#please don't misunderstand kadoc he is just horrendously traumatized and misguided

[morsking]

i’m entering the final stages of lostbelt 1 and not to sound condescending on main but i think almost everyone has been horrendously wrong about kadoc and we should set the record straight. 

his beef with guda isn’t anything as simple as “i’m jealous they got to be a big damn hero while i was stuck taking a nap”. kadoc, much like the other crypters, has internalized an aspect of mage society in spite of their status as deviants that has affected how he relates himself to others and how his overall psyche works. in mage society what you accomplish determines your worth in life (insert obligatory “being a mage is an allegory for capitalism” comment here) and kadoc had never accomplished anything. his family line isn’t as old or grand as other mages, it has offered no contributions to the world of mages that would make it stand out, and he is already someone who cannot be as cold or calculating or manipulative enough for other mages to treat him with any regard for his personhood. that isolation of being perceived as belonging to the bottom rung of a social class that is already plenty unforgiving towards outsiders left kadoc desperate for purpose, and once he found it at long last when chaldea told him he was needed, a person so unnecessary as himself, he is killed that is as if the universe was telling him that being born worthless means he’ll die worthless. so when he learns that guda, an ordinary person with no connection to magecraft with credentials and origin even lesser than his own, managed to survive an entire peril-ridden journey, thereby proving that they earned the right to live, it sends him into a fit of fucking rage. 

kadoc isn’t jealous that guda accomplished all these great things. he’s jealous that guda proved that they deserved to live more than he. how is it fair that his suffering meant nothing and yours was rewarded? how was your path more correct than his? he thinks to himself that’s bullshit. so in a bid to challenge and overthrow that unfairness, kadoc adopts a new persona. he becomes abrasive, hostile, and borderline apathetic because he is trying to prove that his lostbelt’s way of life is just as much, or even more deserving, of survival than the one of panhuman history. the yaga, despite being stronger than regular humans, are doomed because they had to abandon weakness to survive. the yaga have suffered so much misfortune and sacrificed so much that kadoc, and the universe has decided they deserve to die? in kadoc’s mind that’s nothing more than tragic. that’s repulsive and unjust. so to prove that russia’s worth he adopts its philosophy to directly oppose chaldea’s, because its philosophy is that of panhuman history, the history that has tossed away its losers instead of acknowledging their pain and losses. 

what kadoc can’t realize because he’s too obsessed tying his lostbelt’s worth to his own, is that in trying to help the people of his lostbelt while thinking like them, he’s not helping them or saving them in any way that matters. tamamo vitch steps on the yaga and forces them to slaughter one another for basic needs and he does nothing. he is not out there actually providing shelter and food to the denizens of russia to show them that there is another way to live where they don’t have to leave their weak behind and live with heinous pragmatism. kadoc resents the culling of the weak, but because his natural empathy cannot coincide with the life he is trying to vindicate, he ends up resembling the very same principle he is trying to resist in the first place. kadoc is a mass of contradictions and because his brain is filled with trauma he lacks the self-awareness to realize that by pretending to be someone he is not he’s only setting up not only himself but the lives he is trying to save for devastating failure. 

his beef with guda isn’t about guda all that much but the larger concept that guda represents in his own mind. he isn’t wrong to want the losers of history to be redeemed for being cast aside and erased, nor is he wrong to want his own redemption for the way he (and the crypters among other outcasts of society) was treated. he’s fundamentally wrong in his approach because he is trying, out of sheer emotional principle, to defend a way of life that cannot possibly sustain itself or offer hope for its own future because it happened to have been forsaken just like he was.