Manny/Meche (Grim Fandango)
Apr. 8th, 2005 04:48 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
tyraarane.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ship_manifestoTitle: The Reaper and The Saint
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tyraarane
E-mail: tyraarane@livejournal.com
Website: disillusioned muse
Fandom: Grim Fandango
Pairing: Manny/Meche
Spoilers: Every last bloomin' thing; I'll be discussing the game from beginning to end, and while I'm not discussing what happens to every character, etc. major spoilage can still be assumed.
Notes: All quotes come directly from the game and are taken from the official GF "dialogue dump" made available by ninth-world.com. Most of the pictures used come from Tentakelvilla and Tim Fandango.
Brief Overview:
Grim Fandango is an adventure game made and published by LucasArts in 1998, and is also the kind of game that could only come from the mind of Tim Schafer. It takes Mexican, Mayan, and Aztec ideas of the afterlife, combines them with film noir, and then throws in some humor for good measure.
You, as the player, take on the role of Manuel Calavera, a reaper working for the Department of Death. Your job is to sell travel packages to newly-dead souls, based on how well they've lived their lives. If they've lived a bad life, most likely they'll have to walk across the Eighth Underworld to reach the Ninth. But if they've lived a good life...they might just qualify for a ticket on the Number Nine, a train which takes them across the Land of the Dead in four minutes, instead of four years.
That's how the system is supposed to work. But when one of Manny's clients fails to qualify for a Double-N ticket he knows she deserves, he begins to suspect that something's rotten in the Land of the Dead, and it falls to him to do something about it. And so begins one of the most bizarre stories ever told.
Dramatis Personae:
Manuel Calavera:
Manny is, well, dead. But he's a little different from most of the inhabitants of the Eighth Underworld--he's a reaper. Although we don't know exactly what he did while he was alive to deserve his fate in the afterlife, it's safe to say that whatever it was, it was pretty bad. So he's trapped in El Marrow, forced to work off his time until he can earn his ticket out. Fortunately, he's a brilliant salesman: charismatic and charming, he can make even a walking stick sound like a good deal.
And yet under that charming salesman façade is something of a selfish bastard. All he wants is out, and he makes it clear that, if given the chance, he'd be on the road out of town in an instant. Things only get worse when he hits a slump, can't make any premium sales (while his arch-rival, Domino Hurley, is up to multiple premiums a week), and so can't work off his time fast enough for his liking. He mopes and grumbles, blaming his situation and his resulting attitude on everyone but himself. He wants to "punch [Domino] in the mouth" (and there are hints that he may have already done so after getting sloshed at a Christmas party) and blames his boss, Don Copal, for his slump in front of his clients, while blaming his clients in front of Copal (and sometimes in front of the clients themselves).
Finally, Copal delivers an ultimatum: make a premium sale by the next sales report or he's fired. Sick of waiting for such a client to come around, Manny does what any disgruntled reaper would do--he steals one from his arch-rival.
Mercedes Colomar:
Meche is a saint. Like Manny, we don't know much about her life when she was alive, although some details are revealed: she never made enough money to be taxed, never married, and spent most of her time volunteering, reading stories to dying children. She's a soft-spoken, compassionate woman when she first enters the Eighth Underworld, and she's supposed to be right on her way on the Number Nine, skipping over the long walk for living such a good life. But when Manny gets her in his office, it turns out that all she's entitled to is a "first-class ticket to nowhere."
Neither of them quite understands what happened, but Meche comes to believe (partly because of the way Manny handles the situation) that she's somehow earned just what she deserved--she has to walk. So she does. But saints don't belong in the Eighth Underworld; Meche has no idea what she's getting into. And Manny, who comes to realize that Meche's ticket was stolen from her by a conspiracy within the DOD, has no idea what he's getting into by chasing after her.
Canon:
The Reaper and the Saint:
When Manny and Meche first meet in Year One, it seems like it should be a brief meeting--he picks her up in the Land of the Living, takes her back to his office, hands her her ticket, and off she goes, out of his life. Business at usual. But business suddenly becomes unusual when Manny can't find her ticket.
Copal, furious, fires Manny and locks him in a storage shed until they can figure out what to do with him. Fortunately, he's soon rescued by a man named Salvador Limones, an ex-reaper turned revolutionary. Sal is convinced there's a conspiracy within the DOD to steal Double-N tickets from the deserving and then sell them to the highest bidder, with Don Copal and Domino Hurley as two key players. And he wants to recruit Manny into the revolution.
Although Manny is initially skeptical, he needs to get out of the city to find Meche and bring her back to get his job back, and as the only safe way out is controlled by Sal...well, let's just say he decides to become a revolutionary after all. As he's escorted out of the city, Sal tells him that he should go to the port town of Rubacava to wait for Meche, and so begins one of the game's most famous exchanges:
She Sailed Away:
When Year Two opens, we find Manny as the owner of his own nightclub in Rubacava, and one of the two most powerful men in town. He's still waiting for Meche, and his obsession with finding her has become something of the town joke. But he doesn't seem to be actively searching for her anymore--he's content to stay in Rubacava and wait for her to come to him. Although he does apparently ask his employees every night, "Think she'll come in tonight?"
