Continuing the archetypal rolecall, Henry, Karnon, and Ramiro—the three main agents in conflict outside of the tournament—form a mystifying orphan triangle, which connects, if not by any apparent narrative purpose, then by grief and by shape to the love triangle at the heart of our man Miller’s unexplained duel.
Orphan A: Karnon, The Laughing Son
Karnon—whose biography is recounted during Henry’s studies of The Laughing Son’s Combat System (160-165)—is revealed there as a record-breaking triple orphan.
Parents one are lost prior to joining Togavi’s jokester organisation. The stated mechanism of their death is consumption by a giant bat, but this could be farcical, given that the account is written by an author self-identifying as ‘His Royal Poop’.
–160: ‘…recruited into The Sons as an orphan child...’
–161: ‘[Karnon said] their search could stop because his parents had been eaten by a giant bat.’
The god's next parent, ‘Xivtust’, an inventor of gag devices with whom he travels in a comedian apprenticeship, dies shortly after finding him from old age.
–161: ‘In his final years, the elderly Xivtust met an interesting Earthfriend boy… by [Xivtust’s] 90th year, the unravelling of life's twilight set upon him…’
The doomed caregiver after is ‘The Laughing Man’. This a foreign overseer of Togavi whose prank-based combat system—on an Orphan-based re-reading of the section—might be a method of violent hazing and mid-fight psychological torture. This dad’s given his last laugh by Karnon himself.
–161: ‘[The Laughing Man] immediately acknowledged Karnon by adopting him as the youngest Son.’
–160: ‘Finally, Karnon's entrance into adulthood and onto the global stage occurred when, having absorbed the lessons of the parent, he assassinated The Laughing Man in spectacular fashion.’
To these three parental loss events, we might add a fourth, symbolic orphanhood as the god’s biography culminates in the revenge assassination of an ‘All-Mother’.
–164: ‘Thus, on that anti-climactic note, concluded The All-Mother's reign, in less time than a responsible person takes to brush their teeth.’
Karnon, whose mere presence signals catastrophe for any adults in the vicinity, might be regarded as a super orphan, an orphan-generating industry unto himself, a Typhoid Mary of Orphanhood. Morality-wise, I derive from his super orphan tale an allegory for the rippling social consequences of bad/non-existent parenting. ‘If you do not properly attend your kids’, lectures the saga, ‘if you get eaten by a bat, they may grow up into untamed propagators of chaos who commit bestiality and dye their hair blue.’
I skip the finer details on this super orphan’s past, available as they are to other researchers in The Laughing Sons chapters.
Orphan B: Ramiro, The Saviour
Most readers have likely not yet recognised Ramiro as an Orphan. This blind, embarrassing ignorance is to be forgiven because the fact is not fully revealed until this duel with Miller, although there has been copious synchronic foreshadowing.
Skipping ahead some chapters, one of the duel’s very confusing interpolations is a lengthy speech, which is at first anonymous but is eventually revealed to be delivered remotely to some troops of Ramiro's hanging out in a jungle somewhere. A group of these soldiers begin a Plato-esque symposium on their leader's guilt. They examine, and debate, The Saviour’s professed innocence in the child-eating scandal, which he claims was a ruse of doppelgangers conspired by Karnon and Henry to defame him.
During this symposium, already quite digressive from the duel, an old geezer slides in with a tangential yarn. The debate and jungle scenery recall to him another time he’d hung out in a jungle with some troops, likely an earlier Saana instalment, and they’d debated how to handle a group of captured prisoners. That debate, ending on another tangent, was settled during a nocturnal intermission by one of the soldiers, an Argentinian fellow, who strangles a captive and serves a breakfast the next morning that the soldiers refuse, presumably—from the context—due to the meat being human flesh.
–Chapter undecided: ‘“None of us ate his meal that day. Not that day.”’
The group’s Argentine strangler-butcher is later, in the geezer’s epilogue, described as being arrested for a string of cannibal murders in the real-life city of San Miguel de Tucumán. (‘Author’s’ note within an ‘author’s’ note: The structural parallel with my egg-myth anecdote is not coincidental, mine inspired by this confusing story tangent.) After an execution, the strangler leaves behind an orphaned son, the mother unknown and missing, possibly herself throttled and consumed.
Although not made explicit, the synchronic insinuation in the digression is that this son is Ramiro. His identity outside of Saana is mysterious, but the Argentine nationality and the age of his avatar matches, as does his crime, mythologically repeating the behaviour inculcated in his father from the menace of videogaming.
