The House in Fata Morgana: A Requiem for Innocence
The thing to notice about A Requiem for Innocence is which character it actually follows. The original House in Fata Morgana told the story of how the witch was made; the 2018 prequel tells the story of how the lord was made. This is not a small distinction. It means the prequel's central question is not why women get burned but why men who set out to abolish the conditions of that burning end up presiding over them. A Requiem for Innocence is a protagonist-to-villain journey for Jacopo, showing how heroic, good-natured and well-intentioned he was before slowly becoming a paranoid, heartless and tyrannic lord who killed slaves by the dozen and ultimately decided to kidnap an old woman and bleed her dry to enact his scam. The work earns the religious solemnity of its title by treating his trajectory not as personal failure but as something closer to a structural inevitability—the way the energies of liberation get captured, drained, and re-poured into the same goblets they were meant to break.
Begin where the work begins: the dining hall. Lord Barnier and the nobles who join him in his "banquets" cut open Morgana so they may drink her "holy" blood. Read this with a little distance and it stops looking like gothic excess and starts looking like a thesis. The body of the woman whose blood is rumored to perform miracles becomes the literal fluid that constitutes the ruling class as a class—they recognize each other by what they drink together, by their willingness to feed at this source. There is no metaphor here. Primitive accumulation, the conversion of the feminine body into something the powerful share, is staged as a sacrament. And it is staged, crucially, while the woman in question is still called a saint. The accusation of witchcraft has not yet arrived.
The witchcraft accusation, when it arrives, is the work's most telling small moment. Morgana's desperation slowly turns her prayers for deliverance into curses for death and destruction upon her persecutors, and in turn, Barnier's taunts of her holiness suddenly give way to accusations of witchcraft. The same girl becomes a witch the moment her position changes from passive object of consumption to active subject of refusal. The change in her status requires no change in her practice—her blood does what it does either way—only a change in her disposition toward her captors. Sanctity is what she is called when she suffers silently. Witchcraft is what she is called when she stops. This is a piece of analysis far more interesting than the standard "she was unjustly accused" trope, because it grasps that the categories saint and witch are not opposites but two names for the same apparatus seen from two angles. A holy woman is a useful woman. A cursing woman is a problem.
What rescues Morgana from Barnier's table is, of course, Jacopo's slave revolt, and here the work begins its real argument. Jacopo tackles Barnier away during the uprising, frees Morgana of her chains, and carries her toward the city, explaining that he has friends at a brothel who will look after her. Note what this revolution produces in its immediate aftermath: not a state, not a regime change, but a network. Jacopo, his ally Gratien, the proprietor Maria, the women of her house, the merchant Odilon, Morgana herself—a horizontal weave of people who have nothing in common except that they have all been damaged by the same regime and have decided to take care of each other in its margins. The work's image of what liberation actually looks like is this network, and it lasts for years.
Take the brothel itself seriously, because the work does. Morgana's happiest days are spent in the brothel with Maria and the girls; you see Jacopo and Morgana's early relationship grow there, charming even if the day-to-day reality of living in the back of a brothel is far from ideal. Mainstream prestige fiction almost never does this: treats commercialized female sexual labor as compatible with, even constitutive of, real solidarity. This is exactly the kind of subaltern arrangement that materialist histories of the witch hunts have had to recover from beneath centuries of moralizing erasure—the women's communities of mutual aid, the inns and brothels and cottages where unattached women lived collectively, the spaces the new order would eventually have to break in order to consolidate the supervised, isolated household it required. The brothel is the closest the work gets to depicting a commons. Jacopo keeps trying to give Morgana ointment for her scars even when it feels like a placebo, and the rapport among the brothel's allies makes clear what troubles all of them to want to rebel against the Lord. Solidarity here is the willingness to keep applying useless ointment to wounds that will not close, because the act of applying it is itself the relation. And, as commons tend to do, this one gets attacked.
