A truthful witness saves lives.
—Proverbs 14:25
Heavy spoilers for Wuthering Waves 3.1. Heavy subject matter ahead.
I
Aemeath, the latest pink-haired waifu banner character in the game Wuthering Waves, is named after the Hebrew word for “truthful” or “faithful,” emet (אֶמֶת). Her story has moved the hearts of anime gacha players all over the world, because throughout the deeply emotional quest she has never failed to live up to her name.
Before we even knew her name, we first hear her crackling voice over the trans-dimensional radio in version 2.8 saying: “I hope I made you proud. I hope I haven’t let you down.” It is a tantalizing hint of yet another lost memory we are in the process of recovering, but the words don’t sound like they are from an ordinary friend or colleague. They sound like they’re from a junior, a student, or even a child. Someone who looks up to us. Who is this?
To make a long story short—spoilers to follow—she is, in fact, a foster child of ours. We raised her after she is orphaned by a terrible storm and she wanders into our home. She is also not alive in the usual sense, but a “digital ghost” able to enter computers and hack systems, but invisible to everyone but ourselves. We find out eventually that she got that way because she learned from us, a stranded hero exiled from home, to continue to be faithful to the mission of saving others, even if it means permanent loneliness and separation. She turned out to be following our footsteps from the start, and in one of the most moving twists in recent anime-style gaming, the tragedy is that in the process it takes us—her found parent—away from us at the same time. The sacrifice she makes is the kind we would have done, and have done, even when it hurts and we wish otherwise. And even when we would not wish it on the other.
Most players are moved by the parent/child dynamic of the story, identifying Aemeath as their “daughter” and burning with retributive desire to get her back from the clutches of the cosmic horror that has ensnared her, Aleph-11. The appeal does remind me somewhat of the relationship between Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, of a young girl taken in temporarily by a haunted father-hero in a dangerous world beset by monsters. The game expresses this relationship and the emotional core of it in very well-directed set pieces reminiscent of quality anime, using different art styles and effective callbacks to previous lines, images, and music to tie it all together.
One of the most effective passages was an allegory Aemeath tells while we are in her mindscape, about a black cat (a stuffed animal she has on her bed) who acts as a savior to ungrateful people and who is trapped by its role and the world. She tells what she calls a “laughable” story with rising scorn and pain at the plight of the cat, culminating in this image where all you need to know is written on her face:
In many fine stories such an allegory is often used as a way for a character to talk about their own pain. When I first started hearing it, I thought it was the same. But it takes little time to realize that the black cat couldn’t be talking about our pink-haired and white-clad heroine; it was instead talking about us, the black-clad Rover. Her pain and anger was directed on our behalf, nor her own. It hurts her far more that we suffer, so much so that it spawns the creation of a destructive spirit-robot called Sigilium, which threatens us in the quest’s first half. This too is an ironic consequence of how well we raised her to be self-sacrificial, always looking to the interest of others. But it is also the natural byproduct of a child who loves her parent and wishes the best for him or her. It is a way of honoring her father or mother. And in the time looping action of the plot, her motive for sacrificing herself is to not only save the world but to spare us from further grief and pain. A child, sacrificing herself for the parent.
I don’t have children myself. But like everyone else on earth, I am a mother and father’s child. And I think I understand and relate to where Aemeath is coming from.
II
In late 2014, I received word from my mother that my father’s slow deterioration from Parkinson’s disease was accelerating. I remember where I was when I received the phone call (or maybe email, I can’t remember) from Taiwan—sitting in front of the computer, editing a video for this website. (Which video, I can’t remember either. It may never have been published.) He had already begun to forget things a lot some years before that, but my mom said that it had gotten bad enough that he wasn’t going to be able to walk or talk on his own for long. The rest of our family had noticed and it was hard for them to watch.
Since they were both overseas, I wouldn’t get to see my parents for some weeks until they returned. Honestly, I didn’t think it was all that different than before—his gait was still a shuffle and his voice had already faded—but I knew, somehow, that this was the long slide down. And when I realized that, something broke inside me as well.
