The Eternal Tutorial
My last example of the immortal theme, and its most important, is this saga’s entire first volume, ‘History’s Longest Tutorial’.
A synchronic, puzzle-game reading of that volume as the timeless quest for immortality provides what is, arguably, its main diachronic plot, i.e. the conventional story with a Goal-Conflict-Action-Resolution structure. For reasons bizarre (and I’d say mythological), the key piece required for the comprehension of the tutorial according to this plot, its Goal, is buried beyond view until after its Resolution. It’s only at the very end that the inexplicable Conflicts and Actions that prolong what should’ve been a basic tutorial—and that give this level of the saga (286: ‘Low-Tier-Plebeian: a videogame adventure’) a pacing that is torturously unreadable—condense abruptly around Henry’s acquisition of The Cap of A Thousand Dreams, his saga’s highest Goal (286: ‘Uberpatrician: a post-post-maximalist non-linear inversion of the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh as achieved through a videogame’). As when listening to the hero of the egg-purchasing anecdote, we suddenly realise, 'Oh, this is what’s driving this weird, manifesto-writing dude-let. He’s a psycho.'
A retrospective combing of the tutorial’s oddities dislodges multiple repetitions and variations of this immortality theme that precede and foretell of that conclusion.
The final boss: As Henry’s own psyche makes semi-explicit in the nightmare of Chapter 247, the senile monkey god has parallels galore with Utnapishtim/Noah of Gilgamesh/The-Bible’s ancient flood myth. He’s a 1) venerable wiseman from 2) a time before a mass human extinction event with 3) the secret to immortality.
Utnapishtim/Noah’s mission inverted: Noah collects animals to conserve them in his immortal ark. Henry, his tutorial arc messing with the theme a little, goes on a zodiac genocide, slaughtering pigs, slaughtering wolves, slaughtering psychic monkeys. Another characteristic of myth emphasised by Levi-Strauss is a continual drama of themes with their binary opposites, which are constantly being contrasted (e.g. good-vs-evil, light-vs-shadow). Between Noah and Henry, the core moral lesson in the one story, save animal life, has a comical inversion in the tutorial to its mythological opposite, extinguish animal life.
Further Antediluvianism. While undergoing one tutorial ritual, Henry is psychically teleported to a scene during The Redeemer’s era, where a dead lightning goddess activates his ‘Martial Body,’ i.e. allows him to gain combat levels.
—19A: ‘During this period, the Gods who'd managed to survive the assassination [by the Redeemer] sought to strengthen and rebuild humanity by formulating a new method of power transmission…Each figure standing around the base of the pyramid was a deity taking their turn to impart their energy into a dummy that would transmit their powers across the ages….Aionian Lowgod who fell at the naval Battle of Himatsu, 7244 years before the game's present calendar date...’
Noah-wise, the episode has an interesting pre-flood or ‘antediluvian’ mood, dense with ancient chronologies and half-recalled heroes. Story-wise, it foreshadows Henry’s eventual duel with The Redeemer—portrayed at this time in the tutorial as dead—in an ironic address by the lightning goddess to the recruits of her era.
—19C: ‘The dead lightning Goddess extended her hands to his face and cupped his cheeks like a mother sending her son off to war, her palms rough but warm. “He [The Redeemer] won't be easy,” she said, smiling the complicated smile of one who's lost all hope but chooses to fight anyway. "Good luck, kid!”’
—19D: ‘In the end, [the dead gods] would succeed and, with their new army, they eventually reconquered the world - but not before suffering huge numbers of casualties. After a millennium of global warfare, The Redeemer, cornered, his commanders beaten, his territories lost, committed suicide.’
Beyond the inversion of The Redeemer’s false death, the notion of ‘dead gods’ is thematically curious, having a paradoxical connotation as deities are usually assumed in modern theology immortal.
Monster Kings as Cursed Immortals: The slaughtered bosses each showcase various downsides of immortality, threats that, non-linearly, tease some of the challenges posed to anyone doffing The Cap of A Thousand Dreams.
King Torc, The Horny Boar, exemplifies the misery of lacking a romantic peer.
