Tales of Berseria's Innominat's Betrayal

Huge big grand special thanks to my buddies Ecclesiastes and Angel Adonis for stepping up to be my sounding boards and proofreaders on this rant.  Very much appreciated, guys!



Today’s gonna be 1 of those more rambling, meandering rants I sometimes do where I just don’t really know where I’m going with it and there may or may not be a point.  But hey, people seem to like Love, Death, and Robots pretty well, and something like half of its episodes are totally pointless, too, so surely it can’t be that bad when I do the same, right?

This is gonna have highest-tier spoilers for Tales of Berseria.  If you have not played the game, to completion, then back up, and walk away.  And...then walk back to your PC, tablet, or phone, and, like, go to a different site.  Look, just don’t be spoiled by this rant, is what I’m saying.  Tales of Berseria is awesome and to lessen the eventual experience of it is to do yourself wrong.

Alright, so, we’re all ToB veterans here, right?  Great, cuz I am not writing “Innominat” out 31 more times.  The title of this rant’s mostly just for the sake of avoiding spoiling anything for potential players.  We’re calling the boy by his real name, Laphicet, for the rest of today.  Admittedly not much of a difference in length, but it’s at least easier for me to keep track of its correct spelling.

And speaking of names, to avoid confusion, I use the names Arthur and Artorius to help better distinguish the man before and after his fall into despair turned him into a villain.

So!  Betrayal.  Betrayal is the great sin perpetrated against Velvet Crowe that destroys her life, and transforms her, in body and far more importantly in spirit, from a simple, caring, and optimistic young woman into a murderous, driven demon of vengeance obsessed with destroying he who betrayed her.  The betrayal of her brother-in-law Arthur is the defining tragedy that propels Velvet forward, both haunting and motivating her every act and sin as she brings chaos to an ordered world and leaves pandemonium in her wake.  Artorius betrayed her trust, murdered her brother, and destroyed her life, and nothing can heal her from the pain and fury of that transgression.

Velvet’s is a powerful story of revenge, and it works in large part because it hinges itself on a rock-solid basis: the sin of betrayal.  We as a species have a perspective on betrayal that is, perhaps, not entirely logical--we take wrongs committed against us way more personally when they’re also acts of betrayal.  For some reason, we hold much less contempt for a known enemy doing us harm than for a supposed ally doing so, even if the hurt inflicted is exactly the same.  Hell, we’ll often hold less of a grudge over a foe doing greater harm to us than we will regarding a friend’s betrayal.  It’s a universal sentiment to humanity, as far as I can tell, across any number of major cultures: traitors are the very worst kind of villain.  Violence, murder, mental abuse, rape, theft, arson, manipulation, there’s no evil we can contemplate that doesn’t become substantially worse in our minds when it is an act of betrayal.  We don’t even like people who betray others for our benefit--the infamous Benedict Arnold had great difficulties finding much love or respect from English government or society after switching sides, for example.*

And hey, in fairness, there IS some basis to this deep hatred our collective consciousness has for traitors.  Beyond countless pieces of media from every point of cultural history telling us that they suck, betrayal is, theoretically, the hardest attack to defend against.  Walls keep enemies out, not friends; it’s always harder to save ourselves from harm that comes from a source we don’t expect.  Having natural distaste for those who turn against those who trusted them, and then enhancing that distaste by drilling it further into our head with stories both fictional and historical on the matter, is a psychological safeguard that helps keep us all just a little more honest as a whole, as valuable to our advanced society today as it was to our tribal beginnings, and even perhaps to our social primate ancestors.  Maybe it’s still a little objectively silly that we would classically see an infamous traitor as a worse person than a genocidal tyrant, but there IS a cause for this deep-rooted inconsistency.

At any rate, getting back to what might generously be called my point, Velvet’s relentless hatred and thirst for vengeance has a solid basis in Artorius’s betrayal.  This isn’t like Grandia 3’s Emelius going evil-crazy because he has to share his worldly importance with his sister, or Shin Megami Tensei 3’s Isamu wanting to remake the world because he got stood up 1 time, or The Legend of Zelda’s Gannondorf falling prey to sunk cost fallacy as regards his efforts to conquer Hyrule.  Velvet is not Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, or Xenogears’s Id, or Xenosaga’s Kevin, or Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth, or Danganronpa’s Junko.**  Velvet very clearly has an actual reason to be what she is, and that motivating event is extreme enough that it never stops seeming to the audience a completely believable cause for her quest.  Artorius took advantage of the trust that his family had in him, and the damage that did to Velvet is a penetrating, persisting one that easily supports all that follows.

