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I love everything about your art, the colors, your art style, the compositions. Thank you for posting!
Ah, thank you for your kind words ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶!! It motivates me to continue drawing to a better extent.
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I made two new videos on my Fictiners Tapes channel. You can check them out and give me your thoughts.
I’m glad to see you’re still working on the tapes. I have watched the latest ones and I like the way you’ve now drawn the goats (I find the style for them to be very cute actually) and how there seems to be progression in the story of things (the goat’s dreams being questionable). It’s cool.
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🗡️ Sayaka’s heart 🫀
#thanks for the tag!#love love the strange ambience in this one#so bleak and moody#simply beautiful#fav art shelf
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hello odd request do tyou think you could summarize sayaka (or how you Perceive her) in a few sentences? thatg may be impossible but your art and writing and mind fascinate me Beyond explanation and i want nothing more than to understand as much as possible. (i understnd that in itself is a bit naive and i should strive to build my own interpretations but u engage with every part of her in a way i adore you're an Inspiration. have a lovely year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[Sayaka lives in her own bubble. Predictably, her worldview lacks nuance, but that also makes her immune to the justification for exploitation other magical girls might have. She operates only on her own logic, and when that bubble is popped, what you have is a girl who is misplaced in Reality. She will always be the little mermaid.]
That’s the most shallow way I can summarise her tragedy without checking the veins of her complexity, of which would fill in on their own anyways. You can interpret her however you want based on anything you like or read, honestly. And although I don’t know if this answers your request, I am thankful for your letter and kind words of support Σ੧(❛□❛✿)!
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your wish came true, didn't it?
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I think Sayaka’s relation to reflection [as a means of rumination and what it means to her powers] is not always thoroughly explored, so it’s something interesting to consider with her.
1. Second thoughts.
2. Conversations with the mirror.
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A pool of blood wizards.
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I realise I haven’t been art-maxxing to the point where I can visualise the texture of my coffin just yet. I’m sorry, I will do better next year.
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1. Second thoughts.
2. Conversations with the mirror.
#ttpoiart#madoka magica#pmmm#puella magi madoka magica#sayaka miki#pmmm sayaka#pre-grief syndrome#animation
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#looks amazing 👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️?!!!#everyone please show this some attention#thanks for the tag!#fav art shelf#I love when there are Textures
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Incomplete scribble.
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i know when ppl talk about anime crash outs it’s usually about shounen characters but id like to nominate this bitch
#mutual sent me this and it’s true#sayaka becomes a disillusioned old war general when things don’t go her way#her schizomoments are so real#just constantly murmuring about something no one gets and misunderstands
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I just wanted to say thank you because your Sayaka art reignited my love for the character and I just finished writing a 5 page essay for college on the Sayaka train scene in episode 8 lol
Hello, I’m glad to hear that ^^ It’s an honour to be able to help rekindle your love for a character…I hope your analysis essay will be well-received. (*゚▽゚*)!
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#fav art shelf#the bleak feeling in this drawing is very good#I love the contrast of everything here o_o!#that fuzzy static sentiment is so accurate#thank you for the tag!
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[Vacation is going great. There are trains and convenience stores with giant noodles.]
#I want to get back to drawing eventually#ttpoilog#Guy who only likes eating the same food: waouh noodles in another country o_o
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Kinda like a part 2/companion piece of Pavlovian Love. After comparing Sar to Pavlov this time we're comparing Media to Skinner (or more accurately Marginals as radical behaviorists).
As with before, this assumes you have read BreadAVOTA in its entirety as well as have found Media's secret backstory vignette (the one with the birds).
First for some context to answer @frankiistein's question:
"Black box" psychology which is the idea that mental processes like thoughts and feelings aren't observable and shouldn't be considered in the science of studying behavior is more typical of early behaviorists like Pavlov and Watson. John Watson in particular is associated with "methodological behaviorism" where only observable behavior matters and subjective experiences are rejected.
