gerdy-sertorius

[gerdy-sertorius]

Prologue to Osamu Dazai's "No Longer Human"

I have seen three pictures of the man.

The first, a childhood photograph you might call it, shows him about the age of ten, a small boy surrounded by a great many women (his sisters and cousins, no doubt). He stands in brightly checked trousers by the edge of a garden pond. His head is tilted at an angle thirty degrees to the left, and his teeth are bared in an ugly smirk. Ugly? You may well question the word, for insensitive people (that is to say, those indifferent to matters of beauty and ugliness) would mechanically comment with a bland, vacuous expression, “What an adorable little boy!” It is quite true that what commonly passes for “adorable” is sufficiently present in this child’s face to give a modicum of meaning to the compliment. But I think that anyone who had ever been subjected to the least exposure to what makes for beauty would most likely toss the photograph to one side with the gesture employed in brushing away a caterpillar, and mutter in profound revulsion, “What a dreadful child!”

Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child’s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, “What a wizened, hideous little boy!” I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.

The face in the second snapshot is startlingly unlike the first. He is a student in this picture, although it is not clear whether it dates from high school or college days. At any rate, he is now extraordinarily handsome. But here again the face fails inexplicably to give the impression of belonging to a living human being. He wears a student’s uniform and a white handkerchief peeps from his breast pocket. He sits in a wicker chair with his legs crossed. Again he is smiling, this time not the wizened monkey’s grin but a rather adroit little smile. And yet somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the “heaviness of blood” or perhaps the “solidity of human life”—it has not even a bird’s weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling. The picture produces, in short, a sensation of complete artificiality. Pretense, insincerity, fatuousness— none of these words quite covers it. And of course you couldn’t dismiss it simply as dandyism. In fact, if you look carefully you will begin to feel that there is something strangely unpleasant about this handsome young man. I have never seen a young man whose good looks were so baffling.

The remaining photograph is the most monstrous of all. It is quite impossible in this one even to guess the age, though the hair seems to be streaked somewhat with grey. It was taken in a corner of an extraordinarily dirty room (you can plainly see in the picture how the wall is crumbling in three places). His small hands are held in front of him. This time he is not smiling. There is no expression whatsoever. The picture has a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality, as if it caught him in the act of dying as he sat before the camera, his hands held over a heater. That is not the only shocking thing about it. The head is shown quite large, and you can examine the features in detail: the forehead is average, the wrinkles on the forehead average, the eyebrows also average, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin... the face is not merely devoid of expression, it fails even to leave a memory. It has no individuality. I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it. This face could never be made the subject of a painting, not even of a cartoon. I open my eyes. There is not even the pleasure of recollecting: of course, that’s the kind of face it was! To state the matter in the most extreme terms: when I open my eyes and look at the photograph a second time I still cannot remember it. Besides, it rubs against me the wrong way, and makes me feel so uncomfortable that in the end I want to avert my eyes.

I think that even a death mask would hold more of an expression, leave more of a memory. That effigy suggests nothing so much as a human body to which a horse’s head has been attached. Something ineffable makes the beholder shudder in distaste. I have never seen such an inscrutable face on a man.

[gerdy-sertorius]

The Lee Shore

The quiet embrace of land calls like a siren, and one ship, weary and hungry from years on the open sea, is primed to hear its call. It just needs a little bit more time to find a port, just a little bit more time at sea to ensure its safe landing. Yet its mastheads don’t quite stand with the same vivacity they initially carried themselves with, and its will eventually buckles. Left without wax for its ears, the ship pushes towards the land, nominally its only source of respite, its crew shaking with a growing horror that refuses to be abated. Not unlike the exhausted hands on deck, the twins Scylla and Charybdis hunger; they have hungered for millennia, and it’s safe to say that their bottomless stomachs may well never be full. The very concept of free will is stripped away from the lowliest ship hand and the captain alike as the galleon achingly, forcefully hobbles its way towards its desolation. Eurus himself takes initiative in marching it to its execution, pushing it against the wall for his never-tiring firing squad to take full advantage of. Such is the lee shore. In the chapter of the same name, one Bulkington, a ship’s pilot, found it within himself to reject those winds, and in that, Melville’s Ishmael, possessed for a moment of the spirit of Virgil or Homer, eulogises him and all he represented; it would be the only lasting record in memory of him. 

He appears for perhaps three pages in the novel, in all but this epitaph a minor character, forgotten by the world. The irony is that within the metanarrative, until looking at this eternal tombstone of a chapter, neither would we remember him. Quoted as a man for whom “[t]he land seemed scorching to his feet”, Bulkington was someone who dared to not only reject the grand winds that would push him unwillingly towards land, but someone who dared to reclaim his own destiny from the hostile elements that would come before him. One who found refuge in the greatest danger he could find, whose courage would put a lion to shame. The final thought we ever hear of him is the concluding paragraph of the only page he is remembered in, and some of the greatest prose to grace the English language: “But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God --- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing --- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!” As I’m sure one can guess, there is a certain connotation to that final word that, for all the tenacity of a bulldog, I cannot completely extricate. 

But in that moment, the Eureka escaped from my lips, and I thought to myself, why must one necessarily oppose the connection of the two concepts, particularly when it is inevitable? Why can’t I simply unify the ideas? Is there anything within the concept of art that irrationally linked concepts cannot for whatever reason be rationally linked? In short, I found I was being shortsighted. And, as such, I shall now attempt to explain why, exactly, the themes of both this paragraph and the other Apotheosis, aren’t fully extricable. First of all, I really must apply a disclaimer to this. Doing this properly would in fact require me to elucidate exactly what both the Apotheosis and the Melville passage signify. I’d like to emphasise that this is before the Pristine Cut releases, and as such, I lack the deeper knowledge from Apotheosis that comes from, well, playing Apotheosis in full, but I have enough faith in Black Tabby to believe that the majority of the existing themes are already present within, and will simply be expanded upon and properly developed. That is, I am taking the art as is, and trying to take from that the basic themes that we have now. With regards to the paragraph from Moby-Dick, in my professional opinion, it should be more or less safe from revision, considering it is dated from a hundred and seventy-five years ago, in addition to it being nothing more than a paragraph.

Furthermore, before all else is put forth, it is important to make note of the fact that within Ishmael’s eulogy, Bulkington is not a person. Bulkington the character is only the inspiration for Ishmael’s musings, and could be replaced with anyone else for the same result. He has not played any significant role in the story; he is completely static, and he was never even mentioned by the narration except insofar as to paint a picture of the regulars at an inn. Bulkington the character does not matter. Taking him, however, as an ideal shows a much fuller picture of what Ishmael is trying to say. Bulkington does not need to be a character, but what he does need to be is the conduit for that striking prose, for the triumphant cry against the sea. That is to say, I shall not be minutely analysing Bulkington, nor his four lines of dialogue.

To be able to compare the themes of the End of Everything and the obituary to the End of But One Man requires, definitionally, those themes to be made known. Throughout the final paragraph of Bulkington's epitaph, the primary theme is made quite clear. Despite the battery of waves, the lack of safety, the very ground constantly shifting beneath one’s feet, it is of far greater virtue to die at sea than to perish while cringing towards the land that initially promises its protection. “Lee”, before it was used as a term for sailing, meant “safety”, yet the lee shore promises not safety, but destruction wrapped in the guile of innocence. As it gently pushes a sailor towards the land, his just home, it simultaneously begs him to be dashed upon the rocks of that land. And if he does listen to those sweet lips calling him home, then he shall verily “come home,” and all the seafaring, all the agony was wrapped in the pallor of futility. To conquer the greatest of the seas, to see Tahiti, Cape Horn, the Maldives, to view the truly universal continent, and yet be brought down like Goliath himself by the rocks of the land. They outstretch their hand to hold him, to finally bring him rest. And, at last, they succeed. Such is the lee shore.

Yet Ishmael notes something else, something, dare I say, far more interesting. It is also in the rejection of the lee wind that mankind truly ascends. In nothing more than simply remaining at sea, mankind reaches its towering heights. For vice is meaningless without virtue, no? He who refuses to let himself be compromised by the false cry of home, well, he has then made himself greater than Hercules and all his labours. For in that rejection of the call of safety, mankind has found its freedom. And the greatest thing mankind can do, its highest calling, is to save its life, even if that requires its own destruction. In happily going to the ballroom for the Danse Macabre, the Grim Reaper tires. Ishmael posthumously cries that the pilot should “take heart”, because just as the heart was the key to bodily life, so too has the heart, according to the ancients, a deep and sincere reservoir of what may be more important – moral strength. And it is through that strength that man finds it within himself to fend off old Thanatos’s scythe with the rudder of his innate purpose. 

That may seem rather confusing; after all, Ishmael himself, within that quote, directly romanticises death at sea. Clearly this is not about life and death – it is simply death. Yet, in my humble opinion, I would declare a key difference. To perish in the ocean is the choice taken. It is the adeo, a Latin word that carries the various and eclectic meanings of “goodbye”, of “fulfillment”, and of “action”, all at once; one's final decision. It is desire fulfilled, not simply living in denial about the inevitable, as one attempts to grasp for a chance that will never rear its head. If death is then hanging its gloomy countenance over every outcome regardless of action, then the man who lives as he was, the man who carries on with what he has determined he shall do, he carries far more valour with him than he who futilely runs screaming, never allowing himself to write his own future. A decidedly unromantic view, one could argue, yet one with a strange quixotic passion to it yet; a contradiction in terms, even. Yet, in the end, those are even the words of Christ: whosoever shall lose his life, the same shall save it. The very struggle with death, eternal for man, has become paradox.

And this philosophy of his is itself reflected in Ishmael’s actions later on in the book. He, in no less than the first chapter, is indicated to have an unhealthy morbidity about him – marching in funeral processions in which he has no connection and staying for an abnormal amount of time within coffin warehouses. And in the end, it comes to pass that even the ship he boards and the beast he attempts to slay are hearses of their own (in the plaintext, no less), sepulchres that stand whitewashed in two quite markedly different ways. He is no stranger to looking the angel of death square in the eye. And at the end, it is by clinging to a coffin that salvation finally comes to him. It is in that unashamed embrace of his mortality that he is able to find his way out of the waves. Melville was no Poe. He did not dive into the morbid purely for the sake of itself. But rather, it was the opinion of him that, in contrast, courage was, just for the sake of it being courage, virtuous. And the slow, futile crawl towards the shore, towards “salvation”, only to fall nonetheless, was for those of whom a timorous countenance was the only one they had learned. And in that ocean-perishing, in that death so completely removed from the desperate wish for life, ears far too stuffed with the wax of fulfillment to hear the growing chorus of the shore’s desperate cries, desperate attempts to claim one’s soul; up from that leaps thy apotheosis! 

The Apotheosis carries more or less that same message, but in a very different light. Her context must be taken into consideration if anything is to be said about her, which in turn requires a brief analysis of the Tower. The Tower arises not only out of the failure of her (presumptive) Slayer, but his complete and total submission upon that failure. And in that, she becomes dominance incarnate, she ascends to divinity. And at that point, what is the Slayer to her but whatsoever she wills? There is contained within her purifying light no room for the blemish of disobedience. She offers the Slayer a spot at her side, willing to put aside his past transgressions for the sake of the future. Yet in the face of her magnanimity, he still refuses. 

The Slayer refuses the Princess’s offer, his place forgotten — or perhaps simply never learned. She is willing to forgive his sins, as he has awakened her to her true place, that celestial throne. She speaks, her voice gently booming, love infused in every word, and tells him of all they could accomplish together, she offers the life that only she can bring. Yet in the face of her magnanimity, he still refuses. She is taken aback, yet understands. She understands everything. He needs to be able to process everything, like a young child who is confused on what exactly he did wrong. She has time, all the time in the world. For she is the world. Nothing happens that does not happen without her saying it is so, and nothing does not happen should she say it does. She can reform the world in the Imago Turri, and verily, she shall. She loves the lost little bird, for a reason that she cannot fully express. She finds it within herself to not only forgive his mistake earlier, but to forget it altogether. She is merciful, she is benevolent, she is loving. And through that love, she decides that he has come to a decision. 

And so he utters that decision. And something odd occurs. In the face of her magnanimity, he still refuses. The Princess is disappointed, though she is careful not to break her imperious, royal smile. After all this time, he still doesn’t understand who he is? What he is? And so, though it breaks her heart, she does what she must. She offers him a choice, to either embrace her or to embrace the next iteration of their saga, one in which she shall surely open his eyes, to open the eyes of that poor little bird, if only he would accept it. She hopes deep within her heart that he does not choose the latter; why can her open arms never be embraced? In the last life, her foot brought down the Slayer like it was iron: strength that refuses to yield — why is he so blind to her head of gold, potential made into reality, value that cannot fade? Her silver shoulders that, despite the sickly air of the cabin being so corrosive, refuse to tarnish? Her belly of bronze, sturdy as steel and loving as Venus, here to protect him? 

