At centre of the saga, all of the obscure repetitions of theme begin to blend, merge, and solidify into their most palpable form as repeating character archetypes.
The archetype, for another merger yet, blurs the saga’s highest of its 8th layers, the myth, with its 7th layer, the ‘post-maximalist Jungian allegory’. While attempting to decipher Henry’s jargon, I discovered a theorist named ‘Carl Gustav Jung’, a Swedish psychoanalyst who applied Freudian dream interpretation to myths, both dream and myth manifestations to him of deeper, collective and unconscious psychic processes. One of this Carl Gustav Jung’s prominent concepts is the ‘archetype’. These, as I’ve skimmed from a couple of the Swede's books in a San Franciso public library, are eerily similar to Levi-Strauss’s structuralist theme repetitions, one of the two perhaps plagiarising the other in a form of authorial repetition. In popular culture, the archetype tends to be most well-known for a sub-variant of archetypal characters, a cast of stock personas who make frequent appearances in world myth and dreams. The following is a list of the 12 main ones, which, inspired by these theorists, I borrow shamelessly from a first google hit: Ruler, Creator, Sage, Innocent, Explorer, Rebel, Hero, Wizard, Jester, Everyman, Lover, Caregiver.
It’s that concept of the archetypal character that I’ll be working with in this section, although, omitting a proper dive into Jungian theory, whose scope is beyond this ‘author’s’ note essay, not to mention my scholastic capacity due to not owning the local library pass required to haul Carl Gustav Jung’s books to my hotel, I present these archetypes merely according to the established structuralist framework, as personifications of synchronic myth repetitions, the noun forms of our thematic verbs and adjectives.
For further blurring yet, as the layers of the story blur, as its themes blur with its cast, this section is also where blurs its diachronic and synchronic storytelling modes. Some of these archetypes convey not just obscure myth-puzzles but, within these puzzles, genuine, vaguely-identifiable plotlines, which swim between the archetypes and connect them in a dense network of competing goals, conflicts, actions, and resolutions. We might call these, borrowing terminology from outside of myth, ‘sub-plots’. My prior treatment of the immortality theme’s function within the tutorial provides one example ‘sub-plot’. We could reframe Henry-Gilgamesh as a hybrid of a ‘Tyrant’ and a ‘Hero’ archetype, a king unhappy with his rule and questing for the More of eternal life.
And this blurring section will be where, finally, my analysis merges back with Emerson Miller, himself another archetypal manifestation.
Archetypes in Brief
The following is a quick, non-exhaustive list of the saga’s archetypes and examples of their manifestations. Since the story cranks repetition to a post-maximal extreme, the archetype are distinctly more specific than the generic Jungian categories above. Henry, our hydra-like hero, splits heads across many of them.
* Amnesiacs and Head Injury Sufferers: The Redeemer, Z’s Japanese salaryman disguise, Roboboomers (241-243), Genocidelol, Me in the next section.
* Cannibals: Donkey Bro’s former master and other cannibal cultists, Ramiro, Suchi’s Zone Guardian Nerin (6: ‘Henry…could confirm that [Nerin] was, indeed, a cannibal.’; 223: ‘She’d slain five Rangbitan Princes and Princesses in single combat…carrying a slight grudge for her people’s genocide, she’d finished off her enemies by eating them alive…’), The Left Hand Kings
* Corrupt Saviours: Ramiro, The Redeemer, Henry The Tyrant (?)
* Crippled Geniuses: Henry The Cripple, Heavy Fingers, Grandma Ru (by old age), the hunchback who recounts The Saga of The Sages (263-265)
* Cruel Parents/Mentors Superseded/Killed by their Children/Protégés: The Laughing Man and Karnon, The Eternal One and King Jazeer, Heavy Fingers and Henry, Genocidelol and Henry
* Deceptive Beauties: Loki as Artemis, Candace as Silverwolf, Rose as Silverwolf, Handsome Dan as Handsome Dan (inverted)
* Excessive Synthesisers: Henry with A Thousand Tools, The Syncretist (unknown inventor of his hat and ring, ‘The Syncretist’s Armament’), The All-Mother (194: ‘her style being the fusion of 573.’), Showaxarca The Learned (256, martial art biography: ‘The Final School of Flame’), The Anonymous Student of 286 who penned ‘A Thousand Tools: A Synthesis’, Me puzzling out these myth repetitions.