Skinner was a proponent of "radical behaviorism" the radical part referring to his idea that thoughts and feelings are behavior and that all of these were influenced by environmental factors. For him thoughts and feelings didn't "cause" behaviors - because behaviorists hold behaviors are a response to things in the external environment and not internal states - thoughts and feelings are behaviors.
The philosophy Marginals hold is hard to put together because we mostly have to pick up bits and pieces and come to our own conclusions of the bigger picture but there's some similarities there. Jacques says that Maldevaran society treats thoughts, feelings and behaviors as practically synonymous although the way he describes it is that behaviors are seen as "emergences" of thoughts and feelings, which isn't completely aligned with radical behaviorism.
Although that essay while commenting on the law was more about Maldevaran society and personally I think the fact that the Marginals interpret their own laws/philosophy different than the Living do wouldn't be inconsistent with how it's presented so far.
If we look at the actual things the Marginals do, and not just what they say, the way they structure Maldevaran society follows principles of Skinner's behaviorism, especially the "utopian society" in his book Walden Two: a focus on reward and reinforcement, an avoidance of (blatant) punishment, gamification, a collectivist philosophy and a denial of free will (subtle and maybe unintentional on the Marginals' part).
My understanding of Marginal philosophy is that environment influences thoughts and feelings and behavior is a manifestation of those thoughts and feelings, or as Jacques describes it, practically synonymous. When the Marginals grab hold of countries they eradicate as many problems as possible (punishments), give everyone stipends and necessities and put a focus on "fun" things like art and culture (reinforcements). The culture they want resembles the culture of "automatic goodness" that Skinner did - that is, a world where the "need" for punishment is removed because behavior "needing" punishment rarely occurs in the first place.
The Court is rumored in society to be torturous but it's confirmed by the Judges that it's mostly just boring, and it's largely shown that the Marginals attend to their Judges' needs - the fact that just being around the Marginals drives Living beings insane makes living in the Court still technically "torture" but there's an argument you can make that's not exactly directly malicious or intentional on the Marginals' part.
The last paragraph of Jacques's essay stands out. The sudden mention of "bath salts" looks like a non-sequitur but seeing how most of the essay was about the Living and the final paragraph is about Marginals it points to a difference in how the two species conceptualize the same laws.
The Marginals have a lot of laws and rules but try to avoid (blatant) punishments when possible, similar to Skinner's "Walden Code" which I'm just gonna copypaste from Wikipedia
Such behavior is mandated by the community's individually self-enforced "Walden Code", a guideline that encourages members to credit all individual and other achievements to the larger community. Community counselors are also available to assist with better understanding and following the Code. A rigorous program of "behavioral engineering" is begun at birth and completed during childhood, yet the adults of Walden Two indeed appear to be legitimately peaceful, productive, happy, well-rounded, and self-directed people.
We know that Marginals are "naturally" violent and that's one of the reasons that they forbid themselves from getting too close to the Living. The Judges in my own personal theory aren't just made Judges as a way to "punish" them for being out of line in their society but in an inversion of the Marginals "governing" over the Living, the Judges exist as the Marginals' own form of "behavioral engineering" for themselves: Judges are people they can "practice" proper Living-Marginal relations with without as much public backlash or scrunity.
There's already a lot that hints to that idea. The Annotations themselves are a form of "behavioral engineering" that aims to change how a Marginal behaves by changing how it thinks, and Media pretty much outright says that Jurisprudence for Judges isn't the study of governing the Living but a study of governing Marginalian Objects. The fact that they're called Judges might even be a hint to that: they're not traditional judges of the court that preside over criminal trials, they're judges specifically of the Marginals, or shit maybe of immortals as a whole.
The fact that the Judges are people the rest of society don't want to do with is the "incentive" to have them from the POV of the Living but the Marginals have their own benefit out of it besides collective peace. The Judges specifically aren't "just" bad people, so much as they're people who "somehow" can't assimilate with society, create art or form meaningful relationships despite having everything handed to them on a silver platter.
Skinner's vision of utopia was a constantly "experimenting" society that would adjust its "behavioral technologies" into what would be the most effective, so the Marginals have a great incentive to take feedback not from people who are happy with their governance but from people who aren't, because those people will reveal the flaws of their engineering.
