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Square's Soylent System...
The Soylent System was built with the purpose of "reusing" organic material in mind. The Ministry of Solaris originally meant the facility to serve them in another way, but after several failures, they brought part of the system to Solaris and began using it to produce food with additives that would control the population. | The scientists that work here are the ones responsible for the creation of Wels/Reapers, demi-humans, and a number of other "crimes against humanity". Although these experimentations are not the facility's sole purpose, those few who know of the facility's existence know nothing more. As planned -- of course -- the population of Solaris has no idea where its food supply comes from, and the process of adding drugs to Solaris's food supply remains effective and undiscovered.
Soylent Green |
Those of you who have seen the movie Soylent Green may have picked up on this reference at the beginning. But if you're like me, and you've never heard of it, you might find some value in the little bit of information that's going to follow! I've read several reviews of the movie -- certainly enough, according to the person who brought this parallel to my attention, to give you an accurate idea of what the movie is about and how it relates to Xenogears. |
The movie came out sometime around 1971, and I suppose you can consider it your typical post-apocalypse science fiction movie. ^_~ The world has been ravaged and poluted, and green things are almost non existent. The population is out of control, and for the most part trapped in poverty. There is not enough food to feed everybody, so the government enacted a program to produce several "soylent" products -- Soylent Red, Soylent Green, etc. (Or so it said on the page I saw...) Soylent Green, for instance, was supposed to be made of a soybean compound. What the population didn't know, was that the food they were fighting over was simply "recycled" human remains. Apparently the group of main characters discover this by accident while sneaking into a government facility. (I'm not sure how they chose people to undergo this recycling process, but when the subjects were about to die -- if they weren't dead already -- they were allowed to view anything they wanted via huge screens in their room, or chamber, or whatever it was. Since greenery was practically non-existent, I'm willing to bet most people asked to see forests, etc.) In any case, one of the main characters dies there (which does not happen in Xenogears thank goodness!), and the movie ends with the main character yelling out that Soylent Green is really made of humans. Nobody seems to care, and I suppose if you're as desperate for food as the people of this movie seem to be, you wouldn't care either!
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