The attack is where Jacopo's story turns. The brothel is suddenly attacked by Lord Barnier's thugs after a spy alerts him to its activity; Morgana is captured, Jacopo and Maria presume her dead, and Jacopo—both as revenge for the massacre and fueled by his own ambition for a better life—successfully passes himself off as the true heir to the lord's estate, mounts a second insurrection, and slays the fiendish ruler. The spy, the work eventually reveals, is Ceren—the sweet-tempered young woman who has been Morgana's friend at the brothel. Ceren's case is complicated: she is genuinely innocent to the core, but her inability to understand negative emotions is what makes Barnier interested in her in the first place, as he feels she is the only person with whom he can be complete. She has been moving through the brothel's life in a state of unsuspicious cheerfulness because she literally cannot register what she is doing as harm. Ceren is the work's portrait of the woman the new order requires: amiable, unable to register cruelty, useful to power precisely because she has been engineered out of the capacity for refusal. She is the anti-Morgana. The witch hunt's deepest function is to produce more Cerens.
What Jacopo does after the brothel falls is the prequel's deepest cut. He accepts a proposal that a woman had earlier made to him—to pretend to be her son so as to claim the Barnier inheritance—thus going from slave to Lord, taking the name Jean-François Barnier; he seeks to make the city more livable for everyone, but still makes a number of enemies, becoming somewhat paranoid in his relationships with others. He takes the name of the tyrant he killed. The point is not that he is corrupted, exactly; it is that there is no other position available to him from which to pursue what he wants. His intentions to reward his subjects for their support are soon lost amid his prioritization of macroeconomic considerations and prestige; before his improvements have time to trickle down to the people he wanted to help, they turn against him and label him a betrayer. The real enemy here is not character flaws but an inherent inability to please every single person in the world economically while in power regardless of any moral stance in gaining it. _Requiem_ understands this. It refuses the consolation that a better revolutionary would have made a better lord. It insists that the lord is the problem.
The horror of the work's final movement is that Jacopo, in his slow capture by this logic, eventually does to Morgana what Barnier did. He asks the Swordsman to capture the witch living near the lake, whose blood seems to have magical properties, and whom he wants to deliver to the Church for miracles; he does not realize that the witch is Morgana, and once she does not recognize him, he locks her in the observation tower. The blood that once filled Barnier's wine glasses now fills the Church's reliquaries. The use has been refined; the violence has been laundered through institutions; the woman is still being drained. This is the work's most pointed historical argument: the consolidation of new authority, even authority that imagines itself as reformist, modernizing, economically rational, requires the same operation on the same body. The witch is not a holdover from a barbarous past. She is being produced, again, by the modernizers. She is what the new order extracts in order to call itself new.
This is what is being requiemed. Not Morgana's personal innocence, which she is never permitted to keep. Not Jacopo's, which goes more slowly but more completely. The innocence the work mourns is something more like the possibility that the revolt against Barnier could have produced something other than a second Barnier—that the network around the brothel could have remained the world rather than become the casualty of the new lord's ambition. The prequel is unsentimental about whether this was ever really possible. Lord Barnier, the original one, stabs Ceren for disobeying his orders to stay safe inside, with no remorse whatsoever, even cackling in glee and taunting Jacopo about it. Maria betrays Jacopo. Odilon dies. By the end of his tale, Jacopo is nothing but a shadow of his former self, and dies alone, responsible for the deaths of everyone he knew and loved, his spirit completely broken. The horizontal world that briefly existed in the slum and the brothel—the days of treating wounds, the kitchen-table evenings, the MidSummer festival, the birthday with the gift he never managed to give her—that world is what the work asks us to register as a loss. It is also what it asks us to recognize as the only thing that was ever worth wanting.
A Requiem for Innocence, then, is not really a love story, despite its surface. It is a study of how the political form we call lordship reproduces itself across revolutions, and what it must do to women's bodies to keep doing so. The visual novel form is rarely credited with this kind of analytical ambition, and there is something fitting about the fact that one of the clearer contemporary portraits of how a revolutionary becomes a tyrant arrived in a medium that the prestige discourse has decided to ignore. The prequel knows what it is. It knows that the boy who freed the saint and the lord who imprisoned the witch are the same person. It refuses to pretend that this transformation is a personal tragedy. It is a structural one, and it requires structural analysis, and the work supplies it.
