A Rain to End and a Flower to Begin

A short primer on Drakengard 3 and Xenofeminism

(Spoilers for Hybrid Child and Drakengard 3 follow)

One of Yoko Taro’s most lovingly cited sources of inspiration is the book Hybrid Child by Mariko Ohara. In this book, an immortal rogue AI machine weapon with the power to metamorphose into other creatures assumes the form of a murdered girl and in so doing, preserves aspects of the girl’s consciousness until the end of the universe. The text has been noted to have many feminist themes, and a particularly rich reading is possible through the lens of xenofeminism.

The xenofeminist ethos can be boiled down to a few key tenets:

• If nature is unjust, change nature.
• Alienation is a liberating force.
• Feminism must be a rationalism, and rationalism must be decentralized and decentralizing.

To understand how xenofeminism applies to Hybrid Child, and hence to Yoko Taro’s Drakengard 3 (which is the game that quotes Hybrid Child most extensively), it’s first necessary to understand how Hybrid Child is a feminist text more classically. Many of the major characters in the text are female or in the case of the AI machine weapon, possess female interiority. In fact, there is another female-coded AI that appears later in the book as well. In the interplay between the machine weapon and the girl, notions of female identity and subjectivity are explored and deconstructed, while also subverting traditional conceptions of procreation.

These themes reach their pinnacle with the female-coded AI overseer in the later part of the novel literally killing off the entire population of a planet in order to upload them into a simulation. These mechanical acts of reproduction blur the boundaries between destruction and creation while liberating the act of creation from the confines of the biological. It is in this specific sense that Hybrid Child is xenofeminist rather than merely feminist: it envisions an imposition of the highly alien machines of the novel into the domain typically reserved for and ruled over by flesh. Furthermore, the machines represent maternal forces, rather than paternal ones.

The propagation and preservation of consciousness at the expense of biology and its imperatives is the essence of Hybrid Child as a story, though it mixes these themes with others, including a sort of religious universalism. Yoko Taro shares a writing credit with Sawako Natori for Drakengard 3, so it would be difficult to know how much of the game attributes to his vision, but there are clear and important parallels between Drakengard 3 and Hybrid Child even as Drakengard 3 seemingly removes some of the xenofeminist aspects.

Drakengard 3 is a very simple story, though its simplicity isn’t revealed until the final hour of the game. It is in essence about a mother saving a single child from evil forces. That the child happens to be a dragon is simply the requirements of the fantasy setting imposing themselves. Other important thematic considerations are that the evil forces in question originated in the mother figure after a moment of weakness, and that her final triumph is assisted and made possible by mysterious female androids who break with their own conventions and expectations in order to do so.

It is in the focus on motherhood and the salvation of the dragon child through wholesale murder that Drakengard 3 is most directly like Hybrid Child, as it borrows the fixation on destruction as an act of love, as well as on the alien maternalism of one form of consciousness towards another of a different type. The ending of Drakengard 3, in which the mysterious female androids provide an assist, also touches on themes that are appropriate to xenofeminism.

However, in transposing these themes to a fantasy setting and making various other adaptations, the xenofeminist themes become weaker and even begin to be overpowered by a probably unintentional bioconservatism. To begin with, the dragon child’s “birth” is a result of the reincarnation of a previous, more adult and masculine dragon. Dragons represent a masculine counterbalance to the female forces of Drakengard 3, and in various ways are given priority, such as in them having the sole capacity to destroy “Intoners,” the corrupted female forces that sprang up from the protagonist (the protagonist herself, in fact, is an Intoner).

Dragons are also ancient creatures, as opposed to new creations of the human race. This places the emphasis of the plot of salvation in Drakengard 3 on a female protagonist saving a male protagonist who in some ways becomes a synonym for the biological itself, which is so squarely challenged otherwise in Hybrid Child. In this way, Drakengard 3 takes the xenofeminist themes of Hybrid Child and inverts them, using the sense of alienation and the themes of femininity to support a more conventional picture of motherhood. Drakengard 3 in this sense is a double subversion, or even a reversion towards traditionalism.

The setting of Drakengard 3 is haunting, desolate, and bleak, and does a tremendous job feeling like a fallen world. However, the authority of the world of Drakengard 3 comes from the past, from what was but is no longer, which the dragon child is merely the last iteration of. He must be saved because the alternative is to let the world be survived by corruption, by the essence of corruption itself. Conversely, Hybrid Child places authority in the future. In the final twist of the novel, after all life has perished and the universe itself has ceased to be, a spirit from outside the universe greets the AI machine weapon and welcomes them into a world without pain.

Neither work really fully synthesizes its religious and traditional elements with its xenofeminist elements. However, both speak powerfully to the same range of subjects: to the power of love to transcend facticity, to the power of the maternal, and to the need to preserve what has come before, whether it is succeeded by something alien or whether it succeeds what is alien in and of itself.