The thing about Minotaur Hotel is that 99% of the game has made it easy to be a good person. That is not a criticism, but just a plainness. Here you are, in a hotel with infinite resources with very easily circumnavigable limitations. Maybe I'm just damaged but when faced with a soul that's so tortured and slow to trust, my instinct is to feel a kinship with them. Hearing Asterion apologize for being slow to trust me after all I've done just makes me want to sob and tell him that it's all right, that his emotions are valid, that he's valid, that he won't have to deal with cruelty the way he's dealt with it for millennia. Maybe my life experiences make it easy to connect with someone who has been through so much that he can't fathom the idea of his life even being better that he treats the subject like a completely foreign concept, not knowing how to react, wishing that he could return to the devil he knows because becoming emotionally vulnerable again has become too risky to consider as an option, and after crossing that threshold Asterion finds... hope. Love, even. A home. Joy. There is a psychological security borne of the idea of knowing you can go to bed knowing that everything is all right and your basic needs have been met, but Asterion has been so utterly abused that he spends the first many chapters going to bed in fear, utterly convinced that there is some sort of deception of generosity. Cruelty and deception and the insecurities the world subjects us all to can breed such a mentality, and it is never, ever right, and it corrodes our basic capacity to trust others, maybe because it corrodes us until we become shells. And, while healing scars in people isn't always as tidy as MH makes it out to be, the throughline between IRL healing of tortured souls and healing poor Asterion is clear and absolutely true: we need kindness in our lives. And when you go to bed knowing you're waking up with someone who makes you truly happy and loves you as much as you love them, I speak from experience when I say the feeling transcends security; you feel unstoppable, like you can take on anything.

Sure, IRL we may not find that doing the right thing and being kind and understanding and not quick to judge others is the easiest thing to do the way MH portrays it as, but that's not the point. Let's not let that truth fool ourselves into thinking that being a kind and understanding and accommodating person is so herculean a task as real life makes it seem. I said that 99% of the game makes it easy to be a good person, all things considered but that 1% is in chapter 18 when it gives you a choice to either spare or judge Argos. After multiple chapters of the game make it out to be that this snake man is deserving of whatever comes to him, that force which has done nothing but portray the ouroboric nature of the cycle of abuse (in the form of a snake... which, okay, maybe not EVERYONE will get that subtext, but) in a form that only knows how to take glee in suffering, all of that makes judging him seem like the easiest thing to do. I'd say this was the first time Minotaur Hotel truly made me consider a choice of morality. While I chose to spare him, I genuinely felt like I didn't know what to do in that moment. It was not an easy choice, which only gave way to a sense of shame when I found out that not only is his name NOT Argos, but he's just a poor kid that just turned 20 trying to get through college as an actor. What the fuck was wrong with me to even CONSIDER that doing him in was the right thing to do? I felt utter shame at what could have happened had I not made the choice to let him live. At this point the following observation is just my own analysis, but I think learning about Nikos' backstory just tells me one thing: the idea that some people only exist to make our lives miserable, the concept of an "Argos" in our lives is just artificial, a construct, because at the end of the day Nikos was just another person in the world who came from somewhere. I know that somewhere there's some "ruthless" route that results in you becoming yet another agent in Asterion's broken psyche, and I can only imagine the author must have put work into writing it all out, but not knowing what happens in it, choosing to refuse knowing what happens as a result of cruel actions out of a sadistic curiosity, that's the easiest choice I've made in a game. But in chapter 18, when you've done nothing but try to be a force of ultimate kindness only to be shown a soul in which the game has portrayed as truly irredeemable up to that point and you're given an option in which the consequence is that you guarantee he stops hurting someone you care about for good? That's a REAL moral choice, right there. 

At the end of the day, we have a choice to reach out to people and be kind. We didn't know the extent of abuse and despair Asterion felt when we first saw him in the kitchen. In many cases IRL we may never even KNOW the hurt others have gone through, but the choice to be kind is, even in the absence of such knowledge, is still the right thing to do, because we're fucking people at the end of the day, and the world needs more kindness. When you're surrounded by it, it's easy to make the right choice and spread it, but when it's an utterly foreign concept it isn't so simple, and I can only feel heartbroken in the reality that not everyone will get to know the security of a world that gives them the kindness that all souls deserve. It's an unfortunate reality that we can only do so much, and yet, it's all we can do, and the decision to be good and kind is never a stain on our souls.

While I played, I wondered if Argos was building up to the revelation that the true "torture" is the idea that Asterion may enjoy the hotel so much as a home for himself and others that he might not even WANT his freedom anymore, that he may have to make a choice between the Hotel closing for good and evicting all the guests in exchange for his own freedom, or, accepting that he will never be free but be a force of good for others and that seeing the guests be happy is what gives him fulfillment. The choice between freedom into an unknown world in which mortality may claim you at any time but you get to live as a man, or, know that your life of service will never end for better or worse but you know that you can find fulfillment in knowing that you can help others lost and their happiness becomes your own. THAT would make for a legitimately compelling choice. Who knows, maybe the protagonist could fill out a contract that states that so long as the minotaur believes that the Master is fulfilling the mission of the hotel, that the Master would never age/die. Maybe he writes a contract that allows the hotel to exist so long as there is a Master overseeing it and that so long as Asterion is present at the hotel, that he would continue his role there but outside the hotel Asterion would age and die like any mortal. Asterion has been nothing but a slave to others making choices for him, and the VN is a story of healing by allowing him to think and decide for himself, bit by bit again. So what better gift to him than the ultimate choice of his own fate? I don't think it's the protagonist's place to decide Asterion's fate. Asterion, so denied and tortured, should, now that his soul has been restored, should be the one to decide. At any and all points where Asterion could choose what he himself likes, I have unconditionally given it to him. I stopped myself for a few minutes to decide what he was going to wear, wondering if he prefers the casual shirt or the 40's attire, wishing honestly that there was an option for Asterion to decide what he wears himself, if only to give him that small victory of choosing what he should look like, a small concession when choice and agency has been so thoroughly denied through torturous millennia.

Sorry if this post is aimless and gushy, but that's just what this VN made me feel. It's an absolute truth, but in a cruel and cynical world that can and will destroy your security and make you question the legitimacy of others' actions and the validity of your own existence, it's a fleeting truth so basic that sometimes a reminder of it is what we all need: 

Kindness can make a home.