#jabber was immortal and light TRIED and FAILED to unmake him

[bestworstcase]

i do think the key to how things will fall out regarding death on remnant is the jabberwalker, bc like

the brothers created death by creating him

the god of light, fearing they had disrupted the balance, tried to get rid of him. the god of darkness refused to countenance this, and they fought about it.

they leave the ever after. jabber remains, implying one of three possibilities: 1. dark ‘won’ the argument and both brothers agreed to let jabber live, 2. dark recreated jabber one last time in secret before they left, or 3. jabber came back later a la modern humans. given light’s general inflexibility my inclination is 2 or 3.

in any case the tree seems to accept jabber as part of the ever after and the presence of his figurine on the blacksmith’s worktable implies that he will continue to exist in some form.

during the creation of remnant, the brothers agree that death will be permanent. their reasons are not yet fully clear, but light was the only one concerned about enforcing this rule; i think it is almost certainly a rule that originated with the god of light.

“but balance cannot be restored by force or calculation; true balance finds its own equilibrium”

force = destroying jabber. calculation = creating a new world with permadeath.

—

the god of light conceives of balance as a fragile order that must be meticulously maintained or else fall apart: his purpose, as he sees it, is to maintain order. everything he does comes from this. he cannot tolerate change because he lives in abject fear of ‘disrupting the balance’ again—as he believes they have already done once, by creating jabber.

so there is a certain narrative equivalency being drawn here between removing jabber and making death permanent for remnant. both decisions are predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of what balance is.

thus the problem of death is not that it exists, per se. the problem is that death is the locus of light’s anxiety about change.

he first attempts to fix the ‘problem’ by getting rid of jabber, eliminating death. but he can’t, because dark won’t let him. so plan b is to leave the ever after and create a new world where death is part of the design—which isn’t contradictory at all if the intention is to prevent disruption of the existing order.

and something to keep in mind here is that 1. the cat and the jabberwalker were both deathless and unable to ascend, and 2. the brothers created death by mistake. for light these are crucial factors that must be accounted for in the new design. the only way to ensure that the disruptive introduction of death can never happen again is to include death from the start, transforming the accident into a deliberate choice.

which is all well and good except for one teeny, tiny wrinkle: for humans, death is not actually annihilative. they don’t simply cease to exist when they die.

i think it’s extremely likely that wasn’t supposed to happen. in a system where death is final and forever, spiritually immortal humans pose an obvious risk of disruption—and the ‘afterlife’ is evidently just permanent unconscious stasis, so it doesn’t seem like human souls were preserved for any purpose.

if your aim is to design an orderly system that can be maintained exactly as-is forever, and one of your core building blocks is that death is permanent, no exceptions, then why would you ever create beings capable of rising from the dead? you wouldn’t!

but once humans with immortal souls exist you’re sort of stuck with them, aren’t you? and i think that dilemma makes the most sense of why light’s afterlife is… like that. the souls of the dead ‘resting’ in everlasting oblivion in another realm that living humans cannot enter is the same in practice as annihilative death as long as every being capable of reaching the afterlife follows the stated rules.

the instant dark decides to make an exception, the whole system collapses. it reveals to salem that death isn’t inherently final or forever—that this is an arbitrary rule that the brothers decided, and one of them is open to the idea of changing those rules. then the gods make her immortal and light reprimands her for failing to understand how important his rules are (rules his brother just broke with no consequence except that light got mad), but ultimately what she learns is that the brothers are fallible and their rules can be changed. her rebellion is underpinned by this revelation.

the divine order suffers one small disruption and almost immediately, catastrophically fails, just as the god of light feared.

but that failure did not happen because of the disruption; the system failed because it was artificial. the brothers designed it a certain way and then light focused all of his efforts to keeping it that way, unchanging, forever—because their world wasn’t an ecosystem so much as it was a lawn in arizona. that lawn can only exist for as long as someone is doing the work to keep it on life support.

anyway the point i’m getting to is that remnant still isn’t in stable equilibrium, largely because of salem’s immortality and ozma’s reincarnations but also in the more general sense: the people of remnant are spiritually immortal but made to spend the vast majority of their existence essentially comatose because One God is afraid of change.

you can’t bring remnant into equilibrium by eliminating death: killing the jabberwalker isn’t the right answer. and you can’t restore balance by restoring the old system of divine rule and rigid adherence to the original design, because that system was a spindly papier-mâché machine that imploded the second somebody breathed on it wrong. and you can’t just yank the dead back to ameliorate your grief because that isn’t your choice to make, that’s an ethical position the narrative has made very clear.

which… really leaves changing the nature of the afterlife as the likeliest direction. death isn’t the problem, the afterlife of eternal stasis is. death isn’t the problem, light’s refusal to allow beings with immortal souls to keep going after their first life ends because the rules say death is final is the problem. because that finality is just… not reality. a person’s soul persists after death, ipso facto death isn’t the end.

but the reverse idea that death shouldn’t happen at all is not reality either. salem can’t die and her immortality is isolating and endlessly painful. ozma can’t stay dead and it’s eroded him down to a miserable shell of who he used to be. afterans choose to leave their memories behind when they ascend—nothing can happen to you in the tree except what you want to happen. without destruction, creation stagnates. death is part of life, not its enemy.

i doubt very much that the endgame here is for afteran ascension to be directly ported over into remnant—these are different worlds, different peoples, different systems, and while people from remnant can spiritually connect with the tree they are still fundamentally not part of it. afterans are emanations of the tree; humans and faunus are not. when afterans ascend they return to the roots of the tree and flow upward to blossom again from its crown, and that is, to put it mildly, not a system of reincarnation that physically makes sense for remnant, where things reproduce and have babies instead of new lives budding from the cosmic tree. if reincarnation brings equilibrium to remnant then it will presumably happen in a manner more natural to remnant’s people, and may not even involve passage through the tree at all.

