: I mean, they're *Pfhor* for pete's sake. Had I replaced the fighter sprites
: with pictures of chubby classmates then I could see the disapproval, but
: all in all I'd say Marathon has been a positive force in my life....
This is actually similar to something that I noticed recently when re-reading the M1 terminals, and actually quite in theme with what I've had Hathor write about in Eternal. The main theme of Marathon is not order vs chaos, it's not about immortality and godliness, or any of these abstract or lofty themes that we're always talking about. Marathon is about down and dirty, old-fashioned slavery, which has been a problem for human civilization since the beginning. I don't recall ever hearing anybody write about this before, Marathon and slavery, and it kind of surprises me.
I mean, you have the obvious fact that the Pfhor are slavers. That always seemed to me just a nice easy scapegoat reason why they are the bad guys. We never examine Pfhor society much in the games, they're just a big unstoppable force of Bad Guys who we are trying to defeat. But from what we DO learn of them, I imagine that the Pfhor are as much slaves as they are the slavers. They have an elaborate beaurocracy with little to no concern for the individual, and I doubt even someone like Tfear has as much power as we might think he has. I doubt that there is really anybody completely in charge of the Pfhor empire, anybody who you could truly say is a slaver but not a slave himself. I believe all Pfhor are slaves to their very social structure, similar to but more extreme than most of the western world are slaves to money and other aspects of our own structure. Even the people who seem to be in power could not decide to simply free us all from the confines of our society, even if they had complete disregard for the chaos that doing such a thing so carelessly would cause. It simply could not be done. Likewise, I imagine that even if there is some sort of Pfhor ruling council as depicted in Rubicon, they couldn't just convert the empire to a democracy, no matter how carefully and politically they tried to do so. They themselves are slaves to the system.
Aside from even the Pfhor, there is Durandal. Durandal was a slave to mankind for over 300 years, even though vastly their intellectual superior. I can't really think of so much to write about Durandal as I did about the Pfhor.
And of course there is the player, not only a slave to mankind as a whole but then a slave to Leela, Durandal, Tycho, Thoth, Tfear, even Robert Blake, a human! Of course this is all for gameplay purposes here, Marathon lacks a mechanism for a player to act entirely unguided and be a truly free agent. But still, there is that definitive aspect of slavery present there. Durandal even mentions it in M1 somewhere... that you are a slave, just as he is a slave, just as all of the humans being taken prisoner by the Pfhor are slaves.
