VLR Spoilers

This contains massive VLR spoilers so be warned. As is perhaps a bit appropriate when talking about an Uchikoshi title, I figure I might as well go into depth as to why Bluebird Lamentation is one of the saddest tracks in any video game I know.

So this theme is attached primarily to Luna (although it plays at a few moments in the game), and it fits a caged bird motif to her, that of a being that is sort of trapped for reasons out of its control, a symbol of sorrow, but relating it to a moral of an old play called The Blue Bird, where "happiness is closer than you think if you search for it" (a moral I would say appears a couple times in the game).

A comment I've seen often on Bluebird Lamentation on Youtube is that Luna is the character that displays the most humanity, despite not being a human herself, as she never seeks to betray anyone over its course. I actually think this misses the mark. One literary point that can be made about the ambidex game (and implementation of the prisoner's dilemma), and in some ways, part of the point of the game itself, is that an inherent part of how humans behave is in making decisions in one's own self interest, and that all too often this can lead to the benefit of nobody involved. You see this brought up in a way after Alice breaks down in her own end because she acted on the basis that the ambidex game is all about selfishness, and in acting upon that selfishness, very nearly killed Sigma because she feared he might try the same. Tenmyouji, Clover, Phi, K and Alice betray you out of self-interest at least once, K even kills Dio in two endings purely out of revenge. That's not to say that they're bad people, they have their moments of doing things for the benefit of others as well. Rather, humans are a collective of deeds done both good and bad.

Luna's characteristic niceness and willingness to ally with everyone even to the point of being almost complete naivete serves as a bright spot in a game full of people betraying one another, but in turn it may also be the "least human" thing about her in some ways, at least the way the game presents it. Her never betraying anyone isn't human, and that almost makes it worse to think about, that betrayal is a concept inherent to humanity. Everyone in the game is somewhere in the grey area of idealism vs cynicism; the one person at the very end of the idealism side turns out to be the one that isn't even a person. But that idealism also serves as a beacon of hope in a game where many routes are often devoid of it.

And by design, her other character point is that you aren't supposed to figure this out until nearly the end of the game (given the Luna end requires like 5 or 6 other endings to get), as she is supposed to blend in and make people think she's a human (hence the tangent the game goes on about the Chinese Room). She's not voting ally because she's a good person, she's voting ally because she is not allowed to hurt people. So the entire game, you're left thinking that she's just an extremely sweet person. I'm probably overanalyzing all of this, but I think the way this all is presented is a large part of why Luna is one of the most beloved characters in this series, and why Luna's End is often considered one of the best of the series.

At the tail end of the Luna ending, Sigma finds her in the biotope, as she essentially begins to "die". The tissue that essentially allows her to masquerade as a human begins to deteriorate as the fibers of tissue that hold her human appearance together begin to atrophy, slowly withering away any physical facade of her humanity. Now, the one character you could always trust, the one character who hurts for you as the player to betray more than anyone, with that sweetness that serves as a hope spot for much of the game, begins to die in front of you. She asks if Sigma is scared of her, she laments feeling like she failed even as a robot because six people died around her and she did not prevent it. And it's heartwrenching to see her say "I deserve to die" for this because the entire time she was perhaps the only character (apart from maybe Quark who spends most of the game as a plot device) who does very little to hurt anyone.

And all the while, this song plays. Perhaps it's not simply because she dies, but also because everything she symbolizes in the game dies with her, that trust in others that people wish everyone could have yet in reality is simply considered "being gullible". (yeah yeah I know that Luna End isn't the true end but that's not the point in a game where you can basically reset time). And the theme itself does a fantastic job at capturing the emotions of that moment. It's stuff like this why Shinji Hosoe is one of my favorite video game composers, because at his best, he's able to bring out the emotion of the moment like few others can, whether it be fear or sorrow.