That behaviorism is associated with AI and linguistics is also probably an intentional parallel but I need to do more research on that
The evolution of a culture is in fact a kind of gigantic exercise in self-control. As the individual controls himself by manipulating the world in which he lives, so the human species has constructed an environment in which its members behave in a highly effective way. (Quote from Skinner)
The Marginals are "Universes" of Objects acting as a unit. The original unnamed AI that would eventually make (or become) Marginals based its own "solution" for humanity's extinction on a story of people who were so obsessed with taking care of birds that they never left their habitats to the point that there was no more distinguishing the people and the habitats themselves. The AI records this that ensuring survival was not about the thing you were keeping alive but by "those that subsist it" and that's how Marginal philosophy basically evolved from.
The idea that all behaviorist theories were "black box" theories is one of those things that laymen with no deep knowledge on psychology think although I'm not a complete expert on the topic. The school of psychology to take over behaviorism (cognitive psychology) is usually thought of as the opposite of behaviorism for its stress on mental processes but it seems like a continuation more than the opposite of "radical behaviorism". From what I can see the distinction might be more political than scientific in nature since by the "end" of behaviorism Skinner's reputation was kind of shit from a combination of controversies around his theories (some which weren't necessarily true) and from Chomsky writing a review shitting on Skinner's book on linguistics, so the idea that psychologists trying to advance the field would want to distance from Skinner. But take that with a grain of salt, that's just what I know from my limited research and from pestering rpp about it all day.
As for Media specifically as the Marginal to Marginal of all time all of the above sums it up but it's still interesting to see how that manifests in his individual actions too. What comes to mind is the way he pacifies Jacques - he doesn't explicitly punish Jacques for anything and instead tries to reinforce better behavior in him through rewards, like promising to take him to the grocery store or bribing him with chocolate.
The Marginals and Media for all the Deviantart edgelordery are generally portrayed to be benevolent, or at least trying to be benevolent. You could interpret it as a form of public facing propaganda to keep the Living in check but even in private they tend to show the same principles consistently.
Anthony who is treated like the worst little shit on earth was repeatedly put in Maldevaran society before they decided to give up, and Bien who is a literal murder-addicted Demon was going to have his exile lifted. The fact that Project Maldevaran even happened at all despite Media's clear reservations shows the Marginals have the "experimental attitude" that the Walden Code proposes. Even Anthony who is a noted Marginal hater actually acknowledge in his notebooks that the Marginals follow their laws for reasons beyond propaganda.
Media doesn't believe in Project Maldevaran's premise, he doesn't like Bon, and the Living were initially outraged when the project was first announced. There isn't actually another good reason he had to bankroll the whole idea especially because Project Maldevaran started (and ended) before Media felt any real sense of affection for Jacques so it makes sense to believe that Media's reason is a genuine if reluctant dedication to his goal of "universal development". Media's entire character arc dwells a lot on this idea of making and discovering "new" things and the manipulation of the universe is important to him not merely as a service to the Living but because it's the way he's able to evolve his own species.
Another quote from Skinner:
We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behaviour and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of, character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behaviour.
There are some differences in Marginalian philosophy and radical behaviorism in that the Marginals do focus on internal states to a higher degree, but there's a parallel in the self-righteous attitude that eventually caused Skinner's (and behaviorism as a whole) unpopularity with how Media is about his philosophy of "Love".
Skinner identified his beliefs with science and saw any dissent as unscientific. Behaviorism was never exactly "debunked" despite what's commonly taught (and the principles of operant conditioning are still used today) so much as it was seen that Skinner had overextended his beliefs to the point of trying to make too many things fit into that umbrella. It's similar to how Jacques criticizes Media as constantly trying to look for ways to fit everything under the Marginalian philosophy of Love in the "if your only tool's a hammer everything's a nail" way.
The nail on the coffin of behaviorism being Chomsky's criticism seems a little similar to Media's own philosophical wavering being a direct result of Jacques writing his dissertation shitting on Media's beliefs but that could be coincidence. Funny as hell though.
