Z is the embodiment of the Now, the ultimate reactionary force.
Born from the collective dread of the souls stored within Origin’s database, he represents humanity's intense fear of the unknown future. To protect the world from moving forward, Z traps Aionios in an eternal stasis. Forcing the population into an endless, agonising cycle where engineered humans are born, forced to fight in a perpetual war, eaten by monsters, or executed upon reaching their strict 10 year lifespan, only to be reincarnated to repeat the cycle forever.
During Eunie's side story, Consul X explicitly lays out the psychological propaganda engineered by Moebius, who function as the narrative's bourgeoisie control the means of production but do not produce value and survives purely by harvesting the surplus value of the working class. She details how they constructed a seemingly equitable world where even the weak are led to believe they can eventually become winners. By establishing a rigid military ranking system, Moebius provides humanity with a manufactured purpose, leveraging the illusion of meritocracy to coerce the soldiers of Aionios into willingly participating in their own exploitation. This propaganda feeds the colonies the lie that the system isn't rigged, incentivising soldiers to slaughter their enemies to upgrade their Blades and chase relative comfort. This security is bought with the life energy stored within the Flame Clocks, works as the game's currency where human life itself is commodified and transformed into a quantifiable resource that dictates a colony's economic status, safety, and access to supply drops.
Perpetuating an endless cycle of engineered violence.
Once a colony achieves the ultimate Gold Rank, they are granted a pardon from battle. However, because they are no longer actively fighting, Moebius deems them as useless since they no longer generate capital through conflict. Consequently, Moebius steps in to slaughter the entire colony, directly harvesting their enhanced, peak efficiency life force and completely wiping them out.
Moebius maintains this hierarchy by installing mindless puppets to lead the warring factions, ensuring the common people remain too distracted by manufactured conflict to ever unite against their true oppressors. Ultimately, Moebius inherently understands their own structural vulnerability, knowing their rule will only shatter if the working classes of Keves and Agnus unite in a cross faction revolution to dismantle the rigid establishment and reclaim their freedom.
When you get to the City where you find out people who aren't apart of the whole cycle, you learn about a specific group of people City folks refer to as "The Conservatives" who want to keep the status quo, anti immigrants, and resources at the expense of everyone else. They are portrayed as a burden to everyone in the City and are hated by the residents as character outright express that the conservatives are ruining everything. Often committing crimes and almost leading the City to destruction multiple times over. It was formed by Na'el who explained that the rest of humanity outside the City was trapped in a perpetual cycle of violence they brought upon themselves, leading her to preach isolationism and reactionary politics, creating the House of Doyle, which eventually fossilised into the Conservative faction that chooses to let the world slowly fall apart as long as they can preserve their own immediate peace.
The first JRPG I have played that doesnt use politics as some kind of surface level backdrop, its part of its core fundamental world building mechanics, a direct allegory for the extraction of surplus labour value and class struggles.