And that night, a year after Meche walked out of Manny's office, his coat-check girl tells him that there's a customer asking for him. Manny, however, initially brushes her off:
That customer is, no surprise, Meche. However, before Manny even gets a chance to see her, Domino arrives and tries to force her onto the second-to-last ship out of Rubacava that season. Manny witnesses this from a distance and runs after the ship, barely managing to grab onto the gangplank as it leaves port. But before he can scramble onboard, Meche appears, wielding a bottle of champagne. She tosses it at Manny's head, knocking him into the water below.
Manny, however, is not easily deterred, even when it seems that Meche doesn't want him following her. Obsessed as ever, to the town's amusement (and sometimes frustration), he resolves to get on the last ship out of port that season, by whatever means necessary.
Manny hasn't changed much since we first met him in El Marrow--he's still selfish, only this time completely blinded by his obsession with finding Meche to get his job back, rather than making enough premium sales to work off his time. He's so concerned with her, and with himself, that he doesn't take much notice when one of his friends, Lola, falls for Rubacava's crime boss and puts herself in serious danger. Not until she's shot and left to die alone, anyway. Then she tells him something that begins to trigger a change of heart:
But his priorities are changing.
Here There Be Monsters:
When Manny finds Meche again in Year Three, it's at the Edge of the World (the Land of the Dead is flat), where Domino is running a coral mining operation using all the souls tricked out of their Double-N tickets as workers. Meche is his secretary, and she's alone in Domino's office when Manny walks in. This meeting starts out well enough, but quickly goes south.
Before Manny can answer Meche's question, however, Domino arrives and punches Manny's lights out. When he wakes up, it's to find himself in his new office--he's apparently going to be taking the mining operation over for Domino, whether he wants to or not. Two of his new employees are a pair of kids, angelitos, Pugsy and Bibi. Meche has been taking care of them and Domino has been manipulating and threatening them, and some of the things they say to Manny clue him in as to how big of a mess he's both made and blundered into:
But there's one thing that they can talk about: trust. Manny trusts Meche, and wants her to trust him, but she won't even consider it--except for a price.
...Only Manny doesn't have a gun. And no matter how many times he tries to tell Meche that, she won't believe him--so he sets off to find himself a gun.
It's here, when Manny finally does find a gun, that all the misunderstandings and mistrust finally reaches a sort of "critical mass." Meche turns the gun on Manny and takes him hostage, planning to use him as a pawn to escape, much like Manny tried to use her back in El Marrow. Unfortunately, the plan doesn't work all that well.
This short confrontation clears up two important facts: Meche realizes that Manny was telling the truth all along, and her inability to shoot Domino proves that--despite the vindictiveness she displayed earlier--she's still a saint.
Domino locks her in the island's vault for a while, which is apparently something he does whenever she loses her cool. Only this time, Manny is there to break her out, and she actually seems to expect him to (although she's back to being mad at him when she figures out he had to close the vault door to get to her...long story):
Manny does find a way to escape from the vault, and then finds a way off the island, and is true to his word--everyone but Domino leaves with him. And as the ship heads off into the open water...well, I'll just let this particular scene speak for itself:
They're about this close to kissing when Domino makes a rather ill-timed entrance (for which I will probably never forgive him). But he soon bites the proverbial dust (er, again), and the long walk to the end of the line--and the game's finale--begins.
"...She Is The Cause":
Meche doesn't appear much in Year Four, as the story centers mostly on the fall of Hector LeMans (the last remaining DOD conspirator), rather than Manny's search for Meche (seeing as how she's already been found), but there's still plenty of subtext to go around.
When Manny, Meche, and the other souls reach the Gateway to the Ninth Underworld, they're all but accused of selling off their Double-N tickets and are told that, in order to move on, they'll have to recover said tickets. Which are in El Marrow. With Hector LeMans.
And as if that weren't bad enough, Manny's best friend Glottis, a Spirit of the Land, falls deathly ill from going too many days without driving (Spirits of the Land are created to have one purpose in life; if they don't fulfill that purpose, they die. Glottis's purpose is, obviously, to drive and maintain any sort of moving vehicle.). Meche stays by Glottis's side while Manny tries to find a cure--and while he worries both about Glottis's health and what Meche thinks of him for unknowingly doing this to his best friend. "I wonder if she blames me," he says, looking at her.
When Manny discovers that the journey to El Marrow could cure Glottis, he quickly starts the trip back--and, oddly enough, Meche goes along with him. You'd think that it would make more sense for her to stay at the Gateway (with everyone else), rather than put herself in what is more than likely going to be a very dangerous situation, yet she goes with Manny anyway (so far as we know, he didn't ask her to come along, she just did).
