in your dream field and you're rising to the top of your occupation and just as you're about to publish the paper that's going to make your career, someone tells you to give all that up to work at Mcdonalds.
If we take Batista's words to Hartley as true then Batista only ever researched into the development of Choujin with good intentions, the only hint of the darker motivation is that he also wanted to be proud of his accomplishments.
This is the same person who would massacre people to have enough corpses to deliver to Palma, or submit random people he kidnapped off the street to long, torturous experimentation.
It is the simpler narrative to believe that Batista always had this inside of him, that a morally good person would not be capable of committing human experimentation no matter how far you pushed them. That like Oedipus, Mado foresaw the future of Batista going on to commit Heinous crimes because there was something buried deep in Batista's nature that was always there from the beginning.
There is a lot of resentment on Batista's part, he doesn't seem particularly happy giving up his research, or watching his brother rise to superstardom. There is a subconscious desire to accomplish something great, to do something he can be proud of. That while his actions are selfless, that desire was always there. That he was pretending to be a more selfless, self-sacrificing person than he really was. Batista wasn't sacrificing his life's ambition out of a sense of altruism but rather the desire to appear as a selfless person. If you were to take a more nietzschian view of Batista's character, you could say he resented people like his brother who had the ability to step all over other people in order to be someone great and secretly desired to be like them but lacked the inner nerve to be like them.
Nietzsche believed that the poor and the downtrodden used resentment as a way of getting back at the aristocratic class, they could not become rich aristocrats themselves but they could paint wealth and privilege as evil and empty pursuits while insisting that true happiness came from being humble like they were.
"While the aristocratic man lives confidently and is open to himself, the man of resentment, on the other hand, is not sincere or naive, neither honest nor candid with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret passages, and hidden doors., everything covert appeals to him as his world, his security, his comfort: he is past a master of silence, of not forgetting of patience, of assuming a mode of self-deprecation and humility for awhile," [Genealogy of Morals 27]
Nietzsche would argue this same kind of logic of an internal defect or sickness inside of Batista. Batista is prevented from becoming someone great and making his mark on history, and so he lies to himself, convinces himself that he was fine with his station in life, and became a stewing pot of resentment that eventually boiled over.
My point is, you can view Batista's character from multiple angles and make an argument on his motivation and internal world, and what you see in Batista kind of reflects your opinion on free will, nature vs. nurture, and moral culpability in general.
If I were to pick out a flaw in Batista at this point in his backstory though, I wouldn't focus on that resentment or even squinting at him to find evidence he was a selfish person all along. Rather the flaw that stands out to me is how dependent he eventually becomes on Hartley.
Batista isn't just motivated by altruism, a selflessness that leads him to sacrifice his future so that he won't other people. Just as important is the validation he receives from his connection with Hartley. In fact Hartley's validation and presence in his life grows more and more important, as his possible futures are cut away from him by Mado's prophecies. Batista clearly wants validation for his actions, he wants to be given the same praise and recognition that his brother is, but as he becomes more isolated Hartley becomes the only source of recognition in his life.
Batista was stopped from his Xember research, but he was not banned from research entirely. They didn't fire him from the research program they just told him to stop his pet project. The decision to quit was heavily influenced by Hartley's words of encouragement here, that he didn't need to prove himself to her.
If Batista has Hartley's love, and affection then he doesn't really need to push himself to such extremes to try to earn other people's approval. I don't think Batista was lying when he said that he would rather be a good man, than a bad Choujin. Nor do I think that if Hartley had not tragically die of childbirth he would have eventually got bored of her because he was lying to himself, and settling for a normal life when he secretly wanted to be someone great.
However, it is clear that Batista became increasingly isolated the more and more Yamato Mori cut off all the potential roads he could take in the future, and as a result he basically relied on Hartley as the sole source of unconditional love in his life and his connection to the rest of the world. The way that Batista basically gave up on life after her death is definitely a sign of an unhealthy codependence. The more he relies on Hartley as a source of external validation, the more he becomes fixated on her.
He does kind of objectify Hartley more and more, but is that a sign that deep down he did not really love Hartley, or is it because of the fact that no one at Yamato Mori tried to be friends with him including his own flesh and blood brother.
When Batista is warned by Mado of a possible future where Hartley dies by childbirth, we see the resentment that was suppressed come out.