A confirmation of this backstory is provided by re-perusals of pretty much any of Ramiro’s previous segments in the saga, this predecessor serial-killer papa haunting his internal monologue.
–105: ‘When [Ramiro’s] father had taken to the drink, he used to boast that the men of his line were hard because they had Amazonian blood in their veins. He’d claim that the disease-ridden jungles and the cayman-infested rivers had ingrained in his Indian forebearers, down to their DNA, a contradictory love.’
–181: 'The concept of murder had fascinated Ramiro since childhood. His father liked to tell him macabre stories about the American Indians - Aztec mothers selling their kids for sacrifices during droughts, Yanomami youths caving in the skulls of the elderly too slow to keep up with the tribe.'
This man is especially apparent in the feverish thought-essay during Ramiro’s duel with Henry, where the father is portrayed as an abusive despot.
–205A: ‘In turn, the savage son, if he were to number among the few who survived their harsh boyhood, had to learn that he was as hated as a rat. Only then could he develop the intensive regime of appeasement to mollify his father’s wrath. He lied that he was full when he wasn’t, he gave what food he scrounged up himself back to his father, he never spoke ill of his father, he avoided his father when the man was intoxicated and couldn’t inhibit his murder-urge, he never made direct eye-contact with the man, this crime alone being sufficient to dissolve their fragile parental relationship. When beaten, the savage son produced satisfactory squeals. For these miserable boys, the only pleasant parts of fatherhood were the moments when it ceased, in the many breaks his father gave him out of negligence.
–205B, Ramiro’s novel exegesis of the Jesus mythos: ‘Then, at the climax of the Spaniard’s relatable myths, what miracle this wondrous God-father achieved. He produced the most ideal son fathomable. Even after tricking another guy into feeding his child, this son still developed an ardent loyalty to him alone. This son wasted his entire life spreading his father’s praise, then, at the ideal point, still in his virginal youth, before the son could grow into a father himself and pose a threat, he got murdered. If this ending wasn't beautiful enough, this son—despite having acquired the strength to defy his father’s deathwish—decided, after reincarnating, to quickly return back to the oblivion where his father preferred him. What an outstanding show of filial loyalty. How much easier would the savage’s own life be if their sons could be trusted to commit suicide on command?'
I emphasise the bolded, which, rather than describing an abstract Amerindian child, might be Ramiro confessing his own childhood survival stratagems. With the underlining of intoxication, I additionally note the parallel in the quote of 105, ‘When his father had taken to the drink.’ In this lurks the classic notion of a drunken father, itself somewhat archetypal.
One of this father’s inebriated habits may have been to tease the young Ramiro with the same fate as his victims/mother through light strangulation, a method of abuse that’s now blatantly obvious in the bizarre reciprocal description of the tailor girl’s strangulation
–198: ‘...the textural feedback of her choking throat was propelling their spirits to cross the walls separating their selves and transform into one. Through a paroxysm of shared pain, they were merging. Oliver, Ramiro, and the child were uniting into one entity suffocating and being suffocated.'
The listening journalist, Oliver Spears, in his voyeuristic peak, actually manages to meet this father.
–198: ‘And as the three of them clasped their fingers tighter around their neck, as the song inside of them climbed to the crescendo through the mounting pressure, an unexpected fourth figure suddenly intruded. Oliver had never detected this other in his studies of Ramiro's prior killings, but now, in the extra immersion of the real moment, the epiphany gripped him of their fingerprints, their hands, upon everything. From out of the tense muscles of their forearms emerged this fourth's paternalistic shadow, from out of their large and brutal hands seizing their neck fragile as a rabbit’s, from the unfair difference in strength granted by nothing except the advantage of time and age. Time itself, its concreteness dependent on the oxygen obstructed from reaching their brain, had dissolved. They were cast back into the childhood past, they were the pathetic child being choked by the shadow in its rage, and they were the raging shadow choking the pathetic child.’
And thus we can decipher the paternal patheticness in the last utterance of Ramiro before he snaps the child’s neck, The Saviour insulting his defeated childhood self.
–198: ‘“Why couldn't you fight back?” the child choking themselves begged of themselves. Crick.’
Afterwards, in the post-murder cannibalism, there is a curious fixation on the hands, which formed the symbolic centre of Ramiro’s plotline from the beginning.