* Loser Virgin Creators: Henry, El-Masry, The No’Are Sculptors (245: ‘The young men around then had become so obsessed with refining their clay craft as to neglect romantic relationships.’), Ten Hands (? ‘hands’ -> self-pleasure, perhaps)
* Malevolent Tricksters: Karnon, Loki, Alex Wong
* Masked Assassins: Loki, Henry assassinating Donkey Bro’s former owner, Rose (autistic masking – 115, Henry introducing her: ‘“[Rose] doesn't speak much because she has autism.”’; 192, also Henry: ‘[Rose] had literal autism, so her baseline 'normal' should still be mildly robotic.’)
* Monster-Loving Earthfriends: PeaceLoveHarmony, Karnon, The Third Gate, Henry The Earthfriend (?)
* Mutes: Little Liu, Rose, Silver Wolf in Australian non-disguise, Henry The Barbwire-Mouthed Climber
* Nutjob Scammer Sages Portending the Emergence of a Messiah that is Actually Themselves: Henry The Second Gate, The Third Gate, The First Gate a.k.a. The Baab
* Retired Has-Beens: PeaceLoveHarmony, Henry The Retiree, Grandma Ru, Karnon, Genocidelol
* Reincarnating Gods: The Redeemer, The Eternal One, Henry The Returning Cripple (a duelling god)
* Shadows: The Great Black One, Henry (username: crusadingintheshadows), Vaif of The Shadow Silhouette (245)
* Sentient/Talking Monsters: Tutorial Kings, Donkey Bro, Kabit The Mammoth Beetle (104)
An (unnecessary) apology
I have to preface with an apology to the reader.
(‘Author’s’ preface before an ‘author’s’ preface: Actually, right at the end of this archetype segment, I managed to re-fix the issue, doing away with the need for apology. However, I preserve my admission since I don’t have the time/willpower during my holiday to restructure everything so as to hide the blunder.)
Rather than prolong this essay note with hundreds of pages on archetype analysis, I’d elected, as with my immortality theme analysis, to document in detail only a single exemplar in action, whose depth might suffice in conveying that of the others skipped before Miller’s analysis. My choice was the ‘Orphan’, my motivation being that this figure branched, somehow, to the clarification of Rose’s bizarre face-swapping scheme, a mystery I boasted about solving in my introduction.
—361.1: ‘...the orphan-esque psychodrama behind Rose’s inexplicable theft of Silver Wolf’s appearance...’
I have, however, since misplaced the Chinese restaurant napkins on which I penned that explanation during a dimly-recalled night out weeks ago. Despite many re-readings of these Orphan examples, many re-readings of Rose and her relation’s appearances in the wider saga, and a rough recreation of the conditions of inspiration in a different city’s Chinese restaurant, I cannot for the life of me reconstruct the answers produced in that forgotten night and frenzy of archetypal research before it. The insights on those lost napkins have disintegrated beyond all recall, much like the forgotten faces of an Orphan’s lost parents.
Rose, I remark, is not an orphan, and her inclusion thus in this archetype makes no logical thematic sense.
—147: ‘Vancouver, Canada…there were two parents, their son, and their daughter.’
This loss of Rose’s demasking unfortunately strips this section of its climactic punch, such that other archetypes—like The Meddlesome Cupid, The Sentient Monster, or The Masked Assassin—might have made for superior exemplars, those three bearing greater relevancy to the duel ahead as they cameo by jumping into Henry and Miller’s royal rumble. Nevertheless, I’m choosing to still present the Orphan in its incomplete state, having grown attached to the archetype during my research and not, however superstitiously, wishing to further exacerbate its abandonment issues. After we salvage what lessons are possible from it, I’ll labour to fill out any missing gaps.