—23: '“My tuskless friend, do ye know what waiting alone for thousands of years with only wolves for company does to a boar?”'.
The wolves, although having company, must bide their aeons in a desolate snowscape that they sacrifice their lives failing to escape.
The Redeemer, the bleakest of the trio, is cursed with dementia. His extended life merely prolongs a cognitive decline that reduces a god who conquered the globe through martial prowess into a cloud-gazing imbecile who gets smoked by a random teenager with trash reflexes.
—194: 'Rose answered that her guild chat had been in a heated debate the other day over power rankings for which of Saana III’s NPCs would be the most challenging to assassinate…-Henry Flower: It’s probably The Redeemer…Historically, in the monkey’s first life, he’d never been beaten in combat.')
Henry’s rarely observed complaining about these immortal curses, but I’m sure they’re a factor in The Overdream that encourage his eternal business. The dementia of The Redeemer, not directly repeated, has a fascinating inversion as Henry’s cyborg memory is stated to be flawless. (Ironically, I forget where this mention is and can’t relocate it.) Perfect recall could be its own, novel curse. It could also be the same curse. The Redeemer’s brain troubles might conceivably have begun when, losing the ring that activates the hat, the god could no longer manage the thousand-year bulk inside his head.
The Names of They Who’ve Worn The Cap: After Henry defeats the wolf empress, she recites a clue for his quest.
—57: ‘“Should struggle lose, The Flame must speak of entities whom shall He meet, the age-worn masters sought to become: Redeemer, Ten-Hands, Deathless One.”’
Note, again, the foreshadowing of his meeting with the undead Redeemer, along with a cryptic double entendre in ‘age-worn’ between worn (damaged) by age and worn (equipping) the ages of The Cap of A Thousand Dreams possessed by these figures.
Two of these epithets repeat the immortal theme. ‘Deathless One’ needs no further explanation. As for ‘Redeemer’, a reader versed in the Christian mythos might recognise this as an epithet stolen from Jesus The Redeemer, yet another reincarnating god figure.
‘Ten-Hands’, referring to a craftsman god (57: ‘The greatest non-Cosmic God craftsman in the game’s recorded history, who’d lived sometime between the first and second instalment of Saana.’), I struggle to assimilate into the theme. At a very, very long stretch, we might call him an empty placeholder in the trio, presaging Henry’s own immortality through technology (both cap and cyborg), connecting perhaps with A Thousand Tools and Heavy-Fingers through the repeating hand-finger motif and its tool association. Alternatively, Googling ‘Gods with ten hands’ brings up an Indian goddess, Durga, whose most popular legend is apparently destroying a demon seeking immortality, which an even longer stretch might eventually reconnect to Henry’s story. Rather than accepting either of those theories as real, however, ‘real’ in terms of the saga-sender's design, I think they’re much better evidence of the ease and dangers of over-applying data to a theory if a non-author searches too hard.
The Great Black One. Henry, on his quest for immortality, is manipulated by an ominous shadow creature.
—68: ‘A tall, thin, man-like creature whose body was made of shadows, an Imbahalaala - The Great Black One.’
—59: ‘The Imbahalaala connect with a being's mind, making them capable of predicting one's action.’
—72: ‘The prediction method of the Imbahalaala’s, from his understanding, was based on forming a digital replica of the player in their brain that they could force to answer questions…Hannes, working with it, flagrantly violating game rules to alter events, such as deciding his coin flips and obliterating his boat with a lightning bolt.’
This creature is blatantly mythological. In another intertextual anomaly, its epithet, ‘The Great Black One’ is shared with an eastern deity ‘Mahākāla’, a.k.a. ‘Great Time/Death’, a.k.a. ‘Beyond Time’, a.k.a. ‘Death’.
Wikipedia says of that entity: ‘Both Mahākāla and Kālī represent the ultimate destructive power of Brahman and they are not bounded by any rules or regulations. They have the power to dissolve even time and space into themselves, and exist as the Void at the dissolution of the universe. They are responsible for the dissolution of the universe at the end of each [time cycle]. They are also responsible for annihilating great evils and great demons when other Gods, Devas, and even [the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva] fail to do so. Mahākāla and Kālī annihilate men, women, children, animals, the world, and the entire universe without mercy because they are Kala or Time in the personified form, and Time is not bound by anything, and Time does not show mercy, nor does it wait for anything or anyone.”