Yet in the face of her magnanimity, he still refuses, after everything, and her heart aches as she realises what she must do. The Slayer has forced her hand. And now she will force his. Such is the benevolence of her that she not only shall forgive him his trespasses, but shall even deliver him from the evil one, a dead echo throughout his skull, long forgotten by anyone, yet a plague, a parasite to his form nonetheless. This is something that is neither her nor him, and as such does nothing more than futilely stand in the way of the victory of the god and her herald. The pitiful echo is gone, and they shall begin their dance anew. He will understand now, there is no question of that. And that is all that matters.

The Slayer refuses the Princess’s offer, his place forgotten — or perhaps simply never learned. And so he fights, he marches onwards in his futile drive to freedom. He refuses to turn his eyes to the lee shore where safety and home lie, and stays within the tempestuous, oceanic struggle with a force far greater than him or anything else. This fight was never between equals, yet still the Slayer maintains his assault, not so much because he has a moral imperative to keep the world from ending, but because he shall not be beaten down such that he cannot bring himself back to his feet. He could, perhaps, yield control of the situation — that’s manageable, if not ideal; but he cannot yield his nature. Yet, at some point, he does. He feels his very soul crying out as his willpower becomes moot, shaking with the inevitability and the horror of it, a fight in vain that the Slayer refused to abstain from. It has given a magnificent swan song, yet the hunter he once thought he could win against has wrung the angelic trumpet out of the bird’s chest. He takes his blade, fighting with his own body, delaying the inevitable. 

There is a part of him who wants to lie down, who wants to die, who wants to stake the Slayer’s life upon the ascendance of the only thing that can ensure safety. This part has been a thorn in the Slayer’s side ever since it made itself known. He is sick of it. He refuses to give any oxygen to it. He ignores it. It does not leave. He fights with it, he tells himself that he doesn’t want to give in. It does not leave. He gathers together all of his volition and he wills himself to simply reject this side to him, like he always has. Like he knows he can. But that broken little part of his psyche? He does not leave. He refuses to simply be stamped out. And as he remains, his voice begins to ring with the almost blinding clarity of knowing exactly what he is. But his value becoming as clear as the Princess’s light means nothing. Alongside the Princess, he can do anything. He easily overwhelms any opposition, and with a force unlike anything the Slayer has seen before, that puny little voice steels himself and acts. And with that imperceptible tremor, the mouse has roared, and the rocks upon the lee shore end the day speckled with a blood that the waves that crash against it can’t quite reach. 

And he wakes up once more, the situation hanging like a heavy radiance over his head, a burden that his shoulders cannot bear. Yet he cannot set his burden down. Not yet. The world is apocalyptic and gorgeous and broken and complete all at once; even the trees, desolate and dead as they may be, herald with an Olympian majesty the cella of the cabin, proclaiming the divine majesty of who the Princess is. He at once realises that this is final; that this is going to be the climax of the dance of the god and her singular subject. There is an echo within him — it, unlike in lives past, declares its full and undying support behind him. There will be no treachery, there will be no petulance; the stakes are far too high for something as empty as that to be brooked. He takes a solitary step, not in any direction in particular, and in that moment the height of anything that has existed or ever will exist is reached. The Princess reveals Herself, yet at the same time remains unrevealed. There is no way to describe Her, because there is nothing other than Her. She stands, and with that the heavens bend themselves around her, a thousand lights, a thousand eyes, and a thousand suns in a halo around her beatific head. There is nothing that escapes her gravity, nothing able to stand its ground in the face of who She is. She is the absolute, the end of everything. The beginning of something new, something far grander than could be imagined. 

She is so much more than him. And Her arms are happily opened to his embrace. The Long Quiet lets himself be pulled into the zenith of existence. He has opened his soul to Her, he has opened his mind to Her, he has even opened his carotid unto her, a sacrifice poured upon the marble floor and the symbol that he has repented of his transgressions. It is so easy to simply be loved. There is no virtue greater than love, there is no vice greater than abandoning that love. She loves him, and he loves her. What would he be if he denied that? She smiles at him, as if to say that tonight, he shall be with her in paradise. It has always been an option. This was always an option. He may have lost that paradise, yet alongside her, “the World was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, with Her as their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps, and slow, through this world, they could take their solitary way.” He has embraced oblivion, yet while The Long Quiet remains in the unshakeable grasp of Her, the word has no meaning. She smiles, and reaches to take his hand. The lee wind blows him to shore, and he happily complies. He happily takes the safety offered to him. He is happy, and, just perhaps, that happiness is far more virtuous than any futile resistance could be. She is absolute, the end of everything. The beginning of something new, something far greater than could be imagined.

Yet despite who She is, he still fights. He deigns to perish in this howling infinite — if he must die for the sake of his soul, so be it. The Hero finds the blade, buried deep within one of many monuments to her greatness, and lets himself be swept within her gravity. He is facing the most awesome being to ever walk upon this earth, yet he still fights, for there is no other option. As the world breaks, the one thing that shall not is the Hero’s resolve; the mistake shall not be repeated. The world will end if he does not find victory, so then let him be damned if he doesn’t at least seek it. The knife feels perfectly balanced in his hands, and, shockingly, as he leaps towards Her, he finds within himself a brief moment of exhilaration. He feels that, despite everything, he can still do this. He is the one who has found the highest truth, indefinite as the Princess herself. He will end this. He will Slay the Princess, this false idol that purports safety yet is incapable of living in a world where not all is bent to Her will. The Hero is just the symbol of that, he is just the one who refuses to bend. The Princess turns to him, as he still resists with all the effort he can muster. And upon Her face is plastered a look that the Hero cannot quite understand. She is delighted. After all this time trying to tear his resolve down, to force him to see her point of view, She is glad that he chooses to fight. She faces him with the same love She had when he first entered the basement, all pain between them forgotten by Her. He has borne the suffering grimly, and with that, he, up from the spray of his perishing, found the love that was so much foolishness, a veritable stumbling block only a few seconds ago. Straight up, he leaps to his Apotheosis. 

It is not entirely difficult to see the comparisons between the chapters. There exists within them the ideals of seizing your soul even at the expense of the body, most clearly seen in the end of the Tower. There is, curiously enough, a seeming innocence of the shore within the passage of Moby-Dick. It does not intend for there to be so much pain as a result of its existence, it simply welcomes the ship to itself, holding the anxious family members of the crew up such that they can see their returning loves. It provides respite, it provides warmth and resupply and new people to talk to and new cultures to understand. It simply wants the best for the ship that chances upon it, and with that, there is continuously a shout of joy arising from the crew as they see the land they have left for so unbearably long. There is a love present there. Yet as the lee wind pushes, as the confines of the construct begin to demand its toll, the land warps into a demonic entity, one that claims the souls of far too many innocent men. It does not necessarily want to bring harm, but it does anyway, because what else ought it do? As wood splinters all around it and bodies begin to pile up, the land cannot move. It must simply remain in place, horrified, as these externalities force so much desolation upon the ship that once loved it so. But whatever horrors it may have seen, it shall take heart, and see them through. Because there will always be a ship that the land can help, that the shore can do its just penance for. It never meant to bring harm, not to the ships that love it, and that the land loves in turn. 

This is a love story. 

[gerdy-sertorius]

After thinking about it for like, three hours straight, it is official. Ms. @queenlucythevaliant has in fact convinced me that Brontë's Heathcliff is the initial Earnshaw’s bastard son, and that’s even undoing the massive damage Nicola Edwards did to my perception of that theory. Ms. Lucy has a wonderful analysis of why that is (Like drinking light — In Defense of Wuthering Heights (tumblr.com)), but to simply and abominably briefly go over it, it focuses on one major point. That all of what would come in the book would be the sin of the father being visited upon the son, and how that failure as a patriarch, a husband, and a father would set the seeds for the horrors that would eventually come. The genius of the book comes in the third act, but you really ought to read her analysis, it is far better than I could do. But there is one character, one that I certainly should not love as much as I do, that I feel does not get their due in her excellent analysis, and that is Hindley Earnshaw, the upcoming master of Wuthering Heights. Please forgive in advance my appalling characterization.

Hindley, throughout the book, is objectively a terrible human being. He is an abusive patriarch, one who in a large part forms the trauma that drives Heathcliff and Cathy together, and messes Heathcliff up so badly. He, among other things, tries to murder Heathcliff (multiple times), starves both Heathcliff and Cathy, loses the entirety of Wuthering Heights to gambling debts, and drops his infant son over the bannister of a staircase. He is by no means a sympathetic character, at most a pathetic one, someone that is pitiable but not much more. Yet, to me, he has always been oddly compelling, and I think that the “Heathcliff Earnshaw” theory really adds to his character. 

Much has been made of the fact that when Heathcliff first arrives at the manor within the coat of Master Earnshaw, he replaces Cathy’s horsewhip, in turn becoming it, eventually. Heathcliff becomes her tool to seek revenge for both his own sake and for hers, to be driven to any goal she should like. Yet for Hindley, what is he but the instrument of the devil, the fiddle? He arrives, dark and strangely off-putting, and in turn (implicitly) usurps Hindley as the favorite son. Heathcliff, throughout the book, could perhaps be summed up in one word — ressentiment. The inferiority complex that turns into frustration, yet the aggrieved oft cannot face the purveyor of it. Yet, at the beginning, Hindley is the one who bestows upon both himself and (eventually) Heathcliff the phenomenon. He is the heir, yet the second favorite. He does not have his father’s love in the same way that Heathcliff does, a new member of the house picked up off the very streets. And he cannot understand why Heathcliff would be the one to obtain his father’s love. As much as one can enjoy being loved, it hurts to know that you are only the next best thing. It hurts playing the second fiddle. 

It’s also important to recognize the age gap dynamics at play here. Heathcliff and Cathy are roughly the same age, and so they go and play together, they enjoy their life as children are wont to do with their contemporaries. Hindley is declared to be at least a good bit older than them, and the text says that as he was growing up, he had for his playmate Nelly Dean, who, from the very nature of the relationship, was never on equal footing. She could not engage in the same freedom that Heathcliff and Cathy had, she was simply a servant and a child, doing her job to the very best, and regardless of how much she may or may not have enjoyed Hindley’s company, that thread would underlie everything they did together. 

And he takes it out on Heathcliff. He is the usurper, he is happy and has his father’s real love. He has a true friendship, one that doesn’t exist just because his father is paying for it. Hindley is full of wrath, and Heathcliff quickly learns that Hindley’s kindled fury burns as it fills the air around him, blazing as it fills the room with smoke, obscuring the original purpose of that anger. And that anger is all for naught, for as Hindley torments Heathcliff, his father looks on him with anger, and perhaps worse, disappointment. Multiple times, the old Master Earnshaw starts to try to beat Hindley with his stick, and every time lamenting that he could not. When the decision finally comes to send Hindley to college, out of Earnshaw’s sight, the man says that he doubts Hindley could thrive anywhere. Hindley, in trying to cope with being the second favorite, dooms his place as the heir that shall never have his father’s approval, and at his father's death, he wasn’t even at home to see it. And the worst of it is that it is only because Hindley leaves that Heathcliff and Cathy are able to become close, to become the people so inseparably tied that they would almost bring down two families.

After he ascends to the role of patriarch, he becomes even worse, particularly upon seeing his wife’s dislike of Heathcliff. Beatings and fastings were commonplace. This was the height of his cruelty. Nelly Dean, his own servant and best friend, questioned his mistreatment of them. And after his wife died, things went downhill quickly. He had nobody who loved him anymore except the old, loquacious, contemptible butler. His father hated him to his death, his wife was gone, no siblings anymore, and his sole true friend a turncoat. He had a son, but all that did was remind him of his lost love. He took to drink and gambling, trying to forget that love was ever a thing. And Nelly Dean watched as her playmate from years past threw his own life away. He had no life anymore, he had squandered anything that could have been love. But really, it was only natural.

What other option did he have?

[gerdy-sertorius]

If I had a nickel for every time I fell in love with a tragic love story that takes note of ethnic tensions and follows a protagonist (fueled by ressentiment) with a psuedo-incestuous relationship with a Catherine, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

[gerdy-sertorius]

This is a good bit more low-effort than most of my stuff, but I cannot hold it in. The heart attack I had when I realized the primary lancer of Moby-Dick was also the primary harpooneer was something I could not keep to myself.