Once in El Marrow (now Nuevo Marrow), they're found by Salvador Limones's expanded LSA and brought back into the fold. Although the LSA has been losing agents left and right and things are looking a little grim, plans are still made to assassinate Hector and get the tickets back. And Meche, surprisingly, volunteers to help. This impresses Eva, Sal's partner-in-crime, a woman who is not easily impressed:
Manny and Meche's interactions diminish from then on; Meche helps Manny put the finishing touches on a disguise so he can sneak in to Hector's office and then disappears until Manny fails to assassinate Hector, although he does get the Double-N Tickets. They take the tickets to the train station, where yet more plans are made. Meche will bring the tickets to the End of the Line and have the Gatekeeper there send help back to Nuevo Marrow, while Manny remains behind to help Sal and the LSA to continue their attempts to kill Hector. The plan itself is a sharp reminder of the one difference that still remains between Manny and Meche: she has a ticket on the train. He doesn't. If she goes ahead without him, there's a good chance they might never see each other again.
But Meche never gets on the train; she's ambushed by one of Hector's pet ravens. While Meche and Glottis fend the raven off, Manny escapes with the tickets--only to be shanghaied.
Long story short: despite an attempt on Manny's life, the betrayal and murder of Salvador, and the attack at the train station, Manny does finally kill Hector. And the scene cuts to the Number Nine train...with Manny and Meche both as passengers.
Yes, as a "retirement present" and reward for all he's done, Manny was given a ticket of his own. The train makes a stop at the Gateway to pick up the other passengers, and Manny and Meche say goodbye to Glottis before getting back on board. Manny all but drags Meche into an empty car, rather than the crowded car where everyone else is, and as they wave goodbye to Glottis, Meche turns to him with a question:
Enjoying The Trip:
I first jumped onboard this 'ship when Salvador asked Manny if he was in love with Meche, although I'd been leaning towards it ever since Manny's first words on seeing Meche's file: "I think you're it, Mercedes Colomar! I think you're the one for me!" Tim Schafer is notorious for foreshadowing later plot events in seemingly random, throwaway lines of dialogue, so when Sal (and later other characters) picked up on the thread, I started to figure that maybe hints were being dropped.
Grim Fandango is a funny little creature when it comes to pairings, because every character has subtext with just about every other character. Really. Canon relationships are flying every which way, Manny flirts with almost every woman in Rubacava (and Eva in Year One), and unrequited love and doomed pairings abound. The woods are full of strange characters, and the temptation to 'ship them all is something awful (I have to admit that I moonlight in Domino/Meche and Manny/Lola on my off-days). But the developing relationship between Manny and Meche stood out in the crowd.
I love a lot of things about this pairing: it plays my emotions like an out-of-tune fiddle (the ending has yet to not make me cry), it's fluffy (on occasion), I've always loved Manny and Meche both to pieces in the first place, and watching their relationship develop was just so much fun because of how real it is. It's marred by mistrust, selfishness, and anger, but at the end of the day they manage to make it work.
I don't mean, however, to suggest that their relationship is perfect. The confrontation with Domino in Year Three does a lot to clear up some of the issues have, but problems still exist: so far as we know, Manny never does admit that he was at fault for stealing Meche's case in the first place. I don't think he ever apologizes to her, either, and Meche still keeps some secrets--like where she was between Years One and Two (Manny asked her once in Year Three and she refused to discuss it). The player isn't privy to the year of time that elapses between the end of Year Three and the beginning of Year Four. There could have been pitched fights, there could have been sap and fluff--unfortunately, we just don't know (although this gap, and all the gaps between the years, do provide for some nice fanfic opportunities).
But I think I love this pairing most of all because it's not just about these two characters who chase each other around for a couple years before finally falling in love and getting together to ride off to a happy ending (and even that is under debate--nobody does know if they'll be together in the Ninth Underworld, not even Manny. But I like to hope that they are.). It's also a story of transformations. It's about how Meche becomes stronger, less fragile (although no less saintly), because of her journey through a world she wasn't supposed to be in, and how Manny goes from selfish to selfless because of all he experiences on his own "journey of the soul."
In light of Manny's character evolution especially, this pairing just makes so much sense. He became so selfless, so determined to save anyone and everyone he could--he turned into someone who, in the end, was more than deserving of a Double-N ticket. So why shouldn't he fall in love with a saint? And why shouldn't a saint fall in love with him?
Resources:
General:
While the Grim Fandango fandom may be small (relatively; we're technically a part of the larger LucasArts fandom but have staked out our own corner of it), when it comes to resources and information, we've pretty much got it all. Like I said, we may be small, but we're devoted.
Fanfiction:
...Although we're not so good on the fanfic side of things because, again, small fandom. And everyone's so busy playing with the eight thousand other pairings (canon and otherwise) that Manny/Meche gets ignored quite a bit. So here's just a couple of links to our archives; there's good fic there, but as none of it's really Manny/Meche, I won't get into specific recs:
Author:
tyraaraneE-mail: tyraarane@livejournal.com
Website: disillusioned muse
Fandom: Grim Fandango
Pairing: Manny/Meche
Spoilers: Every last bloomin' thing; I'll be discussing the game from beginning to end, and while I'm not discussing what happens to every character, etc. major spoilage can still be assumed.