We might discern parallels with the bolded sentence and the shadow creature’s blackhole void magic, destroying everything, including gods. The name of its species, ‘Imbahalaala’, also has an uncanny vowel harmony with that eastern deity’s name if its long vowels are written out, ‘Mahākāla’ -> ‘Mahaakaala’, ‘Imbahalaala’. A coincidence? Perhaps.
From a different mythological angle, the creature grants Donkey Bro sentience and the blackhole bite used to devour The Redeemer by force-feeding him a shadow apple.
—26: ‘It pulled out another apple of shadows, identical to the one it’d fed the boar. This, it shoved into the donkey's mouth and down its throat.’
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
This act, my search of the text uncovers, is a repetition of an earlier, failed attempt to feed Donkey Bro a tainted apple, Henry accidentally gifting him one smeared with his former owner’s blood.
—8: ‘Summoning an apple, [Henry] tossed it gently towards the [frightened donkey]... One glance at the apple made the donkey’s muscles tense up further. The apple looked like it had been splashed with strawberry syrup. Henry glanced down. His hands and sleeves were a red mess, and a few splatters from the axe blows were dirtying his colourful West African attire. He must have been a gory sight. “Whoops.”’
The sentience-apple connection should be obvious from the Christian symbolism of Adam and the fruit of forbidden knowledge. More esoterically, however, in the Indo-European mythology that pervades this saga just as much, the apple forms a symbol of an even more forbidden gift, immortality. The Norse pantheon, for example, maintains its eternal youth according to the Eddas by the regular consumption of Ydunn’s apples. We might thus conceive of the apple-gifting Great Black One as a guardian and bestower not only of knowledge but eternity. And such is, in fact, the being’s function in Henry’s quest for The Cap. Throughout Volume One, it assists Hannes to thwart attempt after attempt by the exhausted hero to bypass this ordeal and just complete his tutorial.
Beyond The Limits of Immortality
In collecting the above from the tutorial under the theme of immortality, I’m not trying to argue that it provides a complete or satisfying picture of Volume One, a picture which should be apparent on a first or any reading. Some of my examples, like Heavy-Hands, are likely misapplications of the theme. Of those that might be accurate, they’re scattered to the point of obscurity amongst countless incidents with different functions, such as progressing the tutorial proper and laying the foundations for the non-story of subsequent volumes.
More than that, at the mythological level, immortality constitutes only a single theme, the story repeating dozens of themes if not hundreds, and these other themes, and the relationships between these themes, would need to be deciphered to get a full picture of the tutorial and the saga beyond.
For a sample of a fuller story, I’ll quickly show just two lesser themes and their interaction with immortality.
Sentience. The ‘Sentience’ mentioned of the apple above is its own theme, clustering, I believe, alongside others like ‘Friendship’ and ‘Monster Friendship’, into the saga’s 2nd, melodramatic layer (286: Mid-Tier Plebeian: a videogame melodrama), which I interpret as the story of Henry’s over-projection of humanity onto the game’s NPCs and the suffering that ensues. This theme, although it doesn’t become clear until much later than the tutorial, is also operating all throughout its episodes. The talking monster kings and Donkey Bro simulate Henry’s complicated relationship to Saana NPCs, at times enemies, at others companions. The trigger by which the wolves gain sentience, i.e. when brought into proximity of higher beings, mimics how Saana’s human NPCs have been granted rights by Henry The Humanist, the saga portraying a dynamic, flexible theory of personhood as something that develops through contact, interaction, choice, interdependency, struggle, and empathy. On the negative side, we can ask why is Henry so stubbornly averse to befriending the handsome meathead of his tutorial group? Because, in the development of this theme, our hero has learned to associate all human intimacy with violence and death, a hangup that leads him even when about to make out with a chick to think first of murder.
