Celeste- A Trans Narrative?

Sometimes when you make a deliberate allegory in your story, the sort of pedantic nerd that analyses things will take that as a challenge.  I mean, if you spend a lot of time looking at subtext for hidden things works without overt meaning are about, you start seeing all the ways things that do claim to be about things don’t exactly line up with that thing.

Hi, it’sa me, CK!  So let’s talk about Celeste, seemingly the big Indie Game Hit of 2018.

I checked the game’s launch trailer to see just how blatant they were, and it’s marginally more subtle there than in the game itself.  “Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain!” declares the trailer, before interspersing clips of each stage’s gameplay with the phrases “I can’t breathe!” and “Are you… me?”  So you can safely assume that there’s more emphasis on story than the aesthetic or hook might imply.

Sidebar: I should praise this bit in particular, because the core concept for Celeste is creating a classic platformer with a similar excuse plot to early 8-bit platformers… then reverse engineering a scenario out of it.  We have a young woman climbing a mountain so difficult it has a monument to the fallen.  Why?  What sort of person would do this?  Well… let’s answer that.

Now, Celeste never precisely names its subject.  That is, Madeline does not concretely identify what Part Of Me (henceforth Badeline) is in a diagnostic sense.  The entire internet jumped to depression, which is more or less backed by statements in interviews, although somewhat incomplete: the first quote I got from Matt Thorson in an article goes “If you’re making a game about anxiety and depression, it felt like to us that we needed to show the same kindness to the player that we want to show ourselves.”  But certainly most people don’t make particular distinction between anxiety disorders and depression disorders, and most of them coexist anyways, so the internet’s not too far off base here.

Before I dig in, an obligatory disclaimer: no one person’s experiences with depression or anxiety disorders is universal, and as such any one narrative about them may reflect them precisely or not at all, and anywhere in between.  I can speak for myself, and the trends that tend to pop up amongst my friends or for people discussing the topics in my social media feeds, but this is hardly a scientific or all-inclusive knowledge of the topic.

As with any nerd analysis, it comes down to the small details, and there’re a handful of things in the game that don’t really match my experiences with depression.  Certainly the revealed elements of Madeline’s background are common elements of people dealing with depression: no career or relationship stability to speak of, a reluctance to get help from others (in particular, feeling that she’s a burden), a consistent downplaying of her own skills and accomplishments, and frankly her decision to tackle the mountain at all.  The drive to set unmeetable goals, particularly of a ‘do or die’ nature… it’s bit of a red flag.  Badeline’s abrasive nature, and in particular her deliberating setting off Mr. Ono, are definitely the sort of thing a depressive mind might do from an otherwise caring person.

But with the exception of that scene, Madeline’s interactions with Badeline feel… off.  Depression doesn’t really care how you feel about it; it’s a chemical imbalance, and your acknowledgement of it matters only insofar as knowing what it is may spur you to seek medical treatment.  Depression tends to wax and wane in spans of months or even years, not back and forth over the course of a day.  And more personally, Depression usually manifests as a sort of masochistic epistemology.  A recurring theme I’ve seen in threads and articles about depression is the first thing you need to understand about depression is that it lies.  But while you’re depressed, all those lies need to accomplish is hurting you.  Because you’re living in a state where whatever hurts is true.  Badeline phrases all her attempts to stop Madeline as concern, and her arguments, while extremely defeatist, are based in truth: climbing the mountain is very dangerous, and Madeline really doesn’t know what she’s doing.  She really could die, and the prudent course probably would be to turn back.

The parallels with anxiety are certainly stronger, although I have less experience here.  A lot of references are made, especially in chapter 2, to Madeline having a history with ‘panic attacks’, and it’s noted she only tends to reach out to her parents or (presumed ex-) boyfriend while in the midst of one.  The feather technique used later I have no doubt is a real one drawn from one program or another on dealing with a panic attack.  And certainly Badeline tends to strike out at moments where Madeline is already experiencing a lot of doubt or stress.  But I’m not entirely sure with anxiety what the fusion with Badeline is meant to represent.  Certainly understanding that you experience extreme anxiety can help you cope with it, or learn what sort of situations causes it to flare up and how to head them off or mitigate them, but that sort of learning can take quite some time.  And more than that, wouldn’t it more prevent burnout or setbacks than actually make you more capable?  I admit that without much personal experience here, and with anxiety disorders manifesting in a wider variety of ways than depression disorders, I could be misreading common symptoms or experiences with them.  But the parallel still doesn’t seem as clean as it could be.

And of course it’s undeniable that many specifics of Madeline’s character draw from experiences of both depression and anxiety, but while both combined explain her backstory and motivations a great deal, both make the climactic battle with Badeline not merely a literalization of a metaphorical battle with the self, but an outright videogame abstraction for the purposes of an exciting boss fight, with only a vague thematic connection to the core story.

But I’ve had a thought, and I haven’t really seen this one discussed anywhere.  Inspired a bit by Madeline’s endgame color scheme (upper right for reference: https://i.redd.it/6vh792nc1k411.png ), I got to thinking… y’know, there’s totally a personal narrative where embracing repressed parts of yourself is the only path to success and basically gives you outright superpowers.  It even tends to manifest symptoms of anxiety and depression before the underlying cause is identified.  It’s still not a perfect fit, but basically just one small detail change would make it nearly unmistakable. So I’ll admit I’m reaching a teensy bit, but really that’s the point of these sorts of essays isn’t it.

