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Eternal recurrence stories
Okay, of the four things tied for first place in the WIP meme poll, I felt this one was probably the easiest to quickly finish up in January.
Warning: Spoilers for various things including Braid, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Final Fantasy X.
One thing about dating my partner is that he's always surprised by stories, mainly in Asian media, that sort of take it as a given that the world operates in cycles, an eternal recurrence where what has happened before is bound to happen again. Because I've been consuming Japanese media (anime, games, and films) for most of my life, I never really noticed that a background assumption that the world is cyclical in nature is quite noticeable in the stories of countries strongly influenced by Buddhism, Japan included. My partner analogizes this to how stories that feature a character who is healed/reborn/achieves apotheosis as a true hero through self-sacrifice are just very common in countries with a background assumption of Christianity even when not specifically trying to reference Jesus's resurrection.
Video games series with eternal recurrence worldbuilding
I think where eternal recurrence worldbuilding tends to show up the most is actually in video games, and the reason why is that I think it's fairly common in the video game industry (because of the high effort of finishing a game) to want to sell more games by continuing to make more games in a series, but to be worried (with good reason) that each time you make a direct sequel to another game, you risk losing people who didn't play previous game(s) and now have no idea what is going on and who therefore find playing the sequel a rough experience that they don't get much out of. Sequels have this "double-edged sword" quality where releasing a sequel allows you to capitalize on an in-built audience, but also means you're pretty vulnerable to attrition of that audience as people lose interest in the series, or new people try to jump in and realize they don't understand the series because they've missed out on too much of the story and the game is no longer general-audience-friendly. This is something that affects all media -- book series, movie sequels, TV series (both within a series and across multiple series set within the same universe/franchise) -- but I think it affects video games much more severely because of things like console unavailability/obsolescence and forced console-jumping (e.g. because of platform-exclusive releases), rapid technological advancements that often make older games unplayable or out of line with modern audience expectation, and which basically change the medium of games so that two games in the same series can feel like they're not even in the same genre because of different graphics, core gameplay, sophistication in storytelling, etc. Therefore, liking one game in the series is no guarantee you'll enjoy its predecessors or even find it a playable experience. And games are often longer experiences to complete, sometimes much longer than reading a book, and gameplay difficulty makes it so that sometimes people just don't/can't finish. And the ability of games to branch based on player decisions sometimes means that there isn't a canonical story and/or experience of playing a game; making a direct sequel therefore often means canonizing some version of events that happened in the previous game, thereby invalidating player decision-making and customization and rendering it meaningless. All this means that audience drop-off can be quite severe the longer you try to tell a single continuous story across multiple games. Playthroughs and story recaps mitigate some of these issues, but it's still fairly hard to convince people to pick up a continuous-story game series in the middle.
So one strategy that obviously becomes appealing here is to tell multiple basically standalone stories in the same general "universe." This is the approach that the Legend of Zelda and Mana series take. Each game features enough recurring motifs and character types and story themes and worldbuilding elements that the games feel coherent and part of the same "brand" and players can expect more or less a similar experience to what they got with previous entries in that series, but the world, story, characters, and (to some degree) gameplay can all be refreshed in a way that requires players to have NO prior knowledge of other entries. When done in a certain way, the series takes on the character of depicting an "eternal recurrence": Within this world (united under the banner of a single game series), there is a kind of blueprint "tale as old as time" that continues to unfold over and over again in slightly different ways. In Zelda, it's the eternal struggle of the three pieces of the Triforce: Zelda the princess, Link her champion, and Ganon the usurper. In Mana, it's a cycle of flourishing and decline, ultimately leading to the death and rebirth of the Mana Tree that represents the lifeforce of the world. Contrast this with the Final Fantasy series, which ALSO uses the strategy of making each game a standalone story, but where each game gets to freely choose its heroes and story theme in a way that DOESN'T make the series seem like it's depicting an eternal recurrence of any kind.
Perfect loop stories
So I think games series are ones that tend to feature this kind of eternal recurrence. However, they show up in other media.
