When Lies of P was first announced, there was something of a snicker amongst the gaming community: a dark, Bloodborne-reminiscent souls-like game starring... Pinocchio? That children's story most famous for its adaptation as a Disney cartoon?
Of course, the truth is that Pinocchio has been the inspiration for dark stories in the past. The comic series Fables, which connects many fairy tale characters into a modern story about refugees fleeing an oppressive empire, plays with the themes that arise from what it means to literally be a puppet, and Stephen Spielberg's completion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick's last movie, A.I., uses the story as an extensive metaphor for its central android character who wants nothing more than to be appreciated and loved as if he were a real boy, while living in a world that has only allowed such artificial intelligence to dampen human emotion.
Fairy tales are told to children because they allow us to introduce complex themes to young minds. The fantastical stories serve as metaphors, and create a language and a framework in which a child can begin to contextualize these ideas. Pinocchio, for instance, is a story largely about the puppet learning to be moral - his misbehavior is born more from ignorance than from maliciousness.
The first time I remember ever being punished for misbehaving, I was four years old. I was in pre-school, which was run out of the basement of the neighborhood's Congregationalist Church. (While we did say a quick, rhyming prayer before eating our lunch, the program was otherwise pretty much secular.) In the small playground just outside of the basement entrance, there was some gravel on the ground just outside a fence that looked out on a path that cut across the block, from one street to the next. Being four, I found that dropping gravel through the gaps in the fence was a sort of fun tactile sensation, so I and another kid would gather up handfuls of gravel and dump them out onto the path.
One of the teachers caught us doing this, and we were put in time out. I cried profusely - because I genuinely hadn't thought that I was doing anything wrong before I was caught, and I feared that I had unwittingly become a "bad kid" because of my ignorance.
Most famously, Pinocchio is told not to lie - that lying is a grave transgression, and so when he does lie, he is punished by having his nose grow longer. The odd thing, though, is that in Lies of P, lying actually serves a very different function: when we encounter the suffering inhabitants of Krat, we're often confronted with doomed, hopeless people awaiting death via the Petrification disease (or rather, a horrific kind of immortality). Our first example is a woman whose child was taken from her when she was sent into the (as it turns out, ineffective) quarantine zone. She claims her child is at City Hall, but what we find there is not a child, but only a little doll. However, we can bring this doll back to her, and lie to her and say that the doll is her baby. The truth is that, at best, her baby is somewhere with her family, in whatever shelter the surviving people of Krat have found (which may be none at all - the NPCs claim the Krat crisis is over at the end of the game, but I'm not convinced that there are many if any survivors of the city outside of the hotel) and very likely, the woman's child is already dead.
But the truth would bring her nothing but anguish, and so the game presents this lie as the morally correct thing to do. Yes, it's a deception, but its only purpose is to give this woman some peace before she passes on from this life. Pinocchio's humanity emerges from this act of kindness and empathy.
I've never actually read the original Carlo Collodi novel (my mom might have read parts of it to me as a kid, but that's some very hazy stuff in distant memory) but I'm given to understand that the game takes many, many characters and elements from the novel, transforming characters into its NPCs and bosses.
However, if you've beaten the game, a very strange thing happens: in a post-credits scene, we see Giangio (we'll talk about him in a moment) mention to some associate over the phone that they've found another "brother" who has discovered a new form of immortality. They then mention that the next person they're keeping an eye on is "Dorothy," and our last shot is just a pair of feet wearing red shoes walking along a precipice overlooking Krat who then clicks her heels three times, the last click coinciding with our cut to black.
This isn't from Pinocchio. This is Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, which most people know from its 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland.
Lies of P is claustrophobically trapped within the city of Krat, but this moment, post-game, suggests a larger world. In fact, functionally, it works almost exactly like the very first MCU post-credits scene after Iron Man - yes, we've been focused on this particular story, but there's a bigger, interconnected world out there.
But rather than superheroes, we've got darkly reimagined children's fantasy stories.
The message that Studio8 seems to be giving us is that, given that the story of Krat feels largely resolved, a sequel might instead take place in a different part of the world with a different conflict, while the gameplay mechanics are preserved or iterated on.
And the Oz books by Frank L. Baum are quite extensive: while the Wizard of Oz as we know it races through Oz to fit into its movie runtime, Baum wrote several books about Dorothy's continuing adventures there, and thus I think there would be lots of material to pull from.
This isn't the first time we get a fictional crossover, though: around the end of "Act One" of the game (defining this as your first loop around the city before you come back to Hotel Krat after the Malum District) you find a portrait of a young Carlo. As your humanity grows by telling those benevolent lies, the nose on the portrait extends, until it's finally long enough to be removed and used as a weapon. The portrait was painted by the famous "D. Gray," which is clearly a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Interestingly, Wilde's story is not at all a kid's book - it's a work of gothic horror (and thus often misattributed to Edgar Alan Poe) in which Dorian Gray sells his soul to have a portrait of himself made that will suffer the consequences of aging, drug use, and all manner of immoral behaviors while he remains the picture of pristine youth, health, and beauty.