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Pavlovian Love - an analysis and prediction of Sar/Bien
This analysis has spoilers and assumes you've read BreadAVOTA until the latest update I1-5-RD, including the Further Reading sections and BienAVOTA.
Bien and Sar are interesting in their mandated un-interestingness: Bien is a character who is designated the antagonist instead of being the antagonist (which clearly mirrors Bread's cosmic role, although that's for a different post altogether). Sar, on the other hand, is a guy who just pops up with no context, no warning and no justification - though this reflects the "measure" he is tied to.
Being the most recently introduced character, Sar and Bien haven't had as much interactions compared to the other Nightmare Duo of BreadAVOTA, but the few chapters that do dwell on them have a vivid inspiration: Pavlov and his dogs.
"Fall in love, won't you now?"
The inspiration is no secret - Sar and Bien's introduction is blatantly labelled Pavlovian Love. What BreadAVOTA does interestingly is that it goes past the layman's knowledge of Pavlov and instead parallels the darker reality of Pavlov's experiments.
Let's start with the surface level interpretation, though. Sar "adopts" Bien and immediately starts conditioning him for his own ulterior motives. The "kindness" of all his interactions, from the superficially polite tone of his unreasonable request ("fall in love, won't you now?"), the constant preparation of food and the "leniency" for Bien's incompetence are all thin veneers over the character who is clearly the "actual" villain of the story.
With Bien being highly coded as a neurodivergent character, showing traits of both autism, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder (or even schizophrenia), Sar constantly talking to him like an ABA therapist would is hard to miss.
Sar's first encounter with Bien which immediately ends in Bien's "punishment" for attacking Sar, the very simple statement of "You don't tell me what I "should" be - I tell you", and all the lovebombing that comes afterward all points to his superficiality. He's nice to Bien as a form of conditioning him, and there's an underlying threat that if Bien goes out of line he'll get punished for it.
Yet Bien, despite being aware of this, can't help but feel a sense of flattery over Sar's exaggerated kindness, having been so deprived of kindness his entire life, like the dog that associates the bell with food even when it knows the sound won't satiate its hunger.
Food and the bell
Food is a common reward that Sar offers Bien in all their interactions, and we see Sar feed Bien in every update since they start living together: "Good [ Results and Discussion ]", "Christmas Cookies" and in Bien's personal blog entry, "(Call For) Help". In all three chapters, they also talk about music, with Sar playing a piano song before every dinner.
The food and the music have their own significance in the larger BreadAVOTA universe. The "food", which later turns out to be made of "Mindstuff", is said to be how Sar "satiates" Bien, although what it actually does is a little vague. We know Media sent Bon and Bien food supposedly made of the same stuff, with Media telling Bon in a letter that he sends stuff Bien needs to be "healthy" (complete with the air quotes), and it's largely implied the rest of the Living also eat MargiFood™ that Media insists is basically no different from "real" food... you know, for the Living.
Bien is (probably) part-Marginal, and the Marginals as a species are subtly implied to feel insatiable hunger, so the implication that Bien needs to eat "Mindstuff" might not be too surprising.
As for the music, for Bien, it's a way for him to connect to his father. And for the rest of the world, music seems to be one of the ways that magic is performed with: the Annotations seem to be preceded with a song, Sar says that songs are one of the linguistic presentations magic can take, and Ava describes Reality as a song, with the Wires of Reality making sounds and the Voice of Reality being the "chorus" of it.
Sar promises to teach Bien the piano, and with this in mind, Sar might be banking on using music as a way for Bien to rewrite Reality (supposedly because Ava's plans of making him a writer instead are going nowhere).
All that said, the constant association Sar makes with food and music evokes the imagery of the "classical" Pavlovian experiment: a dog is fed food while ringing a bell, and eventually it'll salivate when a bell rings even without the food.
Except for one thing...
There is no bell.
"I'm trying - and will now shred ████ without mercy"
Warning for animal abuse
Sar's shelf in I1-5-RD lets "you" (Bien) read excerpts from some of his books, and one of them contains a research paper about Pavlov's experiments (interestingly, with all mentions of Pavlov and dogs blocked out).
