This section, both a tangent and a crossroad between the immortal theme and the archetypes, has two unrelated parts, which I compile simply because neither is substantial enough to warrant a full non-chapter on their own. If forced at essayistic gunpoint to find a connecting theme, I'd say they're both very weird. Where they differ is that, in the first, I have no solid explanation for the weirdness, whereas in the second, thanks to this myth research, I now do.
A Weirdness Unexplained
Now, mere symbolic repetition of a theme as a word or moral lesson is not in and of itself extraordinary, and I’m certain that if the reader plundered any of the other anti-literature-anti-roleplaying-anti-gameing litrpgs they’re subscribed to they’d be able to manufacture a similar preachy list to that concluding the last non-chapter. What truly lifts this particular saga to the synchronic heights of mythology is that its repetition extends far, far beyond language and idea, extending into repetitions of theme in items, actions, and even characters who continuously repeat each other’s traits and struggles.
Since I’ve devoted quite a bit to the last of those in developing the archetypal analysis used to de-mystify Emerson Miller, I hope the reader will suffice with just two quick examples of the former two, which bear much less topical relevancy, although they are fascinating in their own right - especially the second.
Repetition of theme in items: Re-using the immortality theme, Henry’s hat, The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, is only one of two items that bestow this power. A second, which receives much less emphasis in the saga but nevertheless features in some of its critical moments, is an ‘Amulet of The Vilified One’. This, causing the wearer to revive from an otherwise permanent death, is what brings back The Redeemer at the start.
—61: '[Henry’s] focus was drawn to [The Redeemer’s] silver amulet, which had a hole where a gemstone might've once slotted. The shape, although the points were dulled and most had been broken, could have once formed a 15-pointed star.'
The amulet is what Henry fears to lose during his duel with Ramiro.
—200: ‘Ramiro was referring to what would be reaped in the event of Henry’s failure in the fight… [Henry’s] most valuable of these disposable Legendaries was an Amulet of The Vilified One.'
And it’s what he does lose, temporarily, when murked by The Third Gate.
—271: ‘In the gory mist, a flash of silver sparkled, the shine glittering from a gemstone amulet, one shaped like a star.’
Peculiarly, in Ramiro’s case, the theme of immortality leaps modalities further from items to Classes. Henry’s main issue with losing the item is its combination with the Legendary Class about to be acquired by Ramiro, ‘The Worker of The Loyal Heart’, whose abilities were demonstrated during the pre-rookie-tournament interruption. That Class has its own in-built revive function to counter a Legendary Class’s single weakness of permadeath, and this Class revival could harmonise with the amulet's revival catastrophically. The main issue thus, reinterpreted thematically, is an excess of immortality, which—in terms of the myth puzzle-game—is itself one of the saga's repeated variations on immortality, the saga portraying figure after figure who go crazy in this pursuit.
Repetition of theme in events: I was assisted here by an odd statement of the narrative during that pre-rookie-tournament interruption. It is implied when Henry decapitates the angel assailant, Alice Wilson, that the act is a repetition.
—312: ‘Through that absurdity might be grasped why Lee—who in the obscure undertakings of his Cripple era must have assassinated his own mighty gods in this fashion—talked with such fatalistic irony about “The Cycle”. The kid himself sensed the currents of destiny that were as bizarre and repetitious as the decapitations of this yogini.’
This prompted me, after awakening myself to the saga’s repetitions, to compile from the texts incidents of decapitation, of which there are plenty, including the saga’s very first kill of Donkey Bro’s former master. That list I omit because identifying the referred-to repetition doesn’t actually require any more effort than re-reading the quote closer.
To repeat the quote, 312: ‘...in the obscure undertakings of his Cripple era must have assassinated his own mighty gods in this fashion...’
Heny’s method of killing the yoga lady mirrors, almost frame by frame, how he slays The Redeemer, a monkey god, at the tutorial’s conclusion.