What's fascinating is how this all ties together to a central theme: Immortality.
In this post-credits scene, Giangio, now identified as Paracelsus (an actual historical figure who was a 15th Century alchemist and is considered the founder of Toxicology,) is on the phone with an unknown associate claiming that their experiment has worked - that they have discovered a new "brother" and a new form of immortality.
We don't know precisely whom he is referring to, but it would stand to reason that he means Pinocchio. As we discover over the course of the game, Pinocchio truly is Carlo Gepetto. The ergo that holds Carlo's soul was placed in the puppet body, and he's thus been given this second life. In the Rise of P ending, we do the same for Sophia, freeing her from the horrific process she was going through at the hands of Simon Manus and placing her ergo within her own puppet body. The truth of the matter is actually that all the puppets in Krat are really people, the ergo that powers them containing the souls of humans. (This turns out to be a really bad thing in the case of Arlecchino, given that the ergo they used for him was as serial killer's).
But functionally, this ability to take the soul of a dead person and put it into a new, artificial body, is a form of immortality, just as Dorain Gray's portrait lets him ignore the ravages of time.
When Giangio/Paracelsus departs Krat at the end of the game, we can find a letter from him in his old spot near the Gold Coin Fruit Tree. He leaves behind his case so we can continue to purchase wishstones (a game mechanic that I most often forget is even a thing) but he signs the letter "P.P.", no longer keeping up his Giangio pretense, his name evidently being Philippus Paracelsus.
However, I was not the only player to see those initials and think of someone else.
Giangio is pretty obviously lying to us when we meet him, tripping over nearly identifying himself as an alchemist. But we're likely to chalk this up to the fact that he seems pretty young. Indeed, he looks about the same age that Carlo was - maybe 20 or so. So, this clumsy lie could just be because he's inexperienced in the intrigue that the Alchemists are known for. The reveal that he's actually pulling the strings on everything (or at least has a separate and evidently unthwarted agenda) suggests that this slip-up might have actually been an intentional red herring.
He's not one of the Alchemists (or at least not among Krat's order of alchemists,) but is working on some global level. And, as we determine, he's on the lookout for new forms of immortality.
And that makes one think: isn't there a famous character from turn-of-the-20th-century literature who is A: eternally youthful and B: has the initials P.P.?
He's got to be Peter Pan, right?
Having grown up with the movie Hook, I've always thought of Peter Pan as being just another child taken from our world to Never Never Land, but the original story makes him a bit stranger and more alien - while Wendy and her brothers have this wonderful adventure, they return to the real world and eventually grow older, and so when Peter comes to Wendy's house when she is an adult to whisk her own children away on their adventure, he doesn't even recognize her, and doesn't even remember the adventure they had (including having evidently forgotten about his own fairy companion, Tinkerbell).
Metaphorically, of course, it's all about how the carefree innocence of youth is fleeting, and I can even see how Peter's total ignorance of who Wendy is represents the way that a future generation's childhood doesn't even resemble one's own (even some younger millennials seem to me to have had a very different childhood experience than I did despite us theoretically being of the same generation, and I can only imagine how differently my not-quite-1-year-old nephew will experience his childhood than I did mine).
But eternal youth as Peter experiences it is, once again, a form of immortality.
What's interesting to me about that throughline is the way in which I don't really see how Dorothy or her adventures in Oz actually fit into it. Admittedly, I haven't read the books. I saw, at least partially, the Return to Oz miniseries from the 1980s starring Fairuza Balk, though in true 1980s fantasy fashion, it was weirdly dark for a thing made for kids, and I remember being too scared to finish the whole thing.
The point, though, is that if there are any themes of immortality within it, I'm unaware of them.
Still, the Oz books are of a similar era to both Pinocchio and Peter Pan - Pinocchio was published in 1883, the Wizard of Oz in 1900, and Peter Pan was first performed as a stage play in 1904 (the novel would come later). The Picture of Dorian Gray came out in 1890. So, it's a pretty narrow era of literature that the game draws from, and very much fits its turn-of-the-century aesthetic (have we agreed to continue calling 1900 the turn of the century and to call 2000 the turn of the millennium?)
As a last note, it's interesting that the film adaptations of both The Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio each have one of the most iconic "I Want" songs in all of musicals, with "Over the Rainbow" and "When You Wish Upon a Star." Lies of P has shown that it's in conversation not only with the source material, but also its famous adaptations - Gemini is a stand-in for Jiminy Cricket, which was just an unnamed cricket in the novel, and our one glimpse of Dorothy shows her wearing red shoes, while in the novel, she had silver slippers (they made them red to take advantage of the bright Technicolor the 1939 movie was so famous for). Thus, these songs from adaptations might also potentially have some thematic connection in the game.
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