The hands are first mentioned at the start of Oliver Spears’s investigation when Ramiro uses his harvest to frame a political adversary.
–99: ‘The Priest From Wanaagsan… adored for his humble speech and his willingness to heal The Slum’s sick without a fee…hunted down over a two-day wild goose chase after the preserved hands of five children were dug up from under his shack, along with effigies to Xun, Demon of Gluttony. Following an interrogation by King Ramiro himself that deemed him guilty, the priest begged again and again to be taken before the Ibanpita, screaming that he'd been set up, right until the moment the executioner’s flames released his soul.'
Oliver Spears’s hunt progresses through the gradual identification of those hands’ former owners.
–140: ‘...uncovered the identity of two more severed hands in addition to the Meggy girl's, making him 3 for 5…’
And, finally, Ramiro is captured—fork-out—gobbling the tailor girl hand-first.
–191: ‘The shadow, as it’d commandeered their hand to close upon her mouth, used her hand in vengeance to close upon theirs, her palm and fingers smothering their lips and assaulting their nostrils with the repulsive salt-scent of human skin beneath the embalming chemicals and blood. [An accompanying journalist, asking about the noise inside the hut.] “Crunching?”’
So, why this hand obsession? Because the hand, to Ramiro, is a symbol of the strangulating father, an object of memory and horror. It is, on the one hand, a threat to be hacked off in loathing and survival. It is, on the other hand, evidence of a guilt to be hidden with all the rapid gluttony of a child who’s stolen sweets from a pantry.
Thus, we have the missing background of Ramiro, the Orphan. Behind the technique of his murder, behind the bipolar relationship it depicts with the slum’s orphans, at once helped, at once eaten, is a tale of cyclical, hereditary insanity, abuse and murder propagating from parent to child to adopted child.
Possibly. While I am convinced that my take is accurate, I will note the fragmentary dispersal of these sightings, which the saga refuses to ever connect explicitly and further obfuscates through biased second-hand accounting. The latter challenge applies even to the cannibalism. The crime is not directly witnessed but re-imagined from the noise by an eavesdropping Oliver Spears, squatting outside the shack while refusing intervention. It is thus possible that, in this idea of a paternalistic shadow oppressor, what we’re truly observing is Oliver’s own sensationalist madness, a misprojection of his struggles with Henry, a.k.a. crusadingintheshadows, cast many times in the role of a clandestine censorer and believed falsely at this narrative point by Oliver to have banished him to Suchi as punishment for a journalistic trespass. Rather than a total misprojection, however, I’m more inclined to interpret, taking all the other evidence into account, that Oliver has arrived upon the prime cause of Ramiro’s perversion even if the pathway was his own.
Orphan C: Henry, The Tyrant
Henry, we might label a ‘Semi-Orphan’, a soft variant of the archetype, worse off than a pseudo-Orphan but not suffering the full-blown traumatic ordeal.
His mother is dead.
–72: ‘Henry’s mother had fallen ill with stomach cancer.’
As for his father, while the man lives, Henry seems to be estranged. Father Lee has no visible role in the saga’s copious pages. The son, despite being a legal minor, resides alone, first at the guild HQ, presently at a pony ranch/world-wonder(?). My personal reading is that what causes the estrangement is Henry’s disappointment in his father, whose negligence in response to the mother’s illness requires the teen to drop out of education and operate the family diner.
–222: ‘His dad, hearing about his travel plans, was disappointed to learn he still wouldn’t be coming home. His father mistakenly believed that Henry’d left due to resentment for having to drop out to take over the family restaurant because his dad had turned into a depressed wreck.'
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
In the rest of the quoted passage, Henry denies this resentment.
–222: ‘Henry did his best to assure the old man this wasn’t the case – and it genuinely wasn’t. He’d observed countless people break down at much more critical moments than that, mothers fleeing burning homes with their infants inside, fathers bargaining to have their eldest sons poisoned in their stead. No one could anticipate how their heart would hold up when death arrived. It was pointless judging.’
But, rather than an honest statement, I read the above as a teen minimising his situation by contrasting himself with those worse off. ‘Hey, at least my father isn’t a cannibal strangler’. Yet, if anything, these morbid comparisons inadvertently express his resentment, Henry mentally linking—and lumping—his father with these other paragons of parental failure.