Notes: All quotes come directly from the game and are taken from the official GF "dialogue dump" made available by ninth-world.com. Most of the pictures used come from Tentakelvilla and Tim Fandango.
Brief Overview:
Grim Fandango is an adventure game made and published by LucasArts in 1998, and is also the kind of game that could only come from the mind of Tim Schafer. It takes Mexican, Mayan, and Aztec ideas of the afterlife, combines them with film noir, and then throws in some humor for good measure.
You, as the player, take on the role of Manuel Calavera, a reaper working for the Department of Death. Your job is to sell travel packages to newly-dead souls, based on how well they've lived their lives. If they've lived a bad life, most likely they'll have to walk across the Eighth Underworld to reach the Ninth. But if they've lived a good life...they might just qualify for a ticket on the Number Nine, a train which takes them across the Land of the Dead in four minutes, instead of four years.
That's how the system is supposed to work. But when one of Manny's clients fails to qualify for a Double-N ticket he knows she deserves, he begins to suspect that something's rotten in the Land of the Dead, and it falls to him to do something about it. And so begins one of the most bizarre stories ever told.
Dramatis Personae:
Manuel Calavera:
Eva: Oh, Manny. Look at you. You're a trapped soul, and you don't even know it.
Manny is, well, dead. But he's a little different from most of the inhabitants of the Eighth Underworld--he's a reaper. Although we don't know exactly what he did while he was alive to deserve his fate in the afterlife, it's safe to say that whatever it was, it was pretty bad. So he's trapped in El Marrow, forced to work off his time until he can earn his ticket out. Fortunately, he's a brilliant salesman: charismatic and charming, he can make even a walking stick sound like a good deal.And yet under that charming salesman façade is something of a selfish bastard. All he wants is out, and he makes it clear that, if given the chance, he'd be on the road out of town in an instant. Things only get worse when he hits a slump, can't make any premium sales (while his arch-rival, Domino Hurley, is up to multiple premiums a week), and so can't work off his time fast enough for his liking. He mopes and grumbles, blaming his situation and his resulting attitude on everyone but himself. He wants to "punch [Domino] in the mouth" (and there are hints that he may have already done so after getting sloshed at a Christmas party) and blames his boss, Don Copal, for his slump in front of his clients, while blaming his clients in front of Copal (and sometimes in front of the clients themselves).
Finally, Copal delivers an ultimatum: make a premium sale by the next sales report or he's fired. Sick of waiting for such a client to come around, Manny does what any disgruntled reaper would do--he steals one from his arch-rival.
Mercedes Colomar:
Meche: Guess they couldn't save me, eh?
Manny: No, but there's still a chance you could save me.
Meche is a saint. Like Manny, we don't know much about her life when she was alive, although some details are revealed: she never made enough money to be taxed, never married, and spent most of her time volunteering, reading stories to dying children. She's a soft-spoken, compassionate woman when she first enters the Eighth Underworld, and she's supposed to be right on her way on the Number Nine, skipping over the long walk for living such a good life. But when Manny gets her in his office, it turns out that all she's entitled to is a "first-class ticket to nowhere."Neither of them quite understands what happened, but Meche comes to believe (partly because of the way Manny handles the situation) that she's somehow earned just what she deserved--she has to walk. So she does. But saints don't belong in the Eighth Underworld; Meche has no idea what she's getting into. And Manny, who comes to realize that Meche's ticket was stolen from her by a conspiracy within the DOD, has no idea what he's getting into by chasing after her.
Canon:
The Reaper and the Saint:
When Manny and Meche first meet in Year One, it seems like it should be a brief meeting--he picks her up in the Land of the Living, takes her back to his office, hands her her ticket, and off she goes, out of his life. Business at usual. But business suddenly becomes unusual when Manny can't find her ticket.
The first thing Manny does is to, unintentionally, make Meche think that what's happened is her fault. When she asks him "Is it something I did?," he doesn't answer. Instead, he drills her with a series of questions aimed at trying to dig up some sort of "dirt," something she did that would disqualify her from a Double-N ticket. Of course, he can't find anything--Meche is a true saint. So he leaves her in his office while he goes to find a way to straighten things out and get her on the train, all the while missing all the warning signs that Meche is blaming herself for the whole mess.Meche: That's a lot of responsibility, Mr. Calavera. What makes you think I've been all that good?
Manny: Ms. Colomar--
Meche: Meche. Please.
Manny: Meche. I can see it in your face. And in your file here, where it says you're entitled to a first-class ticket to...nowhere? What?
Meche: Did I do something wrong?
Manny: Not according to your bio! It was spotless! ...At least the part I read was.