Alice Wilson’s death for comparison, 312: ‘On one nearby pillar Lee stood… He also wielded an Ortheerian sword, “Worldhexer”.. [he] latched onto Wilson’s angel wings…flicked the sword like a lightsabre to slice off the top of her skull…The pair then entered freefall as Lee—“like a daterape-druggist,” one of Wilson’s followers cried—repeatedly stabbed her inert body...The plummeting duo were caught by a platoon, who then assisted with the queen’s dismemberment.’
A review of The Redeemer’s death would show it to be nearly identical, from the freefall to the anatomical target of partial decapitation.
—67: ‘Henry’s face was bespattered with blood fountaining from the monster's skull, the rapier looted from King Torc peeling away the top of its head as smooth as the lid off a can.’
Many of the apparent differences are, in fact, merely substitutions. The heights of the jungle tree on which Henry makes his stand against the monkey are exchanged for the heights of an Achievement Pillar. The extendible-rapier Worldpiercer—since lost when Karnon blew up The Trading Post (185: Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Fucking cunt made me drop it…’), although, while we’re on this tangent, Worldpiercer actually returns this duel, being the specific Legendary sword Emerson Miller throws at Henry and refuses to use—is replaced by a different Ortheerian sword, Worldhexer, looted during one of the intra-tournament episodes. Donkey Bro’s finishing blackhole-bite meanwhile becomes a helpful platoon.
Add onto this the yoga lady styling herself a revived god, and the episode is, frankly, a flagrant plagiarism, and I would’ve called the sender of this saga a cheap hack writer who’d run out of duelling ideas if the saga wasn’t 259% factual.
Synchronically, there are many myth-lessons we could dissect from this hyper-spasm of recurrence. It could be a Promethean tale: 'Man may rise to great heights to equal the gods, but, being human, he cannot escape descent and his only option is to demote the gods to his level'. Or a heartwarming cyborg anime-friends tale: 'Man may only obtain his highest self through technological assistance and nakama to catch him when he falls.'
But what intrigues me more than the myth angle is that the narrator of Chapter 312, a historian from the year 2150, should be aware of the unwitnessed duel with The Redeemer. From this, we can conclude that Henry, preserved if not in flesh then as a cyborg, must have since divulged the details of his path to immortality. That fact blossoms into many other interesting questions: what does 2150 look like, what happened to the apparent global illegality of Project Aevitas (180: ‘Since the AI revolution, there'd been severe international prohibitions against creating self-aware AI with independent thoughts and interests’), and did Henry, one of the pioneer immortal cyborgs, have anything to play in these societal transformations? Since this non-author can’t even decipher 2050, I leave that as another set of unsolvable mysteries beyond these unsolvable mysteries.
So why does it repeat?
Considering the saga repeats so overtly and anomalously that it catches even the attention of Henry (312: ‘The kid himself sensed the currents of destiny…bizarre and repetitious’) and future-future historians, this leads to follow-up questions of how and why? In myth and fiction, this degree of repetition might make sense, but in a factual, 370%-real account?
These are also challenges I struggle with. Part of me guesses that whatever/whoever’s sending me these far-distant future messengers might be a fan of myth, denying us a less obscure, reasonably-paced presentation of the narrative out of cruelty or boredom. Another part guesses, based on Henry’s self-awareness and some of his more cryptic, cycle-based theories (e.g. 187’s essay on ‘World-Substance’) that Saana, this game universe of gods, operates according to the exaggerated rhythms of myth. As I was researching the next section of my ‘author’s’ note, on archetypes, I found another corroborative observation by him in Volume II, after the tutorial, when he’s power levelling through dungeons and fights a random beetle deity.
—104: ‘Henry groaned. A mad, verbose, imprisoned, weakened monster God...these lazy game developers were always reusing their archetypes.”’
Either of these interpretations could be possible, or both, the different streams of repetition combining into a flood of super repetition, or both and more, or neither. This non-author tosses the matter behind me as yet another of the saga’s impossible enigmas.
A Weirdness Explained
Although that weirdness might have no answer, I will now flex the power of the mythological interpretation described thus far by using it to solve and terminate another of the saga’s gore-based themes.
