The outside weather in the world of Ergo Proxy is indeed frightful. So terrible, in fact, that almost nothing can survive in the climate. Whatever does manage to endure the weather, usually dies from some airborne virus. As can be expected from such harsh conditions, very few humans survive outside the domes. While not exactly "lucky ones", Re-l and Vincent find ways to live through whatever they find themselves against, in this case, the weather. (Pino, being an AutoReiv, does not have to worry about cold weather or virus-induced illnesses that infect mainly humans.) Once it was just a worry for outsiders, but now the weather, too, is an immediate problem: now they have no choice but to live amongst the various elements, since their venture to Mosk from Romdo. As Re-l's opening dialogue tells us, her first experience of the morning for that day consists of seeing dense pre-dawn fog. After it lifts, there is still not much to see: a perpetually cloudy sky making everything dark and cold. The clouds never go away; they are always there. They do not hang in the sky; they smother it like how a neglected masterpiece becomes covered in years of grime and soot. When we look to the earth, our gaze is met with ice, snow drifts, and barren landscapes of rock. If the sky is a ruined masterpiece, the land is an empty and tattered canvas, discarded by its creator. And the one crucial element they depend on--the wind--is nowhere to be found. It's a conspicuous absence that Re-l never fails to notice as she plans her day.
Here we have it: the weather being another influence on her experiences of things. Alongside her routine-behavior and inculcated dispositions as mentioned above, she also has the weather itself flowing into her mood, heightening the elements within her experiences. In some experiential elements, the effect is like listening to aggravating feedback in an auditory system, always giving unwanted extra sounds. In one scene, as Re-l is trying to sleep she hears the sound of ice falling on the roof of the craft. If one were to suddenly stir a bag of dry bones, the sound, we imagine, would be similar--and it may well produce the same feelings within us, as well. Trying to put the distracting sound out of her mind, she tosses over in bed. The sound, we speculate, creates in her mind a paradoxically unheard mental noise, an extra tone, scraping against the edges of her conscious mind. When Re-l awakes once more, she cannot even force herself to get out of bed and maintain her routine. (Another strongly felt effect of the mood: the loss of energy.) We have to admit, however, that few weather related events can cause such a mindset. A week of cold weather usually does not affect us so greatly; most of us shrug it off and get on with our days. Yet, could we easily shrug off bad weather that has lasted for hundreds of years? What if we were compelled to live in confined quarters as well? And what if we kept a diary consisting of systematic notes of how things became progressively worse, thus preserving specific memories of the past days? Are we finally beginning to have an understanding for what Re-l is experiencing? For an analytical mind that naturally tends to focus on certain relations, objects, or qualities in her experiences, it would be safe to say that Re-l gradually learns her limits--her breaking point. We say this because repetition of certain things is always a fine way to test someone's limits. By now having gained an idea of what has been contributing to Re-l's worsening state of mind, perhaps we should begin our study of moods. For it's through a mood that these elements are filtered and thus experienced.
As we can see, we need to obtain a general sense of moods. Of course, the sense we are after, since it will be general, will undoubtedly leave out some elements; but we will fill them in as we go forth. For now, we just want to secure the overall "feel" as our starting point. As such, it's necessary for us to grasp an intuitive feel of moods if we are to make any advance in our study. We must also have an appropriate scheme that makes conspicuous whatever is not; it's one of the goals of this essay to make us understand what is involved in being in a mood, especially when we do not always notice our own interactions in the mood. How we are attempting to understand this necessarily depends on our using the appropriate scheme or working hypothesis, in conjunction with our intuitive feel for moods. With that in mind, we can now consider moods and the roles they play in our lives.