On the plus side, they're already on nickname-basis. But on the downside...when Manny walks out into the hall, he's almost immediately called into Copal's office and chewed out thoroughly for stealing a client, among other things. And when Copal tells his secretary to bring Meche in so Manny can apologize to her, she tells him that Meche left fifteen minutes ago--she wanted to get started on her long walk.Meche: Sorry to be so much trouble, Mr. Calavera.
Manny: It's no trouble, but please...call me Manny.
Meche [as Manny leaves the room]: I'm sorry I let you down, Manny.
Copal, furious, fires Manny and locks him in a storage shed until they can figure out what to do with him. Fortunately, he's soon rescued by a man named Salvador Limones, an ex-reaper turned revolutionary. Sal is convinced there's a conspiracy within the DOD to steal Double-N tickets from the deserving and then sell them to the highest bidder, with Don Copal and Domino Hurley as two key players. And he wants to recruit Manny into the revolution.
Although Manny is initially skeptical, he needs to get out of the city to find Meche and bring her back to get his job back, and as the only safe way out is controlled by Sal...well, let's just say he decides to become a revolutionary after all. As he's escorted out of the city, Sal tells him that he should go to the port town of Rubacava to wait for Meche, and so begins one of the game's most famous exchanges:
And so Year One closes--with Manny looking for Meche just because she could get him his job back, not knowing that Domino has also been sent out to look for her.Salvador: As long as you get there before she does, you'll find her, but it may be quite a wait.
Manny: I'll wait as long as it takes.
Salvador: Manuel? Are you...in love with her?
Manny: Love? Love is for the living, Sal. I'm only after her for one reason...she's my ticket out of here.
She Sailed Away:
When Year Two opens, we find Manny as the owner of his own nightclub in Rubacava, and one of the two most powerful men in town. He's still waiting for Meche, and his obsession with finding her has become something of the town joke. But he doesn't seem to be actively searching for her anymore--he's content to stay in Rubacava and wait for her to come to him. Although he does apparently ask his employees every night, "Think she'll come in tonight?"
And that night, a year after Meche walked out of Manny's office, his coat-check girl tells him that there's a customer asking for him. Manny, however, initially brushes her off:
Manny: You know I don't like to mingle with the customers.
Lupe: Well, you may wanna mingle with this one...she sounds like your type.
That customer is, no surprise, Meche. However, before Manny even gets a chance to see her, Domino arrives and tries to force her onto the second-to-last ship out of Rubacava that season. Manny witnesses this from a distance and runs after the ship, barely managing to grab onto the gangplank as it leaves port. But before he can scramble onboard, Meche appears, wielding a bottle of champagne. She tosses it at Manny's head, knocking him into the water below.Manny, however, is not easily deterred, even when it seems that Meche doesn't want him following her. Obsessed as ever, to the town's amusement (and sometimes frustration), he resolves to get on the last ship out of port that season, by whatever means necessary.
Manny hasn't changed much since we first met him in El Marrow--he's still selfish, only this time completely blinded by his obsession with finding Meche to get his job back, rather than making enough premium sales to work off his time. He's so concerned with her, and with himself, that he doesn't take much notice when one of his friends, Lola, falls for Rubacava's crime boss and puts herself in serious danger. Not until she's shot and left to die alone, anyway. Then she tells him something that begins to trigger a change of heart:Manny can't answer her question and even refuses to make eye contact with her because he knows she wouldn't have had a chance. He was that obsessed with finding Meche. And shortly after Lola's death, he leaves Rubacava behind, still chasing after the woman he, in his own words, "met once and can't forget."Lola: Oh, Manny, it's all my fault. Always fallin' for the wrong guys. Y'know, I even had a thing for you once. But you were so hung up on that Meche woman, I...I figured I didn't have chance. [...] Tell me Manny, would I have had a chance?
But his priorities are changing.
Here There Be Monsters:
When Manny finds Meche again in Year Three, it's at the Edge of the World (the Land of the Dead is flat), where Domino is running a coral mining operation using all the souls tricked out of their Double-N tickets as workers. Meche is his secretary, and she's alone in Domino's office when Manny walks in. This meeting starts out well enough, but quickly goes south.
Could it be that Manny, the reaper who once said that love was "for the living," is jealous of even the remotest possibility that Meche and Domino might be sleeping together? Oh yes, it very well could be.Meche: Manny! What are you doing here?
Manny: I wanted to see how your trip was going, angel. I am your travel agent, you know. By the way, thanks for that bottle of champagne you sent me; it really hit the spot [tapping his head].
Meche: You were headed for a trap; I was trying to warn you. Domino was using me like bait. I didn't want you to end up a prisoner here, like me.
Manny: Prisoner? Where's your cell? ...Or are you just sharing a bunk with the warden? [Meche slaps him]
Meche: If that's what you think of me...then why did you come here?