The Hero Without Parents
Behold the Orphan, a tainted variation of the Jungian ‘Innocent’ mixed with parental loss.
Outside of this saga, its list includes such beloved myth heroes as Moses, Hercules, King Cyrus, Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, Karna of the Mahabharata, Mwindo of the Congolese Nyanga, Sedna of the Inuit, and innumerable protagonists of Korean soap operas, the most mythological of modern storytelling genres.
The trauma of Orphanhood is often what initiates a hero’s journey. On one level, the Orphan-creating incident immediately establishes a challenging goal, e.g. refind the parents if not dead, gain vengeance if they are. On another level, the incident—by divorcing the hero from the parent and the homestead, entities of protection—casts the hero out into the tension, hostility, and unknowns that make the world adventurous. It is an archetype that dramatically expands the range of environments and social milieus explored by the hero, that generates constant mysteries, rage, tears, delicious episodes of irony when the Orphan bumps shoulders unaware against forgotten relatives and murderers, and, at the finale, a joyous reunion with the killer or their parents. It is an archetype that, through the many adversities it dumps upon the hero, creates the hero, transforming society’s castaways to legends.
As the Orphan reoccurs in myth, so does it reoccur all throughout Henry’s mythologically-reoccurring saga. In the first part of this section on the archetype, I’ll be compiling the Orphans’ multi-faced manifestations, including several minor characters, since lost from view and memory, and several major characters not so obscure. The latter category, we’ll discover, encompasses all three parties engaged in the conflict tangential to this arc’s tournament and who make cameos during this character-packed duel with Miller. Those are Karnon, the trickster god whose pranks create much of the duel’s complexities, Ramiro, the slum’s ousted cannibal saviour, exposed during this duel as an orphan, and Henry himself, whom my research has since identified as a ‘Semi-Orphan’, sharing partially in the other two’s non-parental baggage.
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In this section’s second part, I’ll be extracting from the saga’s strays a pan-Orphan super drama, a tale, far more specific than mere Orphanhood, a tale that repeats between them and coalesces them into into a single, cyclical plot. In the course of that extraction, I’ll be developing some of the subtler mechanisms employed by the saga to assist in the cryptological identification of these Orphans and their joined plot, mechanisms that transfer further to the saga’s non-Orphan archetypes and their own unexplained plots.
Part three, anticipating our demystification of Miller, will utilise these mechanisms to explain another competitor in the tournament who was not—superficially—an Orphan. Septic Rose, comprehended as one herself, suddenly gains an entirely new, different storyline, a plot that exceeds in psychological gravity the prior stalker-romance sub-plot, reduced to a mere surface feature of the deeper psychodrama. In our discovery, her histrionic face-theft scheme, yet another of this arc’s unsolved mysteries, will have its mask removed, and behind it we’ll glimpse a stream of pseudo-Orphan’s tears, tears redeeming as they warm upon her cheeks from tears of taint to tears of celebration and healing.
Part One. Manifestations of The Orphan
The Minor Orphans
The Delivery Roaches. In Suchi’s slums are a gang of parentless street urchins who operate an informal postal system. They have close affiliations with Ramiro, ‘The Saviour of The Slums’, and are later revealed to be the primary victims of his cannibalism. These roaches could qualify as double orphans, their organisation having been founded by a ‘Mother Kedvessen’, a charitable woman publicly murdered for badmouthing Ramiro’s girlfriend.
–99: ‘…she’d developed the enterprise to feed and clothe The Slum’s orphans…a criticism she’d laid two weeks earlier against the spendthrift habits of Queen Atusa…while distributing soup in the markets, she was apprehended by a group of thugs, put on display for the crowd, and disembowelled.’
An anonymous crusader. Another ex-slumdweller, The Kolonian builder with the worm, was likewise twice orphaned.
–206: ‘There were many deaths. His mother—technically a second aunt—was killed in a mugging. The birth mother that’d abandoned him had, fittingly, succumbed to a plague.’
