Tales of Berseria's Artorius's Irritation with Velvet

Great thanks once again to my friends Ecclesiastes and Angel Adonis for their assistance with proofreading and content-checking today's rant.  As always, guys, you are truly awesome!



In a game filled with excellently-written characters and iconic personalities, Artorius holds his own as a villain, being a nuanced, well-sculpted antagonist.  He acts as a conceptual reflection of protagonist Velvet, he’s got a compelling and believable backstory, and he manages to hit that elusive sweet spot of being misguided but rational and sympathetic.*  Artorius is a quality adversary all around, no doubt about it.  And he hits on smaller villain virtues, too, like his overall demeanor.  Artorius possesses an imposing and signature personality and presence that fits his methods and beliefs: rigidly logical, calm, austere.  He consistently embodies the qualities of pure reason and detachment that he desires to impose upon humanity, and he pulls it off really well--more than characters like Cyrus of Pokemon Generation 4, and Shin Megami Tensei 3’s Hikawa, who simply feel inhuman and robotic in their rejection of emotion, Artorius comports himself in a manner that seems genuine, like a real person who has driven himself to be coldly above his humanity.  ToB succeeds where other games fail to create a villainous Spock rather than just a narrative automaton.

Most of the time.

There IS an instance in which Artorius the villain’s** composure breaks which I find quite interesting.  At the end of the game, as Velvet and her team stand before Artorius and Innominat, she steps forward to give Artorius an answer to the question he asked her years before: why do birds fly?  Velvet’s answer is a reaffirmation of who she is and, by extension, who she believes humanity is, a declaration that her nature, human nature, needs no excuse and will not be restrained.  And it’s at this moment that Artorius’s aloofness finally is broken.  His reply to her is not restrained and unemotional, as all his interactions with her (and everyone else) have been prior to this moment.  Artorius is irritated.

“You were always like this.  That sort of foolishness is what creates the daemons, and plunges the world into tragedy and despair.”

He isn’t yelling it.  There’s no more than a disapproving frown upon his face, and if there’s any rage within his eyes, the camera doesn’t deign to rise high enough for us to see it.  And yet, that we can hear the annoyance in his voice at all, that he is actually making a statement that shows that he has taken her stubbornness personally, is more affecting than another villain’s screaming tantrum could ever be.

Artorius is exasperated.  He’s borne Velvet’s desire to kill him, her hatred, her determination to end his ambitions, her threats, her attacks...everything in her opposition of him and her quest for vengeance has been met with unmoved, adamant stoicism by Artorius. Until this moment.  Why?  Why is this, after everything that preceded it, the act that finally gets under his skin?

Well, there’s plenty of possible reasons, of course, and good ones, at that.  It could, for example, be because it is only now in which Velvet finally meets him not as a personal enemy, but as a philosophical one, stating her resistance to him in terms of ideology instead of vendetta, and ironically yet appropriately, the arena of doctrine IS the one which Artorius takes personally.  It could also be that he really doesn’t like his own birds-fly question schtick being thrown back at him, or at least, dislikes that the answer is better than his own.

I wonder, though, if perhaps this moment finally draws real irritation from Artorius because of something else.

Consider this.  While not any official, dedicated tutorship, it’s clear at the beginning of the game that Artorius is the one that taught Velvet at least some of her skills at fighting, back when he was simply Arthur to her.  More importantly, however, he also taught her the discipline of combat, the rules by which one self-governs his or her feelings and decisions in battle to be at one’s most effective.  Velvet can quote the full range of Arthur’s maxims of combat, and does so many times over the course of Tales of Berseria, both in relation to her own actions, and when explaining her knowledge of how and why Artorius acts.  Velvet knows how Artorius fights and she knows how he thinks, because she learned his lessons well.  You cannot deny that she was a good student, in the sense that she learned the material.  But she did not take it to heart, she did not internalize and embrace the maxims and doctrine of Artorius herself, even if she learned it.

Velvet was Arthur’s student, his only protege.  He imparted to her his doctrine of logic and order, encouraged her to embrace it, gave practical examples of why she should.  And yet the lessons never took hold in Velvet’s mind and heart.  It wasn’t a problem of her simply not understanding.  She learned what he had to teach--she simply rejected it, or at least, the part of it that mattered most, in his eyes.  In spite of he himself guiding her, Arthur could not get Velvet to give up her passionate and emotional nature.  Velvet could not be convinced or cajoled to stop letting her feelings dictate her purpose and actions.

And now consider this: for much of the time that Arthur was training Velvet, he was grappling with his despair that humanity could not be saved from its own base instincts and emotions, the ones which caused the Daemonblight which was destroying human civilization.

I’m not saying that she was an instrumental part of Arthur’s descent to become Artorius.  Obviously the major factor in his losing himself to despair over the hopelessness of humanity was the loss of his wife and child, as shown in the game.  But all the same...could it be that Velvet played an unwitting role in Artorius’s decision that humanity must be changed by force?  Here she was, a willing student, a learner who would listen to his counsel voluntarily, and yet she would not change!  The guidance of the enlightened one himself, given to a learner who wanted to receive it, and still Velvet could not and would not cease to be a person ruled by her instincts and emotions more than her rationality.

Considering that...even if she wasn’t the core cause of Artorius coming to the conclusion that humanity could not be saved from itself without force, did Velvet help convince him that said conclusion was right?  Was her example proof, to Artorius, that even a well-meaning human being with the right knowledge could not help themselves but to indulge in the many facets of human nature that would lead to daemonhood?  And proof that no matter how revered he might be when he became the world’s Shepherd, his own example would still not be enough to inspire humanity to rise above itself as he had?

Is the vexation that Artorius shows with Velvet’s affirmation that human beings cannot and will not cease to behave as human beings simply a case of an old, long-felt disappointment finally being shown?  Is this aggravation with Velvet’s eternal inability and refusal to live any differently an old wound, a personal failure that still galls him?  Is Artorius so frustrated because Velvet does not understand that she is what convinced him that there was no other way to begin with?
















* More than any other medium I’ve come across, RPGs seem to struggle with creating decent villains whose motives are misguided attempts to do right by the world.  I mean, I know writing a solid character isn’t necessarily easy, but I swear for every 1 Artorius, there’s a solid 20 or more bullheaded, irrational, outright stupid jackasses like Fire Emblem 16’s Edelgard, Pokemon Generation 3’s Teams Magma and especially Aqua, Enzea from Conception 2, Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, Hilda in the first half of Stella Glow, the Light Deity in Asdivine 4, Linear in the second half of Evolution Worlds, Caesar in Fallout: New Vegas...morons who wouldn’t know a rational solution to their problems if it bit them in their pompous asses are a dime a dozen in this genre.


** By which I make the distinction of the period of time after Laphicet’s sacrifice and before Artorius’s defeat and death.  Before he committed himself fully to his path to save the world, and once he has failed and can release his hold on his own despair and grief, he’s shown to feel emotions.  But for most of the story, we see him in the role of emotionless savior to the world and villain, and that’s the period of time I’m referring to.