Pyrrus
[14] Master
Justice and Stale Bread.
About Tira supposedly killing Sophitia.
- Thread starter RWB
- Start date
Justice and Stale Bread.
- Moderator
- #42
WindupSkeleton
[14] Master
Not a rolling pin and a basket then?
CalibursEdge
[10] Knight
No time for that. He's got a business to run. Dat bread yo.
ShaolinTiger86
[13] Hero
It ain't gonna sell itself.
M.Yoshimitsu
[08] Mercenary
To the "person" who wrote that... Who hurt you? What on earth did Sophitia do to you?
I'm sorry, but that genuinely sounds like something made to clown on her, and upset people that genuinely like her (like i do).
She was already done dirty in SCIV, but this is just beyond overkill.
"Ah yes, the person that blackmailed me into fighting for the thing I once sought to destroy would be the perfect choice to look after the daughter she stole from me." (even if tira was the only one there, it's still absolutely braindead.)
Iceweb38
[10] Knight
Sophitia is my favorite character next to Ivy but I think it's on character.
She's pure at heart and has nothing but pity for Tira who's never known hapiness.
Maybe she had hope for Tira to look after Pyrrah, as long as Pyrrah would be safe.
Mind you, she was in a situation all too unbearable to deal with, not a lot of options on her hand.
She's pure at heart and has nothing but pity for Tira who's never known hapiness.
Maybe she had hope for Tira to look after Pyrrah, as long as Pyrrah would be safe.
Mind you, she was in a situation all too unbearable to deal with, not a lot of options on her hand.
M.Yoshimitsu
[08] Mercenary
Fair enough. Maybe it just hurts more knowing what Tira did to Pyrrha in SCV.
Rusted Blade
[14] Master
Ehhh, I'd stick with your initial read, M.Yosh, at least on the narrow issue of whether or not it makes much sense for Sophitia ask Tira to look after her child. We're talking about a peripheral product light novel here: I don't think there's particularly strong reason to go through mental gymnastics in order to contort some convoluted reason to make it work with the "canon" of the games themselves (such as even that makes sense). The problem here is that Tira is such a cartoonish, mustache-twirling, exaggerated psychopath of a villain, it's pretty hard to imagine any circumstances where it makes sense for Sophitia to make this kind of appeal to her and actually believe there's any realistic chance of it being a good idea. It would be like a dying Batman appealing to the Joker to raise his newborn child:
"Hey, I know you're my psychologically-shattered ideological foil, whose raison d'etre is to sow manic, destructive chaos and trauma everywhere they go, but would you mind terribly making the safety of my child your chief priority, and instantaneously transforming into pretty much the opposite of the type of human being you are now, so that this can be accomplished without my child being raised in the most traumatic and psychologically damaging context imaginable? Please don't instead immediately go drop them off the side of the nearest bridge for a laugh, or raise them to be a twisted, volatile mockery of the person they were meant to be....one of the two of which you are absolutely certain to do, come to think of it... Shit, I didn't think this through."
I mean, it is pretty heavily indicated that Sophitia herself has become fairly malfested by the end of SCIV or shortly thereafter, so I suppose you might argue that she's just lost the plot. But to the extent that being malfested twists a person's mind, the indicators have always been that it mostly changes their motivations and values, or just makes them basically more psychopathic and/or animalistic. There's never been an example that I recall where it just warps the cogency of their thinking and makes them easier to manipulate. So if one does use this as reason to think Sophitia would willingly give over her daughter, it would presumably be less a tearful goodbye/desperate plea situation, and more a "Sure, take my child and turn her into a living weapon to see Soul Edge's will done!" Which does not seem to be the scenario described in the light novel--though, notably, that's been shared second-hand with us here, so who knows.
So...yeah, that doesn't add up for me either. Buuut....here's the thing: the bigger question is why you would expect a hard degree of logic and/or internal consistency in this particular story anyway. This is an extremely goofy pulp fantasy story, with mostly very silly characters and very surface-level, meandering, action-adventure plotting. Now, don't misunderstand me: I love these games (I've been playing them from pretty much the month of Soul Edge's English release), and it's not that I don't think that games can do narrative well, by any means....but these just aren't games to justifiably look for that level of storytelling in. The first few don't even have a clear continuity when it comes to the early events: you just have to try to piece together from the starting places of the individual characters at the beginning of a given game which events from the previous one the writers decided to make the 'canon'/'real' events.
So, despite constantly clashing with-one another in supposedly epic showdowns, and the stakes being described as fate-of-the-world level stuff in each game, everyone is back in mostly status quo ante positions for each follow-up game, and there's no tension or drama or depth in any of it, as a result. Which of course is pretty much a constant conceit in fighting games, but is made even more obvious in a setting where the fighters are armed with deadly weapons and immense power, and ideologically driven to annihilate one-another. In truth, I always felt the stories were originally probably not meant to be interpreted as ever having a strict continuity, so much as being variations on a narrative theme taking place in similar but not completely identical continuities. You might even argue this interpretation was kind of soft-confirmed by non-numeral entries like Broken Destiny and Unbreakable Soul which have stories that don't jibe 100% with the continuity of the main entry games they closely followed, and even confirm a "many worlds" approach to the Soulcalibur universe.