Begin where the work begins: the dining hall. Lord Barnier and the nobles who join him in his "banquets" cut open Morgana so they may drink her "holy" blood. Read this with a little distance and it stops looking like gothic excess and starts looking like a thesis. The body of the woman whose blood is rumored to perform miracles becomes the literal fluid that constitutes the ruling class as a class—they recognize each other by what they drink together, by their willingness to feed at this source. There is no metaphor here. Primitive accumulation, the conversion of the feminine body into something the powerful share, is staged as a sacrament. And it is staged, crucially, while the woman in question is still called a saint. The accusation of witchcraft has not yet arrived.
The witchcraft accusation, when it arrives, is the work's most telling small moment. Morgana's desperation slowly turns her prayers for deliverance into curses for death and destruction upon her persecutors, and in turn, Barnier's taunts of her holiness suddenly give way to accusations of witchcraft. The same girl becomes a witch the moment her position changes from passive object of consumption to active subject of refusal. The change in her status requires no change in her practice—her blood does what it does either way—only a change in her disposition toward her captors. Sanctity is what she is called when she suffers silently. Witchcraft is what she is called when she stops. This is a piece of analysis far more interesting than the standard "she was unjustly accused" trope, because it grasps that the categories saint and witch are not opposites but two names for the same apparatus seen from two angles. A holy woman is a useful woman. A cursing woman is a problem.
What rescues Morgana from Barnier's table is, of course, Jacopo's slave revolt, and here the work begins its real argument. Jacopo tackles Barnier away during the uprising, frees Morgana of her chains, and carries her toward the city, explaining that he has friends at a brothel who will look after her. Note what this revolution produces in its immediate aftermath: not a state, not a regime change, but a network. Jacopo, his ally Gratien, the proprietor Maria, the women of her house, the merchant Odilon, Morgana herself—a horizontal weave of people who have nothing in common except that they have all been damaged by the same regime and have decided to take care of each other in its margins. The work's image of what liberation actually looks like is this network, and it lasts for years.
Take the brothel itself seriously, because the work does. Morgana's happiest days are spent in the brothel with Maria and the girls; you see Jacopo and Morgana's early relationship grow there, charming even if the day-to-day reality of living in the back of a brothel is far from ideal. Mainstream prestige fiction almost never does this: treats commercialized female sexual labor as compatible with, even constitutive of, real solidarity. This is exactly the kind of subaltern arrangement that materialist histories of the witch hunts have had to recover from beneath centuries of moralizing erasure—the women's communities of mutual aid, the inns and brothels and cottages where unattached women lived collectively, the spaces the new order would eventually have to break in order to consolidate the supervised, isolated household it required. The brothel is the closest the work gets to depicting a commons. Jacopo keeps trying to give Morgana ointment for her scars even when it feels like a placebo, and the rapport among the brothel's allies makes clear what troubles all of them to want to rebel against the Lord. Solidarity here is the willingness to keep applying useless ointment to wounds that will not close, because the act of applying it is itself the relation. And, as commons tend to do, this one gets attacked.
The attack is where Jacopo's story turns. The brothel is suddenly attacked by Lord Barnier's thugs after a spy alerts him to its activity; Morgana is captured, Jacopo and Maria presume her dead, and Jacopo—both as revenge for the massacre and fueled by his own ambition for a better life—successfully passes himself off as the true heir to the lord's estate, mounts a second insurrection, and slays the fiendish ruler. The spy, the work eventually reveals, is Ceren—the sweet-tempered young woman who has been Morgana's friend at the brothel. Ceren's case is complicated: she is genuinely innocent to the core, but her inability to understand negative emotions is what makes Barnier interested in her in the first place, as he feels she is the only person with whom he can be complete. She has been moving through the brothel's life in a state of unsuspicious cheerfulness because she literally cannot register what she is doing as harm. Ceren is the work's portrait of the woman the new order requires: amiable, unable to register cruelty, useful to power precisely because she has been engineered out of the capacity for refusal. She is the anti-Morgana. The witch hunt's deepest function is to produce more Cerens.