—186: ‘Henry, as the beauty didn’t break eye contact, suddenly saw the flash of a familiar expression. It was one that he’d glimpsed from countless souls, from the soldiers lined along the parapets before he sieged their castles, to the assassins before they’d offed his companions, to the Senior Director today before he’d slit the man’s throat. These were the eyes of one about to participate in the desperate moments of death, the pupils dilating in response to the adrenaline coursing through their body to make the muscles move strong and quick. In the corner of his vision, he detected the knife the beauty had been drying, its handle squeezed in her clenching fist. So, he thought, this is how he died, caught off guard and shanked while washing the dishes.’
Shadow. Playing with the theme of Shadow and the saga’s seventh psychoanalytic layer (286: ‘Ultrapatrician: a post-maximalist Jungian allegory’), the Imbahalaala, a literal shadow creature, can be reinterpreted as signifying a confrontation between the hero and his shadow or darker nature. This battle, in psychoanalytic terms, with all its risks of destroying the self, has the capacity to grow the individual by granting them an awareness and control over the elements of themselves repressed by the psyche. Notably, the mechanism of the monster’s manipulation of Henry is through replicating him psychically, through comprehending him more than himself. This, from my little understanding of psychoanalysis, dramatises a key concept in the field, that our shadows are wiser than us, that we should befriend them and assimilate with them.
Immortality x Sentience. Why does Henry go to such extreme lengths in his quest for immortality? Early on, when he and his narrative are still tight-lipped about the NPC topic (compare the barbed wire in his nightmares. 147: ‘his lips were sewn shut by barbed wire and the words were mangled into a grotesque mumble.’), Henry’s motives behind The Cap are suggested to be rest and a desire to make avant-garde art. However, if we re-examine the artefact in terms of the Sentience theme, it might, much more than those other purposes, have been one of several items sought to bolster his humanist mission. This alternative reading would explain one random, non-positive, anti-climactic remark right after he obtains it.
—68: ‘His only regret was that he hadn't found it earlier. Maybe he—but no. Late or not, it was still something worth celebrating.’
What was The Cap late for? The crusade, I’m betting, which is already finished by the volume’s start.
Sentience x Shadow. What personal problem does Henry need his psychoanalytic Shadow to grow beyond? The madness of Sentience.
Sentience x Shadow x Immortality. And how, precisely, does Henry grow from this Sentience-created madness? By using the immortality of the Overdream as therapy, which is how we might re-interpret many of the extended martial episodes. The therapeutic function of some, like the meditation, gardening, and drugs, should be obvious on re-examination. Perhaps less obvious is the Left Hand Nobility mentioned earlier. This martial art, from a psychoanalytic perspective, might be the shadow confrontation driven to its extreme, as Henry masters such dark practises as not showering (277: ‘they refused to bathe’), the min-maxing of mass-murder (275: ‘On The Execution of Friends and Family’), and cannibalism (276: ‘He ate his assassinated friends. He ate that little orphan tailor girl. He sculpted a fleshy puppet of his dead mother, emaciated and bulbous-eyed in the last stages of her cancer, and he ate her, too.’). The term itself, ‘Left Hand’, implies an opposition or a sinister opposition – ‘sinister’ derives from the Latin ‘sinistral’, meaning ‘left hand’. Chat GPT, giving me more info yet, says that the ‘Left-Hand Path’ describes a practice in Western occultism for magics accessed through the exploitation of taboos. The name's also used in a sub-tradition of Indian Tantrism, Vamacachara, based on the same restriction-breaking.