Little Liu. The toddler’s parents are mortally intact, yet he functions within the narrative as a pseudo-orphan, shuffled as he is between the care of babysitters and a ‘nonconventional unrelated-by-blood Uncle’ (168). And why, might we ask, was this child a mute in the first place? His silence might be portrayed comedically, an anomaly to gawk it and remark ‘haha, what a weird kid,’ but might the tale of Little Liu not veil a tragic case of custodial negligence, the boy’s father too busy playing videogames to teach him rudimentary communication? Possibly. Meanwhile, the kid’s pseudo-father, Henry, albeit the worst rolemodel for impressionable minds imaginable, steps up and performs a genuine parental function when the toddler is inspired by his eloquence during the Australia romantic outing to utter his life’s debut word.
–178: “FATHER!”
Geri and Freki. Father Henry extends his adoptive generosity cross-species during Chapter 57’s battle with The Wolf Empress a sibling pair of wolf pups. Their names, ‘Geri’ and Freki’, as a mythological observation, are copied from the companions of the Norse god Odin. This is a factoid I learned recently (and, preceding my discovery of these siblings, led to it), based on research into the deity prompted by Karnon likening him with Henry during a chat with the pro-transgenders spy Loki that interrupts the duel with Miller.
–chapter undetermined: ‘“Jormungandr…you know, my best friend was a giant serpent, too? [‘Sarff’, see: 86] Professor T doesn’t have a lick of the species’ humour. Not one lick! Not one scale! No, I think he’s got more kindred with your universe’s Odin. A beneficent father of all, a crotchety bookworm, a compulsive hoarder of techniques to minimise the fun whenever Ragnarök arrives [a reference to the Norse god’s wandering quest to save himself from a prophesied death during the event] – isn’t that our Tyrant, a doomed prepper?”’
The underlined clause refers to one of Odin’s epithets, ‘The All-Father’. The link with Henry initially stumped me, nothing apparent beyond the generic parent-esque qualities of his Tyrant role, and I began to wonder if Karnon might’ve gleaned Henry’s humiliations outside the game with pseudo-son Liu. My search of the text soon dredged up the actual reference in a forgotten in-game orphan.
Archdeacon Mohon. A young member of Suchi’s sky-worshipping clergy. This figure is not only an orphan but an adopted son of Henry’s as part of a conspiracy that I’d also utterly forgotten. The following are a collection of quotes relating to Mohon and the scheme:
–80, when Henry’s meeting the priest in disguise: ‘[Mohon] had been the son of a prominent Merchant family from the Kingdom of Sagua in southern Kanaru. The King there, coveting his family's wealth, had hired bandits to ambush them during a trading trip. They were killed, but the boy survived. After being found and raised by Henry, he’d been adopted into a new Suchi clan, and, from there, he’d entered the Ibanpita church and gradually climbed their ranks.’
–131: ‘The current plan [with Alex Wong] was to have [Henry’s] guild toppled in a world-wide rebellion in the game’s last few months. Then, the resulting fractured territories would be overtaken by successors they’d groomed – such as Archdeacon Mohon. Some of them should be able to preserve the ongoing golden age for a few millennia, before their kingdoms, too, were dismantled by the entropy of history.’
–135, while Henry’s massacring a cannibal cult, some of whom are identified as rejected candidates for this scheme: ‘Henry'd specifically scouted the children of former nobility. This archetype tended to have a decent education, socialisation, combat training, and motivation to risk their lives in the pursuit of power. Additionally, their family history created political connections that could be exploited during coups. In The Slums, where the excommunicated of the world fled, these people could be found everywhere, under every piece of rotting driftwood.’
–161, while Henry’s investigating Karnon: ‘Henry ran his own kind of Laughing Sons: the cabal of NPCs like Archdeacon Mohon whom he'd raised since childhood to succeed The Company when this Saana instalment concluded.’