Whether or not the resentment’s true, Henry’s Semi-Orphanhood has fulfilled a central background role throughout the saga, especially regarding its second-level, ‘Mid-Tier Plebeian’ melodrama layer, i.e. the over-the-top, ‘humanist’ NPC drama. This connection, and Henry's Semi-Orphanhood, might have already been apparent to those interpreting the story according to this layer, but to me, aspiring to the mythological heights and ignoring everything below, they're quite novel, and I'll take a moment to compile this plot for others ignorant like myself.
A possible formulation of the melodrama
His mother’s death, if my grasp of the timelines is correct, is not technically the first act in this tale, taking place as it does between the current game instalment and Saana II. But, this plot being hyper-synchronic, her passing retroactively injects grief into the dormant events preceding, like Henry’s grooming by Rose’s brother, the death of Heavy-Fingers, and the deaths during his first campaign of the horse archers that teach him the bow-riding technique used in Volume I on Donkey Bro. The last group inspire a protagonist in Henry’s pleb-bait.
– 267: That period pre-dated his ‘serious’ metamorphosis. Henry’d only had a foretaste in the losses of his first NPC pals during his guild's steppe campaign, the deeper milestones of Heavy Fingers and his mother yet to occur
–36: ‘Back in Saana II, [Henry’d] been taught horse archery by a tribe of nomads...’
–113: ‘[Henry] did an apprenticeship in command under Septic Rose’s brother during their alliance’s unification of the nomadic steppe tribes...’
–136: ‘a passionate muscular stallion-riding barbarian NPC...’
–212: ‘One of the male leads had been a nomadic warrior NPC; that character featured traits of himself and his problems, but it was also a composite of his first significant virtual buddies, a memorial of the young soldiers whose comradery had removed the blinding veil from his eyes.’
Together, these deaths—real and unreal—morph into the ‘humanist’ complex that initiates and sustains his tyrannical world mission, a mingling we continue to observe as Henry, rather crazily, laments the NPCs and his mother in the same mental sighs.
–113: ‘…perhaps due to his mother's passing giving him a more tangible sense of death, he'd found that that pesky empathy for the NPCs had only blossomed over the years...’
–212: ‘The pain at losing his NPC friends had not been fundamentally discernible from the loss of his own mother. In certain respects, it’d been worse. He’d at least been able to prepare for his mother due to the slow process of her illness; with his NPC colleagues, he’d be hanging out with them having tea one day and the next he’d receive a clip of them getting their head sawn off.’
While projecting the grief for his mother onto the NPCs, Henry might also project a sense of responsibility and guilt. Her death, I remark—in an odd detail I’ve not been able to resolve since one reader pointed out this plothole, Henry’s (and my) homeland, New Zealand, having universal healthcare—is constantly attributed to financial limitations.
–72: ‘Back then, his family had been broke. Despite him dropping out of school to keep their restaurant afloat, they'd been unable to come up with the treatment costs for her end-of-life care. When Alex caught a whiff of this, he went around his back and paid to have his mother transferred to a swanky hospital, where she spent her last few months in comfort and peace.’
–113: ‘Initially, to pay back Alex for his mother’s hospital fees...’
–212: ‘His mother had died in her 30s of a treatable cancer because, envisioning no way to pay for the medical costs without ruining the family, she’d resigned herself to her end, telling no one until the visible disintegration of her body revealed the truth.’
However that plothole came to be—another far-distant future mystery just like the transgender—we can track the development of Henry’s neurosis into the actions that follow his mother’s death.
Immediately, he quits school to work at a diner. This is initially presented in the saga as a purely pragmatic decision. Henry, later, confesses that it isn’t quite.
–186: 'Truthfully, there’s been no material necessity for quitting school. He could have devised more lucrative pursuits than saving his parents’ restaurant…he’d been too angry and depressed to go to class…a convenient excuse to drop out, a goal by which to reorient and direct himself.'
I underline not the normative response of depression here but ‘angry’ and ‘reorient’. Through those, we learn that his rationale is not simply grief. There is a rage, too, some of which is directed at himself and a past behaviour in need of correction. What is that past behaviour? I’m guessing, based on the key morality of this saga, the crime of playing videogames, worthless time-wasters during which he should have earned the cash required to save his mother.
Except, in a nuance Henry realises—and what’s contained in the bolded ‘more lucrative pursuits’—the videogames are NOT worthless, not to him. Returning to Saana, more mature, he re-employs his old warlord talents as a hardcore sell-out, starting ‘The Company’, an org whose name preserves this initial economic motive.
–113: ‘[Henry] started an in-game trading company to accumulate goods to sell for real-life cash.’