Although Pavlov's experiments are commonly taught to the general public and first-year psychology students to have used a bell, in reality his experiments were more complex (and often more brutal), using different stimuli like metronomes and electric shocks.
In Pavlov's studies of digestion, as the excerpt says, he would cut out a dog's esophagus and create a fistula. No matter how much a dog would eat, the food would fall out of its throat and never reach the stomach, meanwhile Pavlov and his fellow scientists would collect the secretions to study.
In "(Call For) Help", Bien complains about feeling the need to vomit, and Sar tells him that's impossible because there's nothing in him to vomit.
We see in I1-4 that Bien's body is completely hollow, and while it's never been completely explained there's implications here and there that because Demon's don't naturally have Bodies, their Bodies might only superficially resemble "Real" Bodies. What's interesting is that Sar spends all his time feeding Bien - for him to comment that there can be nothing inside of Bien to vomit implies Sar must have certain expectations of where exactly that food is going.
Bien does have one thing inside of him: blood... or something like blood. If he's meant to closely parallel Pavlov's experiment that could make for some interesting theories.
The feeding experiments aren't the only things Pavlov did to his dogs though, and Sar's actions parallel some of his other experiments. The "spinal cord surgery" (and the foreboding implication that it wasn't really "just" a spinal cord surgery but a full on vivisection, based on how Sar describes it) is similar to Pavlov's own experiments where dogs where vivisected to study their digestive systems, and Bien's current living conditions resemble the "laboratory for central nervous system research":
The Towers of Silence
Bien's point of view is never shown post-surgery: we're only ever shown Sar, who looks at "you" as if you were Bien and does all the talking. If Bien "says" anything we can only hear it from Sar repeating and implying it, but never from Bien actually being given the chance to speak.
It signifies Sar's dominance over him, both as a character and in the meta-textual context of the narrative. But besides that, Bien's perpetual silence is an interesting parallel to the Towers of Silence experiment.
The "Towers" were soundproof buildings where experiments were performed on dogs specifically to try and break them down into madness: random stimuli were paired together to see how the dogs would react, like electric shocks coupled with force-feeding. "(Call For) Help" shows this the most blatantly. Where Bien ate on his own (if reluctantly) in the previous chapters, in "(Call For) Help" it seems that Sar is actively force-feeding him, with the last lines being Sar telling Bien to stop fidgeting.
Ava, at one point in Bien's blog, compares herself to Bien, saying that Bien's neuroses over his isolation (at this time, when he was alone in the military bunker) reminded Ava of her own experience in the "Recursive Panopticon" - with I1-3's Further Reading section showing to us that the Recursive Panopticon seems to be something vague, surreal and maddening.
There's another very obvious parallel here in regards to being an experiment for brutal psychological experiments, of course...
Like Father, Like Son
Bien's not the first Demonic teenager subject to inscrutable experiments. That crown goes to his father, Bon, whose experiments under the Maldevaran Centre of Supranatural Research and Development were similarly vague and highly traumatic.
Here are excerpts about Milord and Postrel, two of the dogs the Towers of Silence, taken from the Kingdom of dogs exhibit (where the book on Sar's shelf is referenced from)
Milord - Markedly more placid and peaceful than POSTREL. Expected his experimentally induced breakdown to reflect inborn character difference. Hypothesis confirmed — M has broken in the direction of ‘inhibition’.* Previously established conditional reflexes disappeared. Stopped salivating to most ALL positive stimuli as shock was increased. Attempts to cure Milord with bromide solutions and rest unsuccessful. He has been retired. Phlegmatic character. Balanced, calm, consistent, not easily aroused. *Results later rejected in their entirety Postrel - We are combining shocks with food to test if breakdown can be experimentally induced, and if direction of break reflects inborn character — choleric in Postrel’s case. Hypothesis confirmed — Postrel has broken in the direction of ‘excitation’.* Previously established conditional reflexes are now erratic. Salivation in response to ANY stimuli excessive and undifferentiated. The animal’s reflexes are shattered. ‘Will now observe therapeutic effects of bromide salts. and rest. Choleric character. Lively, sociable, extremely excitable. *Results later rejected in their entirety.