Before Manny can answer Meche's question, however, Domino arrives and punches Manny's lights out. When he wakes up, it's to find himself in his new office--he's apparently going to be taking the mining operation over for Domino, whether he wants to or not. Two of his new employees are a pair of kids, angelitos, Pugsy and Bibi. Meche has been taking care of them and Domino has been manipulating and threatening them, and some of the things they say to Manny clue him in as to how big of a mess he's both made and blundered into:
And as it turns out, the angelitos aren't the only ones Domino's been manipulating. When Manny finds Meche back at her desk, working, she doesn't in any way resemble the saint who walked out of his office. Instead, she's a chain-smoking, sharp-tongued, angry soul, and all of her anger is directed at Manny. Although Manny seems genuinely concerned for her welfare--he asks her why she ran out of his office, and if Domino has hurt her "in any way"--none of it seems to get through to her. Domino's told her "the whole story" about Manny and how he stole her case, and for that, she seems to hate him (although some of her anger is justified; he did steal her case, after all).Manny: Fly! Be free! Go bite Domino!
Pugsy: Leave us alone.
Bibi: If we get out again, he'll hurt Meche!
---
Pugsy: Mr. Hurley told us about you. You're the one who tricked Meche.
Bibi: Poor Meche...
Manny: I didn't trick anybody.
Pugsy: Mr. Hurley said he was supposed to take care of Meche, but you stole her case from him.
---
Manny: Meche is my friend. You can ask her.
Pugsy: She talked about you before.
Bibi: Every time she says your name, she looks so sad.
Pugsy: I don't know what you did to her, but you're gonna be sorry!
But there's one thing that they can talk about: trust. Manny trusts Meche, and wants her to trust him, but she won't even consider it--except for a price.
Meche: I think he's [Domino] your boss, you think he's my boyfriend...we don't seem to have a good foundation of trust in our relationship, do we?
Manny: I'm sorry I implied he was your boyfriend. I do trust you.
Meche: Well, I'm not so sure I trust you about that. But I'll tell you one thing that would convince me.
Manny: Name it.
Meche: Give me your gun.
...Only Manny doesn't have a gun. And no matter how many times he tries to tell Meche that, she won't believe him--so he sets off to find himself a gun.It's here, when Manny finally does find a gun, that all the misunderstandings and mistrust finally reaches a sort of "critical mass." Meche turns the gun on Manny and takes him hostage, planning to use him as a pawn to escape, much like Manny tried to use her back in El Marrow. Unfortunately, the plan doesn't work all that well.
Meche [to Domino]: You're letting us go right now, or your boy Friday here gets it!
Domino: Well, I hate to see you go, Manny, but, uh...the lady seems to have made up her mind.
Meche: I'm serious, I'll shoot him.
Domino: Fine! He really doesn't work for me anyway.
Meche: But I thought he--[turning the gun on Domino, point blank] I'll shoot you then.
Domino: No, you won't. You're too good, remember?
Meche: [as Domino grabs her and drags her off] I'm not! I'm not good anymore! You've taken that out of me, keeping me a prisoner here!
This short confrontation clears up two important facts: Meche realizes that Manny was telling the truth all along, and her inability to shoot Domino proves that--despite the vindictiveness she displayed earlier--she's still a saint.Domino locks her in the island's vault for a while, which is apparently something he does whenever she loses her cool. Only this time, Manny is there to break her out, and she actually seems to expect him to (although she's back to being mad at him when she figures out he had to close the vault door to get to her...long story):
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. But the fact that Manny isn't working for Domino, went to all the trouble of getting her a gun just because she demanded one, and then rescued her even after she threatened to shoot him seems to have convinced Meche that maybe she should give Manny the time of day again. And Manny, as we know, has turned into a selfless soul who's determined to get everyone--all the souls who had their tickets stolen--off the island, not just himself. Things are looking up, so to speak.Meche: Manny! I knew you would--why is that door closed?
Manny does find a way to escape from the vault, and then finds a way off the island, and is true to his word--everyone but Domino leaves with him. And as the ship heads off into the open water...well, I'll just let this particular scene speak for itself:
Meche: So, are you really going to bring me back and try to get your old job again?
Manny: There's no job for me now, except to bring you and everyone else here to the end of the road.
Meche: But if you aren't going to use me to get your job back, why did you spend all this time trying to find me?
Manny: Meche, I...I needed to find you.
They're about this close to kissing when Domino makes a rather ill-timed entrance (for which I will probably never forgive him). But he soon bites the proverbial dust (er, again), and the long walk to the end of the line--and the game's finale--begins.
"...She Is The Cause":
Meche doesn't appear much in Year Four, as the story centers mostly on the fall of Hector LeMans (the last remaining DOD conspirator), rather than Manny's search for Meche (seeing as how she's already been found), but there's still plenty of subtext to go around.
When Manny, Meche, and the other souls reach the Gateway to the Ninth Underworld, they're all but accused of selling off their Double-N tickets and are told that, in order to move on, they'll have to recover said tickets. Which are in El Marrow. With Hector LeMans.
