Obsessed with the parallels of Asya’s opening monologue and Tosya’s at the end of the game.
Asya says, right at the beginning: “Just the slightest fluctuation in the composition of our atmosphere, the size of the globe, or the distance between Earth and the Sun - and none of us, none of the beauty surrounding us, would exist. Some would call it a miracle. And that’s a lovely way to put it…”
And then, as you’re climbing the stairs to the top of the Research Institute, Tosya says: “But I was born from a wish made in earnest. If both of us had never known these rules, what the world deems as balanced or unbalanced… I’d still exist. You’d just call me a miracle. … Ew, forget I put it like that, okay?”
There’s something to that, I think. They mirror each other, even down to their word choices. Tosya describes herself in the same ways Asya uses to describe the loving precision of the Universe. There's a connection there. In the same impossible way a star and a planet with the perfect conditions for sentient life happened to come into existence in close proximity to one another, there came into existence a friend who manifested out of thin air to answer the wish of a lonely girl in a closed-off city. Two miracles, in parallel to each other.
And I think of Asya's theory. That the Universe created us because it wanted to be loved by others. It created us as the plus one, beings separate but still a part of itself.
And I think of Asya's message. Her final words, her transmission to the Universe she spent the whole game preparing for. How in the end, the one to receive it ends up being... another her. Another Asya, who's seen her through it all. Her best friend in the whole wide world, separate but still a part of her.
The Universe and Asya. Us and Tosya. The wish maker and the miracle.
And the Universe said I love you.
And Asya said I love you.
[I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.]