Bon and Bien are really similar to the dog of Pavlov's experiment: the more "placid" Bon, who is better at controlling their Demonic "instincts" compared to the more "choleric" Bien, who was far more impulsive and violent. Bon breaking down and becoming more subdued seems to reflect Milord's results - we haven't seen what will happen to Bien yet, but if this parallel means anything then it looks like he's going to become far more erratic under Sar's care.
Going by how Bien reacted to his time with Ava in the bunker, this is likely to be the case - Bien already seems predisposed to neuroticism, constantly freaking out and fluctuating between childish excitement to detached and even cruel apathy in his appearances.
"Your presence (here) is of utmost value to the recipe..."
So Sar is an evil mad scientist and Bien is the schizoautistic kid he's bullying to the death. Alright, we can leave it there, I guess? Sar is nice to Bien because he's gaslighting and manipulating him, case closed.
Well, I recommend reading the paper that Sar's shelf has in full. The paper itself claims that its intention isn't merely to "damn Pavlov in retrospect" but to focus on the lives of the animals that were experimented on and to dispel the illusion that they were completely passive in the experiments.
As Todes noted, this set-up facilitated a relationship in some ways akin to 'pet and master'; it resembles what we might today call a companion species bond. That said, on the experimenter stand it was a relationship often defined by a shared tedium. The hours would often drag for both – experiments were monotonous and wearisome, involving little more than pressing a button to trigger a stimulus, measuring saliva, proffering small amounts of food at strictly regulated intervals. And then waiting. Apparently, a key challenge was staying awake – either animal falling asleep at the 'wrong' time was potentially ruinous for the experimental procedure. However, it also meant human and canine co-workers got to know each other to an unprecedented extent compared to Pavlov's early career.
Sar's and Bien's time together, despite their shared goal being something larger-than-life and implied to be urgent, is remarkably mundane. The contrast between the Protagonist Half being a disjointed mess of lulrandomxD events to the repetitive, maddening tedium of Bien's life is notable. Bien reads and writes and codes and reads and writes and codes, and when he moves to Anselir with Sar, Sar makes him do all those things again, enforcing a strict schedule on him as a way to keep time stable in the disjointed reality of Anselir.
The presentation of Sar and Bien's time makes it foreboding. Sar's constant dominance of the conversations, his creepy attitude, the visuals from Bien's point of view being a contrast of a dark background with neon text and highly pixellated and distorted graphics, and Bien's increasing incoherence and borderline-psychotic episodes, these are all different elements that make Bien's portions of BreadAVOTA notably more disturbing than Bread's half of the narrative.
And yet, when you look at it literally, nothing ever actually happens. Bien embodies the "measure" he is stuck in, as the Eye of Space.
Like the Towers of Silence, Bien's stuck in an inescapable torture (especially with the unspoken but horrifying implication that the spinal cord surgery "tethers" him to Anselir so that he can't ever leave), but it's not the type of violence we see happening in the Time measures (where violence, it seems, is rendered meaningless because it undoes itself).
Bien's torture is more psychological in nature. From his life at home, his time at the War, his time in the bunker to his present day in Anselir, Bien's lived a life of being constantly trapped, in a situation where no matter what changes it stays the fucking same.
...and more importantly, to me"
And the interesting parallel he has with Sar is that Sar is stuck in the same situation.
The obvious interpretation is that Sar is nice to Bien because he needs Bien for whatever bullshit experiment he's trying to run, and that he doesn't really care about Bien to any meaningful degree. And maybe that's true now, but my personal theory is that over the course of them being stuck together in Anselir, a place where it's confirmed that even short periods of time feel like forever, Sar's going to develop a genuine attachment Bien.
Sar's an enigmatic character whose motives are hard to guess, and a major factor to that is that we already met Anthony, and even though Sar is Anthony... well, he's really not like Anthony.