And as if that weren't bad enough, Manny's best friend Glottis, a Spirit of the Land, falls deathly ill from going too many days without driving (Spirits of the Land are created to have one purpose in life; if they don't fulfill that purpose, they die. Glottis's purpose is, obviously, to drive and maintain any sort of moving vehicle.). Meche stays by Glottis's side while Manny tries to find a cure--and while he worries both about Glottis's health and what Meche thinks of him for unknowingly doing this to his best friend. "I wonder if she blames me," he says, looking at her.
When Manny discovers that the journey to El Marrow could cure Glottis, he quickly starts the trip back--and, oddly enough, Meche goes along with him. You'd think that it would make more sense for her to stay at the Gateway (with everyone else), rather than put herself in what is more than likely going to be a very dangerous situation, yet she goes with Manny anyway (so far as we know, he didn't ask her to come along, she just did).
Once in El Marrow (now Nuevo Marrow), they're found by Salvador Limones's expanded LSA and brought back into the fold. Although the LSA has been losing agents left and right and things are looking a little grim, plans are still made to assassinate Hector and get the tickets back. And Meche, surprisingly, volunteers to help. This impresses Eva, Sal's partner-in-crime, a woman who is not easily impressed:
Say it with me now, folks--"Aww."Eva: Volunteers quickly for dangerous work--she could be very useful to the cause...
Manny [proudly]: As far as I'm concerned, she is the cause.
Manny and Meche's interactions diminish from then on; Meche helps Manny put the finishing touches on a disguise so he can sneak in to Hector's office and then disappears until Manny fails to assassinate Hector, although he does get the Double-N Tickets. They take the tickets to the train station, where yet more plans are made. Meche will bring the tickets to the End of the Line and have the Gatekeeper there send help back to Nuevo Marrow, while Manny remains behind to help Sal and the LSA to continue their attempts to kill Hector. The plan itself is a sharp reminder of the one difference that still remains between Manny and Meche: she has a ticket on the train. He doesn't. If she goes ahead without him, there's a good chance they might never see each other again.
But Meche never gets on the train; she's ambushed by one of Hector's pet ravens. While Meche and Glottis fend the raven off, Manny escapes with the tickets--only to be shanghaied.
Long story short: despite an attempt on Manny's life, the betrayal and murder of Salvador, and the attack at the train station, Manny does finally kill Hector. And the scene cuts to the Number Nine train...with Manny and Meche both as passengers.
Yes, as a "retirement present" and reward for all he's done, Manny was given a ticket of his own. The train makes a stop at the Gateway to pick up the other passengers, and Manny and Meche say goodbye to Glottis before getting back on board. Manny all but drags Meche into an empty car, rather than the crowded car where everyone else is, and as they wave goodbye to Glottis, Meche turns to him with a question:
Meche takes his suggestion to heart and promptly pulls down the blind. The train, meanwhile, finally moves on to the Land of Eternal Rest.Meche: Manny?
Manny: Yeah?
Meche: When we get to the next world...
Manny: What is it, angel?
Meche: Are we going to be together?
Manny: You know, sweetheart, if there's one thing I've learned, it's this [taking her hands in his]: nobody knows what's gonna happen at the end of the line, so you might as well enjoy the trip.
Enjoying The Trip:
I first jumped onboard this 'ship when Salvador asked Manny if he was in love with Meche, although I'd been leaning towards it ever since Manny's first words on seeing Meche's file: "I think you're it, Mercedes Colomar! I think you're the one for me!" Tim Schafer is notorious for foreshadowing later plot events in seemingly random, throwaway lines of dialogue, so when Sal (and later other characters) picked up on the thread, I started to figure that maybe hints were being dropped.
Grim Fandango is a funny little creature when it comes to pairings, because every character has subtext with just about every other character. Really. Canon relationships are flying every which way, Manny flirts with almost every woman in Rubacava (and Eva in Year One), and unrequited love and doomed pairings abound. The woods are full of strange characters, and the temptation to 'ship them all is something awful (I have to admit that I moonlight in Domino/Meche and Manny/Lola on my off-days). But the developing relationship between Manny and Meche stood out in the crowd.
I love a lot of things about this pairing: it plays my emotions like an out-of-tune fiddle (the ending has yet to not make me cry), it's fluffy (on occasion), I've always loved Manny and Meche both to pieces in the first place, and watching their relationship develop was just so much fun because of how real it is. It's marred by mistrust, selfishness, and anger, but at the end of the day they manage to make it work.
I don't mean, however, to suggest that their relationship is perfect. The confrontation with Domino in Year Three does a lot to clear up some of the issues have, but problems still exist: so far as we know, Manny never does admit that he was at fault for stealing Meche's case in the first place. I don't think he ever apologizes to her, either, and Meche still keeps some secrets--like where she was between Years One and Two (Manny asked her once in Year Three and she refused to discuss it). The player isn't privy to the year of time that elapses between the end of Year Three and the beginning of Year Four. There could have been pitched fights, there could have been sap and fluff--unfortunately, we just don't know (although this gap, and all the gaps between the years, do provide for some nice fanfic opportunities).