We've been talking so much about Freud, it's the perfect timing to introduce the concept of a Freudian Slip. The last tidbit of dialogue is especially significant You think knowing the future makes you better than the rest of us? It's not just resentment for having his choices taken away by someone else or having years of his life wasted because of Mado's prophecy at this point, it's also an insecurity that the other Choujin are looking down on him. Mado makes him feel inferior, he assumes she is warning him not because she genuinely does not want to see him hurt, but because she sees herself as a superior being to him.
Again this is where we get to ambiguity within Batista's motivation. How much of what makes a person up is subconscious? Freud believed Oedipus was brought to his tragic fate because his subconscious mind made resisting it impossible. Nietzsche adopts the viewpoint that the poor are sickly in spirit because they want to be rich like the aristocrats, they want to be masters. They're not meek because it's morally righteous, but rather because they lack the will to assert themselves.
The fact that Batista feels looked down upon by Yamato Mori, and wanted to be great like his brother but was robbed of the chance to prove himself does factor into his motivations.
Sora knows the best way to get under his skin is to suggest that Batista never had control over his life to begin with. That everything that happened to him was because he was just a pawn of fate. That he never had the power to determine his own life. Sora doesn't even give him the dignity of being a prophesized villain, she even suggests that he's just a supporting character in her story, that all of his suffering happened because it would eventually turn him into a person that would help further her schemes.
The idea of his life being scripted clearly bothers him, especially because his choices were taken away by beings that have a higher power than him, Mado and Sora who have power over him the way that an author has power over a fictional character. Characters are just plot devices, they're tools with no free will or personhood. The ultimate insult is that Batista is Oedipus, that he's the pitiable victim of a pre-determined fate. Except at least Oedipus was the main character of his own tragedy, while Batista is reduced to being a supporting role in someone else's schemes. The players who are more important and more powerful than he is.
He is also delighted to think that he might be the catastrophe that Sora was worried about in her visions, because being at the center of a prophecy even as a villain makes him feel important and central to the unfolding story of reality.
Batista's hubmleness may have been a farce, but I think again his interpersonal relationships is a more interesting angle to analyze him with then trying to squint at him for evidence of a secret selfishness he possessed all along that led him to commit evil later on.
I think what's most interesting about Mado's warning that Hartley would die of childbirth and his tantrum, is that after the fact Batista deliberately chooses not to tell Hartley. He leaves her out of the decision on whether or not they should keep their child. Of course, Hartley might have also agreed that it's ridiculous to abort the child that they both wanted to have because another one of Mado's fortune cookie prophecies. I think it's also semi-reasonable that Batista had had so much of his life controlled by Mado's prophecies up until this point that he didn't even want to acknowledge them anymore.
However, he still doesn't let Hartley make an informed decision. It could be for multiple reasons, maybe he was just sick of the prophecies and wanted to ignore them. Maybe, he was afraid of anything that would threaten his future with Hartley, because having a child and raising it together with Hartley gave him a place in the world after he was thrown out by Yamato Mori. Either way he chose not to tell her, because the more emotionally dependent he becomes on Harltey the less he is able to see her as a person separate from hismelf. As a fully independent person has the ability to leave him and if she did that, it would rob Batista of his place in the world.
Batista has a pattern of wanting to be recognized as a good person and wanting to feel like he belongs, he first tries to work hard as a choujin, then as a scientist, and finally when Hartley tells him he doesn't need to earn anyone's approval or love he sort of hedges all of his bets on her. Batista doesn't have any friends, and he doesn't seem to see his brother as someone he can rely on for emotional support. Either way Batista is choosing to close his eyes to the danger of having a child with Hartley and remain ignorant, because his mind literally cannot handle the idea of living without her at this point. It's too uncomfortable a reality to confront so he just doesn't.
When he is confronted with his fate, he takes the mask off, and we are shown the oedipal imagery that makes up Batista's face. His eyes are missing and while he has multiple eyes they are all sewn shut, to mirror the autoenucleation that Oedipus performs on himself at the end of the play.
When unable to face the sin he has committed Oedipus, and after finding out his mother / wife Jocasta has hung herself, Oedipus uses the pin from her brooch to gauge out both of his eyes.