The theme to be guillotined? Castration.
To jog the reader’s memory, I list below a chronological sampling of the theme’s repetitions that were gatherable by searching the saga text for ‘castration’ and ‘eunuchs’. Reading them isn’t necessary. Like a good student, I merely show my working out to receive half points from the saga-senders if the solution turns out wrong.
* 132: Henry, in a flashback, recalls a former colleague’s castration. To quote, ‘Henry's next blink blessed him with a knife-wielding mob pulling down a former vizier's pants and castrating him.’
* 179: A description of Suchi’s priests, presently selected from childless homosexuals, a tradition evolving from a deeper eunuch past. To quote, ‘The 'Sky People', the Ibanpita, had been The Deathless One's eunuch researchers selected from the Clay-caste, tasked with performing human experiments to find a method of immortality.’
* 205: Ramiro is castrated by Henry during their duel. This act prompts the former’s psychotic internal monologue to conflate Henry as The Tyrant, negligent Amazonian cannibal fathers, the Jesuit priests that converted Southern America to Christianity, and modern technology into one unified force of psychological castration.
* 238: The episode of greatest thematic density. Henry makes his Chayokan soldiers drop their trousers for Justinian and gives a lengthy monologue about castration and himself as a penis-returning hero.
* 255: An Overdream study of the martial art ‘Universal Big Man’, the tradition of 238’s eunuch soldiers. Please note the euphemistic titling, ‘Big Man’. What feature of the man, we might ask, is big? To quote, ‘The other males—typically, his sons—would be castrated and tasked with bringing The Big Man materials for his martial cultivation…Within this delightful culture, the notion of ‘The Universal Big Man’ towered as the highest ideal and aspiration…This was a man who could defeat any rival in the universe, who could tame the very heavens and lop off its cosmic member.’
* 272A: In the nightmare about an Eden-like garden inside the corpse mountain built by his rejuvenated soldiers. Henry gains admittance to a medical station by feigning castration, (to quote, ‘In a lily-woven mask, He came, with crotch-discoloured trousers; and, His inspection, skipped the guard, when He mumbled, “stolen valour…”’). He’s subsequently sourced a replacement penis by the doctor, a medical fraud, who harvests the appendage from a partially-amputated priest. ‘Like a gardener who tends the stalk of an undesired thistle, the doctor grabbed the soldier’s groin and scrupulously pruned it. At the knife’s eviscerating kiss, the priest’s half-conscious face contorted. As his member’s stretched flesh split and peeled, he groaned as if in orgy.’
* 272B: In the dense floro-symbo-cryptology of one of the nightmare’s last stanzas, as Henry leaves the garden and discards his flower clothing, including a necklace made of hibiscuses that the soldiers originally claimed had healed them. I highlight in this quote the relevant dream-elements at play: ‘He relinquished to the lake of blood his counterfeited chain of buds, of red hibiscuses that cured absolutely nothing. As this last discarded necklace splashed, its flowers showed a strange reaction. Despite their stalks’ incisioned death, the touch of blood revived their vigour. Along the vermillion-surfaced lake spread—like lotus pads—their petals. Their stamens elongated forth, and—like lotus blossoms—opened.’ The hibiscus, my research notes, is a symbol of femininity and the lotus a symbol of rebirth. The incisioned stalk and stamen in contrast repeat phallic representations, the ‘stalk’ of a cylindrical, penis-like shape, the stamen a flower’s male reproductive organ; the revived ‘vigour’ adds a masculine triplicate with its connotation of strength and testosterone. Reconfiguring these symbols of femininity, masculinity, and rebirth, decoding their interaction, we might perceive a floral inversion of the castration witnessed earlier in the nightmare. The ‘hibiscus’ flower, not only counterfeit in its healing properties but its femininity, ‘revives’ its ‘incisioned’ ‘stamen’, and it does so through an absorption of blood reminiscent of the male genitalia inflating in erection.