But what’s really cool, to me, is that Tales of Berseria’s writers managed to top it with the revelation that the true betrayal was Laphicet’s.

Arguably the greatest twist of Tales of Berseria is the revelation that it was not Arthur’s idea to sacrifice Laphicet to save the world--it was Laphicet’s own.  Knowing that he had at best a few years left to him thanks to his illness, Laphicet sought to make his brief existence worth something, and convinced Arthur to kill him, to use that death to call upon the power of the god Innominat to save the world.  No longer able to believe in humanity’s ability to save itself from the threat of daemonblight,*** Artorius agreed, and cast aside his humanity for the purpose, so of course he isn’t blameless, and his discipline of detached, cold logic means that he is still accountable for the atrocities that follow, including those inflicted upon Velvet herself.  But the heart of the matter, the core of Velvet’s suffering, is a betrayal by Laphicet, not Artorius.

It’s a masterful move by the writers, and arguably the only scenario that could have deepened and worsened the treachery committed against Velvet, if you look at the concept of traitors classically.  Dante’s Inferno makes the argument that the greatest of all sins, the evil act that will send you to the very bottom ring of Hell, is betrayal--but even then, there are 4 different tiers of this ultimate sin, describing which forms of it are worse than others.  As Velvet originally understood it, the treason committed against her by Artorius can be described as both Type 1 and Type 3, in Dante’s system.  

The first type is the betrayal of family, which of course Arthur has committed--he’s murdered his brother-in-law.  Hell, even considering that Laphicet actually asked him to do this, Artorius is still guilty of betraying his family, because regardless of what Laphicet’s will on the matter was, killing him still destroys Velvet’s life.  And let's be clear: it would have ruined her life even if Velvet hadn’t become a demon in the process--she’s devoted everything to keeping her little brother alive, and as healthy and happy as possible.  It doesn’t matter if Laphicet didn’t have much longer left anyway; Arthur has still brought everything for which Velvet has lived for and devoted herself to a premature end.

While any betrayal is, in Dante’s estimation, deserving of the deepest level of Hell, treachery against family is actually the least heinous version of the sin.  Worse than that is treason against one’s nation, but that’s the only kind of betrayal that Laphicet’s death does not commit.  The night Arthur destroys Velvet’s life, however, does also qualify as a betrayal of the third tier of Dante’s Inferno: the treachery of a host against a guest.  While that doesn’t seem like a literal description of Arthur’s actions, one must keep in mind that the spirit behind Dante’s description of this kind of treachery is the concept of betraying those who have, in trust and good faith, placed their well-being in your care.  A guest who enters a host’s home is a person who goes into unfamiliar territory that they have less or no control over, with the understanding that the host is now responsible for their welfare.  It’s synonymous with the trust that one places in one’s protector and/or caretaker, and to knowingly double-cross those who you have agreed to defend and provide for is the second greatest betrayal there is.  Velvet placed her faith in Arthur, with his great skills and unique powers, to protect his family: both herself and, far more importantly, their brother.  To witness the man she had held complete, unquestioning faith in as their protector violently take her brother’s life, coldly use his death as a means to an end...even beyond the harm that Artorius did directly to her that same night, such a life-shattering tragedy is easily great enough to sustain any quest for vengeance from start to finish.

And yet, there is 1 final, higher still level of treachery that can exist, if we follow the Dante’s Inferno metric.  The very worst form of the most heinous sin of all: the betrayal of one’s benefactor.  And this is why I find the twist that Laphicet’s sacrifice was his own idea and request such an impressive and clever piece of escalation from the writers of Tales of Berseria.  Because it takes the already life-destroying betrayal that Velvet thinks she has suffered, and manages to actually worsen it.  Because Laphicet is Velvet’s Brutus.  Her Judas.

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Velvet made Laphicet’s health and well-being the center of her universe, the reason for her being.  Her every effort was devoted to fighting his illness, keeping him alive and as happy as he could be.  Although Arthur kept them physically safe in the village, it was Velvet who was Laphicet’s caretaker, the one who got him medicine, cooked for him, engaged in their home’s upkeep, hunted for their food, and provided him with love, attention, and, inasmuch as she could with their limited resources, things he enjoyed.  Though Laphicet’s determination to live, whether for his own sake or hers, was surely a great factor in how well he persisted, it’s only reasonable to conclude, from what evidence the game provides us, that Laphicet Crowe’s having survived as long as he has by ToB’s opening is primarily thanks to the tireless efforts and relentless, loving devotion of his sister Velvet.

