Up until now, Guertena's paintings have only been threats to the safety of Garry and Ib, Garry instantly dehumanizes Mary and treats her as an enemy. The sentient gallery, in trying to split up the trio, informs Garry (and the player, but not Ib in-game) that Mary is not human, but merely a painting. However, despite her cheerful appearance, we soon learn of an unsettling secret. In short, the perfect picture of youthful innocence, the girl who just wants a friend. She is carefree, scatterbrained, and friendly. Mary, the female character that Ib meets next, is a vivacious girl. In Garry, we see man as socialized under capitalism: selfish, incapable of true compassion, and a sense of manhood based on control over the environment, women, and children. When the gallery tries to stop their attempt at escape, Garry violently destroys the obstacles in his way, paying no heed to the fact that the entire gallery, all of the paintings and sculptures, and all of the dolls are sentient. When he does help Ib, he never asks for her feelings and retains his aloof, cold personality, always attempting to maintain the illusion of dominance and control over the unpredictable situation. Despite needing to be rescued by Ib, he is paternalistic towards her and refuses to see her as an equal (despite both being held prisoner in an abyssal nightmare world). He is an adult, he is visibly shaken by the gallery, and he thinks nothing of the rules of the gallery. Immediately, however, Ib sees that Garry is not like her. Garry, the male character that Ib meets first, is initially presented as someone just like Ib: an outsider to Guertena's gallery of horrors who stumbled into the art gallery by another entrance. Thus, Ib is the audience of the game at large, us who are expected to experience the drama between these two people and undergo a potential change in opinion. Ib enters the abyssal gallery voluntarily, gets stuck, and although silent, is clearly entranced by the gallery's otherworldly sights and clearly afraid of the gallery's horrors and wants to go home. As is typical for the RPG horror genre, she doesn't talk except to advance the plot. Ib, the nine year old girl representing the player, is the human embodiment of the player's choices. However, as with analysis of any creative work, the material relevance of such a work is always found in the correspondence of such archetypes to the world we live. They seem more like Platonic idealized forms, character archetypes more than real people. The Game Ib and Mary-ism, a Materialist Analysis.ĪT first glance, the game Ib's 3 central characters seem to have nothing to do with a materialist understanding of the world.
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