Probably some of the most memorable ones are ones where the work of art is itself a perfect loop, where the ending of the work is meant to feed naturally into the opening of the work -- a movie that tells a story but can be watched on loop, for example. I feel like I've seen several examples of this in my life, but the one that stands out the most to me where I can recall it off the top of my head is Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent. Aside from some minor differences, the show is designed so that it opens in the same way that it ends. Obviously, this kind of plot structure is quite hard to pull off and tends to come off as quite artsy and weird because it eschews the normal catharsis featured in stories where something has to develop, break, and change in order to make the story feel like it has stakes or is worth watching. In a kind of cyclical structure, the characters feel trapped, their fate preordained, stuck in a time loop of their own making. It's quite a bleak structure, with characters doomed to make the same mistakes over and over because they don't and can't learn from their experiences. For example, another work that features this kind of perfect loop story where the beginning and end are in the same place is the game Braid, which very much features all these elements of the ending feeling quite unsatisfying because there is no sense of progress, and also strongly featuring elements of time looping and repeating or ruminating on the same mistakes over and over again. The maker of Braid, Jonathan Blow, is also very strongly influenced by Buddhism, so I guess the structure of this game isn't particularly surprising. That said, despite the somewhat unsatisfying elements of perfect loop stories, some entries are at least able to give a bit of catharsis by having a beginning feels confusing, mysterious, and unexplained, but then an ending that explains "how we got there."
Individual stories with eternal recurrence worldbuilding
A bit less strict, but the work may not be structurally cyclical but just feature a kind of history where the same story or the same drama keeps playing out over and over again. Here I think a good/easy example is Star Wars. Star Wars of course opens with the interesting choice of words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This combined with the futuristic technology and interplanetary story establishes from quite early on a blending of past and future (fantastical/alt history and sci-fi) and with it the vague sense that what has happened in the past will happen in the future. This cyclicality is reinforced by the depiction in this world of what seems to be an eternal struggle between the light and dark sides of the force which try but can never quite extinguish each other (itself a very Daoist outlook on the world). At the start of the series, the Jedi representing the light side of the force have basically been pushed to the brink of extinction and passed out of memory, but Luke represents a revival of this tradition. The prequels depict a world at the opposite point in the cycle, with the Jedi at the height of their numbers and power, and hopeful and arrogant enough to think that the dark side of the force might be eliminated for good. The result is a feeling that Luke is only one (/the latest) iteration in a struggle that has been going on well before he was born and will continue long after he dies. This seems a bit bleak, this depiction of a world in constant struggle, with some times of peace and prosperity, but where such things never last long. Still, it avoids fatalism -- despite the pattern of struggle without outright victory, there is also a specter of permanent defeat/victory. Or at least, what Luke does still feels meaningful, because there is still a need for a hero to step up in THIS cycle; there are still stakes. (George Lucas was also of course self-consciously influenced by Buddhism when coming up with the Jedi and the Force.)
In this sense, Final Fantasy X also depicts a similarly tumultuous world built on cyclical struggle punctuated by only-temporary periods of peace. Like in Star Wars, there is a destructive evil in the world that can't truly be killed (Sin can killed but it eventually is always resurrected and reincarnated), and peace and prosperity can be achieved but comes with a short time limit. Unlike in Star Wars, though, this metaphysical reality is so bleak that the point of the story is that eventually, in order for the world to become a better place, someone must decide to irreversibly reject the comforts of tradition and doctrine for everyone in order to take the chance on something completely new that may or may not actually be a viable alternative.
Eternal recurrence and multiple-lives soulmates AU
The background assumption that people reincarnate also tends to lend itself to stories that are a specific subtype of soulmate AU, which is one where the same people/souls reincarnate and live multiple lives and are destined to find each other in each life. This plays a role in the first arc of Sailor Moon where Princess Serenity and Endymion meet a doomed end in the old Moon Kingdom, but through the actions of Queen Serenity, they get born again and have a second chance in the next life. There is a moment, though, when it looks like Usagi and Mamoru are always doomed to have a tragic end, playing out the same sad story over and over again.
I can't really think of that many original works that feature this thing of "soulmates finding each other over and over again" -- I guess it's quite a sad story setup because in order to portray it, you basically have to confront characters' mortality repeatedly; for a story centered around romance, there are no happily ever afters (or an illusion of such) to be found here; rather, any happiness the characters find in each other is temporary and eventually ended by death. However, I feel it's a much more common story setup to play with in fanfiction, because fanfic writers love setting AUs (which this setup gives you a good chance to do), and one common function of fanfiction is to give people an experience like canon but MORE, and what fits that if not getting to see a ship fall in love over and over in different times/situations/settings and in different ways? The pre-existing investment in the characters that fans come in with allows you to tell one compelling story in canon and then a reincarnated soulmates AU in fanfiction that draws on/is in conversation with the canon dynamic but also just gives people MORE of the characters and their dynamic that they enjoyed so much in canon.