Badeline’s presentation is initially presented as a bit unreal: stage 2 is ultimately revealed to be a dream sequence, and she breaks out of a magical mirror that does not seemingly exist in the material world.  But even at the start, small wrinkles appear.  This mirror never shows Madeline: your initial pass always shows Badeline, and once she breaks out of it the mirror’s broken state does render a reflection, but it’s distorted and not clearly recognizable as Madeline.  The following exchange takes place almost immediately after they meet.  “Why would Part Of Me look so creepy?” “… This is just what I look like okay?  Deal with it.”  After which Badeline calls herself the ‘Pragmatic’ part of her as punctuation of a speech declaring Madeline could be lots of things, but never a mountain climber.  After which she starts displaying her ability to leave the bounds of her character portrait… in other words, straining against the game’s abstraction of reality, a push against the fourth wall.  Most tellingly, in this segment Badeline touching you counts as taking damage, in direct contrast to your final confrontation where any touch, not just bonking her head (the way the other enemies in the game work) advances her to the next area.

On their second meeting, Theo snaps a selfie of Madeline and himself, which she objected to.  Noticing, he immediately says he won’t post it, only for Madeline to note her objection was that she’s not photogenic.  Whilst wearing full winter garb rendering only her face visible.

Let’s make the parallel extra obvious by doing a teensy bit of fanfic.  Consider a version of Celeste in which Badeline is designed as somewhat masculine (which goes right along with Madeline thinking she looks creepy!), and is implied or shown to exist outside the mountain.  In other words, a twist that flips the narrative thus far: Badeline came to the mountain to test herself… but instead appears as a kinder, more optimistic, and more feminine version, who Badeline spends the entire game trying to intimidate, scare, hold back, and ultimately outright destroy while trying to assert she knows what’s best.

A version of the story where Badeline is the person that was, while Madeline is the person she could become.

In other words, it is trivially easy to recast Celeste as a trans narrative.  A young woman goes to a deadly mountain to find some meaning in an empty life that’s refused to start, one with no future.  An aspect of herself (her ‘pragmatic’ side) thinks her incapable of the journey, and insists she stop for her own safety.  She refuses, driven by something she doesn’t quite understand to press forward, sometimes out of compassion, sometimes determination, and sometimes with a lot of help from her friends, but in the end she can only succeed by embracing the part of herself that denies her, the one convinced she’ll never succeed… and by inches and feet and miles showing her she’s wrong.

A lot of the small details feel more natural under this lens.  Early in Madeline’s journey, touching Badeline, the manifestation of her past, physical self, is deadly and requires trying again.  In otherwise normal, intimate events, Badeline butts in to remind Madeline of everything she’s doing wrong, that she’s fake.  Various techniques that help with depression or anxiety (support from loved ones, mediation, breathing exercises) provide temporary relief, but when pressed Badeline can easily shatter such things, because they’re just treating symptoms, not getting at the root of who Badeline is and why she exists.

As Madeline grows stronger, and finds more facets of who she wants to be, this flips: her touch drives Badeline further and further back.  Her tactics get increasingly desperate: she hides in corners, let’s all the natural barriers of the mountain thwart Madeline for her, uses thorns and tendrils to create artificial ones, eventually outright throwing lasers at her.  And none of it matters, because Madeline won’t give up.  And all she wants is embrace her… accept that while that was who she was, it’s no longer who she has to be, because she knows far more than Badeline ever did who she wants to be.  But most telling of all, during the final climb, Badeline… is convinced.  Sure, Madeline can’t navigate everything alone, she still draws on the experiences of Badeline to make the ascent… but that fits too.  It’s a bit of a super power really: the greatest enemy Madeline faced was herself, and while the climb is steep and filled with obstacles, none of them will be as direct or damaging as the damage she once tried to inflict upon herself.

Maybe I’m off base of course.  A casual search of twitter and youtube didn’t turn up any analysis along these lines, and just as with depression or anxiety, no one narrative will cover all, or even a majority, of experiences.  But the thing that most puts me in mind of this reading of the game is this: for a lot of trans people, merely the acknowledgement of their true gender, to themselves, will have immediate effects on their outlook.  Dysphoria doesn’t magically vaporize, underlying depression where it exists is not often effected, and of course society as a whole has a profoundly awful view of transness and gender non-conformity, but merely having that knowledge allows a lot of trans people start to see a way forward, usually for the first time in their lives.  This doesn’t really hold true for depression: chemical imbalances don’t much care what you think of them.  Understanding that your anxiety is not a personal failing may sometimes help, but still produces a far less dramatic shift than displayed in the game (though of course artistic license and the abstraction required of the medium make fine handwaves there).  It’s enough of a good fit, and Celeste seemingly a game destined for the indie game pantheon, that it didn’t feel right not having the thought out there in the internet aether.  Because there really just aren’t enough trans narratives, even ones cloaked in metaphor.  And many that do exist focus so much on how society ‘deals’ with trans people that their own personal journey, the seemingly impossible task of looking long and deep at yourself and realizing the very first thing anyone ever told you about yourself was completely wrong, is lost.  And even now finding the stories about that journey, so that more people out there can find the story that leads them to themselves, is far more difficult than it should be.  And that matters especially for trans people, because each year that passes makes transition harder.

So, I dunno.  This is just me putting a layer on top of a story I found, but I have such a strong hunch there’s a lot of people out there who might understand themselves better if they play the game with that lens in mind.  And I guess that’s the biggest reason for these sorts of works: to give people another way to look at games and film and literature, so that it might speak to them that much clearer.