It was a moment that comes for almost everyone eventually—the day that you bear your parents’ burdens more than they did yours as a child. To watch a father fade, even gradually (it took five years from that message before he finally rested), even fairly predictably as the natural course of disease—it still hurts. The grief starts early and feels drawn out, which is I suppose both better and worse than a more sudden shock, a short time from hospital to cemetery, might provide. But the problem when it lingers that long is that every time I saw him, I was forced to think: what could I do to make him better? Is there anything at all? Can I pray harder? Can I tell him the same stories or help him recall some moment we had 20 years ago to light up some distant neuron in his brain? How could I help my mother, who always looked tired and barely got much sleep? Eventually when he couldn’t speak at all, what was he thinking and feeling? Was it anguish? Fear? Happiness and peace? Faith? Only God knows, right?
I just know that I wanted to do something, anything, to help him. To uncage the brilliant scientific mind that raised me to be able to sense the world again. What would I have to do for that to make that happen? How could I ask God to take not my cup of suffering, but his?
The thing is during those years, and the first years after his passing in 2019, I was breaking too. Depression and anxiety overtook my ability to do the things I wanted. It is a primary reason why I left this site in 2015 without an announcement. Why I, once a good student, eventually couldn’t pass my graduate school classes, even when I only had one more left until graduation. (I still haven’t graduated yet.) I started having trouble holding on to jobs, and holding on to friends, and sometimes holding on to my faith.
But throughout all this time, I didn’t feel like I was thinking about myself that much. This didn’t come out as overt self-pity, a woe-is-me keening for which I still have very little tolerance. No, it was an overwhelming tide of pain for what my mother and father and closest friends were going through then. The helplessness is the poison rather than the pain itself. The natural impulse is to want to do something about it, to fix it, but if you know you can’t, and God seems far away, then it hurts so much more. More than one’s own pain. Watching a loved one suffer is far worse. It’s why the cruelest regimes’ most effective torture tactic is not to torture their prisoner, but the prisoner’s family in front of them. That makes a man crack a lot faster than all the beatings in the world, even if—maybe because—they often beg him not to give in for their sake.
And Death itself, I suppose, is the cruelest regime of all.
III
If you’ve read this far, you probably know the final scene of the quest, the scene that feels like a last gut punch in a quest full of emotional gut punches. We have already been through the extraordinarily powerful and well-told, but not atypical, scenes of Aemeath deciding to heroically sacrifice herself for the land. We get the climactic, soaring music, the big booms, the visible tears, even the sentimental childhood flashbacks. All done to a high degree of quality.
But the quest ends not with her total disappearance, as one might expect. Instead, recovered from the training pod, she reappears as a blank physical shell of Aemeath held together by Soliskin, mute and unresponsive, staring passively ahead. We, the Rover, talk to her quietly, voice filled with heavy grief but not despair, but still hoping for some kind of response. Not that different from the way I talked to my father in his last days, really. And the Rover’s dialogue in that scene sounds a lot like the things I was thinking when I saw him:
But if you exist, it means she’s still alive too. Doesn’t it?…[The doctor] told me you’re a piece of her. A thread that might tie her to this world. If I follow it, maybe I can find where she is. [But the doctor] might have only said that to comfort me. No one has ever seen what’s beyond the Stridergate. It’s all just guesswork. How long has it been for her since she was pulled into that chaos? Is she still alive? And if she is, how much longer can she hold on? …I don’t know.
But then—in the midst of the sad stillness—a flicker of a finger. (I remember this too with him, a trembling hand trying to raise itself.)
And she speaks, haltingly but clearly. (My mother said that before he stopped breathing, my father somehow told her goodbye.)
People sobbed during this scene, though oddly enough I didn’t. And, notably, neither does Rover. In the story this is meant to be the ray of hope that we will rescue her and see her again. I knew that, in this story but also in my own in a way, though it’s not me that does the rescuing. The big black hole that sucked in Aemeath and my father is not higher, or deeper, or wider, or longer than the reach of Love.
IV
My last words to my father as he lay on the hospital bed, mute, were: I will be all right. I will live my life to make you proud. I am going to live my life to honor you.
It took me three more years of hardship, sometimes even worse than before, until the darkness began to lift. Eventually I accomplished more at work. I turned to my mom and my friends. I returned to school and started passing classes again. I prayed more. I am getting better, Dad.
For Min-Chi Huang (1944-2019)
- Yet another Hebrew reference. Aleph (?) is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, like aliph (??) in Arabic, alpha in Greek or our letter “A”. So the Threnodian is “A-1.” ↩︎