One work that plays a bit with this idea of soulmates who always find each other is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The removal of memories creates a situation where two characters are unable to learn from experience and so make the exact same mistakes they have before, creating a kind of cyclicality that resembles "soulmates" or "fated love."
The emotional landscape of eternal recurrence stories
Looking at the stories above, one general takeaway is that eternal recurrence stories feature an ambivalent, somewhat-contradictory combination of optimism and pessimism. Successes are never permanent, but failures aren't either. The eternal recurrence brings a kind of fatalism or pre-destiny to the world, but also establishes a kind of narrative tension that one day, in some iteration of the cycle, it might be broken and nirvana might be attained. This is quite a different kind of background worldbuilding than one that tends to assume the world is progressive, slowly but gradually arcing toward justice, an ever more perfect union, and such. Here, the normal state of the world is to stay the same, and only a dramatic upheaval or decisive change is capable of setting it on a different path.
I also have this note here that Japanese art in particular often features a variation on background Buddhism that embraces the cyclicality of the world. Since at least the Heian period, an aesthetic very common in Japanese art is mono no aware, or an awareness of the transience of things, which is related to what I said above about how neither successes nor failures are ever permanent in eternal recurrence stories. However, I feel like mono no aware departs a bit from traditional Buddhism by embracing the meaningfulness and preciousness of the cycle rather than having the goal of eventually escaping it. However, I feel like talking about mono no aware in modern Japanese art could be its own post, and I want to keep this post short and avoid my tendency toward monster essays. So let me leave that topic for another day!
Anyway, are there any examples of perfectly cyclical stories or stories with eternal recurrence background worldbuilding that stand out to you? Do you notice these kinds of stories tend to be more popular in specific genres or media? Do you tend to enjoy these stories or find them frustrating?
In my classic![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge fashion, I will count this as fulfilling Challenge #9 - Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works, even though I don't know if this would actually count as a favorite trope of mine!
Warning: Spoilers for various things including Braid, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Final Fantasy X.
One thing about dating my partner is that he's always surprised by stories, mainly in Asian media, that sort of take it as a given that the world operates in cycles, an eternal recurrence where what has happened before is bound to happen again. Because I've been consuming Japanese media (anime, games, and films) for most of my life, I never really noticed that a background assumption that the world is cyclical in nature is quite noticeable in the stories of countries strongly influenced by Buddhism, Japan included. My partner analogizes this to how stories that feature a character who is healed/reborn/achieves apotheosis as a true hero through self-sacrifice are just very common in countries with a background assumption of Christianity even when not specifically trying to reference Jesus's resurrection.
Video games series with eternal recurrence worldbuilding
I think where eternal recurrence worldbuilding tends to show up the most is actually in video games, and the reason why is that I think it's fairly common in the video game industry (because of the high effort of finishing a game) to want to sell more games by continuing to make more games in a series, but to be worried (with good reason) that each time you make a direct sequel to another game, you risk losing people who didn't play previous game(s) and now have no idea what is going on and who therefore find playing the sequel a rough experience that they don't get much out of. Sequels have this "double-edged sword" quality where releasing a sequel allows you to capitalize on an in-built audience, but also means you're pretty vulnerable to attrition of that audience as people lose interest in the series, or new people try to jump in and realize they don't understand the series because they've missed out on too much of the story and the game is no longer general-audience-friendly. This is something that affects all media -- book series, movie sequels, TV series (both within a series and across multiple series set within the same universe/franchise) -- but I think it affects video games much more severely because of things like console unavailability/obsolescence and forced console-jumping (e.g. because of platform-exclusive releases), rapid technological advancements that often make older games unplayable or out of line with modern audience expectation, and which basically change the medium of games so that two games in the same series can feel like they're not even in the same genre because of different graphics, core gameplay, sophistication in storytelling, etc. Therefore, liking one game in the series is no guarantee you'll enjoy its predecessors or even find it a playable experience. And games are often longer experiences to complete, sometimes much longer than reading a book, and gameplay difficulty makes it so that sometimes people just don't/can't finish. And the ability of games to branch based on player decisions sometimes means that there isn't a canonical story and/or experience of playing a game; making a direct sequel therefore often means canonizing some version of events that happened in the previous game, thereby invalidating player decision-making and customization and rendering it meaningless. All this means that audience drop-off can be quite severe the longer you try to tell a single continuous story across multiple games. Playthroughs and story recaps mitigate some of these issues, but it's still fairly hard to convince people to pick up a continuous-story game series in the middle.
