Ash's Choice

[Figal-sensei]

Interpret and comment on Ash’s choice at the end of Avalon. What do you think motivates her choice? On what basis could one justify it?

[Josh]

Due to the smile of the ghost and the “Welcome to Avalon” at the end of the moving, I’m guessing that Ash chose to stay in Class Real. This choice is perfectly logical. Ash’s life has become a monotonous cycle. I only had to watch her go through her daily activities for like 5-10 minutes and I couldn’t take any more of it, so it must be torturous to have to live that life every day. The only thing that brings Ash any pleasure in life is her wonderful dog. The only time we see her smile is when she’s with that dog. In Class Real, her boring, sepia-colored, monotonous life is turned into a world of color. It also shows people living their lives normally, a sharp contrast to the Avalon-obsessed and often stationary people we see outside of Avalon. The games also uses subliminal messaging to make the world seem even more desirable and perfect to Ash: the Avalon posters no longer say “STOP” and instead display a photo of her dog. With Ash’s decision, her reality is now Class Real, and she is simultaneously sealing herself inside the game and escaping its domination over her life.

[niahcharles]

I suppose Ash decides to stay in this other reality, “class real”…if it’s even real at all. The “Welcome to Avalon” at the last scene makes this choice fairly obvious, I think. I agree with pretty much all of Josh said, that Ash’s choice makes sense. Who would want to live in the horribly drab and mundane, monotonous life that Ash has lived up until this point? Her only escape from that boring as hell life was playing Avalon…but now it becomes confusing. Is Avalon “reality”, or is she still within the virtual reality? How do we know which reality is “real”…how do we define what “real” is? Does the disappearance of her dog and the frozen people indicate that her previous reality was merely a simulation, that it, as opposed to Avalon, was the virtual world? Right before Ash shot Stunner, he said, “reality is what we tell ourselves it is” ..or something like that. That is probably a significant line…and I think it raises some ambiguity about Ash’s situation. Maybe it is suggesting that neither of the worlds, the sepia reality and the reality of Avalon, are solely real…it simply depends on perspective and what we decide to believe.

Again, I don’t think I even answered the question, but I’m trying to process this movie. I kind of hated it until the last 10 minutes.

[Alyson Win]

I agree Ash decided to stay in Class Real. Even though she knew she was just in a game; that reality was so much better than the reality she was living in. The only time the movie was in color was in Class Real, which shows how much she hates “reality.” She would rather live a content life in a place she knows isn’t real, than go back to the drab reality she lived in for so long. It’s like the analogy of the shadows and the red vs blue pill. Live in your own ignorance or come out the other side knowing everything but being depressed because the truth hurts?

[alappah]

I’m going to argue the opposite side as most and say that I think that Ash chose to leave. Though Class Real offers a happy and exciting alternative from her bleak life, I think Ash has hit the point where she has become too caught up in the game, to the point where it’s all that matters to her. For example, she knew she had the choice to be with Murphy forever in a better world and she still decided to fulfill her mission objective, causing him pain and sending him back somewhere worse than where he was. Though we don’t see her shoot the ghost at the end, the fact that she pulls out the gun and the ghost smiles almost implies that the game knows that it’s won and sucked the hope out of its best players, who know that their bleak reality is all they’ll ever have.

[Brandon Kim]

In my interpretation, Ash has left class Real for the “next level”. The ending in which she finds the Ghost again is followed by the message “Welcome to Avalon,” meaning she has decided to continue playing the game. I interpret the cryptic final message to imply Avalon itself is another “level” of the game, if I can still call it that.

This means she decided to leave class Real. According to Murphy, class Real is in fact reality, and he tries to convince Ash to stay. Ash doesn’t because she doesn’t want to accept the modern city as reality. To her, reality is the game, so she decides to move on.

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