#i still have a few posts about babel (and then a few about ep14) I need to do... they will be forthcoming...

[oltammefru]

I think the thing that gets me the most about Kal'tsit and Theresa in Babel is like.

Theresa is a character who is alluded to in previous story and depicted as someone who is incredibly kind and hopeful and idealistic, the ideological foundation for the goals of Rhodes Island. At the same time, underneath this, she has such a sense of sorrow and despair to her, that her own fate and impending death is inescapable, that her illness is terminal, that she is the sacrifice atop which the future will be built, that she is the soil that nourishes the flowers of the future but will never get to see them bloom, that she is the thing that must be destroyed to build a ladder.

There's this posthumous conversation between them that makes me deeply abnormal:

(Theresa, in her letter to Kal'tsit)

(Kal'tsit in her 3rd file)

Kal'tsit understands all this, all of Theresa's sorrow, her despair that she is fated to die, her sorrow that she won't be there to watch over Amiya as she grows up, that when the day that all on this land will be able to rest in peaceful slumber, she won't be there to see it. Almost everything Kal'tsit does in the aftermath of Theresa's death is influenced by this context, and to her, it is her way of fulfilling her promises to Theresa the only way she can.

"I will be there for Amiya and guide her and nurture her and witness her growing up for you, because you can't. I will make sure all that you suffered and fought and lived and died for aren't in vain, that your ideals live on. I will prove to you that Oripathy isn't terminal, that no one should have to undergo the same despair and resignment to fate that you need. If you ever despair or are ever in doubt, I will be there to remind you. And when the day comes that your dreams are made reality and all of Terra can rest in peaceful slumber, I will be there to witness it for you."