Of course, if that was the idea, priorities later changed. With SoulCalibur V (and arguably starting with IV), there was a concerted shift towards trying to make the story more substantial and consistent. I actually think that SCV is the best series in the game in this respect. A lot of casual-player nerds lost their ever-loving shit with that game just because it had the audacity to not give their favorite character in the series an equal corner of the limelight for that entry, even for the legacy characters that did return. But in my view, that's just an inevitable trade-off of giving more depth to the stories of a more reasonable number of characters instead.
Now, Shakespeare it was not, SCV, but it still should have been perceived as a step in the right direction for anybody who wants to take such a pop fantasy story seriously. By making the narrative the end of the story of the two soul blades, and making the death of long running protagonists and antagonists a real and permanent element of the plot for the first time. the story finally had real stakes and some emotional resonance. And when you look back at how the Alexandria family in particular was chewn up and spit out by the conflict between the swords, the last scions of that family being the ones to seal the blades and the astral chaos away, seemingly for good, had a cathartic and meaningful tone to it. Especially after the final arcs of the story really emphasized that, despite being the good guy weapon in the earlier entries, that SoulCalibur was itself as big a part of the cycle of conflict as Soul Edge.
But what I didn't like about SCV's plot (and this brings my diatribe back around to the question of Sophitia's fate) was many of the particular choices Daishi's design strategy stamped on top of that story. Advancing the story so far over such a massive jump in time is just incredibly questionable. The individual choices made with respect to particular characters (the ones that were included, despite tending to be the older characters; the those that weren't, despite tending to be the younger characters; where they were when they get pulled back into the plot) are often very bizarre, bordering on nonsensical.
For some of these characters, some of these changes might make some sense if we saw how things played out, but in SCV we are given extremely limited connective tissue in terms of these kinds of details. For Sophitia, the character who dies in between games, but who has the most lasting impact on the plot of SCV of the non-returning characters, the issues are particularly confusing. She turns coat completely on her sacred duty (if for arguably understandable reasons) and is by all indications significantly malfested by the time of her death, but somehow she ends up SoulCalibur's avatar/manifestation thereafter? Thematically it is clear that they were trying to mirror the Siegfried/Nightmare situation, but when you look at the particulars, it's all quite peculiar.
For that matter, what was ever going on with Sophitia's story that led her down this path to begin with? So, if memory serves, Sophitia is contaminated with fragments of Soul Edge after its (as usual, temporary) destruction at the end of one of the earlier titles, right? And it's implied that this contamination is what makes her susceptible to malfestation later--and more to the point, it taints her children conceived thereafter as well, creating a more substantial form of leverage over her). Although it's not at all clear what she is being threatened with? Can her children just be killed at will by Soul Edge or one of it's champions/minions? Or is the threat that they would be malfested if she doesn't play ball? It's very hard to imagine why she would believe that the worst wouldn't happen to them after she's out of the picture anyway, and how helping to re-awaken Soul Edge improves their circumstances.
For that matter, where were the Olympian gods who sent her on her missions in the first place, in all of this? Were they as indifferent and capricious with regard to her suffering once she had served her initial purpose as were the soul swords, apparently? What exactly is their relationship to SoulCalibur, if any? How do they even exist in, and interact with, this world? Sophie and family live in a place and time where the Abrahamic religions dominated, and yet they worship Hellenic deities who are apparently so widely worshiped still that they have massive temples, and these are real gods that intervene directly in the world. And yet everything else we hear about that world seems designed to indicate that history has followed mostly the same track as actually history? I mean, there's a Holy Roman Empire, which presumably is still built upon the Christian faith, but it exists largely unchanged in the same world as polytheistic pantheons, Japanese Oni, malfested, dragons, and all the weirdness that routinely spills out of the astral chaos? How does that work?
I mean, the answer is that it's the result of lazy (or just intentionally cheesy) writing from creators more familiar with manga than history, working on a series that originally was clearly not attempting to take itself too seriously. I mean, there were gimps and dominatrixes and lizard people, and a samurai/robinhood style outlaw/demon/wood-based cyborg (and even that doesn't begin to describe the weirdness that is Yoshimitsu) fighting each other in the fifteenth century in the very first games, so.... Getting too fixated on (and/or nose-out-of-joint about) any particular questionable turn of events in this particular story just feels like a weird response to me.
More than that, imo the storytelling was honestly much better when they stuck to an apparent philosophy of not trying to make it all conform to some sort of convoluted sense. The cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers narrative of the single player content in SCVI, though it clearly made some lore nerds cream their pants with it's effort to harmonize all the details into one cogent story, was so tedious and boring, with its unending hours of low-rate visual novel style storytelling. I'd go back to having the story mostly told through small little snippets of dialogue before matches, mildly supplemented by museum content or auxiliary modes, in a heartbeat, if I was in charge of Project Soul.
TLDR; yeah the Sophitia trusting Tira thing doesn't make a lot of sense and can probably be best explained by the fact that it was written for some peripheral cash-grab light novel. But more importantly, very little of this story ever made a whole lot of sense when you examine it on anything other level than the story being intentionally superficial and silly by design.
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