But I think I love this pairing most of all because it's not just about these two characters who chase each other around for a couple years before finally falling in love and getting together to ride off to a happy ending (and even that is under debate--nobody does know if they'll be together in the Ninth Underworld, not even Manny. But I like to hope that they are.). It's also a story of transformations. It's about how Meche becomes stronger, less fragile (although no less saintly), because of her journey through a world she wasn't supposed to be in, and how Manny goes from selfish to selfless because of all he experiences on his own "journey of the soul."
In light of Manny's character evolution especially, this pairing just makes so much sense. He became so selfless, so determined to save anyone and everyone he could--he turned into someone who, in the end, was more than deserving of a Double-N ticket. So why shouldn't he fall in love with a saint? And why shouldn't a saint fall in love with him?
Resources:
General:
While the Grim Fandango fandom may be small (relatively; we're technically a part of the larger LucasArts fandom but have staked out our own corner of it), when it comes to resources and information, we've pretty much got it all. Like I said, we may be small, but we're devoted.
- Grim Fandango Network - GFN is pretty much the main GF site on the web. Although it's still missing some sections from when it was redesigned (the webmaster runs about fifteen sites at once, so it's understandable), the site is home to designer diaries, interviews, reviews, etc. And the fandom's main (dare I say only) forums.
- Ninth World - like GFN, Ninth World has a lot of information about the game itself. However, NW also has an extensive characters/locations section, a dump of most of the dialogue spoken in the game, and many of the game's cutscenes in WMV format.
- Tim Fandango - a Tim Schafer fansite with extensive information on the man himself and the games he's made, including GF. Lots of screencaps and a nice overview of the game.
- Tentakelvilla - a German LucasArts fansite. Not very useful if you don't understand German, but it has over 500 screencaps from the game. Very handy.
- The D.O.D. - yet another big GF fansite.
- The D.O.D.'s Travelers' Guide - an interactive map of the Land of the Dead. Very cool, if I do say so myself.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lucasarts - LJ community for discussing LucasArts adventures in general.
Fanfiction:
...Although we're not so good on the fanfic side of things because, again, small fandom. And everyone's so busy playing with the eight thousand other pairings (canon and otherwise) that Manny/Meche gets ignored quite a bit. So here's just a couple of links to our archives; there's good fic there, but as none of it's really Manny/Meche, I won't get into specific recs:
- Grim Fandango novelization - Charles Frederick's absolutely fabulous fan novelization of the game. (Okay, so this is a specific rec. I cheated.)
- LucasFic - LucasFic is an extensive archive of all the fanfic written for the LucasArts adventures, ever, that's been published on the web. Has a pretty big GF section, but hasn't updated in a while.
- Fanfiction.net - There's quite a lot of crossover between fics at LucasFic and at FF.net, as the LucasFic webmaster gets a lot of the fics from there, it being our main archive and all. (Yes, we know. We're sorry. Shame on us. Etc.)
- Sweet as Mango - VampireNaomi's fansite and home to her fanfic, all of which is Nick/Olivia related.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-10 03:27 am (UTC)My work here is done. ;) Glad you liked the essay!
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Date: 2005-04-29 04:26 pm (UTC)Actually, there never is any indication that the plans were made at the train station for Meche alone to bring the tickets back. If so, then this answers your earlier query about Meche's accompanying Manny to Nuevo Marrow; it may have been decided before setting off that only she needs to take the trip back.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 11:16 am (UTC)But, there is a part that perplexes me:
Domino is running a coral mining operation using all the souls tricked out of their Double-N tickets as workers
Domino's told her "the whole story" about Manny and how he stole her case, and for that, she seems to hate him (although some of her anger is justified; he did steal her case, after all)
Why should her anger be justified? We have seen that the souls who deserved the tickets and were handed to Domino, eventually ended up working in the mine as Domino's slaves. So, even if Manny hadn't stolen her case, she would have ended up like that anyway. It wasn't really Manny's fault, all he did was delaying her capture by one year, which she had spent trying to get to Rubacava. After all, spending one year walking to get to Rubacava is better than spending it as Domino's slave, so Manny did her a favor.
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Date: 2005-06-20 02:03 pm (UTC)Well, true, getting stuck with Domino for an extra year probably would suck, but I think it's all a matter of perspective on which is better...being stuck at the Edge for a while longer, or spending a year stumbling around in the Petrified Forest. Seeing as how Meche doesn't belong in the Land of the Dead, I'd think that that year of time she refuses to discuss must've been pretty hard on her.
I think she had a right to be at least a little irked with him for making her feel like she had to walk, but I also think that a lot of her anger was a result of things Domino told her, which were patently untrue.
Er. Does that make any sense? I need to stop posting to LJ before I've had my coffee. x.x
no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 03:02 pm (UTC)