Now, arguments can be made as to what level of gratitude, if any, Laphicet is morally obligated to feel toward Velvet on this matter.  Other arguments can be made as to whether or not it was morally acceptable for him to take the life that Velvet had safeguarded for him and give it away for a greater purpose--it’s a strong point that, regardless of her contribution, it IS still HIS life, and his autonomy to devote it to a cause is inviolable, regardless of how Velvet would feel about it.  And, of course, there’s always the practical argument to be had that his time was running out, regardless of how hard Velvet worked against that fact, so even had he not sacrificed himself, she would only have had a short time longer with him.  Yes, there’s a lot you can argue about the right and wrong and practicality of Laphicet’s decision to give his limited remaining time in service of the world.  

But right, wrong, some impossibly tangled quality between them, 1 thing you cannot really deny is that his voluntary sacrifice IS a betrayal.  Velvet is Laphicet’s benefactor, she has, in effect, given him his life, and he has thrown it away.  She has done everything for him that she possibly can, practically given up the idea of living her own life in order to provide for his, all to the simple, sole intent of trying to keep Laphicet alive and happy.  Maybe it was his right to and maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was morally good to attempt to better the world by using his life to safeguard all others’, but these are irrelevant concerns to Velvet.  For Velvet, Laphicet’s existence WAS hers, his life a treasure that she bought with years of her own. 

Velvet Crowe was Laphicet’s benefactor.  And she didn’t let her love for him consume her time and energy at every turn because she wanted him to make some grand gesture to the world.  What she wanted was for her brother to live, for as long as he possibly could.  And he took what she had given him, and used it to do the opposite.  Laphicet gave up, and in doing so he robbed Velvet of that for which she gave everything.  Right, wrong, practical or pointless, all irrelevant to the story of Velvet’s suffering: what matters is that Laphicet betrayed his benefactor.

As I said, it’s a stroke of brilliance from the writers, in my eyes.  I mean, it’s unexpected, it’s a shocking revelation, it makes a huge amount of sense in the plot and ties a lot of details together, it’s a tremendous turning point for the characters of both Velvet and the new Laphicet, it’s thematically excellent and ties that tragic moment all the more to the concept of despair in having Arthur’s loss of faith in humanity be manipulated by Laphicet’s own choice to give up in the face of his illness’s likely victory,*** it creates opportunity to deepen the characters of the game’s villains (and Selica’s, as well)....it’s already a fantastic plot twist.  But it’s all the greater for the fact that it manages to surpass the power of Artorius’s betrayal of Velvet and expand the tragedy of the night her life was destroyed by increasing the sheer magnitude of treachery to frankly Biblical proportions.

And it even manages to redefine the possibility and potential of the very concept of benefactor betrayal--Laphicet doesn’t stab Velvet, he doesn’t sell her out to her enemies, he doesn’t even wish her harm; he volunteered to give his life to save the world out of love for her.  And it is only the most powerful form of treason because of her love for him!  Had he not loved Velvet so dearly that he burned with the need to do something to ensure her future, Laphicet might very well not have stolen his remaining time with her away from Velvet.  Had she not loved Laphicet so dearly that she valued his own existence and happiness more than her own, Velvet would not have been so utterly destroyed by having Laphicet taken from her before his time.****  There is no malice, no greed, no disappointment, no ambition, nor anything like that--Tales of Berseria’s writers created a scenario of the greatest form of betrayal which is born and carried through solely out of love.  More than just brilliant, Laphicet’s betrayal is poetic.

This is a winding, rambling rant and I barely managed to make a point in it, let alone have any idea how to end it.  I guess I’ll just say, not for the first time, that Tales of Berseria is an inspiringly well-crafted story of a remarkable caliber, and I have nothing but respect for it because of such shining moments in its narrative as the plot twist of Laphicet’s betrayal.




















* In fairness, some of this was, as I understand it, more practical than personal (sort of), in that he was so reviled by American revolutionaries and later officials that he would be a disruptive military target in the field and a liability in the court.  Still, a lot of it was emotional bias of society against traitors; the East India company once basically told him to fuck off because no one likes a backstabber, even those who he acted in favor of.


** If Danganronpa was an RPG, there would 100% be a new queen loser at the top spot of my Lamest Villains rant.  Junko is the kind of pathetic, tiresome dipshit that makes Sephiroth look legitimate.


*** Oh, hey, by the way, Spike Chunsoft: this is how you write a character defined by despair.  Maybe take some fucking notes, hm?  Or at the very least look up what the damn word means; it’s clear you guys haven’t got the slightest idea about what despair actually is.


**** Yes, she still would, presumably, have been done the great injury of having been turned into a Therion demon.  But while she clearly, in the story’s course, resents Artorius for this personal harm and the terrible treatment she endures because of it, it’s also just as clearly not the root of her tormented quest for vengeance.