OEDIPUS: Enough! All, all, shall be fulfilled.... Oh, on these eyes Shed light no more, ye everlasting skies That know my sin! I have sinned in birth and breath. I have sinned with Woman. I have sinned with Death. [He rushes into the Palace. The Shepherd is led away by the thralls.]
When Hartley dies, Batista doesn't immediately snap and become a mad scientist. While he's too emotionally dependent on her to try living and healing and he can no longer imagine a future without her, his first instinct is to try killing himself.
However, there are hints that Batista's stated motivations may be at odds with his subconscious desire. Choujin have the ability to raise, but BB says during the fight with Vlad that she is going to die because she cannot imagine her heart healing. Batista speculates that he he's unable to kill himself because deep down he might not truly want to die.
Batista openly wonders what is keeping him alive, and we get some hints in the next panel. When he sees his own brother acting as a hero without a stone's throw of his suicide attempt, Batista clearly resents that his brother did absolutely nothing to save him.
Which, you know he kind of has a point. If your brother's wife dies and you can't even bother to pick up a phone to check on how he's doing, then that kind of makes you a shit brother.
The Nue picks up on this resentment too. That even though Batista has nothing positive left to live for in his life, the fact that he's willing to continue living must mean it's despair and suffering that is keeping him going now.
You, you've become obsessed with despair!
If he does not have anything positive to live for then, Batista must be living to take revenge upon life itself. Striking back against the people who hurt you is still a form of validation, though one that often leads to a negative feedback loop.
There are two conflicting desires in Batista, that to live a normal life with Hartley and receive validation from her, or receive validation from being someone important and in control of his fate like his brother and Mado. Rather than one of these being more true than the other, both are equally powerful motivators and when Hartley is taken away from him all he's left with is seizing back power to take control of his life.
Batista's acceptance of his deal with the Nue is signalled by his eyes being removed just like Oedipus, as well as a serious portion of his face being peeled off.
However, while The Nue suggests over and over again that Batista's desire is to strike back against the people that hurt him, I think it's singificant that he only accepts the deal when the possibility of seeing Hartley again is back on the table. While both are significant motivators to him, a desire to hurt those who hurt him, and the love and human connection Hartley represented in his life, it's Hartley that gets him to agree to the bargain.
The sight of this entire sequence leads to this particular line of dialogue from Ely, "still doesn't make it right for him to sacrifice anybody."
It is easy to blame Batista for the choice he made here, and then move on. A good person would have rejected Nue's offer to see their loved one again, and moved on, because good people are always good, and they always make good choices. Batista is the product of the toxic ideology of Yamato Mori on more ways than one though, he didn't just have his life choices taken away from them but when he finally gains some power for themselves he repeats their ideology. The people that matter are the powerful, and because they are powerful they have the right to take from others in order to shape the world in the way they want.
If Batista thinks his power gives him the right to sacrifice other people, it's only because he drank the kool-aid that Yamato Mori was offering. The genocide that Yamato Mori carried out on Anitise, the royal family, and his citizens wasn't just carried out by Sora, but by everyone who let it happen, by the regular people that marched with her. It's not the product of Sora acting as a bad actor, or even a prophecy, but of a bunch of normal Choujins who had the ability to stop Sora and didn't. A bunch of choujins who saw themsevles as heros who defended Yamato Mori against Queem, and probably never imagined they would commit a massacre on innocent people under any circumstances.
Stories, narratives, prophecies, if our thinking and worldview follows a strict and rigid thinking like that then we don't have to doubt, because doubting is scary.
Batista's real point of no return isn't when he accepts Nue's powers, in a narrative sense it's when he forgot about Hartley's words. He stopped trying to create a "Wonderful future that no one has foreseen."
The loss of Hartley was so devastating he forgot about Hartley the person, that she probably would not want Batista to kill himself, or go full mad scientist because she saw the good in him. When Bastista adopts the narrative thinking suggested to him by Nue, of taking back the pen for himself and rewriting fate he's not truly rewriting fate. He's not seizing control of anything. He's just grasping for power and the illusion of control. That decision to think of the world as a story, the way that Mado and Sora both do, makes him equally as blind as they are. (Sora has her eyes covered even in human mode, Mado is literally decapitated shortly after this arc ends). The moment he starts to think of the world as a narrative with a fixed future like they do, he's given up on the idea of the future as something of infinite possibility where anything can happen.