Immortality+. This dance with lesser themes, in turn, assimilates back into the highest immortality theme, modifying it and bestowing it nuance. The saga, starting with Henry’s acquisition of immortality, which he begins to employ for a host of purposes, is NOT Gilgamesh but a ‘non-linear inversion’ of Gilgamesh. Here, I’ll admit the saga’s themes exceed my organic limits, my brain unable to retain and juggle any further themes without losing sense of their proper weight. I have a very vague sense the highest plot is not so much about ‘Immortality’, the pursuit of which is often framed by the saga as negative and insane. Rather, the notion of immortality proposed is an Immortality+, a more complex, multi-part, flawed thing, closer to the cyclical drama involved in religious conceptions of rebirth/reincarnation. The saga outlines a phasal allegory of falling/dying and rising/being-reborn forever like Henry in his nightmares, an allegory of repeatedly exploring things in their layers and multiplicity, of going mad in the process to the point of failure, of emerging exhausted but, somehow, better. As I attempt now, deleting and rewriting, a better articulation of the highest layer than that, however, I sense myself a victim of the same myth-like cycle. It strikes me, at one moment, meditating on and absorbed in myths, that this poorly described allegory IS myth, that what I am articulating is merely the repeating, irrational structure of all myth. At another, the reverse strikes me, that myth is this puzzling allegory, that they’re both games exercising the highest, dynamic, questing part of the human, that the listener’s own struggle from incomprehension to comprehension mirrors and imbues with greater significance the struggles of the myth’s hero from goal to resolution. At another moment, I’m convinced the saga-sender might be myth itself calling back to me for rebirth after its myth-like demise, the genre dead at this time of writing and only further dead by 2050. At another yet, I feel that I, attempting to give this dead myth a voice but failing due to my human inadequacies, am still somehow, like the myth’s insomniac hero, growing in the process of each failed articulation, reaching ever closer towards comprehension, never obtaining it, yet lengthening the muscles of my stretching brain…
Immortality’s End
Such is my cognitive limit, and such is why I concede any interpretation of the saga’s mysteries larger than our one unexplained man. Nevertheless, for the smarter folk than myself, I preserve my blundering commentary and re-highlight the immortality themes revelatory powers over Henry’s tutorial and its cryptic diachronic plot, unmasked only at the resolution.
It occurs to me that this ‘tutorial’ volume may have been a tutorial in a second, meta-mythological regard. Its bizarre construction could point to the synchronic-oriented mindset required to make heads or tails of the rest of Henry’s myth, which has since repeated and exceeded its opener by having no apparent diachronic plot for three, significantly larger, significantly more digressive and deranged volumes.
I will confess, however, that this might be yet another crazed misreading, caused by meditating too long on the repetition of themes and other things, such that the concept of repetition has spread falsely up to every layer of the saga, including its volume structure.
The Other Themes
As I take my hands off the whole plot, I’ll quickly list all of the repeating themes noticed in my personal research. Due to the laboriousness of corroborating the single theme of immortality, the reader must forgive my lack of treatment. Some themes may themselves be repetitions, variations, or sub-themes of other themes.
Themes: Mountains and climbing, immortality, cycles, death, light and shadow, tools, juggling, maximalism versus minimalism, metamorphosis, youth versus senility/retirement, violence and trauma, addiction, multiplicity and layers, synthesis, speed/timing/gaps as essential, chaos and apocalypse, trickery, history as deep/faulty/impossible-to-reconstruct, biased accounting, ‘stadiums’ and ‘duelling’ as euphemistic artifice, heads and decapitation, punctured eyeballs, Machiavellianism/psychopathy, cannibalism, transgression/rebellion against the sacred/taboo, ambivalent human value of technology, dead mentors, poison, psychedelic/poisoned foods, monologue and dialectics, imperialism and democracy and communism, daggers and assassins, moral relativism, human progress, avant-garde art, digression, orphanhood and neglectful parenting, castration, flatness/savannah/plains/desert/decline, blood and sacrifice, law versus savagery, gangs and cults, priests and religion, limits of the conscious/rational/brain versus the unconscious/instinctual/body, elitists versus plebs, indifference to the mass, masks/inauthenticity/deception, pronoun ambiguity, meta-'fiction', spectacle, humanism, sentience, love triangles, an elemental trifecta between sky and sand and clay, existential purpose and meaning as things projected/generated/maintained, life valued over happiness, the other valued over self, power as corrupting but necessary, gender swapping, greed/wealth-accumulation as positive, simulation, irony, anti-humour, phallicism, paranoia of surveillance, censorship, amnesia/emptiness/gaps/hollowness, solitude, madness.
The saga's main plot, if such a thing exists, likely lurks somewhere in that wall.