Saw some Jade Harley art in the right mood and now I'm thinking about that one shot in [S] Cascade where Jade has gone god tier and teleports the ship over LOFAF and we see her body, her old body, is still there. And there’s a still almost calm to the music, the way it strips down some of the epic layers a little, this strange unearthly serenity not quite papered over by the magic of the moment. She is alive. She is dead. To become a god is to die.
And it’s so wrapped up in game mechanics and quest nonsense and tragicomedy that it gets lost a little but. I don't think it's an accident that even god-tiering death leaves a ghost.
To become a god is to die.
Jade Harley who was human and thirteen is dead. Jade who is Bec and dreamer and ghost and space is alive and more. Jade glides along through the foreground, superceding her corpse, and it is at this moment that she takes up the mantle of the game’s idea of godhood and begins fulfilling Echidna’s request to take the planets with her. Jade Harley’s dead body becomes just another thing to carry with her on this shrunken-down planet, the offal of the production of the divine.
Do you think she ever came back to that spot? That any of them did? Did John, to LOWAS? To the thirteen year old bodies they once were?
Does it seem strange when they start aging but the bodies they left behind do not? Do they rot? Or are they by some Sburban magic preserved?
Three years is a long time to carry your own corpse.