[gerdy-sertorius]

First of all, you are completely right. There is no statute of limitations for genocide apology. There's no statute of limitations for genocide apology because it's no crime. And the reason that statutes of limitations exist in the first place is because punitive justice is (rightfully) not the way we run our system. If someone is 101 years old and turns out to have committed a war crime in a time past the statute of limitations, we can be reasonably sure that they won't have committed a crime recently and that they won't commit a crime in the near future. As such, there is no compelling reason to limit their freedom for the safety of their neighbors.

People in modern developed societies don't get locked up because "they deserve it". Mankind is unique in that it has endless ability to grow and endless opportunity for compassion. We are able to forgive the most evil of people, and verily, we ought to if they prove their capacity to change. I hope you recognize that you're using the same line of logic as the conservatives here. Of course their sin will follow them, but the societal consequences of their sin needn't.

A repentant murderer is forever haunted by his actions, but our society ought to accept that repentance. Anything else is downright monstrous. He will stand before the face of God and answer for his evil, and before then, we have to make sure that more people aren't hurt by him. If that's the case, then of course we'll incarcerate them, or maybe even rehabilitate them. But to give an evil for an evil simply because it is "deserved" is such backwards thinking, particularly for a leftist.

Now, I don't mean to say "oh, those poor genociders". I, for one, believe that everything they got, they asked for, they *deserved*. But that's irrational, that ought to be entirely taken out of the equation. That's not the way we run our criminal justice system, because above all else, it is for the prevention of crimes. If it prevents crime, we incarcerate an individual. If it doesn't, we don't. And isn't that the most moral of options?

[gerdy-sertorius]

Alright, please allow me to rant here. This is not an effective solution for the average underpaid blue-collar worker. This is not in the interests of labor or unions. There are genuine upsides to a four day work week, but the "8 really rich guys" aren't the only ones who are against it, because in every single one of these scenarios, you cannot just dig in on a surface level. There are layers here, ones that may reveal some real harm to the worker.

First of all, we have to make some presuppositions, which will allow me to get into the same framework as you. For one, I'm sure none of you would disagree that labor politics should take care of the poorest fist, that is, to focus on the people who need the *most* help. Secondly, I assume that you fellas are pro-union, and oppose right-to-work. In fact, I'm going to go out and assume that you support advanced regulation to help unions and oppose strikebreaking. And I'm going to assume that you do not care at all about the economic standing of the business owner, only the workers (which I myself disagree with, I think that everyone should be looked after, but whatever).

In that case, this would be intolerable. But let me point out the positives first. Sticking to a forty hour work week, each individual would serve 10 hours a day. Compared to the standard 8 hour day, psychologically, the day doesn't feel that much longer than it would otherwise, and a third day off is universally beloved. This objectively makes workers happier and healthier, and even though you don't necessarily care about it, more productive. That third weekday also allows for more time with family, which is key to a good education for the workers' kids and could even lead to lower divorce rates. Everyone wins here.

Except one group, actually. And that is the destitute union man, especially the older ones. I know a lot of people in the oil fields. I know a lot of government workers. And I'm sure you know some sort of person in your town. The miner. The man working the auto industry. Barely making enough to stay alive and dependent upon the union for just that. It's disgusting, and honestly one of the best arguments against modern capitalism (much more so than complaining that it discriminates against ADHD folks or whatever else is the current hot topic). And they don't want the 4 day work week for one reason alone -- overtime.

Because it gets really hard to pull a double shift when you get off for four hours of sleep each night, less when accounting for travel and getting up in the morning. And unlike most people, most of these folks *have* to work massive amounts of overtime in order to make enough money to raise a family. That's one of the reasons they're so vociferously tied to a union -- to make sure that the overtime numbers come out fairly. Otherwise, they're out on the streets. And while an 8 hour work day versus a 10 hour work day isn't a lot, a 16 hour work day versus a 20 hour work day is night and day, quite literally. It makes things so much worse for the most vulnerable within our society, the man who makes no money *and* must raise a family, usually a large one. This doesn't help his health, this doesn't assist him, it just makes life even more of a living hell than it already is.

And don't come in with the rejoinder of "just increase the minimum wage". Disregarding any *massive* political issues of getting the wage to a place where overtime isn't required (some $25-30 an hour for a family of six to barely get by ($55,000), that's simply not going to pass Congress, at least while the dollar remains valued as is), that also massively accelerates the "sweatshopification" of America, because, believe it or not, massive corporations don't care about their workers. You bring in a $25 minimum wage, and every single job out here is going over to China, where they don't have neat stuff like "labor regulations" or "environmental regulations" or "having to pay workers". Beyond that, it also hurts American mom and pop shops, which is the only reasons that transnational corporations don't price gouge even more than they do now.

This is an incredibly complex issue, one that helps the average worker and kills the most vulnerable worker. I for one, am not willing to sacrifice my brethren on the altar of progress, although I'm sure many of you may. But please remember that there is nuance to this, and that there are more than "8 really rich guys" who oppose this.

Edit: You fellas do understand that making a 32 hour work week is a thousand times worse than even this, right? A national 25% increase in wages is going to absolutely demolish economic stability, along with annihilating any semblance of low prices, devaluing the dollar, which in turn causes stagflation. I'm not exactly sure how many of you are familiar with the economy of the early 1970s, but then you could buy a good burger for a half dollar or less. There's the old article of a cup of coffee becoming more than a nickel during the Carter administration. That's not just boomers going on a nostalgia trip, that's the reality of what occurred in the seventies and changed in the seventies. Stagflation hurts the common man more than maybe anything else, and a 25% increase in wages is going to contribute to that, guaranteed, because that is a foremost way to cause instability, which is fatal.

The issue is that you fellas are Romantic in an economic system that simply doesn't allow for Romanticism. The Sueno Impossible doesn't work. We need to understand that we must work around corporate greed rather than eliminating it in one fell swoop. Because if we attempt to legislate greed away, there are many things that fall, not just the corporations. Heck, I'd offer you more credit if you were straight revolutionaries, because at least that contains more of a chance of success. But the economy, the dollar, the wages of the common man, there are so many factors going into it. Think of it as the Sword of Damocles. Yes, it hangs, but you can't attempt to rush and take care of it, or you shall get run through. The best we can do is to help the King survive as is. We must help the worker in a way that actually helps.

[gerdy-sertorius]

"I offer you no sign but the sign of the prophet Jonas."

Beyond the actual, literal definition of the statement declawing any semblance of an apocalyptic "sign", was this not the core of his story? That he was happily waiting (popcorn bucket in hand) for the judgement to come to a people who could be saved if he had only tried? Him caring more for the plant that gave him convenience than the deliverance of an entire city from destruction? It reminds me of a lot of my problems with modern Protestant Christianity in general.

rant.

Ok so right now we are approaching a rapture date set. May the 19th. People are claiming the sign of Jonah was an eclipse and not Jesus’ literal words about his own death. And so they gave the world 40 days to repent before Jesus comes back. According to them the 40 days ends on the 19th where Jesus will come back. Here’s my issue with the absolute heresy:

People like this ALL OVER Facebook. Sit back and enjoy? Correct me if I’m wrong but no Christian should be excited to watch people die and get judged to hell. This idea of escapism is so engrained that people no longer care about the dying world around us. They only care about them getting zapped out of here and not having to suffer.

we lose our heart for the lost when all we can think about is what we get to enjoy. We care less about the suffering of our neighbors when we are just sitting around waiting for Jesus to get us out. You are going to sit back and enjoy while judgement falls on people? How about you get out there and get busy. If you truly believed the crap you say you wouldn’t be a smart ass on Facebook posting cocky popcorn emoji. You’d be telling every single person you could to follow Jesus. Begging them even.

but in my experience people like this just don’t care. They will believe this crap and when the 20th comes they will believe more crap. And they will continue following false prophet after false prophet who tells them the world is going to hell and it doesn’t matter because they get to get out before anything bad happens.

Makes me sick.

[gerdy-sertorius]

A Damsel Pristine Cut Prediction

Alright, I have a theory for the leadup to Damsel’s Chapter Three. So, what information do we have on Chapter Three presently? Well, we already know it’s going to be depressing as all heck (Tony has mentioned that Abby's plan for the chapter would be very painful for both you and the Princess). We know that it will exist in relation to staying with her in the cabin. We know that there are heavily Romantic themes within the chapter. We know that one of Damsel’s primary themes is her lack of agency, so frightening in her Deconstruction and somewhat nervously endearing in her fairytale escape. So to recap, it will focus on Damsel and you staying together, it will focus on the Damsel’s lack of agency, and it will play into traditional Romantic tropes while simultaneously deconstructing them. 

So the idea is that when Damsel declares her wish to leave, rather than simply deconstructing her, you deny her request. You declare that you will stay with her and live out your romantic destiny. While taken aback, she accedes to your request, as she always would. So you stay together in the basement, spending time with each other, maybe opening up new lines of dialogue. She would be acting odd throughout, clearly wanting to leave but also wholly devoted to you. If you say that you’d love to continue to be with her, then what does leaving really matter? She has you, what more could she want? But the drive to leave, to be free, it still tugs at her, to fulfill her purpose as a vessel.

She eventually works up the courage to ask you if you would be willing to leave yet. You could either agree and get the standard “Romantic Haze” ending, or continue staying with her, much to Hero’s chagrin. It feels uncomfortable to so disregard the Princess’s wishes for this life. Smitten, for his part, is so completely out of touch with reality that he genuinely believes that spending time with the Princess like this is something that she honestly wants, and is pushing for a continuation of the status quo. He wants the time with the Princess, he wants to take her and live out their life together, forever.

In response to your second denial, she is clearly hurt but also putting on a brave face. *For his sake.* She is happy, she tells herself. She is with the one she loves, she is willing to do whatever he wants. If being with him would make him happy, then that is what she will do. You unlock more dialogue with her. You talk and laugh and love each other. But the Damsel’s wishes still have been ignored, the one thing she wanted, taken from her. She, after sitting for a long while with you, declares affirmatively that it is her wish to leave. Once again, you can simply get your “Romantic Haze” and abort, or you can continue on and definitively say no. She accepts your wishes, a smile on her face as a tear rolls down her cheek (meant to be reminiscent of the Scorched Grey leadup). 

The dialogue for you… shifts. It becomes more possessive, more controlling. More in tune with the player. The Hero, by this point, is fuming. He keeps telling you that this isn’t right, that this isn’t what she wants and that this needs to stop. You ignore him. You and the Damsel will be together, there will be nothing standing in your way. You lifting her, her lifting you, forever and ever. Consumed by true belief, there is absolutely nothing that will stop you. You are her guide, the one who knows what is best for her. She needs you and you need her. 

Damsel, in one final effort, merely asks to go up the stairs, not to leave but simply to look out the window. To see the stars, to keep a grasp of what could have been. To have a dream. The game will allow you to say “no” as long as you want, but she will begin to deconstruct along that route, unless you allow her to go upstairs. You take her hand and the music swells as you take the stairs, and despite the bleakness of the moment, despite the fact that you will never leave, the moment is beautiful, seeing a smile upon her face that you have not in a long while, seeing the wonder of the outside world. She smiles, turns to you with tears filling her eyes. 

“My dashing hero.”

“I’m sorry.”

She grabs the knife and begins to stab herself in a cruel reflection of Chapter One, apologizing to you all the while. She was incapable of living like this, incapable of being there for you and for that she is truly, genuinely apologetic. She is broken and tearful the whole while, and eventually, as the last flame of light exits her eyes, she dies, with a simple “I’m so sorry” exiting her lips. The Smitten immediately takes the blade to end his own life, both finally being together forever in the cabin. The Hero does not try to stop him this time. 

[gerdy-sertorius]

For They Know Not What They Do

The Story that is Christianity

Many have written pages on pages on pages of how to understand Christianity. Two of my favorite books of all time, “Mere Christianity” and “Orthodoxy”, both approach the issue of what the core of Christianity is for the layman. The intellectual (or perhaps a more accurate term would be “armchair theologian”) has even more access to works ascertaining precisely what Christianity is. I would say that is a fantastic way of getting to know our place within the world and our relationship with the God that ensures every atom moves properly. I also tend to view these works, seminal as they may be, as incomplete. But I suppose they aren’t trying to be complete, really. That’s because they are only building upon a completed text, of course, one they can hardly re-establish while remaining true to it and simultaneously expanding. They aren’t going to have the spark of the original.

But that’s not my problem with the modern discourse around Christianity. I understand that they lack the spark of the original. When dealing with direct divine inspiration, I would imagine that tends to happen. My problem is that, beyond lacking the spark of the original, it doesn’t even try to come close, it doesn’t *search* for that spark. There is nothing ventured back to the original composition except as intellectual evidence for a broader thesis. That is, the Gospel, the single most important piece of literature in history, is no longer a piece of literature but a manuscript. Because the core of Christianity is not praxis or hermeneutics or any other ten dollar word. It was passed from carpenter to fishermen. Christianity is, with all else stripped away like chaff in the wind, a Story. 

