Without love, it cannot be seen; or (Re)Learning how to fall in love with solving mysteries

Because wanting to know the truth isn’t enough

I finally started watching season 2 of Severance. If you haven’t watched the show, I Highly Recommend clicking off this page, logging onto Apple TV and watching it from the beginning. It’s an incredible thriller and the kind of TV show we just do not get anymore. But if you’re familiar with the show then you’re probably wondering why I waited so long to watch season 2? The reason is simple: I just wanted to wait until all the episodes were out and binge it at once. There’s a satisfaction in knowing I can slowly piece together what is happening during a show and not feel like I’m gonna bit concrete when there’s a cliffhanger and I have to wait another week for the next episode to resolve it.

What sort of corporate hell will Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) face this season? Credit: Apple tv

Now, usually with shows like these I don’t read any comments or articles or social media posts about the show. Mostly to avoid spoilers, but mostly to avoid reading annoying takes and posts by people a certain type of person who I can charitably describe as a CliffNotes viewer: someone who skips through a majority of the show or film or any piece of media and just wants to get the juicy bits, the main plot points and the final scene. Unfortunately, my own curiosity got the better of me and I looked on the internet for reviews. One particular reddit post caught my eye.

The reddit user on r/television was rather miffed at the fact that season 2 starts incredibly slowly, saying something along the lines of “viewers only want to get to the good stuff now, not in 4 or 5 episodes time.” Mind you, at the time of the review’s publication, only two episodes of the new season have come out. This person, I thought, was very much a CliffNotes viewer. When I looked at the dreaded comment section, I realised that their entire audience were, for the most part, also CliffNotes viewers. Complaints about how they didn’t need for the same slow buildup like in season 1 — they wanted to get back into the action to solve the mysteries and questions put forward in the end of the last season, not sit around and watch people look at each other in silence with occasional bit of “vague and riddling dialogue.”

And that got me thinking. What did they expect from Severance in the first place?

I think audiences are falling out of love with solving mysteries. And I don’t just mean actual mysteries in the mystery genre. Rather, I’m using the term mysteries to describe the act of slowly piecing together the mechanics of the world and the bits and pieces of the overall plot from what we see and what we don’t see in any piece of media.

More shows are seemingly written with the assumption that they will be “second-screen” shows: something put in the background while the viewer is doing something else. Meanwhile more books are written relying heavily on tropes rather than actually telling a story. The same goes for video games, especially in the AAA scene. Lots of AAA games, especially in RPGs, do not have the desire to tell an engaging story, something that creates an enticing challenge for the player to piece together as they experience the game at its own pace. Instead you get stories that just straight up tell you something bad is happening. The Big Bad is, well, Big and Bad. You, the plucky protagonist, must fix it because you are soooooo special and you are the only one who can do it. There’s nothing to sell you on why you should even care about saving the world, whether there’s any tension between the supposed Good and Evil factions besides the fact they are Good and Evil.

So when you finally have a piece of media that is not treating it’s audience like little babies who cannot think and need to be spoon-fed every piece of information, suddenly you get audiences who have never been challenged complain about the fact they have to actually pay attention and think.

Let me be clear, Severance isn’t a particularly clever show. It’s a good show, but I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly clever show. It sets up it’s questions and answers them in interesting ways throughout the season, but if you strip away the incredible camera and directorial work, it’s a rather straightforward story. Yet it’s very meticulously crafted. It understands that it’s story is simple, but still wants the audience to be engaged in the mystery surrounding it. It wants the viewer to engage earnestly with the questions it sets up, and find joy and love in not just answering what or who is behind those mysteries, but enjoy the process of discovery. Fall in love with the act of crafting theories with other fellow viewers about what on earth is happening to the Innies?; are the Innies and Outies considered different people even if they were initially severed from a single person?; is Reintegration something good, and something the characters actually want?

There’s a quote from a visual novel called Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (When the Seagulls Cry) that has stayed with me for years.

Without love, it cannot be seen.

The game is a murder mystery set in 1980s Japan, where an incredibly wealthy family return to the family’s private island for their annual gathering. As head of the family Kinzo Ushiromiya’s own health deteriorates, his children begin talks about the inheritance, while the next generation of cousins try their best to have a good vacation knowing that these talks will bring trouble. Soon a typhoon hits, the island is cut off from the rest of the world, and one by one members of the family are murdered while a supposed witch who gave Kinzo his wealth returns to the island to take back what’s rightfully hers.

Ahaha.wav starts playing. Credit: Ryukishi07

Throughout the visual novel, the phrase “without love, it cannot be seen” is stated like a recurring mantra. In the beginning it refers to the idea that without love, magic, and therefore witches, cannot be perceived. And is a phrase that the witch, Beatrice, uses to mock our protagonist Battler as he insists on using logic and reasoning to figure out what actually went down as his family was massacred.

But as the visual novel progresses, the phrase brings out another meaning. With each chapter, a new version of the story is told, this time with more information given to the player and Battler from Beatrice, more seemingly illogical events that Beatrice says is the work of witches like her, the introduction of other witches who want to mess with the game of cat and mouse between Battler and Beatrice for their own amusement and gain, “without love, it cannot be seen” starts to feel like a message from the writer, Ryokishi07, to the player.

The joy isn’t always in uncovering the truth. The joy is in the process of finding out the truth. It’s in the process of trying to work around and with Beatrice’s shenanigans as you, the player and Battler, piece together what really happened on that island, and whether it really is a good idea to peel back the curtain and see the evil for what it is.

Here, love isn’t romantic love. Instead, love is the desire to seek out and engage with the mysteries of the game; love is believing that the mystery is solvable and attempting to solve it with the bits and pieces the writer has given; love is trusting the writer to tell us, the player, a story that he wants to tell, and bring us along for the ride. Love is magic. Magic that takes us through an incredible journey that is well worth exploring.

Because without love, the truth cannot be seen.