The Island is intrinsically linked to the practices of Wish Craft and a Universal religion that had wish-making practices powerful enough to where Siffrin’s wish alone was fucking with the rest of Vaugarde’s
The Island has a lot of overlap with red’s presence in the game, almost like the island and color’s disappearance are connected.
There is an entire storyline wherein Siffrin is so traumatized by the revelation that his culture is still out there with other survivors of the aftermath of the island disappearing that he routinely jokes about croissants and carries around a random coin for “some reason”
The main antagonist of the game is another survivor of the island’s disappearance who became overran with grief and swore off the future for everyone and everything because he could not bear the thought of a loss like that ever again.
The central event that governs the entire conflict of ISAT is the island disappearing. It’s so obviously a bad thing that it happened. It is a tragedy that haunts the entire narrative. The main character barely has a sense of self because their sense of self got ripped away when they were a child on a boat playing a prank on their mom. And that sense of self is understood by practically no one alive.
In what world would erasing a whole culture be a good thing? Even if Island culture was somehow Secretly Evil But in a Suspiciously Orientalist/Anglocentric Way, would it matter? Are we to say Siffrin cannot love a culture that was flawed? But, from what we do know of the island, it’s almost all neutral or complementary worldbuilding to existing countries - never spoken in bad faith or given a reason for disappearing. It’s a tragedy that didn’t need to happen and shouldn’t have happened.
Island stuff is very much death of the author territory for me because so much points to any remnants of the culture still being archived, that it is in fact worth celebrating like any other culture. If the island was secretly horrible, then what does that say about the fact that the House of Change mysteriously has a bunch of Island-language text and iconography? Wouldn’t that make the game’s central utopic setting also problematic in that argument? Yeah every culture sucks and is horrible the end!… of course that’s not what is happening here. id5 is real weird about stuff like the Island and Euphrasie tbh but like, if you’re going to write an intentionally vague major story plot twist that has very specific real-world implications, you can’t be surprised when people question why it is infact so vague ingame and you seem so authoritative about a mystery you designed to be a mystery
I interpret the futility of bringing the country back like grieving a dead loved one. Nothing you can do can bring them back necessarily but that does not mean your grief is invalid or that your dead loved one must’ve actually been Horrible Actually. And you can infact live the rest of your life cherishing the memories of your loved ones and allowing new memories to form even in their absence (although in this case the Island’s memory or lack thereof complicated that metaphor.)
The last thing ISAT would ever be is a story that encourages repression. Yep kill all your memories of your stars and universe! Ok sure yeah except that’s how we got here, ISAT exists because it is infact impossible to kill all your memories of your stars and universe and you will drive yourself insane doing so.
Always fascinated with what levels of reading comprehension people can cook up these days but “the Island was evil actually” is fascinating in a uniquely sad way to say the least. It’s like the Chara Undertale discourse almost but like 10x more racist
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