it’s also not the only possibility: for example, there’s no reason that remnant’s afterlife has to be eternal sleep. it could just be… a new realm, a new world to live in after your life on remnant is ended. the brothers’ departure from the ever after into the boundless potential of the unknown is as likely a model as ascension. maybe remnant’s dead can’t return except by an act of god, but “gone from remnant forever” can coexist with the afterlife being… alive, as opposed to cold storage for inconveniently immortal souls.

basically the narrative setup isn’t toward rejecting death, it’s toward rejecting the state of affairs where you die and then millions of years later a god wakes you up and you have no awareness or memory of your existence since the moment of your death because you were kept unconscious until that god needed a servant. the point is that death isn’t the natural end of existence (because souls are immortal, on remnant as in the ever after) and remnant’s dead shouldn’t be held in stillness by light’s futile effort to make the facts of reality conform to his intended design.

the jabberwalker has existed for eons without bringing the ever after to ruin; the balance shifted, things changed a little, and life went on. remnant is existentially threatened by the factual reality of life-after-death only because light is so convinced of this danger that he is determined to prohibit it by any means necessary, including “demolish everything and start over from scratch.”

even a god can tilt at windmills.

[bestworstcase]

half a thought. the cat, "i need to know why my maker has left me here"—singular. "only to leave and make all of [you]." either:

light carved and animated the cat alone

light took all the credit and dark let him

this is soft confirmation dark ascended

jabber is the prototypal human; the brothers made him together, to "finish what the cat started." but he came out "brutal" (uncontrollable) so light decided to unmake him. dark refused. the brothers fought. jabber remained in the end—either dark won that argument or jabber returned on his own, like humans would after him.

in brother-cult doctrine, the god of darkness "forgot" the grimm after he and his brother made humans together. we know from the lost fable that this is not true, that darkness lived among his grimm, and even in the myth he refuses to destroy them and it hurts his feelings when light disdains them as creatures of pure malice. however,

that is precisely what the god of light did to his first creation: the cat figures in the blacksmith’s tale only as the inspiration for the brothers’ creation of jabber. the cat has no relevance or presence in the story after jabber is made. the god of light forgot them.

likewise the motivation ascribed to the grimm by brother-cult doctrine, that they hate humankind out of jealousy because their creator forgot about them in his fascination with humans, is the cat’s motivation exactly.

the cat is the prototypal grimm

light controlled the narrative back in the day, and the story he told about the grimm was a projection of his own failings in regard to the cat

hm. hmm. the cat–

hm. the cat "finds the broken parts of the ever after." in other words, they’re drawn to negativity. empathy. they seek out pain and offer comfort—but, but. jabber was meant to "finish what the cat started" and although he came out more "brutal" than the brothers anticipated, he was "effective" for this purpose. the cat was to find the broken parts and jabber was to act as the reaper, sending them back to the tree for ascension.

and that’s why jabber turned out wrong. the cat became a healer and the brothers created an executioner to "finish what they started," because they didn’t understand what the cat was really doing.

snaps fingers. pattern theory. the cat is untethered from the tree until they’re killed, and then they wind up in the blacksmith’s workshop. the god of light feared they had disrupted the balance and tried to destroy jabber, but darkness remade him, and jabber remained—not a monster but a creature desperate to "fix" his home.

for it is in passing we achieve immortality. fuck. we all got it backwards: ascension didn’t exist—couldn’t exist—until the brothers created HEALING and DEATH. true balance finds its own equilibrium. what was the ever after like in the very beginning? "[the brothers] were given creativity, to imagine what—and who—could replace the wilderness… the brothers built homes for them and gave them roles to play." that isn’t how ascension works! that isn’t how the ever after is anymore! the brothers were children playing with dolls until they disrupted the balance. ascension coagulated in the wake of that disruption.

oh. OH—ambrosius. destruction to clear the wilderness and creativity to replace it. that’s how light thinks it should work because that’s how it DID work before he and his brother changed things. every time they made something new they began by destroying what had been.

so– so the grimm—

hm.

like the cat, grimm are empathetic beings drawn to painful emotions. like both the cat and jabber, they’re predators. like ambrosius’ creations, they crumble into ash and smoke when they die. "you may bask in the powers of creation, but you do not own them" and "this force of pure destruction could not destroy […] so it created." their true purpose cannot be to kill humans, because they were created first; the mythical conceit that they envied humans because darkness forgot them is contradicted by the reality that he didn’t.

they are "manifestations of anonymity."

if i’m right on the origin of ascension and how the ever after worked before, then the rules the brothers set regarding life and death in their new world mimicked the original conditions of the ever after—but only imperfectly, else there would be no afterlife.

the planet’s core is liquid grimm.

the faunus came into being when salem combined the waters of life and grimm into one being and remade herself into something new. the god of darkness made the grimm to find the broken parts of this world, like the cat had done in the ever after, and then…

…either destroy or create.

the pool of grimm creates salem. or else she used it to recreate herself. either way the grimm have the capacity for it.

darkness refused to punish jabber for being what they made him. and then, in the new world he and his brother created together, he… made a new iteration of the cat with jabber’s destructive nature woven into the design and also gave humans a powerful weapon in the form of magic, protecting them from his other creations.

which sounds like a purposeful attempt to recreate the conditions that shifted the balance in the ever after, without being too obvious about it. and that tracks with what we know about him—his contributions outlined in the myth suggest that he set out to make their world into an ecosystem that could exist without them—but hm. still cooking.