PARASITE EVE: More than a videogame (an analysis of Aya Brea)

As a fan of the Parasite Eve video game, since I was 12 years old, I must accept that I like to gloat in the typical pleasure of any gamer teenager; Who can not love a game starring a sexy blonde who fights mutant beings transformed in disgusting mitochondrial aberrations using firearms and supernatural powers? Beyond that great argument, as I matured and replayed it, I went deeper into the story and saw details that I didn't notice before in the development of the main character, Aya Brea.

Aya has become one of the waifus with more fans in the videogames world, for her beauty, her slender figure and her exotic japanese-american features. But if we talk about her personality, we have to take a look to her history. Although she is a character who has been sexualized over the years, Aya is not the typical blonde you'd see posing as a model or drunk at a party and dancing reggaeton until dawn.

When Aya was a child, she lost her mother (called Mariko) and her sister (called Maya) in a tragic traffic accident, becoming an orphan. This gave Aya an introverted and lonely character. This can be noticed from the beginning of the video game, when she attends a Christmas opera recital and behaves distantly with his companion, as a person who doesn't like to externalize her feelings, although he does interact without showing shyness. We could say that the fact that he had to deal with the loss from an early age, made her a down to earth woman.

Now, there's an important fact and it is that the accident in which his family died, happened during Christmas season, which for anyone would make Christmas very depressing time of the year, and even if it's not impossible to get over it, it could always remain that bitter taste every time December approaches. And more if you are all alone. Let's face it, Christmas brings a toxic substance in the air that puts us all in a melancholic mood. At each Christmas or New Year's Eve party we can see someone immersed in sadness. To this we add not having family and we will have a more approximate idea of ​​how Aya Brea would feel.

I would say that that wound that left her past in her, opens again during the events of the first video game, when exactly at Christmas 1997 (yes, it's so retro the whole thing), the villain, called Eve, makes her appearance and makes her have flashbacks about her deceased sister, which leads our beloved heroine to become sensitive, allowing her feelings to surface during the fight against the mitochondrial being. At some point in the adventure, New York City is evacuated and Aya is left alone in the company of his colleague Daniel Dollis and scientist Kunihiko Maeda, who can't go with her at any time and place because they run the risk of being burned by Eve's energy. So our protagonist has some important moments of loneliness and introspection in which he has the opportunity to heal his emotional wounds through the confrontation against his nemesis. From the moment she is alone in that abandoned room in SoHo (an old New York neighborhood) and breaks, letting out her crying and clarifying that she doesn't want to become a monster and that she fears stop being human. Each encounter with Eve marks and empowers her little by little. She faces every dangerous situation that comes, until she finally accepts her destiny, her condition, her strange powers and recognizes herself as the only one capable of stopping Eve.

In another moment of the game, Eve tries to make Aya join her cause, to get on her side so they can master everything together. This is something that could be attractive to someone who hasn't had anything (or anyone) throughout his life, but not for Aya. She is reluctant to let herself be dragged along that new powerful side of her, full of supernatural energy and capable of everything.

Therefore, more than a horror and a RPG videogame, for me Parasite Eve represents someone's struggle to overcome a tragic and traumatic event that left emotional wounds. I like to believe that it is about someone who accepts their loneliness, their reality, as sad as it may be. In other words, I think that the incident with Eve is a reason for Aya to get deep into herself and fight her trauma and the melancholy that invades her every Christmas. It also could be seen as quarter-life crisis. Being 25 years old, our blonde girl must decide who she wants to be for the rest of her adult life, so she suffers many of the symptoms of this stage, such as the need to establish an emotional bond of a romantic type, of long duration and stability (when dating the man at the beginning of the game, even if he doesn't take him seriously), confusion of identity (when he no longer knows if he is a monster or a human) or the feeling of isolation and loneliness, especially emotional type (sometimes She is apathetic and prefers to act alone, even becoming sarcastic). Unlike the second game, Aya in this first installment is only a rookie police officer and the Manhattan Incident serves to test her. His inexperience helps to intensify what she feels during this process of self-discovery and acceptance as an adult.

This is one of the reasons why I love this video game. For me it is much more than going around shooting at every monster that appears. It's a different way of seeing our step to maturity and self-acceptance.

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