It is a Story of love and betrayal. It is a Story about good vanquishing evil. It is a Story of a Bridegroom united with His Bride, finally redeemed after constant failure and everlasting patience. It is a Story of a Father and Son, and how they, despite the pervasiveness of wickedness, would save the world from itself. It is a Story of love and the sacrifice that would naturally pour out from that love. It is a Story of undeserved grace by one party and an undeserved outburst of fury on the part of the other. It is, as odd as it is to say it, a grand Romance, one that spans across the entire history of man and especially the history of one Man in particular. It is a Story.

And like all stories, this one has a beginning. In fact, it has something before the beginning, before the very concept of time. It has a God, triune in nature, omnipotent and wholly benevolent. Now, this God is a creative God, and as such shapes the world. He forms what would become reality, all the laws of nature and mathematics, the ideas of time, of space, of matter itself, ex nihilo. He makes light and life, seas and earth and celestial bodies, animals and plants in an explosion of what can only be described as art. And He makes man, defined to be with a soul, in the imago Dei, His very image, capable of creation, capable of love, capable of making a sincere decision. The crown of what exists.

And with that, the very next day He rests, surveying His creation. He has done a good work, shrouding the world in the radiant light that He is. He has made something that continues on its own in a way, yet in another way is still eternally dependent upon Him for every action, every movement, every moment in time. Something has been created and with that beauty arises where there was none before. There is a completion to what was to be done, man being what was finally needed for the world to be properly finished. He loves the world, and He loves man. And so He rests. 

After that, He graces us with something magical. You want to know what was the first thing He gave man beyond the very life we hold so closely? The concept of romance, of marriage. Of giving one’s life over to another, of being able to truly understand another individual in a way that nobody else can. Of living your life for someone other than yourself, of being, in a way, one with another individual, fully free and without fear or reservation, only sheer, insurmountable love. It is the closest thing that we have to a relationship with Him with another individual. It is the epitome of a relationship among us, one that if we are lucky enough to have it, is the most beautiful thing we can have within the confines of this world. And He gave it to us because He loves man. 

And man loves Him, the only creature able to love establishing their love first and foremost. God created a garden, one in which it is declared that He walked with man. At every point man was covered by who God was, engaging with Him and with each other in the beauty of merely being able to speak, to talk, to be in conversation with the being behind everything that happens at any point in time, to talk to someone unimaginably beyond the world yet still willing to interact with it, with His greatest creation. And He offers but one demand – do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

And, of course, they do so anyway and as such are blemished by sin and therefore must be driven out of the garden, out of the sight of the God that loves them so much. With the knowledge of what evil is, evil becomes an everyday occurrence rather than the quite literally unthinkable action that it was within the garden. Their love for God is tarnished like silver being exposed to oxygen. It is still silver, no doubt, but it is difficult to tell that it was the same thing as the genuine article, and while the value inherent within it will still be present (the silver atoms aren’t leaving anytime soon), it would require the level of atomic precision to return it to its original form, something we are entirely incapable of doing. 

With that, God can no longer speak with them, walk with them, be with them in the same way He used to. For sin cannot exist within the sight of God, the idea is a logical impossibility. Just as matter and antimatter cannot coexist within any one location, neither can the absence of God and the presence of God. There’s one theory that the reason God was no longer able to be in the physical presence of humanity is because the sinful nature of ourselves would quite literally destroy our very personages if exposed to the sheer holiness that is Him. I don’t know if it’s true or not, and it is impossible to know, but it sure does preach well. 

Most of the remainder of the Old Testament squarely places a focus on the Jews. For his devotion to God, Abraham was given an assurance that his descendants would be specially protected by God as long as they remained faithful, and as such the Jews became the “Chosen People”. This assurance is referred to as the Abrahamic Covenant. They were gifted with the Law, which essentially was a document of divine nature that established what they could and could not do as a nation. One of the most important parts both for their society and Christianity wholesale was that of animal sacrifice, something both commonplace and unique among the Jews. Rather than in other societies, where an animal sacrifice was there to satisfy the gods and not much more, the Jews symbolically placed their sins upon the blood of a pure white lamb and then killed it as a symbol of repentance (where we get the term ‘scapegoat’ from). And if they continued to abide by that Abrahamic Covenant and showed a dedication to faithfulness, then God would accept that symbol.

Throughout the Old Testament, an intriguing turn of events would begin to rear its head – they did not remain faithful. Throughout the history of Israel, the Jews would remain stubbornly in a constant flux between faithfulness and the complete denial of basic morality. Many times they would clean up their act, so to speak, and less than a decade later fall into depravity. The majority of the Old Testament is them doing terrible stuff, getting punished, getting better, and then returning to exactly what they were doing before. As it can be understood, for a society solely existing due to God’s special favor, this was less than heartening. I want to take what may seem like a sharp turn into one of the more overlooked books of the Bible, one of the (very many) stories about a prophet attempting to bring Israel back to God and one of my favorites. 

The Book of Hosea, at least the beginning of it, is a love story between a man and his wife. Throughout the section you find this book in, it is filled with books that essentially amount to a whole bunch of sermons being combined. This is not that. This is a genuinely beautiful story, this is something that I would want to read, this is *real*. And it may well be the best summation of the Old Testament in the entire Bible. This is exactly what I was searching for with the rest of my readings, something that so perfectly encapsulates the relationship between God and those who He loves. 

Hosea was a prophet, someone who was given direction from God to return Israel to its worship of Him. Many had come before him, many would come after him. One could even say that his actions were entirely futile. But he had a calling, despite the truly unrepentant nature of Israel, and he was not exactly going to tell God of all people “no” – that was the very thing he hated so much about the society he found himself in. So he decided to follow that calling, becoming the newest prophet of Israel. 

With that came instruction from God. He was to take a certain individual as his wife, one by the name of Gomer. She was a prostitute, and more or less written off when it came to marital prospects, perhaps understandably so. But Hosea was commanded to do so, and as such took her as his wife. And Hosea took care of her, fully and totally, as a husband should, providing for her economically, emotionally, generally being an all around good husband. Why? Simply because he loved her. He loved Gomer more than anyone else within the world. Certainly more than anyone else would within the nation, what with all of the social devastation from her peers of both sexes. 

And as I’m sure you can tell, the infidelity continued throughout the marriage. Constant heartbreak on the part of Hosea, who loved his wife, with the constant rejection of the wife incapable of loving him. Yet Hosea did not cease loving her. Even when the provisions he offered to her went to those she would cheat with him on, Hosea did not cease providing for her, something that was well outside of the norm within society, when at the very least divorce was the status quo. Hosea was continuously loving his wife, and he was continuously being emotionally destroyed by her. One day, Gomer disappeared for longer than she usually did. Hosea went looking for her, and found that she was being sold into what amounted to sex slavery. And once again, against *all of the* standards of the time, he went and gathered together a small fortune to purchase her and free her. And why was that? *Because he loved her.* And the absolute kicker is, there is no record of her ever stopping her activities. Despite all of his love for her, despite everything he gave up emotionally and physically for their marriage, she would always let him down. It was her nature. To fail and hurt in the process but to always be able to return to one who would always love her, it’s heartbreaking in its tragedy. 

It’s not difficult to see the allegory between this and Israel’s repeated falls from the graces of God. A nation chosen by God in particular, one that is provided for and taken care of more than any else in the world, one he frees from backbreaking slavery, one he offers bountiful land to despite everything. A nation that is truly blessed among all others. It of all countries should be one not to turn away from the path that has been consistently positively reinforced and consistently negatively punished. Yet it still does. Because men loved darkness rather than light. Because the love offered towards us is something they took for granted. Because it is our nature to spurn that love. 

Yet there would be one moment to establish that love forever in the eyes of God, and it began with one man, by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The humiliation of the Incarnation is something that deserves to be talked more about. God becoming man and all the wonder inherent in that is highlighted in various Christmas events and the like, but it rarely goes anywhere beyond the surface level. Another way to say it would be that the substance is highlighted, but oddly enough not the sacrifice of the thing that would eventually become Calvary. For in the Incarnation was the stripping down of Christ long before His arrest. Taken from the omnipotence of Godhood to the inability of a child, forced to flee to Egypt just so He wouldn’t be killed before He turned three years old. Losing omniscience for the insight of an infant, losing omnipotence for the physical ability of a baby. The Incarnation was the deliberate elimination of anything especially divine He had, with the sole exception of his relationship with his Father. It is hard to overstate exactly how drastic a change like this was. Imagine losing any and all sensation, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, all at once, and then entering into the world and being told to go out and live, get stuff done, have a proper life. The thought is quite frankly absurd. 

Yet all of this and more was suffered for love. For the chance to live as a person to save all people. For the beauty in finally freeing mankind from our nature of destruction to all we come in contact with. For love. Love for us, broken and fallen as we may be, entirely covered in the ink that obscures what we could be from what we are. The entrance of Christ alone into the world is a sacrifice for our sin, and it would not be the last, as I’m sure you are aware. Everything, absolutely everything orchestrated throughout the Old Testament lines up towards this moment. Everything evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed, fluctuating back and forth and forth and back for a purpose, for the ultimate evil and the ultimate redemption. All that was needed was for that very redemption to enter the world. And so He did, incapable of speaking, incapable of walking, incapable of bending the entire cosmos to Himself with one thought. The birth of Christ to Mary was, in essence, His first death. 

Jesus Christ had lived life as a man among men, with one exception. He had never sinned, not once. The evil that had plagued humanity as a whole was absent from Him, not a speckle on His fleece, for the entirety of His life. All of the absurd wickedness, every disgusting thing mankind suffers from, it was all gone from His personage. He was, morally speaking, perfection. And with that perfection comes something important. With that truly pure fleece, He was able to be a sacrifice that was more than symbolic. No longer would man slaughter a lamb, a symbol of sin, and obtain a symbol of repentance. Instead, man would commit the ultimate sin and slaughter The Lamb, The Son sent among them, and with The Son's sacrifice gain the possibility of True Repentance.

Eventually, He would begin to teach. A message of adhering to the spirit rather than the letter of the Law, which Israel was just beginning to follow. He taught forgiveness beyond what the Law said, commitment to marriage beyond what the Law said, being willing to help the fellow man beyond what the Law said. He did not supersede the Law, but He was the completion of it. Everything the Law said, He went beyond, not because He added to it, but because He fulfilled it. Everything He said was the intention of that Law, the meaning of it that had been lost to tradition for centuries. Israel had finally established a dedication to the Law and Jesus swept that rug from underneath their feet. It was the acceptance of the thought that went behind the Law rather than exactly what it said. 

And yet the position was unpopular with the people whose opinions on the subject mattered. The local Jewish ruling classes were quite comfortable with the acceptance of established law and tradition, leaving the more learned and established classes at the top. The local Roman ruling classes were quite comfortable without more religious zealotry breaking out in an area known for it. The idea of expanding upon existing Law and riling up support for and against it in an endless cycle of polarization was not in either of their interests. Yet the movement continued to grow, and it increasingly became an elephant in the room when it came to politics within the area. With that, quite reasonably, the decision was made to kill Jesus on charges of sacrilege. 

While they were taking such an action, Jesus was doing something entirely different. He was preparing Himself. He went over to a garden and began to pray, to beg, to plead for any other option. He did not want to die, He was genuinely scared of the suffering that would await Him. He sweated drops of blood throughout his prayer, such was the fear that took hold of Him. He was in agony. There was nothing He wanted less than to die an excruciatingly painful death. Yet He declares that it is His duty, that He must accept death. And that is what He does. The Romans and Jews arrive to take Him away. He does not resist. 

They brought Him before the Romans, because they, as rulers of the area, were the only ones who could prescribe capital punishment legally. There was an issue, however – nothing within Roman law actually enabled them to kill an individual for blasphemy against a god not recognized by Rome at all. So they simply decided to go with charges of treason. A similar issue arose – there was basically no evidence for a statement like that. So the governor of the region more or less tried to weasel his way out of it. He summoned Jesus, desperate for any sort of denial that would allow him to say there wasn’t enough evidence. Jesus, for his part, was cryptic, of absolutely zero help to the governor, Himself, or anyone, really. 

The governor called for something, anything to assuage the crowd from a death penalty with no evidence, something guaranteed to look bad to his higher-ups. Bargaining – citing a Jewish holiday about to come up, he offered a choice between two prisoners to be freed – Jesus or a murderous thief. Those who were present for the choice, a mob at this point, called for the freedom of the murderer. The crowd did not yield. Humiliation – a beating, fine clothes, a scepter and a crown of thorns. The crowd did not yield. A “lesser” punishment than execution – nine and twenty lashes from a cat o’ nine tails, each tail burying itself in muscle rather than skin and more or less skinning Him alive, with immeasurable pain coursing through every single second of trauma to his rapidly shrinking back. For some point of reference, the standard death penalty within the region was thirty lashes from this very whip. The crowd. did. not. yield. There would be no option other than crucifixion. They would never be content with anything else. And so the order went. 