Batista just goes from following one narrative to another. He goes from letting Yamato Mori make all of the decisions in his life, to letting Nue control his life. He gets trapped in an illusion world with a fake Hartley, in a state of ignorant bliss. His relationship with Hartley in that world is also a sign of how unhealthy his dependence on her was, he basically has no life outside of her besides his 9 to 5 job, the rest of the world in his illusion are faceless npcs that turn into monsters the moment he pays attention to them for five seconds.
If anything for as much as Ishida loves making literary references and having characters actively insert meta commentary, by saying things like "rewrite the script" or "take control of the pen", I think Batista is in part a warning against the temptation to think of the world like a fictional story.
Batista is trapped inside of a comforting a fiction, and while he is inside of that fiction he loses all of his ability to influence the real world. Batista gives up on living in the real world and the future, and is willing to settle with this world because he knows the real world will never be safe like this one. He'll never have the guarantee that his loved ones will always be by his side like he does in this fantasy world.
Batista's greatest sin if you forget about all the war crimes, is abandoning the real Hartley in favor of the idea of her. Which is I think the underlying point of all of these inclusions of "predestination" and "chosen one" tropes. Yamato Mori relies too heavily on the prophecies of the future, because it grants them the illusion of safety and control. Batista almost settles for an illusory world with an illusory Hartley because it provides him with a comforting fantasy where he never has to lose his loved ones or worry about them.
The fiction can it can provide the idea of safety, it can give you the idea of control and structure to the world. These things are all comforting, but they are also ideas and not reality.
The most important and meaningful thing in Batista's life was his connection with Harley. Not because it made him feel powerful, or important, but because it made him feel love. I think what finally getting through to Batista is Chie suggesting he's betraying the real Hartley, reminding him again she is a person and not an idea says a lot about his motivations.
We think in narratives. Our brains are hard wired to try to make structure out of the chaos. However, the thing that ends up mattering the most to us are connections with other people. There's a superman quote I'm going to include now because I love it.
All Star Superman by Grant Morrison, is an elseworld story where Superman is dosed with a lethal radiation posioning by Lex Luthor and has to spend his last year on earth trying to live as meaningfully as possible, by doing things like, telling Lois about his secret identity, and helping Bizzaro. At the end Lex steals a fraction of Superman's powers in an attempt to kill him, and Superman gives him even more power to sabotage his plan which results in Lex being able to see the world as Clark does for a moment. Lex is immediately humbled by Clark's perspective.
"And this is how he sees things. All the time. Every day. It's a cruel joke. The mechanistic clockwork of reality hinging on a precious, impossible defiance of entropy, on life, and the clockwork doesn't care. It's like it's all just us in here together. We're all we've got."
Lex when the scales fall off his eyes and all of his delusions of grandeur fall away, realizes that the universe is indifferent to him. If you move away from the ideas of a destiny or a divine plan that makes it seem like the universe doesn't care. If that is the case then all we have is each other.
Perhaps the scariest thing about Oedipus Rex is that now that we no longer exist in a culture that believed that Fate was dictated by the gods, there is no longer an easy explanation for his actions or his tragedy. In ancient greek times we could have just said "it was fate" and left it at that, but now I have to write thousands upon thousands of words waxing poetic about an ancient play and still not really come up with a definite answer.
Which is why I find an interpretation like Ely's that puts all the responsibility for Batista's actions solely on his shoulders, to be reductive and overy simplistic. Individual responsibility is important but if we're all connected, then we're all somewhat responsible for each other.
Ishida goes out of his way to simultaneously emphasize that narratives are incredibly important to us as humans, but also not nearly as important as we think we are. The characters in the story that have the most power, and are most narratively significant also lose out on the experience of being a human being. Sora is a giant pair of hands always clapped together in prayer. Queem was literally hitler and the only legacy he left behind were some clone children, one of which is openly trying to defy him. Sandek couldn't pick up the goddamn phone to call his brother after his wife died. Perhaps being the main character of a story isn't all its cracked up to be, because heroes and villains are equally both narrative devices. They'll never get to live out the wonderful complexity of human existence. You can trap yourself in a fantasy like Batista thoutht he wanted, but in a fictional world you'll always be alone, whereas reality is messy but it's full of people who are just like you.
When is a choice actually a choice?
When we make it together.