What Jacopo does after the brothel falls is the prequel's deepest cut. He accepts a proposal that a woman had earlier made to him—to pretend to be her son so as to claim the Barnier inheritance—thus going from slave to Lord, taking the name Jean-François Barnier; he seeks to make the city more livable for everyone, but still makes a number of enemies, becoming somewhat paranoid in his relationships with others. He takes the name of the tyrant he killed. The point is not that he is corrupted, exactly; it is that there is no other position available to him from which to pursue what he wants. His intentions to reward his subjects for their support are soon lost amid his prioritization of macroeconomic considerations and prestige; before his improvements have time to trickle down to the people he wanted to help, they turn against him and label him a betrayer. The real enemy here is not character flaws but an inherent inability to please every single person in the world economically while in power regardless of any moral stance in gaining it. _Requiem_ understands this. It refuses the consolation that a better revolutionary would have made a better lord. It insists that the lord is the problem.
The horror of the work's final movement is that Jacopo, in his slow capture by this logic, eventually does to Morgana what Barnier did. He asks the Swordsman to capture the witch living near the lake, whose blood seems to have magical properties, and whom he wants to deliver to the Church for miracles; he does not realize that the witch is Morgana, and once she does not recognize him, he locks her in the observation tower. The blood that once filled Barnier's wine glasses now fills the Church's reliquaries. The use has been refined; the violence has been laundered through institutions; the woman is still being drained. This is the work's most pointed historical argument: the consolidation of new authority, even authority that imagines itself as reformist, modernizing, economically rational, requires the same operation on the same body. The witch is not a holdover from a barbarous past. She is being produced, again, by the modernizers. She is what the new order extracts in order to call itself new.
This is what is being requiemed. Not Morgana's personal innocence, which she is never permitted to keep. Not Jacopo's, which goes more slowly but more completely. The innocence the work mourns is something more like the possibility that the revolt against Barnier could have produced something other than a second Barnier—that the network around the brothel could have remained the world rather than become the casualty of the new lord's ambition. The prequel is unsentimental about whether this was ever really possible. Lord Barnier, the original one, stabs Ceren for disobeying his orders to stay safe inside, with no remorse whatsoever, even cackling in glee and taunting Jacopo about it. Maria betrays Jacopo. Odilon dies. By the end of his tale, Jacopo is nothing but a shadow of his former self, and dies alone, responsible for the deaths of everyone he knew and loved, his spirit completely broken. The horizontal world that briefly existed in the slum and the brothel—the days of treating wounds, the kitchen-table evenings, the MidSummer festival, the birthday with the gift he never managed to give her—that world is what the work asks us to register as a loss. It is also what it asks us to recognize as the only thing that was ever worth wanting.
A Requiem for Innocence, then, is not really a love story, despite its surface. It is a study of how the political form we call lordship reproduces itself across revolutions, and what it must do to women's bodies to keep doing so. The visual novel form is rarely credited with this kind of analytical ambition, and there is something fitting about the fact that one of the clearer contemporary portraits of how a revolutionary becomes a tyrant arrived in a medium that the prestige discourse has decided to ignore. The prequel knows what it is. It knows that the boy who freed the saint and the lord who imprisoned the witch are the same person. It refuses to pretend that this transformation is a personal tragedy. It is a structural one, and it requires structural analysis, and the work supplies it.
Mini Review: A Requiem for Innocence is a masterpiece of structural tragedy. It posits that "saint" and "witch" are merely two angles of utility: a woman is holy when she suffers silently, but a witch when she resists. The prequel asks not why tyrants are cruel, but why revolutionaries who conquer the throne inevitably replicate the abuses they sought to end. The true tragedy isn't personal failure, but the realization that the machinery of lordship inherently requires the extraction of the vulnerable.