Matter Of Perspective: Bayonetta

Heaven versus hell, good versus evil, and light versus dark are all extensions of the theme of combat in the stories that are encountered in fiction. Gods fight and beat demons, knights defeat dragons, and people burn the witch leading to a happily ever after conclusion. However, sometimes the reason the conflict arose in the first place is because what should have been the happy ending is destroyed, and that is what sets up the story of Bayonetta, the Umbra witch who takes up arms against the Lumen angels.

All of the events in Bayonetta’s life can be traced back to the moment an Umbra witch and a Lumen sage happened to fall in love and conceive a child. This event was deemed as wrong by both factions, who much preferred the segregation of their respective tribes which leads to the young Bayonetta being shunned. It’s a situation that has played out in reality many times before and it is likely to continue to play out for a while longer, but why did both decide that the mixing of their groups was forbidden?

The fact is that the Umbras and the Lumens both have a responsibility to watch over the flow of time and the events that take place. While it isn’t clearly explained as to how this responsibility is split, it’s there, and it could be the justification for why the segregation of the factions is enforced. If both groups start mixing and producing children then eventually you’d have a new group that would look to take part taking care of time, a practice which has been honed over millennia and is delicate enough whole armies will look to protect it.

The fact is that both Umbra and Lumen looked to stamp out any sort of cross breeding to protect the very fabric of time, and not just out of a sense of tribalism. If a Lumbra group emerges they’ll try to exert their own power and take control of things. Just look at how powerful Bayonetta proves to be during the story, and she is just one Lumbra. Imagine a hundred years down the line there are a thousand Lumbras, all turning against the old tribes. That’s a war that would be much more costly than the perpetual stand-off the Umbras and Lumens had.

When Bayonetta awakes the remaining Lumen forces mobilise to stop what is perceived as a threat to the thread of time, hundreds of angels fight against what they perceive as a potential evil that will rip apart the status quo, but they can’t win. Eventually Bayonetta herself actually finds another reason as to why she as been awakened, and it features a rather violent family reunion with her father, Lumen Sage Balder.

Balder has one goal, and that is to bring all the planes of existence together into one, including using an object his daughter has called the Left Eye Of The World. There must be a major reason that Balder wants to have three different worlds come together, each one home to different species from demons, angels and humans. It could be that the fact his own love was shunned by those he trusted has eaten away at Balder and manifested itself in a new idea.

Balder is perhaps just as angry at the segregation of the factions as Bayonetta may be, if not more so, because he lost the love of his life because everyone judged them based on a reason that seemed absurd. So to show his disdain for this law he bypasses everyone and tries to the summon the highest power to blend the world’s back together. Once the higher power in the universe, the creator Jubileus, merges the worlds then anyone can mix with anyone they wish, forbidding laws be damned.

Bayonetta herself stops her father and Jubileus from breaking the barriers of existence, and in a way stopping the law that had her shunned in the first place from altogether being wiped from reality. This is the biggest blow for Balder who wanted to make the world a place where it didn’t really matter who you fell in love and raised a family with, despite what your group or faction said. In a way what Balder did was out of love as well as hate. He hated what the world had become and wanted to make it better.