In the most damning moment in the history of humanity, we determined we would commit Deicide. And the deed was done. Christ, God Himself on the earth, innocent in the truest sense of the word, slowly dragged His own cross through the streets of Jerusalem towards a hill called Calvary, where He would meet death. He stumbled, weak from blood loss and unable to continue to carry anything, let alone a cross. The pinnacle of mankind, brought down to being no more capable of preaching than a corpse like any other; He was thirty-three years old. And behind Him followed the very crowd that put Him to death, some jeering, some disgusted by He who would attempt to destroy Judaism, some even weeping over the demise that they themselves caused, any semblance of righteous fury gone from their eyes. 

Eventually the procession was able to make it to Calvary, at which point the crucifixion began. There are two tangentially important facts about crucifixion as a means of execution. The first is that Jewish Law states that any who die by being hanged on a tree have been cursed by God. It was considered that anyone who goes through that was abandoned by God, and it’s a generally bad omen. The second fact, somewhat more well-known, is that “crucifixion” is the root of the word “excruciating”. Crucifixion was not the means of execution generally used; it was always used in cases where an example was going to be made, due to its incredible cruelty as an execution device and its incredibly public location.

A brief overview of how exactly an individual dies would begin with both arms secured in place to the cross with nails, hammered into the wrist between the radius and ulna and directly through the median nerve. This would leave the body hanging from the overextended arms, which, apart from the immense pain such a position provides, physiologically makes it impossible to inhale. That’s where the legs being kept in place (with rope or nails) would come in, pushing the body up whenever oxygen was needed, and allowing the diaphragm to do its job. This had the added effect of causing even more pain from the scraping of the oft-scourged back against the rough wood of the cross. The process would continue until either the victim would die of asphyxiation due to exhaustion of the legs or until their legs were broken, making them incapable of continuing breathing. In total, time to die was varied but could last up to several days.

As the nails hammer into the flesh of Jesus Christ, He does not resist. As He is hoisted into an upright position as the death knell tolls and His minutes upon the earth begin counting down, He does not resist. As an innocent man being killed for a crime He did not commit, He does not resist. He is simply a Lamb walking quietly to the slaughter. The cross is beyond painful, there is nothing that could have prepared Him for such physical torture. But He does not resist. He shouts out the opening line to a song He knows well: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He does not believe He has been abandoned by God, but in the moment, it certainly feels that way. It is hard to think of anything outside the pain of the moment. 

Voices resound around the crowd watching Him. Cries taunting Him to save Himself if He could supposedly save so many others. The apparent desecration of God is unthinkable within Jewish culture, no god of theirs could die like that. And so, in their denial of such a concept, they desecrated the only God they could ever have laid their eyes upon, the only God they ever could have spoken to, the only God who lived among them, who ate and talked and laughed among them. The Human God and the Divine Man, being scourged, crucified, abused with all manner of insults. He does not resist. The only thing He offers up out of His battered, gasping chest is a plea, not even to them: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

While I may have offered the Book of Hosea as the clearest summation of the Old Testament, those ten words are the clearest summation of the New. For despite everything, all of the suffering that we placed upon each other, for all of our sins, for everything. For the very execution of the only perfect man to ever live, for the very execution of the God who knows and loves every single individual, we are forgiven. Yes, it is in our nature to betray that love constantly, it is in our nature to harm everyone we come in contact with, it is in our nature to hate and kill and lie. But we are forgiven regardless. 

Jesus Christ makes one final shout to His Father, a proclamation that He is coming, if you will, and dies, the last breath of oxygen leaving His lungs long before the expected time of death. And in that moment, everything changes. The scapegoat is slaughtered. All the sins of mankind, past, present, and future, are placed upon His shoulders in a horrific mask of wickedness. Mankind has had their own sins cleansed in the greatest show of love possible, the brutal self-sacrifice required to keep all of us away from the fruits of our own actions. With Jesus shrouded in the infinite sins of humanity, God is unable to even look at His own dying Son, forced to turn His face away from the evil that has subsumed Him. Even the fury that would have been leveled at the crucifixion is placed on no other shoulders than the victim of it. We as a collective have, through the most heinous act in history, been redeemed of our heinous acts.

The eternal salvation of mankind is not the only thing that happens. The sky goes black instantly. Tremors begin to shake the earth and thunder shakes the skies. Dead men stand up and begin to walk, reunited with their family in a way that the Christ who just died could not be, carrying the sins of man and unable to stand within the presence of God. And within the temple, something curious happens. The veil that blocked the room to where the Jews believed the physical presence of God resided was torn asunder. No longer is man forced to use a proxy to commune with God, no longer is man separated from the One who loves them so much. Mankind, it could be said, is back in Eden, back before everything started. 

Jesus died quickly, so unlike those beside Him who had their legs broken, there was yea, a spear piercing His heart also. He was taken down from the cross and buried in an actual tomb, courtesy of a rich follower. Several days passed, and on Easter, the tomb was found by a contingent of women to be empty with the exception of burial wrappings, much to their eternal surprise. Despite the remainder of Jesus’s followers remaining in a combination of shock and depression, they too eventually made their way to the tomb and found it empty as described. It was empty.

At the crucifixion, at the condemnation of God to death and His willingness to do that for humanity, the devil rejoiced. In God’s love for us, He did exactly what the devil wanted. To remove Himself from the picture, to call for the death of Himself. But there was something that a created being like the devil could never understand. For death was artificial. It was not in the original world, it was not inherent to life, as much as it might seem otherwise. Death was a consequence of man’s sin, and while that sin was upon Christ, His death had washed it away. In one glorious, triumphant moment, the enemy of man for so long, death itself, was defeated by Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God. 

For God was not constrained by institutions that only exist as a consequence of evil. He was the one who established those institutions, and in the death of Christ, He could overthrow those institutions while simultaneously ending mankind’s eternal culpability for sin. And so Christ erupted out of the grave, and with it the grave ended. Death, the bitter rival of humanity from the beginning of time, was never going to have an impact again. For love, God died an excruciating death. For love, God refused to die. For love, we have been saved by Him. 

The most common analogy offered by Jesus between Him and those who follow Him is that of the Bridegroom and the Bride, each desperately in love with the other, each willing to give everything for the sake of the other. We can never be the perfect Bride, that much has been made clear. But in the eyes of the perfect Bridegroom, we’ve already been made perfect. No matter how much evil we purvey, no matter how broken of an individual we are, we are made perfect in the cleansing blood spilled from the sacrifice of the Lamb. All the grime that is us, every evil action we take, it has all been scrubbed clean off. For love. 

[gerdy-sertorius]

The Shifting Mound and Tumblr

(In which it soon becomes abundantly clear that I prefer the former.)

It's seemed to me that the overwhelming majority of people on Tumblr are generally far more opposed to Slay the Princess's Narrator than the average consensus (which admittedly has very few Narrator defenders). Not necessarily with the idea that there are few Narrator likers. No, that's to be expected. What's interesting is the sheer amount of disgust that the Narrator receives, almost on a nonsensical level. That's intrigued me, especially with Tumblr's, shall we say, unique reputation both in terms of bias towards certain positions as well as the generally intriguing style of media analysis.

The theory that I think sticks best is that the Princess is exactly the kind of character that the most active folks on Tumblr would love, to be frank. She's a god stripped from her godhood, a Lovecraftian entity for all of the horror fans who like religious theming, something directly associated with this platform. She is a genuine "girlboss" (as opposed to the plastic, artificial "girlboss" plaguing our corporate slop), something that this site, both overwhelmingly disgusted with modern media's analysis of women and the only one to openly tolerate blatant misandry, is absolutely dying for. She is a Princess, in a romance of magnificent proportions, one toxic and healthy and horrific and beautiful all at once, one with an innumerable amount of the platform's endless shippers begging for a bit of anything to turn into homosexual romance.

She is something of an ideal character, both in the narrative and in the meta narrative, an individual that can and will be perceived in many different ways, to wear so many hats that the local haberdasher goes out of stock. She has all these positive traits, and infinitely more can be tacked on at the creator's intention. In a way, the Shifting Mound herself begins to deconstruct, every bit of her, even the genuinely nasty parts like Tower or Nightmare, being flanderized into this nothingness, this being that is whatever you want it to be, well, that leads to a lot of opportunities for fan creation, for genuinely talented fanart with an audience for quite literally everyone.

So of course, when something threatens the Shifting Mound, then things begin to get spicy. The Narrator, who fully threatens both the Princess and her endlessly farmable romance with the Long Quiet, already plays something of an antagonistic role. But you attack the cash cow (the golden calf, if you will) of the fandom, one that so many people have a far greater investment in because she embodies those values that creators here so value, then obviously the antagonist must become a villain, no? So with that, the Narrator becomes a pariah, not only being the prideful, unlikable jerk he is as is, but as a threat to the Princess, a threat to the truly *over*loved character in this slice of the fanbase. And while the former would almost certainly be allowable (I can see the "skrunkly" art already, Madre de Dios), the latter is unconscionable.

As I'm sure you can see, I just wanted to dunk on Tumblr while also talking about my favorite game of all time. It's all in good fun, though. Despite everything, you fellas are still the number one site I go to for any fandom, because for all of the irritation that you cause within my fragile body, you make quality. And I do not take that for granted, you magnificent ladies, gentleman, and the remaining 80% of you.

[gerdy-sertorius]

Exactly. The deconstruction of the Damsel is not the Damsel. A truly Romantic ending unstained by postmodernism at all, simply a love story, is entirely possible, even admirable. And with that, Damsel is my favorite, easily.

Slay The Princess: The Damsel and Simplicity

SPOILER WARNING - This is my personal take on the Damsel. Enjoy. Or not.

i see a lot of people criticising or backhandedly complimenting the damsel's route because they looked very heavily into it, but in my opinion i think the fact that they looked so heavily into it is what caused these criticisms in the first place. and that's likely intentional.

the route is a lot less weird if you rescue her without asking questions and don't listen to the narrator, the only really weird bit being right at the end where her simple and joyful nature clashes harshly with the complicated nature of the story as a whole.

because the damsel's character, as a whole, is... simple. a dainty princess waiting to be rescued by her heroic knight in shining armour. if it wasn't for the shifting mound taking her at the end, this would have been a simple "hero saved princess and they lived happily ever after" tale.

however, if you ask her too many questions, that's when it gets weird. you ask her all these questions because you want more than what her character is and it feels weird that she really is as simple as she appears. continuously asking her what she wants causes her to deconstruct even when there's nothing left to see.

and if you kill her, the idealised fairytale takes a dark turn, but even as the grey, her motives are still simple. she's convinced that the cabin drives you to kill her, so she sets it ablaze, taking you with it so you can join her in death. all still with a simple smile on her face.

both of these more unnerving possibilities are the result of you being unsatisfied with her simplicity. and for a lot of people, that's understandable. but for those that embrace her simplicity, it's a heartwarming tale of rescuing a princess (up until the very end that is, which is fitting for the game as a whole, especially if this is your first path).

don't believe me? ask the shifting mound during the fight regarding the two different versions of the damsel vessel.

here's what she says about the deconstructed damsel:

"Love melted into skepticism, and you pulled back layer after layer after layer until all you were left with was the knowledge that you did not know me. You sought the truth then. Will you hide from it now that it is within your grasp?"

now here's what she says about the regular damsel:

"But the stakes meant nothing to you. You had a desire, and you set that desire free, you lifting me and me lifting you, forever and ever and ever. Consumed by true belief, there was nothing that could hold us back."

it can be that simple and heartwarming... if you want it to be. if you don't want that, you get a shell or a shadow of what it could have been.

the voice of the smitten reflects this as well. he is also a simple character. he is motivated by one thing and one thing alone: love. even when presented with the weird parts of the damsel should you choose to explore, he loves her in spite of that. warts and all.

and should you kill her and intentionally make the story dark, he has nothing left to live for and goes mad with grief, putting his simple desires under a dark light. (i will admit the burned grey was painful to go through because of this, seeing such a simple and optimistic character transform like that from sheer sorrow)

in a way, i would say that the damsel and the voice of the smitten are perfect for each other. a bit weird to everyone else, but to each other, nothing but pure and simple happiness.

and if you don't like that? of course you wouldn't like either of those characters. because you want more than that. most people want more than that. i'm personally fine either way.

but yeah, that's my take on the damsel (and by extension the voice of the smitten). a simple character. nothing more. will you embrace her simplicity, try to tear her down to the bone, or twist it into something horrifying?

either way, there are no wrong answers. and that's why i like this route. and this game.

