#don Quixote

[quinnonimp]

dont got anything good to post for christmas soooo ill throw some small on-theme doodles

[blobcatthe1st]

MWAH!

[sharoo]

The Flower-Seeker, the Robot, and the City without Faith

It's me again emerging from my mole's burrow to leave a thematic analysis piece and then bury myself again for a few more months.

Spoilers for Canto 7

CW for mentions of suicidal ideation and some death talk

Let's talk about Bari and her role in the world of Projmoon.

I think everyone who experienced LoR before Limbus was in the same camp as me upon the reveal of Bari.

Which is to say:

The chat was not normal.

But now I've had some time to cool off and actually think and Bari's position in her world is honestly kind of fascinating, especially as a take on immortal characters.

Because first and foremost, Bari has to be ancient. In a meta sense, sprites of the Book Hunter, as we knew her back then, date back all the way to Lobcorp. In universe meanwhile, she was already a long time traveller before she met Don Quixote senior and Sancho. She was there when the Associations were being established and competing for popularity. That was, on the low end, several hundred years ago. We don't know how long it took to construct La Manchaland, or how long that operated before everything fell apart and Quixote Senior sealed everyone away for 200 years.

All through this, Bari hasn't aged a day. My guess is that it's possibly thanks to the river of immortality Xichun mentions, or something else found outside the City.

And this is where we hit one of my favourite tropes - immortals passing time.

1. Remember that you will not die

One of the most interesting things to consider in fiction is the question of "What would you do if you were immortal? You'd have infinite time to do anything you desired - to travel, learn, rest. What would you do?"

Very often, humans who undergo this process in stories eventually begin to stagnate. They end up not doing anything, because internal motivation disappears. This is understandable, because, to get a little memento mori for a moment here, death is the biggest motivator we humans have - it's our time limit. You only get X amount of time to enjoy certain things, to achieve certain goals, so that at the tail end of it you'll be able to reminisce and hopefully smile before you expire. Add to it that age itself limits us, be it youth not allowing us independence or old age slowing us down and limiting us with weakness, and you can see how we are driven, at least in theory, to live life fully as long as we can.

To lose that - the constant dread of your body slowly, but surely, progressing towards failure, breaking down little by little, is to rob us of our inherent motivator. It is a very large part of being a human, really. A lot of our lives and cultures circle around this immutable fact that we don't last, and our questions regarding the why and the what comes after. Religion exists to answer most of those questions.

So... what does one do when they lose that, and become immortal without purpose?

They seek another. Or they disappear.

2. Faith (A Ruina tangent)

Before I get to Bari, it's important to examine her debut game, and the one person she interacts with (and believe me I have thoughts about it).

So, Angela. Our most beloved not-human with all the characteristics of humanity except a lifespan, and a perfect example of an immortal trying to pass time.

LoR goes to great lengths to show her desperation going back all the way to Lobcorp. It shows, quite clearly, first her inability to cope with the circumstances Ayin stuck her in, followed by her resignation to fate and a silent wish for the end. I will not mince words, Angela reads to me back then as silently suicidal, in that she's given up on any other solution to her pain but the conclusion of the play. Then, and only then, was she to be allowed to rest. She had no say in when the play would end so she could only hope it eventually would.

She yearned for death. But then, something changed. Netzach points out that indeed, though she wished for the end, she truly wanted to live. To exist, to escape her prison and to finally know this world besides the pain. That desire gave her enough humanity to manifest her own EGO.

All with the purpose of seeking the One Book that'd give her humanity, and, in her eyes, make her finally complete and able to live in happiness.

The most important part of LoR for this analysis is the Floor of Religion, and Hokma's view of faith. Honestly I'd recommend watching through all of these because it's so poignant. Or better yet, watch Hydrojoy's Angela video (the fact they've got so few subscribers with this level of analysis is a crime honestly).

Some lines I want to focus on, though, are these:

Things without purpose shall disappear. People without purpose will similarly expire.

Angela admits to herself that she doesn't know what she's doing. She's simply chasing some sort of meaning - revenge, freedom from her robotic condition, power, knowledge, anything that'll give her fulfilment.

And in the forgiveness route, she finally finds that in companionship of Roland and, I'd like to think, the Librarians.

But if she doesn't forgive, she ends up losing any purpose besides continuous revenge. There is no companionship when the Librarians turn on her for betraying them. There's no use in being human when it doesn't benefit her mission, and frankly just makes it harder because it makes her easier to harm. There's no point leaving the library when outside will not welcome her, it's much safer to stay inside forever.

There is no point to anything. Angela's revenge is hollow, really - Ayin is dead and no amount of sticking it to him will earn a response from a dead guy.

Enter the Book Hunter.

I will be honest in saying I don't fully understand what they both mean, with them speaking in sort of vague terms. It sounds like Bari was employed by Angela to kill other Book Hunters (perhaps in exchange for knowledge?).

