Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones.”

Sadie’s observation at MIT shows the insidious way in which patriarchy operates. Women are so indoctrinated to want to belong that they refuse to form a community. When a woman breaks into a male-dominated space, she feels she must prove she has done so because she is not like other women.

“‘Always remember, my Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.‘ Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.”

Sadie’s grandmother, Freda, tells Sadie not to lose hope that Sam will forgive her because life gives a person many chances. At the same time, life is also finite, which is why one must seize the moment. The statements sum up the contradictory nature of time and reality itself. Freda’s statements prove prophetic, as Sadie and Sam’s friendship lasts the test of time, but Marx and Sadie’s love is cut short.

“There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.”

Dov’s statement highlights one of the text’s key ideas: Designing a game is a work of art and empathy. Because designing a game makes the creator put herself in the mindset of a player, it involves a certain kind of compassion. Of course, statements like this can be used to coerce women and other minorities into suppressing their voices and designing games for the buying majority.

“‘I don’t want to play a game that’s a collection of some guy’s fetishes,’ Sadie said. ‘Dude, Sadie, you described ninety nine percent of all games.’”

Sadie and Dov’s conversation is a comment on the hypersexualized depiction of women characters in video games. Since most successful and featured video game designers were men in the 1990s and early 2000s, such problematic depictions were common.

“One of Sam’s eventual strengths as an artist and a businessman was that he knew the importance of drama, of setting the scene.”

Sam has an innate gift for building a narrative, which is why he can be both commercially and artistically successful. He knows that in real life as well as games, pauses, emotional resonance, and grand gestures are as important as ideas.

“What a world, Sadie thought. ‘People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.’”

When Sadie finally visits the Glass Flowers gallery, which is filled with exquisite sculptures of the ravages of time on living things, she is moved by the creative spirit of human beings. This creative joy—the pleasure one derives from creating new and beautiful things—is one of Sadie’s own strong character traits, as well as one of the novel’s central messages.

“There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about the pleasures and tribulations of creative work. One of the challenges an apprentice creator faces is that of ambition exceeding skill. The only two ways to overcome this problem, Sadie learns, are practice and the willingness to fail.

“For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.”

These two short and pithy sentences sum up the professional rift between Sadie and Sam. The text does not take sides; both measures of greatness are equally valid.

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”

Sam’s statement to a magazine is characteristically provocative. Sam and Sadie have been accused of cultural appropriation for basing Ichigo in Japanese art and culture. While Sam is part Korean, Sadie is white. Neither of them is Japanese, as the magazine points out. However, Sam counters that if one only depicts one’s own culture, they may end up becoming insular to the beauty of the world. The conversation depicts Sam’s willingness to express unpopular opinions.

“In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.”

The book often reiterates that games are easier to play than the “algorithm” of real life. This is most obvious in cases of loss and death. When Sam’s mother dies in a car crash, he keeps thinking about how she could have been saved if life were a game. If even one variable, such as the path Anna took, were switched, the outcome would be different. The poignancy of Sam’s thoughts is all too familiar for anyone who has experienced tragedy.

“The world always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick.”

Sam’s thoughts show the reality of living with a chronic health condition. Having had many stints in the hospital to get his foot treated, Sam worries he is losing time in the outside world. The contrast between sickness and health never seems greater than when he is confined.

“Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to ‘fight,’ as if illness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.”

Through Sam’s experience with illness, the text questions the clichéd vocabulary and assumptions around chronic conditions. One such cliché is the idea of fighting or battling an illness as if it were a foe that could be conquered. With this, an inability to conquer the foe assumes a weakness or a flaw. This notion is problematic; illness is a fact of life and like all other facts of life, it is complex.

“Sam’s doctor said to him, ‘The good news is that the pain is in your head.’

‘But I am in my head,’ Sam thought.”

People with chronic pain tend to be given anodyne statements, such as the pain being in one’s head. Sam’s doctor may not mean to be insensitive, but the truth is he underestimates Sam’s phantom limb pain. The fact that Sam’s pain may be psychosomatic doesn’t lessen its intensity or reality, as Sam notes.

“He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.”

Sam’s experience of his body is complicated by his constant, physical pain. Because the pain is ever-present, Sam learns to cope with it by dissociating from his body. He also believes his body is capable only of pain and has withdrawn from it. In more concrete terms, forgetting about his body is blissful because it means he has forgotten about his pain, or his pain has ceased.

“As she played, she realized that the thing that gave the fantasy world of Myre Landing emotional resonance was Mapletown.”

Sadie has an epiphany about what makes her and Sam such a great team of designers. While Sadie brings in conceptual and technical mastery, Sam’s ideas provide the game’s emotional heft.

“What was a gate, anyway?

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before. By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.”

Traditionally located in Japanese shrines, a torii gate marks the transition from the mundane to the sacred. As Sadie passes through a series of gates at a shrine in Tokyo with Marx, she has the epiphany that change and transition are an essential part of life. She has resisted change in the past, engulfed with sadness when a relationship or a game fails. However, in this moment, she has the epiphany that there are always new games to invent.

“You are no expert, but what you know is this: No human has ever been murdered with a video game weapon.”

Marx makes this observation while facing the gunmen in his office. Though the gunmen like playing first-person shooter games like Call of Duty, it is not the simulation of shooting that drives them to violence. Ironically, it is a peaceful game, Mapleworld, with liberal values that has riled them up. Marx notes that it is because these men are violent that they are drawn to shooter games, and not the other way around.

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

In the novel, Zevin subverts the trope of idealizing partnered or sexual love. Instead, the novel shows that love has many forms, each of them meaningful and valid. Marx notes this when he is in a coma in the hospital and Zoe tells him she loves him deeply. Love can be infinite when freed from definition.

“I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.”

Ant, one of the two game designers of Counterpart High, voices a sentiment shared by many of the text’s characters. The algorithms in video games can be optimized, unlike the cruel, random real world. Ant’s statement is particularly poignant since it comes after Marx’s death.

“‘And what is love, in the end?’ Alabaster said. ‘Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?’”

Love’s many different avatars of love are a prominent thread in the novel. Characters are often puzzled by the nature of Sam and Sadie’s great—but non-sexual—love. Alabaster Brown, Sam’s avatar in Pioneers—the game he designs for Sadie as a love letter—offers the final word on the meaning of love. Love means, above all, putting someone else above one’s own self.

“Sadie was not a natural mother, though this was not a confession one was allowed to make. She craved solitude and personal space too much. But she loved this girl, nonetheless.”

Being a mother is often equated with losing one’s sense of self. That is why Sadie thinks she is not a natural mother. In truth, Sadie is a natural mother by virtue of loving her child unconditionally. Sadie’s complex feelings around the definition of motherhood have to do in some part with society’s impossible expectations.

“To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.”

The novel focuses on the peculiar nature of Sam and Sadie’s love. Though they never become lovers, it is clear theirs is a great romance if the definition of romance is going above and beyond oneself for another person. Dov tells Sadie as much.

“The best you can wish for anyone, Sam decided, is a video game death. Which is to say, spectacular and brief.”

Sam’s reality and those of video games are inextricably enmeshed; sometimes, the world of games is infinitely preferable to real life. Sam wishes his ill grandfather would die a quick, merciful death, rather than go through terminal cancer.