These randomest of comments, unburied from the narrative and arranged thus, seem to describe Henry’s role as both parent and engineer of what be the most most consequential, most substantial ‘plot’ in the entire story, a global conspiracy on the scale of previous global conspiracies. Although a sparsity of detail leaves room for interpretation, Henry—who meets Mohon with a Ring of A Thousand Souls disguise—appears to have spoofed an elderly male NPC and, for unfathomable reasons, parented a secret network of agents hostile to his own guild.
–80: ‘Archdeacon Mohon flashed his teeth, returning a little to the optimistic manner of the kid he'd been not so long ago. “So what’s the latest from the old man?” Henry’s face remained blank. “An operative has discovered a secret…”’
I read in Henry’s blankness that this ‘old man’ is himself, suppressing a reaction to the irony of chatting in the third-person with a boy he’s parented. That ‘old man’ is also Karnon’s ‘beneficent father of all’, Henry’s analogical link to Odin, All-Father of the Norse.
An additional oddity, for which I have no explanation, is that this conspiracy’s shadowy limbs entangle Donkey Bo, considered as a successor like Mohon, and the nebulous shadow creature of Volume I.
–131: ‘The Great Black One, after learning of Henry’s succession plans while reading his mind during the tutorial, wanted him to consider the donkey as a candidate.’
In the above respect, the Archdeacon, as one of Henry’s groomed puppets—tasked with infiltrating and, eventually, governing the region of the tournament—might be upgraded to a major example of the Orphans. However, I’ve retained his minor status after failing to connect this ill-defined plot in any substantial, non-symbolic way to this duelling tournament. If memory serves, the current timeline is only two years into five of this game instalments, long before that conspiracy’s fruition. And, in the pages of this saga, the Orphan priest has merely acted as a forgettable liaison between Henry, The Church, and The Slum Empire.
But one archetypally-curious point my digging into this obscure future plot did find is that this Mohon figure will likely not survive that future rebellion, Henry’s conspiracy to promote him ending as a failure. The priest’s demise is foretold in an obscure quote by the 2150 historian narrating the pre-tournament intermission, found when searching the text for ‘archdeacon’.
–309: ‘[Henry’s 50v50] roster tallied so many grand-manipulators of Saana’s history that, as one archdeacon destined for exsanguination put it, “Disposing of just two squads would take back the continent, the full platoon the planet.”’
I note, firstly, that, although Mohon isn’t named here, the identity matches based on his clergy position and the anti-Company sentiments he’s expressing, which would align with the bizarro self-rebellion Henry’s groomed him for. I note, secondly, the method of Mohon’s death, ‘exsanguination’. This is a repetition of two earlier exsanguinations in this saga. The first is conducted by Mohon himself, way back during Volume II’s random vampire moth outbreak.
–81: ‘As [Mohon] tapped the assassin’s forehead, the man’s body went slack and the cuts on his wrists healed…The skin of his back began to split apart, creating a network of thousands of red lines, none thicker than a hair. At his back’s centrepoint, a single crimson droplet condensed and fell, followed by another, then another…Bleeding out one drop at a time, he would take several days to die.’
The second case is carried out by Henry when executing a corrupt official.
–179: ‘For this execution, [Henry] would be using the traditional Ibangua method of exsanguination, death through blood loss….with the other hand grasping the ceremonial knife, [Henry] cut the man's throat.’
These repetitions, one by the adopted son, the other by the adoptive father, can obviously not be coincidental. There is, clearly, some mythological meaning in this. I take it as foreshadowing and outlining via the saga’s cryptic synchronic layer of the rough shape of their mutual destiny beyond this story.
As we, in the next sections, examine the saga’s main Orphans, including Henry, and as we congeal from them the ur-plot that unites their archetype, it will become gradually apparent that the perpetrator of that minor Orphan's exsanguination is—counter-intuitively—Henry himself. One day, the priest son will be betrayed by his co-conspirator and adoptive father. Henry, by turning thus upon his child, will mutate into another of the saga’s archetypes entangled with the Orphan's super drama, will become the 'Cruel Parent', which lurks sinisterly behind the Orphans, waiting always to deprive them of the very lives it gifted.