#they’re throwing the seaborn parallels directly in our faces at this point

[000yul]

the thing that strikes me about the hortus de escapismo ending is that

uh.

!! MAJOR SPOILERS FOR HORTUS DE ESCAPISMO !!

ok so. the thing that strikes me most about the way the events concluded is that, ultimately, i think the sankta cube god achieves its ideal outcome. you could go so far as to say all according to keikaku, even

- roaming monastery retrieved

- the sarkaz are forced out to the wilderness, and no one complains

- violence/conflict is minimised

now that last point isn’t important to the sankta god because of any humanitarian reasons or anything like that. it’s important because it means no sankta character is significantly newly radicalised by the events of the story.

I think this is the true crisis that the sankta god is panicking about at the beginning of the story - the risk that sankta society sees the beginnings of a collapse because enough people question the awful things it’s built on.

let’s look at lemuen, the face of the ‘moderate’ sankta (bonus that literally she was a head prefect when she was a student). at the beginning of the story, she’s at a stalemate with the abbot because she won’t budge on the sarkaz issue. despite her being so nice!, and briefly leading fortuna to hope that coexistence is possible under the sankta god’s rule. when executor’s group enters the situation, and breaks the stalemate, the way the cards fall is that the abbot gives up hope. he comes to think: “peace wasn’t possible after all.” he accepts laterano’s ultimatum, defeated.

but what if the situation had resolved differently, because maybe someone more prejudiced than executor had been sent in? if things had resolved in violence, I believe lemuen might have come around to andoain’s point of view. after all, she keeps his notebook. his words are dear to her, even if she doesn’t agree. it’s not impossible to think that with more blood spilled, she’d be horrified enough to join him.

this is why executor was chosen. he’s a good man, at heart, and he does defuse the situation when it goes south. but his group being sent to the monastery is also a destabilising element in the situation, and executor himself recognises this.

executor’s partial success is exactly ideal for the sankta god.

it maintains the awful status quo. the question of “how can laterano force such a cruel binary choice on the monastery residents?” is just buried. and to any outsiders, the incident is just going to end up part of the self-fulfilling prophecy that is “ah well. sankta and sarkaz just don’t get along.”

the self-fulfilling prophecy, that by nature of the origins of the sankta, is a crucial pillar to laterano’s continued existence.