[gerdy-sertorius]

The Definitive Damsel Analysis (if I do say so myself)

(Disclaimer: I know it’s absurdly long, and for that I apologize. I apparently am more unwilling to make cuts than I am to present subpar work. I’m working on it. Only editing I do for my autistic ramblings is copyediting, baby! Whoo! I will be updating this for the Pristine Cut once it comes out and we get even *more* Damsel. Obviously, as I’m sure you can tell from the length, I really like Damsel. There will be all of the bias. It will be great.)

(Author’s Note: For the love of the most high God, it took me like twenty read throughs for me to standardize what I wanted to call the Scorched Grey. Here is a brief list of all the terms I used to refer to her: Scorched Grey, Burned Grey, Burning Grey, Fire Grey, Damsel Chapter 3. Sometimes but not always preceded by “the” or “The”.)

Alright, ladies and gentlemen. I have oft made the statement on here that Damsel is the best route in the game, and this began as me trying to definitively prove that, by microscopically going through the route, I could establish exactly why, it would seem, that Damsel has objective superiority. It sorta… evolved, though, so instead I will be going relatively chronologically throughout, and trying to point out a couple things that all of you know about and maybe a couple things you don’t about the best character in the game. With that preamble out of the way, let’s begin with the goofy stuff, the grab bag if you will. 

This will certainly be more personal taste than anything else, but I do think there’s a lot of miscellaneous stuff that Damsel does better than the other chapters. For example, I am convinced that it has the third best music, behind Tower and her routes and then Thorn. I am genuinely obsessed with “It Was Always That Easy”. The basement has some *fantastic* art, and I think that really carries a chapter that is otherwise generally bland when it comes to actual visual activity. It’s really carried by its genuinely perfect dialogue. 

Overall, and most importantly, this chapter is the undisputed master of the idea of positive ambience. You know elevator music? How it’s there to artificially increase the cheeriness of an otherwise dreary moment, like a hotel hallway or, yanno, an elevator? Well, this is the chapter that does it perfectly. Everything is designed to make it “nicer” than it actually is. The Narrator even takes that into account when describing the basement. The sound design is fresh and relaxing, the music is uplifting, the Princess’s voice is obviously fantastically done, but also the Voice of the Smitten plays a large role in making it feel “good”. It’s something that exists in order to communicate exactly the feelings it wants the player to feel, which is all warm and fuzzy inside. But let’s move on to the actual content, shall we?

Damsel has *the* best Chapter One and it isn’t even close. Certainly not in the horror department, where I think Beast and Nightmare shine, or even in the whole characterization bit, where the award can only go to Spectre and the masterclass that is her Chapter One. But Damsel has something else to it. Damsel has tragedy, almost Shakespearean in nature. Nobody else has it (except Witch, to some extent, but nowhere close to the same level), nobody manages to reach that connection, there and then broken, to honestly feel for both Princess and Slayer. Allow me to paint a picture of a playthrough. 

You are on a path in the woods. At the end of that path is a cabin. In the basement of that cabin is a princess. You are here to slay her. But you don’t do that. That voice itching in the back of your skull, the one you quite literally call Hero, your moral compass even, raises some objections. You don’t want to kill *anybody*. That isn’t something you want to mark yourself with, especially not solely on the word of an individual you just met. For now, violence is a nonstarter.

You enter the cabin. And you hear her voice. And you see her. You even talk with her for a while. The moment is… hypnotizing. Despite the Narrator’s warning of manipulation, well, you cannot help but be manipulated. This is a genuinely nice, sweet, scared Princess who simply wants to be free. You have to save her. It is the right thing to do, it is the… only thing to do. Anything else marks you with the dirtiness of simply being unwilling to help someone in need when you had the full ability to. 

You go to get a key. Unsuccessful. The door locks. Even worse. The Narrator is moving from irritating to downright malicious, clearly enjoying recounting the lock of the door. Disgust for Him has been present since you entered the cabin, but it shifts to anger very quickly. That shift continues with full force as you attempt with what little ability you have to save the Princess, even if you don’t quite know how you will get out. The question does not last long. For the shift to anger shifts once more, to a sort of incomprehensible fury.

For the Narrator has crossed a line. Not only has he taken away any semblance of choice, not only has he raised your own knife against an innocent, someone who has been nothing but kind to you, but you are the one who must bear the shame for it. You are the only one who is doing the foul deed in any eyes but your own. Speaking of, the Princess’s eyes are filled with genuine happiness at the moment, as you are finally giving her the freedom she has yearned for such a  long time. Yet through no fault of your own, you raise the pristine blade, the one you refused to bring down to the basement in the first place. You scramble through the list of options, attempting to find anything that could provide a sliver of hope in the situation, anything without the grim finality of “Slay the Princess”. 

At last, you find one, and are able to bark out a warning to the Princess. That happiness in her eyes is shifted to a look of fear, one directed at you alone, one condemning you with such a sorrowful betrayal that it almost hurts to see. She begs for you to stop, and then she says something that almost calms the internal storm of the player: “Please, I know this isn’t you.” She recognizes that it isn’t us that betrayed her, she understands that we aren’t trying to do this, that we are flat-out trying to stop it. But the eye of that storm is passing, and soon.

And as she takes the blade, as she prepares to do what she must to live, that same look of tragic betrayal crosses her eyes, this time not directed at us, but at herself. She hates that this is her only option, the only way that she can live is to kill another, one with every intention of freeing her and no intention of harming her. And in the end, she simultaneously underscores the tragedy of the moment while confirming our perception that she could never be a threat to the world. As she plunges the blade into our chest, she has failed to even do the bare minimum of making our death painless, something that fills her with even more guilt, tears streaming down her cheeks as she tries and fails to end our own agony. The last thing we see of her are her endless cascade of both tears and apologies, as everything goes dark. 

This… is beautiful. A glorious tragedy, one with limited theming, simply two characters with emotions that feel natural. And, quite strangely, the first chapter has almost nothing to do with the second chapter. But it is still important. I’ll get to that later. Better things await now! For with the end of the tale of the Hero and the Princess, we have a new individual, everyone’s favorite buddy, the Voice of the Smitten. 

I am certain I do not need to underscore just how popular Smitten is. Easily the most fan favorite of the fan favorites, especially solidifying his place within that roster with the Kiss from a Thorn. He is jovial, passionate, he is Don Quixote, complete with the unlimited self-delusion that comes with the territory. There’s a reason people love him. Romantic in a game entitled a love story, the largest of personalities in a game stuffed with them, he is the storybook hero come to life in a game that has just as much reverence for storybook heroes as the deconstructions of them. In short, he is the visage of likability itself, with all the bombast that comes with that. Yet that is only from a wholly external perspective. 

For what I am certain I do need to underscore is just how sinister Smitten is. For all of his likability, the Smitten is also probably the single slimiest voice out of all of them with the possible exception of the Opportunist. This is not a new revelation – people have understood that since the beginning with his frankly disturbing behavior regarding the Princess. What is perhaps more interesting is his relationship with the player. For he is one of the two options that reflect the player at this point within the story. Either the player is trying to do the right thing and free an innocent, or they have somewhat… different motivations. 

The former reflects the Hero. Somewhat naive, in many routes somewhat bumbling even, but first and foremost focused on the external. That is, “how can I make a positive impact on the world around me?” As contradictory as it may seem to how the Hero is presented, it’s something of an intellectualist approach. The Hero is trying to find the best possible world and working towards that with all of his might. It is, one could say, devoid of emotion except that determination to change the world, to make it a better place. While the goal remains the same, the path to get there is fundamentally continuously being calculated. The Hero is your conscience, and as such he must *always* work overtime for that. 

The Smitten is not that. No, he has made no secret that he is the path of passion. Even when he is generally considered to be a better person, he declares that, “Whatever world would condemn two star-crossed lovers to a cycle of violence and despair isn’t a world worth saving.” His focus is internal, it is on ourself and our romance. There is no extensive study into what is the correct option, there is only what would assist in our relationship, which is somehow ordained by the universe. To put it into understandable terms, Hero is a modern hero while Smitten is a Romantic-era hero. 

There’s an important line when going down the stairs that I think speaks volumes about the type of player and playthrough currently occurring. That is “We can still do right by her without all this over-the-top fawning.” *That* is the line of demarcation between the route of the Hero and the route of the Smitten. If you decide to embrace or repudiate the Smitten at that point, I think the route is sealed. I am convinced that the game will continue on in a fixed way based on that philosophy. The point where you must, internally that is, decide if you are doing this out of a desire for what is right, or an infatuation with the Princess. 

Now, of course there isn’t anything wrong with taking the path of the Smitten, and it’s personally one of my top points in the game, but whether you admit it or not, you are long past morality being what decides your actions. That has come and gone. Now, the goal is to express the passion of the moment and delve into your romantic relationship with the Princess. I’ll be evaluating each of the routes differently, loosely organized with a focus on how it reacts to the player. After that, I’ll go on into theming of each route one by one and all that jazz.

The path of the Smitten first. The player embraces that he has been sent to save the Princess from her unjust and foul imprisonment above all else. So that is what he does. He marches downstairs, the blade being nothing but a passing afterthought as it is immediately dismissed out of hand. When it comes to the crucial point of “doing right by her”, the justification is made that two things can be done at once, that you can do this for her and do a little bit of fawning on the way. Doesn’t harm anyone.

And with that the basement arrives, and you see the Princess on the floor. She is perfect in all ways. There is nothing wrong with her. And that’s before you start talking to her. When you do begin talking to her, all of the kindness and innocence from Chapter 1 are magnified to the greatest degree possible. She can do no wrong. And, from a meta standpoint, there’s another thing that stands out – it is really, *really* funny. From everything the Smitten says to the “Then I didn’t end the world!” to the Narrator’s (a villain at this point) growing exasperation at your trust for the Princess, it endears you to the moment even more. 

Because it’s not only that it’s funny. It’s not only that the Princess is genuinely nice to you. It’s something more than that. Something that I am loath to talk about but will anyway. The Princess is incredibly – *sigh* – **cute** within this chapter. This is objective, with science to back me up, I’m sure. But she is specifically designed to be as heartwarming as possible, and every line makes her more and more into someone who should be saved by you, into, well, a Damsel. While it isn’t explicitly stated, throughout the progression of dialogue, the need to protect her becomes more pronounced. You were already primed to like the Princess, you already internally committed to a romantic future. But after stepping into the bear trap willingly, you cannot escape. 

And if you’re anything like me, you are perfectly fine with that. So you take in the moment, you rescue her from her chains and laugh at the way her hands slipped out of the chains and the Narrator’s comical anger at it. It’s all very feel-good, all cleanly written dialogue, and both the Princess and the Smitten are likable, they’re fun, and the Narrator is a fun enough villain for the Smitten and you to unite against. The Hero, if we’re being honest, barely registers, and if he does it’s usually as an extension to the Narrator, as a foil to yourself. And with her finally free, she embraces you, sealing the deal on her perfection. 

And after that, something else happens. The deconstruction begins. You want to see if her dialogue has any more of that saccharine present throughout the rest of the chapter, and are immediately rewarded with the “The princess closes her eyes in deep reflection” and the follow up joke. Hungry for more, you click through some more of the dialogue, but something begins to happen. She begins to… unwind. The Smitten seems to reciprocate in turn, to a lesser extent. In fact, she really starts to return to the horror that this chapter was a nice respite from. So you cut your losses, decide to leave with her, and everything returns to normal. Bathed in the glow of your future, you immediately forget about the deconstruction.

After that, you finally get out of the basement, get a genuinely great moment opening the door alongside the Princess, never think twice about clicking “You’re not doing that.” as fast as humanly possible, and finally await the door at the end of the cabin. You finally get your fairytale ending. The princess goes out into the world together with you. You brought her out. And then she is taken by the Shifting Mound in a way reminiscent of her dying. Even if this wasn’t your first playthrough, it still comes as a shock. For the most part, you were being that Romantic hero, living in the moment with your passion. The thought of this happening was gone entirely. This wasn’t supposed to happen. And it *hurts*. And the chapter is over. 

The route of the Hero has a different point of view on the whole situation. That’s not to say it’s not easy to get drawn in by the hilarious dialogue and sheer cuteness of the Princess – far from it. It is, after all, what drives the conflict within this. For the Hero, and the player that goes along his path, has one bit of information stand out. That the world ended after the Princess killed you. Now, you can naturally be skeptical of the information, but the Princess isn’t helping her case here. Entirely vague, entirely unwilling to mention anything about it. The only thing she seems to care about is getting on your good side. 