So one strategy that obviously becomes appealing here is to tell multiple basically standalone stories in the same general "universe." This is the approach that the Legend of Zelda and Mana series take. Each game features enough recurring motifs and character types and story themes and worldbuilding elements that the games feel coherent and part of the same "brand" and players can expect more or less a similar experience to what they got with previous entries in that series, but the world, story, characters, and (to some degree) gameplay can all be refreshed in a way that requires players to have NO prior knowledge of other entries. When done in a certain way, the series takes on the character of depicting an "eternal recurrence": Within this world (united under the banner of a single game series), there is a kind of blueprint "tale as old as time" that continues to unfold over and over again in slightly different ways. In Zelda, it's the eternal struggle of the three pieces of the Triforce: Zelda the princess, Link her champion, and Ganon the usurper. In Mana, it's a cycle of flourishing and decline, ultimately leading to the death and rebirth of the Mana Tree that represents the lifeforce of the world. Contrast this with the Final Fantasy series, which ALSO uses the strategy of making each game a standalone story, but where each game gets to freely choose its heroes and story theme in a way that DOESN'T make the series seem like it's depicting an eternal recurrence of any kind.
Perfect loop stories
So I think games series are ones that tend to feature this kind of eternal recurrence. However, they show up in other media.
Probably some of the most memorable ones are ones where the work of art is itself a perfect loop, where the ending of the work is meant to feed naturally into the opening of the work -- a movie that tells a story but can be watched on loop, for example. I feel like I've seen several examples of this in my life, but the one that stands out the most to me where I can recall it off the top of my head is Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent. Aside from some minor differences, the show is designed so that it opens in the same way that it ends. Obviously, this kind of plot structure is quite hard to pull off and tends to come off as quite artsy and weird because it eschews the normal catharsis featured in stories where something has to develop, break, and change in order to make the story feel like it has stakes or is worth watching. In a kind of cyclical structure, the characters feel trapped, their fate preordained, stuck in a time loop of their own making. It's quite a bleak structure, with characters doomed to make the same mistakes over and over because they don't and can't learn from their experiences. For example, another work that features this kind of perfect loop story where the beginning and end are in the same place is the game Braid, which very much features all these elements of the ending feeling quite unsatisfying because there is no sense of progress, and also strongly featuring elements of time looping and repeating or ruminating on the same mistakes over and over again. The maker of Braid, Jonathan Blow, is also very strongly influenced by Buddhism, so I guess the structure of this game isn't particularly surprising. That said, despite the somewhat unsatisfying elements of perfect loop stories, some entries are at least able to give a bit of catharsis by having a beginning feels confusing, mysterious, and unexplained, but then an ending that explains "how we got there."
Individual stories with eternal recurrence worldbuilding
A bit less strict, but the work may not be structurally cyclical but just feature a kind of history where the same story or the same drama keeps playing out over and over again. Here I think a good/easy example is Star Wars. Star Wars of course opens with the interesting choice of words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This combined with the futuristic technology and interplanetary story establishes from quite early on a blending of past and future (fantastical/alt history and sci-fi) and with it the vague sense that what has happened in the past will happen in the future. This cyclicality is reinforced by the depiction in this world of what seems to be an eternal struggle between the light and dark sides of the force which try but can never quite extinguish each other (itself a very Daoist outlook on the world). At the start of the series, the Jedi representing the light side of the force have basically been pushed to the brink of extinction and passed out of memory, but Luke represents a revival of this tradition. The prequels depict a world at the opposite point in the cycle, with the Jedi at the height of their numbers and power, and hopeful and arrogant enough to think that the dark side of the force might be eliminated for good. The result is a feeling that Luke is only one (/the latest) iteration in a struggle that has been going on well before he was born and will continue long after he dies. This seems a bit bleak, this depiction of a world in constant struggle, with some times of peace and prosperity, but where such things never last long. Still, it avoids fatalism -- despite the pattern of struggle without outright victory, there is also a specter of permanent defeat/victory. Or at least, what Luke does still feels meaningful, because there is still a need for a hero to step up in THIS cycle; there are still stakes. (George Lucas was also of course self-consciously influenced by Buddhism when coming up with the Jedi and the Force.)
