I think what I'm most impressed with in 1000xResist is how broad a scope it tackles while at the same time being thematically consistent throughout. It feels like, whether talking about unrest, revolution, illness, motherhood, love, duty, diaspora, memory, or trauma, everything very neatly flows into a thematic constant. It's fascinating to see characters from wildly different times mirror each other.
There are like spoilers and stuff below.
The obvious, of course, is Iris and her mother. Both rebelling. Her mother in the unrest, thinking it for the best and losing much. The same of Iris, rebelling against the 50 for what they did to what she came to perceive as her own people. The same of Watcher, resisting for the sake of her people. The same of Blue.
I find it fascinating that Iris takes out her anger and frustration on Jiao, cutting her out of her life, and then Watcher does the same to Secretary, essentially. Hurting their closest friends in fits of anger. Hair to hair, and all that.
It's fascinating how Iris has all the hallmarks of teenage rebellion about her and how the society she (somewhat inadvertently) created is entering a sort of adolescence all its own by story's climax. I always felt Orchard society was somewhat like a childhood but for zeitgeists. Leaving Old Town and the factions that rise up as an analogue to finding one's own identity, and clashing with their mother society. Isn't it interesting that Principal looks so much like Iris' mother?
Speaking of Old Town and the Provisional Government. Look at how, after the death of the Allmother we, the player, have to traipse around an unfamiliar world and when we finally, finally get to come upstairs and see the Orchard again? It's not home. It never will be home, for Blue, but it's not even home for the older sisters. It only exists in memories, no matter how badly you want to go back to it you simply can't. But it hurts. It hurts here in the same way it haunts Iris. How it haunts her parents both, especially her father.
Iris, not even realizing 1000 years had passed. Her mother, not realizing she hasn't spoken to her own daughter years and years later. Her grandmother, likely, not realizing she hadn't spoken to her own daughter. Each woman not aware until it was too late to say goodbye. Watcher, then, not realizing how many communions she had taken and now? Too late. Always too late. Blue almost went that way too, she was so close to doing the same and it's only under the weight of everyone's sacrifices that she lives through any of it.
This is only a small selection of recurring themes in a game replete with them. I haven't even touched on half, a third, a fourth of all the things this game has to say. I haven't begun on how much effort it goes through to give you, the player, a home. Just so you can understand how it can be torn away from you and dropped into a scary, unfamiliar new one in some few years that feels like a blink of an eye. A home that is far from perfect, that you would love to work to better and just when you think you have? Well. You haven't. You haven't even the hope of it until you understand so very much more.
1000xResist said “We have several complex characters who have been both the abuser and the abused, you will see the decisions they make, why they made them and the consequences behind it, and in the end you can decide if you forgive them or not and we will respect that decision…
But if you leave the cops and fascist alive that’s just stupid and we will give you an ending fitting that stupid decision”
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