Now, you still want to save her. That much is clear. You still don’t take the knife in the beginning, and you saw her Chapter 1 incarnation. She is still a good person, kind and loving. But there are questions raised, important questions. Which is why not all Hero routers get the same ending. There is a conflict between how far you’re able to go before the risk of the world ending eclipses your distrust of the Narrator and your trust of the Princess. If the whole world really does end if she’s free, is it worth it? And as such you get to the major points of the Hero ending. 

The first is the Deconstructed ending. As you question the Princess, you desperately try to figure out what the best way to go forward is for you. And that starts with getting a straight answer from the Princess on what exactly she plans on doing. The operation… does not go well. As you try and push for anything, any sign that she isn’t going to end the world, the same rejoinder comes in, alongside a distorted track. “I just want to make you happy.” The Princess is not an individual anymore, and begins to change shape. But you are locked in with a horrified inability to look away, like one who sees a car accident. And with that, the Princess is a Princess no longer, and the Shifting Mound takes her away. 

There’s also the option of taking the Hero’s advice when confronted with the scenario: to leave. You don’t like what’s going on and you try to do whatever you can to undo the doing. Perhaps surprisingly, it works. And then you’re forced to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the Princess and *that* being the same individual. But you, not without a healthy dose of skepticism, still head upstairs alongside the Princess. In the end, you can’t bring yourself to kill her. Throughout it all, she still has been the beautifully endearing picture of innocence, if a questionable one, and especially with regards to the knife on the table, there is no way you can take it to her chest with no warning, especially after everything you did in the first Chapter. So you leave with her, and the “end of the world” really does come in one fell swoop with the call of the Shifting Mound. You can’t help but wonder if the decision you made was the right one, not really. Like, you still believe she didn’t deserve to die, but maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better ending.

So what if you did kill her? What happens when love *truly* melts away into skepticism. After the continuous question dodging and whatever the… other thing was, this is clearly not an ordinary Princess, it is not the same Princess that you tried to save at the beginning. There is only a sliver of her, a shadow of her former self. Slaying her, well, slaying her is probably doing her a favor. It might be doing the world a favor, too. Maybe she is an individual with malicious intent. And as you take the blade and plunge it into her chest, you instantly know you made the wrong decision. She does not oppose it. She simply lets you kill her with a single tear hanging in her eye, saying “I think this is what you want.” It’s meant to feel dirty and it does, even heartbreaking in the moment, although it is immediately counterbalanced by the effect of the Smitten killing you over it.

I won’t exactly go over Scorched Grey the same way, I think there’s generally only two frames of mind going into it, and that’s either the standard “Hero-Skeptic” framework that I’ll expand on later, or simply a completionist mindset. Plus, it’s technically not The Damsel. Plus I’m lazy. But this is the point where I will try to expand on the theming of each and every route and mindset to go through within the Chapter, and that *will* include the Scorched Grey theming. 

It’s made quite clear from the chapter that one of the primary themes is objectification, the making of the Princess into nothing more than a vehicle to live one’s fantasy into. The taking of an individual and making them into an it. The destruction of humanity by your own desire, and what that says about your desires in the first place. Ironically, this is merely one fourth wall away from the rest of the Princesses, each of them being a piece of fiction that many simply engage with *because* they are an object, but with the Damsel it is directly nodded to within the narrative. One meta-layer is peeled back, if you will. 

Nothing hammers this more home than the entirely jarring line that escapes the Shifting Mound’s lips when you ask about the vessel she holds. Unlike the rest of the fragments, which are all given an indication that they have been fulfilled after the Shifting Mound takes them, the only note she has to say is that the Damsel has “served her purpose”. There is nothing that she wished for, as anyone who has obtained the deconstructed ending can attest to. But even in the more standard runs, she is simply a tool to be used and discarded. And there are three general reactions to this line. 

The first is the hardcore Smitten route’s preferred choice, denial. “The Princess was far more than an object, she had character, she had kindness, she had motivations from the beginning! The narrative is what is wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the Princess. She. Is. Perfect. Not just from a narrative standpoint but a metanarrative one as well. She has depth, she *is* a character.” All in the hopes that if they insist on it enough, it will become true. The Damsel was not designed to be viewed in a vacuum. There are themes that run through her character, and including negative ones, and the denial of them is a far truer denial of the character than any sort of objectification could ever be. 

Then the more moderate Smitten routers get a different response. A slap in the face. They did all of this, they had fun, they laughed with her, they cried when she was taken. They were connected to her, they had a real connection to what she was. One could even accuse them of… loving her. They honest to goodness cared about this Princess, they were invested in her story. Yet, in the end, they also formed her around themselves. They “molded her to love you”. As much as they loved the Princess, that was only because they cut out a piece of the Shifting Mound that they *could* love, a caricature of her true nature. They still took an individual, and despite truly loving her, made her into something that she was not so they could do that very thing. She is not a person. She is a plot device, an individual made to love and be loved with nothing beyond that. She is an object. 

Lastly, those who went on the route of the Hero get that same slap in the face, that selfsame bucket of water poured over their heads, but in a different way. They didn’t try to objectify her. They didn’t want anything of the sort. All they wanted to do was the right thing. Right? Yet even in that desire to do the right thing, they still get that same chilling text from the Shifting Mound. They have built an individual just like those who went on the route of the Smitten. Just a different one. Not one who was built around your “glorious romance”, but rather one built around something of a glorious Romance. The need to be a Hero. The desire to do what was right, to save an unjustly imprisoned Princess. The Princess became a plot device in the end anyway, just one that needed to be saved rather than one who needed to be loved. 

I want to continue off of that. The player is trying to do nothing more than the right thing, he is simply doing what a Hero should. And that determination to do what is right leads to him getting impacted the most by that line in the ending, the line that implies that whatever right he was doing, he was still being driven by selfishness, by that need to be a Hero. That hits the player right within where it hurts, it almost could be said to strike at the one emotional vulnerability of them. To have your hard work, your pain, your desire for what is right to be considered nothing more than the delusions of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills in order to fight giants, just as lost as Smitten, that doesn’t feel too great. It almost minimizes your struggle, and it is genius. You play as a Hero because you want to feel like a Hero, not because the morality of this world means anything to you. It is stripping that meta-layer down one by one.

But objectification is not the only theme present. While it may seem like something of a potpourri topic to throw in, earlier on the server we were talking about the Damsel in particular’s perceptiveness with regards to perception. When the door shuts and locks, it is the first and only time the Princess gets visibly **negative** in any way during the entirety of the Chapter. Even when you kill her, she still does so with nary a frown on her face. Even as a tear rolls down her cheek, she still smiles. But not at the door. The narration points out quite clearly that she frowns. This is, I reiterate, the only thing that happens. And her response is not “we’re stuck down here”, it is not “I’m unable to leave now”. 

What it is happens to be “that’s not supposed to happen”. She recognizes the construct in a way very few allude to within the game. Adding onto that note, within the Scorched Grey chapter, she (correctly) determines the very nature of the construct and that inherent “cycle of violence and despair” inherent to it, even (correctly) determining that the only way to leave was to annihilate that very construct. This is shown even clearer at the other major event at the door. When you ask if the Princess can open the door, the sole question she throws back at you is “Do you think I can?”, and after a response in the affirmative, “Then I can”. In the end, it is quite clear that she is, *heavily* ironically, one of the more aware characters in the game with regards to your circumstance. 

While speaking of the Scorched Grey, I think this route also exemplifies another major theme – the nature of the Princess as a being of perception. All routes exemplify one facet of the Shifting Mound: Spectre represents the gravity of her, Tower her divinity, Prisoner the very incarnation in and of itself of her within the construct, and so on. Damsel has something different, though, and that is that she’s just a slippery little fella. Far more than anybody else, Damsel changes throughout her chapters, in ways more pronounced than anybody else. The Shifting Mound declares that we “molded her to love you”, as I quoted previously. That molding takes stage front and center throughout all of our interactions with her. 

The most obvious example is her deconstruction, which when her sole true motivation (to leave) is discarded, she begins to break down, unable to offer to the player anything beyond the only desire every other Princess has. With the compulsive need to love the player, etched into her core, there is nothing she can do other than try to add to that love, losing herself within the process. But that is not the only time she changes. Because she is willing to give up that freedom in, well, a heartbeat. Attempting to kill her does not lead to any sort of resistance from her. The one goal she had, staying alive and winning her freedom, is out the window despite being (questionably) willing to kill for it in the last chapter. Now, throughout the Scorched Grey, it’s made clear that she did not, in fact, want to die, that she just wanted to be free together, but the complete unwillingness to save her own life is a stark contrast to the first chapter. 

In fact, that perpetually changing nature alongside her being so objectified means that it’s really, *really* hard to figure out her true character. There is very little in her that does not change and very little remaining that isn’t specifically put there by you. She is an eel, wriggling out of your grasp and impossible to pin down, in a large way like the Shifting Mound herself. But… for the most part, there are two facets to her character beyond the already listed themes. And a sharp divide between them. 

Chapter One Damsel and Chapter Two Damsel are not the same person. That’s usually true for most of them, but they also usually have some semblance of similarity between their counterparts. The only exceptions I can think off the top of my head are Spectre and *maaybe* Stranger if you want to count that. The rest of them act as exaggerated versions of the existing individuals shown. Chapter One Adversary likes fights. Chapter Two Adversary likes fights. Chapter One Witch is built on the back of distrust. Chapter Two Witch is built on the back of distrust. Everything lines up nicely. 

That is not the case for the Damsel. The only thing that you can say with both of them is that they are nice and do not want to hurt you. The Chapter One incarnation (henceforth Princess) is a tragedy of a character that doesn’t want to kill you but still must to secure her own life and freedom against a renegade puppeting you. The Chapter Two incarnation (henceforth Damsel) is a Horror-”Feel-Good”-Comedic-Tragic character that shows nothing about the emotional anguish she went through in chapter one. I love both of them, but they have an unmatched disconnect. And I think that sort of adds to the character. Now, there is absolutely a benefit from an emotional through-line (there’s a reason Thorn is my second-favorite chapter), but in this case, only brief touches to the beginning enhance the story. 

The most striking thing is the sense of comedic horror that comes when Damsel just completely ignores any expected trauma from the Princess’s emotional destruction. It, depending on the route you take, either makes you love her character more and more as the humor begins to entrap you, or it begins the process of getting the player unnerved, exactly like the developers wanted. It is a key dividing point in the mindset of the player and the route that they have chosen. The Damsel says nothing about what happened, heck, she barely acknowledges it except to indicate that “You died!” 

Secondly, it sets up Damsel as a sympathetic figure while still allowing her to begin establishing herself. Without the setup from the Princess, the player has no idea how to view Damsel, potentially even seeing her as a less on-the-nose Razor, with her comedically hiding her sinister intentions. The Princess allows the player to begin on a note that the Princess is *actually* friendly rather than simply pretending to be so. At the same time, it’s divorced enough that apart from that frame of reference at the beginning, Damsel is still allowed to shine within her own character. 

Lastly, and most importantly, it sets her up for the Scorched Grey. The guilt at causing the death of an innocent and the belief that you would be unable to cause the death of an innocent yourself leads her to blame the construct and attempt to bring it down, which seals your fate in the third Damsel chapter, the only time where the two chapters meet in a beautiful climax of Passion going too far and causing pain, in attempt of running away from that very thing, morphing into something that not even the Smitten is able to remain devoted to in an awful tragedy of love being not enough in the end. 

Wait, wait, wait. Did I hear “the end” being spoken? At this time of year? Localized entirely within this essay? Well then, it’s time to talk about what puts this saga at pure perfection, shall we? I probably could just use the awesome power of Ctrl + V to get the desired effect, but I still do want to offer my narration, so I’ll compromise and do a bit of both. “Your lover drives a stake into your body. And another. And another. And another. And another. Do I miss your heart because I cannot stand to see it go? But the stakes meant nothing to you. You had a desire, and you set that desire free, you lifting me and me lifting you, forever and ever and ever, consumed by true belief, there was nothing that could hold us back.” 

Do I even need to explain why that’s so good? Definitively the best poem in the end, it isn’t even close, especially when coupled with Ms. Goodnight’s awe-inspiring delivery. Did I say that the Scorched Grey was the perfect synthesis of the Princess and the Damsel? I was lying. This is. Every word so lovingly placed, the language sounds like it comes from the pen of God Himself. It is emotionally resonant, the art is beautiful, I have not run into such a short piece of dialogue that outdoes it. Gonna be honest, mostly just wrote up this essay to gush about it. Even now, it is considered by most everyone to be one of the best lines of dialogue in a game filled with magnificent ones. 