We don't know why exactly Sar is so different, but the author does say that being alone for so long drove him "mildly insane." Anthony's antisocial and seems to hate everyone to the point of considering hate as a more important emotion than love, so seeing Sar being so polite (no matter how fake) is a jarring change in character.
In I1-5, there's one detail I noticed. When Bien asks about the MargiBirds, Sar says that he adopted Media's mannerisms so that the Birds would listen to him. And Sar is... vaguely Media-like, in that Media himself is a person who is superficially polite just to get what he wants. But Media and Sar don't exactly act 100% alike, although it's hard to pinpoint in what way they differ. I guess in a way Sar has a more uncanny quality to him, even though Media's the one who's literally an alien computer ghost.
The last line here is pretty interesting. I think that in the absence of any "Living" company, Anthony gradually grew more miserable in Anselir, and his weird personality was a way to try and get the birds to interact with him more just so he'd have someone to talk to. And man, Sar talks a lot.
I can't help but feel that although Sar likely has his own secret goals that take priority, he does feel genuinely relieved that Bien is there with him to spend the tedium of eternity with, even if it might be less about Bien as an individual and more about just having an actual person in Anselir.
Results and Discussion (And Conclusion)
BreadAVOTA as a whole strongly delves on themes of isolation and alienation, and the (often terrible) results that come from having it imposed on others without them having the power to do anything about it.
The decision to make such a unique fictional world with a supposed focus on "worldbuilding" and yet to only ever show Maldevaran life in passing, and the tendency to focus on characters who are mostly unlikable and difficult to understand are risky decisions from a writing standpoint, and it's a little arguable whether rolypolyphonic actually does them well, but I recognize that there's a specific question being asked in choosing to make the story be about what it is. It's a question Ava herself asks Bien when she criticizes Bien's shitty fanfictions:
Why should anybody in the audience care about these unsympathetic characters?
Bien's reply is framed as "stupid", but it touches on one of BreadAVOTA's themes: "why do i need to write down why people need to "sympathise" with mieszko? it should be obvious. you should simply feel bad for anybody ever."
Bien being apathetic and violent usually would be in poor taste considering how he's so coded to be autistic/schizophrenic, but BreadAVOTA's worldbuilding helps toe around the fact by making physical "death" something more trivial and by focusing on the more existential aspects of Maldevaran philosophy, which touches upon the real experiences of people with "bad" mental illnesses: schizophrenia, personality disorders and and "conduct disorders".
The idea of people who become "villainous" as a result of poor upbringing isn't new to fiction, but BreadAVOTA does put an interesting focus on the "poor upbringing" not necessarily being explicit abuse or trauma but a more silent yet perpetual feeling of alienation and disconnect, fitting for the story's overarching theme being an "allegory for schizotypy".
The Kingdom of Dogs leaves us with this compelling message, which feels relevant to Sar and Bien and BreadAVOTA's themes as a whole.
It is an understatement to say that we rarely get to hear about these aspects of Pavlov's work today, a forgetting which extends to the majority of scholarship on Pavlov, where dogs appear only in passing as experimental objects, never as subjects about which we should express care or concern.
BreadAVOTA doesn't necesarily asks its audience to "like" or "care" about its characters, and as the breadposters (all three of us) have noted there's a tendency to make the characters hard to like or care about. But it's not a story that tries to convince you to like the characters. It's just taking the opportunity to express these uncommon perspectives from the first person point of view.
Paraphrased from the author's own words, "there's always the risk of offending people with my portrayal of being schizoid, so you can go and read books that say nothing bad about being schizoid by virtue of never saying anything about it at all."
I doubt that Sar and Bien's relationship will stop as something so one-sided and passive, where Sar tells Bien what to do and what to say, but that eventually it's going to be complicated by the effects that both of them faced being isolated growing up (Bien in his Exile, Anthony/Sar as the youngest Judge), the way they were pathologized for it, and the unhealthy concept of relationships they formed as a result.
#breadposting#wake up bread nation and read this essay please and thank you#I love the analysis on Bien’s character here a lot#loveposting#< can’t remember what tag I used for keeping track of these things urghhh#BreadAVOTA#bread and all variations of the aforementioned
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