* 311: A rant from the feminist terrorist, Alice Wilson, right before this rookie tournament. To quote, ‘I will not weep over my darlings butchered by your patriarchal brutes, just as I will not weep when they and your regime, which has controlled this world through the systematic fraudulence of masculine supremacy, are castrated. Much is destined for the chopping block this hour.’
In addition to these thematic repetitions, mutilation of the groin has been a regular target throughout the duels, although this might be ascribed to mere practicality since the crotch is one of the main armour openings.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Now, for a long time, I’ve been as clueless as no doubt the reader has been about the narrative function of these horrifying repetitions, dismissing them as perhaps a strange Freudian hang-up or fetish on the part of the saga-sending entity. Inspiration for the actual answer walloped me recently, during a visit to Las Vegas.
In that segment of my holiday, what I sacrificed in research financing was well compensated by several profitable encounters with informative pieces of American television media, along with one group of street protestors. These together warned me of the latest menace endangering society, that of the ‘transgender’.
American readers are likely already painfully aware of the transgender, but to give a brief introduction for those like this non-author from the remoter regions of the globe to which it's yet to arrive, the transgender is a novel breed of shapeshifting monster that, based on my assembling of the facts, condenses somewhere in the upper atmosphere of earth’s sky. From this spawning point, it descends from the clouds on rainbows, employed thereafter as a demono-factional symbol. Upon landfall, the transgender haunts public bathrooms where, if my deciphering of the phobia is accurate, it steals the genitalia of men, women, and even—one elderly protestor notified me, the transgender coordinating with shady back-alley doctors, perhaps bribed to hold microscopes—children. What does the transgender then do with these appropriated genitals? None of its victims here in America have yet been able to give me an answer, nor have I been able to track down a live transgender for interview, but, presumably, the genitals are used for sustenance and/or sinister demonic rituals.
I do confess, in terms of the demon’s end game, my investigation remains woefully incomplete. Nevertheless, from what I have gathered, it occurred to me, while trembling in a casino toilet and taking mental refuge in the distraction of this saga’s higher mythological complexities, that this might just be what the theme of castration is haranguing against. Hidden in the story could be a futuristic warning to humankind, prophesying a phallic grandheist concocted by these shapeshifting genital-thieves, of which the poor folk of America are currently only witnessing the opening act.
A re-reading of the saga's castration scenes compiled above, supplemented with the analysis below, all but confirms my supposition.
The saga’s paranoia of the transgender is most attested in the tale of Loki, around whom clusters several of the story’s transgenders-related themes like Pronoun Ambiguity, Gender Swapping, and Demonic Evil. Loki, if the reader will recall, is an evil spy-assassin who swaps from male to female through what must be a virtual replication of the transgender’s shapeshifting sorcery. That sorcery, my online research attempting to infiltrate a transgenders messageboard indicates, is called ‘tucking’. Loki employs the craft of tucking to try to dupe Henry and seduce the innocent wrestler, SaNguiNe. While Henry doesn’t fall for the ruse—doesn’t, as the demons say, ‘get tucked’—SaNguiNe does get tucked, and the other characters thereafter proceed to mock him ruthlessly for getting tucked. It is in the difference between the two targets’ outcomes that I think we learn the moral lesson of the narrative. Attributed to the hero, i.e. Henry, our flawless moral champion, is the talent of an all-perceiving vision that is not fooled by shapeshifters and their tucking wizardry. Meanwhile, as mythologically symbolised by SaNguiNe’s negative fate, a failure to avoid tucking makes one a loser, socially, tournament-ly, and—if my comprehension of America's tragedy is right—genitally.
In further support of my interpretation, I’d highlight another recurring theme associated with Loki, that of Masks and Disguises, a potential metonym for shapeshifting. These, the saga portrays anti-socially. A mask is the prime equipment of its assassins, including Loki himself/herself/itself, and Henry himself wears masks to a pathological extent in the earlier chapters until he eventually embraces his authentic, non-masked, non-shapeshifted self. What is the moral message here? ‘Thou shall not wear masks. Thou shall not shapeshift [like the transgenders].’