What matters to me, though, are the final lines - the recognition of what Angela is and delivering death to the last librarian.

3. The Scholar of Meaning and the Reaper of the Meaningless

As the Limbus wiki points out, Bari is likely named after a Korean funerary goddess who sought both a healing river and a flower of immortality. But this influence strikes me especially in the context of her being an immortal who meets a lot of other (and often younger) immortals.

She's wise to the fact that all things need meaning to exist. They need an ambition, a wish, something to strive for.

So she attempts to give it to them.

This is shown not just explicitly with Quixote senior, but also with Quixote junior after Sancho gives up her memory, itself a form of death Bari guides her to. For 200 years, Bari made sure to visit Don Quixote and leave her letters so that this person who was once a dear friend may dream, may have meaning and a purpose in her immortal life.

Because you need something to drive you in life, be it becoming a legendary fixer, creating a place where Bloodfiends can live in peace with humans, or searching for a flower which grew from the mysterious rivers flowing through your world.

And if you have lost purpose and can no longer find one, if she cannot save you from that void, she will be there to put you out of your misery, for a meaningless eternity is its own sort of hell, and cruelty it perpetuates is nothing but needless.

In her own words - you must pursue your dream, even if it means wagering your life in the chase.

I think Bari's view of the Bloodfiends' illness and what Carmen describes as the disease humanity could be similar if not the same thing. Roland says in Floor of Religion's first episode that the City has no established religion - people focus on their immediate survival, suffering is everpresent, and the more organised religious-seeming groups are cults trying to exploit you.

The City has lost its purpose. People do not dream, or are not allowed to for long because those dreams are swiftly quashed. Carmen offers an out to suffering through becoming so unapologetically yourself you gain the power to enact your will on the world, for better or worse.

Bari seeks, I think, to give the same, but through simple companionship. Not cohersion, not magic, but through the same thing that has given so many people across this franchise meaning - having a friend to be there for you as you look for what drives you. Because to be alone in meaninglessness is the most cruel and difficult thing. I wonder if she knows that from experience...

I really hope we get more of Bari in the future so I can see if my analysis is more fanfiction than truth but with just the bits we have I have to say she's one of my favourite secondary characters in Limbus.

[birdfvcker]

me when the

[therealsanchopanza]

Is it kind of weird being around Hong Lu when he has his Fanghunter ID on? Like- has he ever tried to jump you? Or have bits of his ID lingered and he offhandedly said something kinda worrying like wanting to give you a bath or anything similar-

I don’t think his fanghunter ID realizes I’m a bloodfiend. Fortunately Dante hasn’t put his fanghunt ID with mine or any of my family’s IDs. I think they realize that while they can get away with tricking the N corp IDs into thinking their clock isn’t a prosthetic, it’s a bit harder with IDs that are obviously bloodfiends being paired with bloodfiend hunters.

[foundfamilynonsense]

Had a dream where mini golf was added to the Olympics. And one of the Olympic mini golf athletes lost the gold because she hit the windmill.

And she tweets with a picture of the windmill and the caption “bout to go through my Don Quixote phase” and honestly I think that’s the funniest thing my brain has ever come up with.

[apricops]

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

[hawyermota]

[memesonnets]

Hi my name is Don Quixote of La Mancha the Knight of the Rueful Figure and I have a rueful figure (that's how I got my name) with purple bruised ribs and tall stature and gaunt features and hair turning gray and a rather hooked aquiline nose and large black drooping mustaches and a lot of people tell me I look like Amadís of Gaul (AN: if u don’t know who he is begone!). I’m not related to Lady Oriana but I wish I was because she’s an incomparable flowering beauty. I’m a knight errant but some of my teeth and grinders are missing. I have long lank limbs. I’m also a defender of damsels, protector of orphans, succourer of the needy, righter of wrongs, undoer of injustice, and I wander a magic countryside called the mountains of Spain where I’m in my first year of knighthood (I’m forty-nine). I’m a gentleman (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly armor. I love my great-grandfather's forgotten corner of the house and I cobble together all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a doublet of fine cloth with matching shoes and velvet breeches and a helmet, morion, visor, breastplate and backpiece. I was riding outside La Mancha. It was early morning so the rays of the sun fell obliquely and the heat did not distress me, which I was very happy about. A lot of giants stared at me. I put up my pasteboard visor at them.

[alleesaur]

merry go round and round and round

[thelostpretzel]

bitch i mean beach volleyball

[detectiphoenix]

Bari gave him a cellphone (awful decision) . this is high effort shitposting

[luv4lain]

really fast quixote

[quinnonimp]

moooooooore donqui on mspaint from when i was playing hells chicken ^_^

[birdfvcker]

mwehehehhw

[blodornmee]

sancho! when i catch you sancho!......