In this sense, Final Fantasy X also depicts a similarly tumultuous world built on cyclical struggle punctuated by only-temporary periods of peace. Like in Star Wars, there is a destructive evil in the world that can't truly be killed (Sin can killed but it eventually is always resurrected and reincarnated), and peace and prosperity can be achieved but comes with a short time limit. Unlike in Star Wars, though, this metaphysical reality is so bleak that the point of the story is that eventually, in order for the world to become a better place, someone must decide to irreversibly reject the comforts of tradition and doctrine for everyone in order to take the chance on something completely new that may or may not actually be a viable alternative.
Eternal recurrence and multiple-lives soulmates AU
The background assumption that people reincarnate also tends to lend itself to stories that are a specific subtype of soulmate AU, which is one where the same people/souls reincarnate and live multiple lives and are destined to find each other in each life. This plays a role in the first arc of Sailor Moon where Princess Serenity and Endymion meet a doomed end in the old Moon Kingdom, but through the actions of Queen Serenity, they get born again and have a second chance in the next life. There is a moment, though, when it looks like Usagi and Mamoru are always doomed to have a tragic end, playing out the same sad story over and over again.
I can't really think of that many original works that feature this thing of "soulmates finding each other over and over again" -- I guess it's quite a sad story setup because in order to portray it, you basically have to confront characters' mortality repeatedly; for a story centered around romance, there are no happily ever afters (or an illusion of such) to be found here; rather, any happiness the characters find in each other is temporary and eventually ended by death. However, I feel it's a much more common story setup to play with in fanfiction, because fanfic writers love setting AUs (which this setup gives you a good chance to do), and one common function of fanfiction is to give people an experience like canon but MORE, and what fits that if not getting to see a ship fall in love over and over in different times/situations/settings and in different ways? The pre-existing investment in the characters that fans come in with allows you to tell one compelling story in canon and then a reincarnated soulmates AU in fanfiction that draws on/is in conversation with the canon dynamic but also just gives people MORE of the characters and their dynamic that they enjoyed so much in canon.
One work that plays a bit with this idea of soulmates who always find each other is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The removal of memories creates a situation where two characters are unable to learn from experience and so make the exact same mistakes they have before, creating a kind of cyclicality that resembles "soulmates" or "fated love."
The emotional landscape of eternal recurrence stories
Looking at the stories above, one general takeaway is that eternal recurrence stories feature an ambivalent, somewhat-contradictory combination of optimism and pessimism. Successes are never permanent, but failures aren't either. The eternal recurrence brings a kind of fatalism or pre-destiny to the world, but also establishes a kind of narrative tension that one day, in some iteration of the cycle, it might be broken and nirvana might be attained. This is quite a different kind of background worldbuilding than one that tends to assume the world is progressive, slowly but gradually arcing toward justice, an ever more perfect union, and such. Here, the normal state of the world is to stay the same, and only a dramatic upheaval or decisive change is capable of setting it on a different path.
I also have this note here that Japanese art in particular often features a variation on background Buddhism that embraces the cyclicality of the world. Since at least the Heian period, an aesthetic very common in Japanese art is mono no aware, or an awareness of the transience of things, which is related to what I said above about how neither successes nor failures are ever permanent in eternal recurrence stories. However, I feel like mono no aware departs a bit from traditional Buddhism by embracing the meaningfulness and preciousness of the cycle rather than having the goal of eventually escaping it. However, I feel like talking about mono no aware in modern Japanese art could be its own post, and I want to keep this post short and avoid my tendency toward monster essays. So let me leave that topic for another day!
Anyway, are there any examples of perfectly cyclical stories or stories with eternal recurrence background worldbuilding that stand out to you? Do you notice these kinds of stories tend to be more popular in specific genres or media? Do you tend to enjoy these stories or find them frustrating?
In my classic
snowflake_challenge fashion, I will count this as fulfilling Challenge #9 - Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works, even though I don't know if this would actually count as a favorite trope of mine!
no subject
no subject
no subject
Anyway, are there any examples of perfectly cyclical stories or stories with eternal recurrence background worldbuilding that stand out to you? Do you notice these kinds of stories tend to be more popular in specific genres or media? Do you tend to enjoy these stories or find them frustrating?
~Haha, I was actually going to say I see it a lot in the video game medium (FF in general, certainly, but it crops up in things like Clair Obscur and Code Vein II)! I think there's something to be said about what you mentioned, that it is a good medium for those types of stories because it avoids the "sequel audience drop" that often happens with long-running series. I personally like those types of stories because, like you said, there's always the hope that the recurrence cycle can be broken at some point. :)
no subject