Lastly, although by no means exhausting all my thematic evidence, I’d point to the vehement moral opposition of the narrative to roleplaying, most exemplified by the ‘Virtual Realists’. This is a faction of human-dogs, robots, and—almost certainly—demons. This faction, it now occurs to me, may have advanced the transgender’s tucking magic from rudimentary gender-based shapeshifting to higher, more forbidden magics of species-based and non-species-based shapeshifting, allowing them to expand their zone of lurking from public bathrooms to dog parks, appliance stores, and non-shapeshifting-demon gatherings, all prime locales for genitalia robbery. The saga has, not even subtly, defamed and positioned the Virtual Realists in moral opposition to Henry, our virtuous hero, and I think we can re-read any of his enlightening commentary about roleplaying as transferring to the shapeshifting menace and as perhaps exhibiting through the very circumlocution of the attack his unspeakable, primordial horror of the transgenders. As further evidence, the Virtual Realist’s champion in the tournament, The Third Gate—a shapeshifter I’ll note by Class, martial style, religious doctrine, and theatrical hobby—makes zero pretence of non-villainy, worshipping as she does and wishing for the world’s destruction (a destruction, perhaps, by global penile larceny?). Again, the theme within the repeating themes repeats. ‘Do not shapeshift. Those shapeshifters are villains seeking the apocalypse [by mugging genitals].’
So, is the meta-theme not conclusive? ‘Be wary, ye humans of the far-distant past, there are genital-stealing shapeshifters amongst you, presently in the toilets of America but—one day—everywhere!’
I’ll accept the weird mystery solved. GG, as Henry would declare, Synchronically EZ.
A critical reader retorts: ‘Enchi, you low-pleb clown, you have to be pulling our legs with this drivel that interprets not one element of the castration theme mystery correctly. Why, do you not remember that this saga began not in the 20s but the 10s, well before the first transgender slid down on its rainbow from the sky?! Why, can you not perceive how your analysis contradicts the central moral theme of the saga, which you yourself parodied in your anti-anti-natalist egg-parable, that is the moral imperative to cease wasting your finite life on spiritually-devoid pursuits like videogames, roleplaying, anti-natalism, and, no doubt, fad polito-demonologies that use weak, D-tier monsters to distract the masses from the S-Tier monsters like videogame developers?’
To such misguided criticism, I reply that this story is from the far-distant future of 2050, so it can predict many menaces that had yet to occur or have not yet matured to their full societal devastation, e.g. the looming tastebud holocaust of seaweed-flavoured sodas (178: ‘Henry…split a can of a local brand of seaweed-o-nade with Little Liu’). The transgender of today might be causing a trivial amount of societal damage compared to videogames, which we should prioritise banning first - I fully concede to this astute judgement by my critic. Nevertheless, I ask whether this will still be true by Henry's time, after the transgender has had decades to amass genitals and, through genitals, power? We in the distant past simply have no means to ascertain the landscape of the future, to determine what the saga-senders subject to future horrors esteem as a dangerous hobby/sub-demonology worth creating a litrpg to slander, and it’s therefore prudent that we, culturally and chronologically backwards as we are, bow to their wiser, time-progressed terrors.
Or I should say, we have no means to understand the saga-senders UNLESS we use my method of synchronic myth-interpretation! So, if anyone believes my solution to the mystery inaccurate, rather than just idly complaining, I’d challenge them to construct a more coherent explanation for the repetitive castration theme based on facts, logic, and themes. The answer they'll find after many tears and headaches is that there are no answers better. This saga and its mysterious senders are, definitively and incontestably, motivated by a radical anti-transgenders agenda, much as they are radically opposed to everything else.
As for how this saga’s radical anti-transgenders allegory relates to any other themes or meta-themes, to that mystery, I wave the white flag of synchronic submission. Anti-Transgenders-Propaganda X Immortality? It hurts this non-author’s brain to even think about thinking about it.
And I leave that enigma, too, behind me on the mythological summit as I begin the descent from these abstract themes to the more concrete archetypes and our unexplained man.