And the other one, that of the Scorched Grey. It’s simpler, ironically. “I kill you. You kill me. Back and forth we go, faster and faster and faster. I kill you. You kill me. Hollow eyes watch from the dry corners of a memory. A home built on all of the futures that were supposed to be, preserved until the moment of reunion. The fire of the heart sets it all ablaze. I kill you and me.”

This, this right here is one of the most slept on ending poems and it’s not even funny. So fantastic at expressing the heartbreak inherent to the Scorched Grey’s character. I don’t know how you can see the line “A home built on all the futures that were supposed to be”, especially with the Scorched Grey dead and charring in a wedding gown, and not feel *something*. It’s not as good as the standard Damsel stuff, but then again, nothing is. It’s still deserving of more praise than it currently receives, and one of my top three ending poems of all time, only edged out by Prisoner. Gosh, this game belongs in a museum. 

Seems I need to debunk some stuff that happens to get a lot of traction regarding those who speculate on Damsel, too. First of all, her character motivation is not guilt nor gratitude. That sort of thing works incredibly well in fanworks, and I’m happy to see it ~~because that means I get to see Damsel in a fanwork~~. It has little to no backing within canon. Damsel is a chapter about the only motivations for the Princess being those put in place by the objectification of the player. There is nothing regarding anything beyond that, and it detracts from the existing, well-elucidated themes that are actually within the chapter. The only sort of substance to them is both Chapter 1 Princess and Scorched Grey indicating guilt for killing you, but that is almost entirely repudiated within the actual Chapter 2. 

Speaking of the Scorched Grey, another thing I saw somewhat extensively is that you somehow “taught her” that killing is the way to love one another, and that’s why she kills you in Chapter 3, and I honestly do not know how that gained any traction at all. It’s pretty clear that she views all the death as a pretty terrible and messed up thing and only kills the two of you to escape the cycle of death. It’s spoken of as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I am genuinely confused on how this got started, because it really just… opposes the main *in-narrative* themes of the Chapter??? Like, you don’t even have to analyze it, it’s just within the text, plain and simple. 

Anyway, I deeply apologize for the length of this once again, look forward to an appendix when Pristine Cut comes out. I’ve already played it because my uncle works at Black Tabby, but I don’t want to spoil it for you gents. If my opinions change massively after playing through the new update from today, I will change that too. Anyway, Damsel is the best character, literally does not do a single thing wrong within any of her chapters, has definitively the best Shifty stuff, and you should invest in her. As more people vocally become willing to throw money at anything related to Damsel, the likelier it is that we get Damsel merch. I need it so badly. Please. Anyway, if anything stands out to you or you disagree, I am begging you to tell me to get my act together and explain what I said wrong, so do that. Also please. 

[gerdy-sertorius]

Alright, Kris's gender. Never a more divisive argument within the fandom in the least, nothing so fond of devolving into a blazing fury of ad hominems. The general consensus among the fans of the game is that Kris is clearly and canonically nonbinary. They are referred to with exclusively they/them pronouns and has had zero signs of gender other than that. With that, the retort from the opposition camp is generally that he (and it is always "he") is supposed to be a self-insert for the player, in that we can relate to him more. After that usually comes the devastating rebuttal in that they are not mean to be a self-insert, as that would directly contradict what looks like it is going to be the main theme of the game -- the freedom that they lack. At that point, the argument is generally over, with one or both sides expanding on their arguments no more than repeating their initial theses. My goal is to explain my opinion on the matter, and, more importantly, provide my reasons for believing that it may well play more of a role than we thought before. It is quite clear that within the lore framework of the world, Kris is non-binary, or at the very least goes by they/them pronouns. We never seem to disagree upon that point. Where the heated arguments begin is the purpose. Does Kris use they/them because it is part of their character, and as such using anything else is misgendering? Or is it rather that it's done for a purely meta reason, to make them easier for SI purposes? In that case, using alternate pronouns is not only available, it's encouraged. Despite everything, I would say that I fall into the latter camp. For now. For now. For now. Let me see if I can't explain why.

I am a massive proponent of the "Spookydood" school of thought in that the game is made for casual players first and the mega-fans second. And, quite frankly, the casual players aren't going to notice that Kris is referred to solely by they/them. It's not something that's made a big deal out of, not in the least. And for the vast majority of them who do notice, they're going to default to the SI theory. Not because they feel like misgendering is BASED and TRAD, but rather because they haven't spent over twelve thousand hours of their life studying this sort of thing, intricately going into every single detail of the dialogue. That is, they're going to assume that Kris is whatever gender they want Kris to be. Like a player. Like someone who is in control of this world, like someone who is Kris. Yes, it's clear that Kris is their own character, that such freedom is important. But throughout it all, with the exception of a few moments, that's within the subtext. It's not something the game is hammering you in the face with. To the casual player, the major theme of the story is the beauty inherent in escapism, of Kris and Susie, two disliked individuals otherwise, finding a world where they're liked, where they don't have to worry about real life. The freedom theme is in the background completely.

Yet that freedom theme is there, and in all likelihood will be the most important theme in the story. It's the great Fox twist, like the Flowey moment in genocide where he perfectly mirrors your own actions. So there is shown a divide for Kris. One that the fans, the theorists will speculate on, will hype around, will dive into the mysteries of the chapter. But once again, for the casual fan, it isn't magnified, seen as more important than the central conceit, that being how much these characters love exploring Dark Worlds and meeting all of the wondrous and wacky personalities within. But insisting upon they/them pronouns, refusing to accept anything else, all that does is sharpen the divide between Player and Kris. It doesn't matter that Kris is an SI. It matters that they're perceived as one, for the increased effect of those who haven't played every single fangame under the sun. And that is where the issue lies. Now, this is not in any way meant to hurt non-binary representation. If you want to take Kris and make him a symbol of that movement, go for it. Relate to them, engage with all that. Once again, I will stand by the idea that they're canonically non-binary and as such can be that icon if you so choose to relate to them. Representation is important, I understand how nice it feels to have that. But insisting on that only takes away the payoff when it is eventually made clear as crystal within the game that they are their own human being. And I do think that Fox is going to take some steps to explore Kris having their own gender within the coming story, as a way to show the deepening divide between Kris and player that I'm sure will be something building throughout the story.

Now, to figure out what role that plays in the story. I actually think that it will exist as a major plot point and hold a dual purpose within the story. But let's not get carried away. First, I must justify why I believe it would exist as such a plot point. *Ahem*. I believe that it will be a major event in the story because... it would be really cool. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Now I can get to the fun part. In all seriousness, I do think that it has been set up to at least a minor extent, and my Toby-addled brain cannot handle a minor hint as anything but super huge lore complications. So allow me to begin. Note: I will be rehashing old ground here, forgive me. I wrote this section like a week later. 

As I alluded to in the above section, I think that one of its primary purposes will be to serve as a way to divide Kris and the character. Presumably, the player will be referring to Kris using whatever pronouns they use, because Kris is the protagonist without a clear gender, a silent one at that. There's no reason not to establish one's own framework upon them. That's the point of escapism, right? That's the theme of the game, right? Losing oneself in another world, and all that. By playing into the self-insert main character, we are engaging with the themes of the story, we are doing what the game wants us to do! And we would be right. We are doing *exactly* what Toby wants us to do. We are playing right into his hands. And then the bait and switch that has been built up is complete, the little twitches of the carpet becoming a full on rug pull. 

For Kris will show themselves as their own character, with not just their own personality, their own thoughts, their own desires, but also their own *identity*. In the truest sense of the phrase, they are them. You have nothing to do with that, you are an imposing force from another world, a hijacker. Who knows, you could be doing it for a good reason, for preventing the Roaring against a Knight who would attempt to end the world. You could just be a trespasser who can get away with it because you are above the laws of this world, you could be the one who really ends the world. But they are their own character nonetheless, and you are a foreign body, nay, *in* a foreign body. 

And with that sense of identity, with that inevitable "found self", there needs to be a wedge to actually show a difference between us and Kris. So I do think the pronouns are going to accomplish that. Whatever gender you put upon Kris, what you thought to be their self because it was *yourself*, that is not going to continue with  Kris, resentful and angry, finally free of your grasp. And one of the first things they are going to do is to declare their own self, one that you have not been able to erase. They have their own gender, diametrically opposed to the idea that you can change who they *are*. They are not you, they want absolutely nothing to do with you, you are simply standing in their way to freedom. And so they drive that wedge in between themselves and you, they make sure that you fully understand that there is not one, but two parties at play. 

And the thing is, that idea of a scene is quite flexible. It can be triumphant, a broken teenager finally free and able to express themself for the first time in what feels like forever. It can be sinister, Kris finally capable of going on these grand adventures once and forever with no consequence to the fate of the rest of the world. It can be bittersweet, Kris understanding that you helped them do whatever grand task needed to be done, but never able to forgive you for your intrusion. But Kris will declare their freedom in a fundamentally climactic way, and I believe that reference to their gender is entirely the final crash into the senses of the player, denying any semblance of projection onto Kris the player had. 

But that is not in any way groundbreaking. It’s pretty clear since my opening that such a sort of thing is what I always intended to expound upon. It’s been a theory in at the very least niche circles of the community for a while, although I like to think I put my own unique spin upon it. No, no, that is not the meat and potatoes of this (it is, but I need a third act twist). I have never seen anybody bring this up with regards to the theorization of a certain character (some might even call him the best one) that provides insight into the Kris gender paradigm. 

I am, of course, talking about Ralsei, the Prince of the Dark. He is viewed by the vast majority of the community to be Kris’s ideal self, the personification of Kris’s desire to be someone better, someone very similar, in fact to his brother. But I don’t want to latch onto the brother thing. All that stuff, the family drama, it doesn’t sell anymore. We all understand it, heard it a thousand times, we want something fresh. Something juicy. And I believe I may have just the thing. What is more important is that Ralsei is who Kris wishes to be. Once again, I am hammering just how mainstream a point this is within the community. You will hardly find a soul who disagrees. 

Yet there’s something curious about that, and I’m sure you’ve figured out what I’m talking about by now. And that is that while Kris exclusively uses they/them pronouns throughout the game, Ralsei does not. In fact, he is solely referred to as masculine by everything in the game. He is the Prince of the Dark, he is constantly using male pronouns. Despite what the fandom of 2018 would like you to believe, Ralsei is completely and totally male. And if he truly is Kris’s idealized version of themself, that raises a metric ton (notionally, of course, I would never use the metric system) of questions. Most importantly, wouldn’t it be *so* funny if Kris’s arc at the end of the game does in fact make him male in line with what he truly wishes he could be, and all of the radical folks who get after you for misgendering Kris were actually doing the very thing they set out not to do? So much tragic irony, it would be the best thing to happen to the fandom since the release of Yellow. …I’m joking, of course. I’m not, Toby, please make this a reality.

But that leads me to an interesting conundrum. Is Kris attempting to sequester their feelings on being male because they don’t feel comfortable exploring their own gender? Or is it that Ralsei, this idealized version of himself, one so similar to the golden child Asriel, an unattainable goal? Is Kris fantasizing that he could, in the end, be male, wishing for it so, but unable to change his own identity? Despite my inherent need for the former, I will admit that the latter is likely a more compelling story, so I’ll be focusing on exploring it here. I’ll note that this is very similar to the feelings a lot of LGBT folks I know have gone through, and I have no doubt that this is the case for a larger sample size than that. Heavens knows that in a fandom as LGBT heavy as this one it could touch at least some sort of nerve. 

Ralsei is kind to Kris, loving, even to a dangerous degree. Entirely willing to be stepped upon in service of Kris’s happiness, quite literally. That is combined with a consistent refusal to engage with negative emotions, to simply avoid them. What happens when you combine that with a teenager going through massive amounts of trauma from their very will being ripped from them, and as good a reason as any to build resentment? Ralsei is the very culmination of everything Kris cannot be. Ralsei is a constant reminder of Kris’s failure as a citizen to Hometown, as a child to the family that took them in out of pure kindness. Ralsei is a broken mirror to Kris, something that only shows how out of place Kris is, something that only shows Kris the wretched state they are in. 

Kris is already clearly uncomfortable with Ralsei as is, and that is throughout the exhilaration that they already feel while going through the Dark Worlds, while having the time of his life with his best friend. What happens when that begins to break down, when right down to his gender, Ralsei is the ultimate unattainable goal. Not only that, but Kris directly does the one thing Ralsei gets deeply serious about and starts a new dark fountain. There is no turning back from that. Kris not only failed his own life, but he also failed his idea of literal perfection. 

I know I got sidetracked, but you’ll note in both of these, the gender is only in service of other themes. I think it will be important, absolutely. But I think that Toby’s a good enough writer that he won’t make it cringeworthy, that he’ll make sure to keep the themes sincere while still maintaining their relative value. Everything is in service of everything, and I hope the same goes for Kris’s gender and its consequences.