Yet, in time, The Company grows far beyond its original design, evolving into an empire whose ‘Trading Posts’ are mini-castles built in foreign lands. Why this evolution? By my reading, Henry, the Semi-Orphan—compulsively stockpiling resources in and out of Saana to save a mother already dead, connecting her back with the NPCs of the past, like Heavy-Fingers, whom he also didn’t save—eventually forms a delusion that he can save the NPCs of this instalment in a simulation of the redemption that he can’t achieve.
It’s that crazed mission that defines the closing years of his adolescence, that brings us eventually to the present saga.
Such could be Henry's melodrama.
Beyond Melodrama
Henry's Semi-Orphan backstory diffuses further through the saga's higher layers.
In the Jungian realm, ‘The Tyrant’ that is born from this melodrama is, archetypally, one potential reaction to Orphanhood. ‘If you hate being parentless, then safeguard the world from the same fate by taking up that role and duty, forcibly.’ This paternalistic mindset is most explicit with the Archdeacon sub-plot, in which Henry literally adopts orphan NPCs.
Mythologically, from Orphanhood could also spring Henry’s obsessive quest for immortality, a terror of death for others and the self on who so many are dependent, those figures in his Semi-Orphan past functioning like Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu whose death initiates the king’s own desperate mission.
(‘Author’s’ within an ‘author’s’ note: I have no supporting quotations. Rather, the saga, in one of several omitted nightmares, confirms this mythological parallel. A reader might’ve noticed the sudden absence of his dreams. If I’m being honest, they’d continued to plague Henry (and myself) throughout the tournament, but I’d elected—as I do with Henry’s literary rants—not to translate them because they had no apparent place in a story about duelling and, more practically, their content had become so disturbing that I feared getting banned off this litrpg platform. After awakening to the saga's mythological cryptology, it now strikes me that these omissions were probably an error, that I may have discarded some or other essential clues. But, there's nothing much to be done after the fact, this non-author having long forgotten the nightmares, and I can only offer alongside my apologies the consolatory insight that, in a story so synchronically repetitive, those clues were probably repeated hundreds of times before the nightmares and after.
The following is what I can recall.
A dimly remembered summary of the nightmare progress: Henry, after leaving the soldier haven, has I) executed criminals creatively, II) dismembered a couple million kids while refashioning their body parts into miscellaneous equipment for climbing and other hobbies, III) slow-crawled up a frost layer buffeted by ice-winds from the mouths of corpses repeating his various names, and IV) laboured several infinities murdering and re-murdering a layer of size-expanding titans, one of whom I recognised as Heavy Fingers.
During the kid mutilation layer, Henry almost took the wise choice like myself with the nightmare translation to concede, but he was saved by a horse-riding barbarian—an unsubtle reference to his pleb-bait protagonist—who swifted him through the trial by setting the remaining kids on fire. This barbarian then joins for several more layers, as companion and friend.
The man's analogy to Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu is most pronounced in his death, taking place during a nightmare coinciding with Henry’s latest nap that preceded this rookie tournament. As the summit was entering sight, a mysterious woman, substituting for the myth's Ishtar, barricaded the way. Like Ishtar, she gave a curse sentencing one of the companions to death, and Henry, after an extended battle with the barbarian, dispatched him with a pickaxe through the eye.)
Outside those two layers, and where their narrato-stratospheric placement eludes this non-author who is not so interested in them, from Orphanhood, we might also get some of the saga’s other absurdities, like Henry’s persistent loyalty to Alex Wong, the interfering, pseudo-parental meddling role of his schoolfriend Cathy, and his ironical notion of being a sell-out or ‘filthy rich’. We get, at the most absurd, his pro-gold-digger manifesto, wealth imbued by him with an unstated connotation. ‘Money means your family doesn’t die,’ appears to be the radical moral lesson, ‘so, logically, you should prioritise its accumulation, even over romance. Synchronically, forget your dead parents, do you want your wife to die of cancer? Do you want your kids to die of cancer? Everyone’s survival is hinging on you factoring wealth far more than you currently are, just like the astute and noble gold-digger.'
–167, in a joke reason: ‘When others would summon you back, demand you squander your hours with them or your emotionally-neglected children, the gold-digger never relents in the chant for you to strive further onwards, to climb higher and earn more.’
I underline the intrusive neglect/Orphanhood theme that synchronically participates in his pro-gold-digging moral enlightenment.
From Orphanhood, we might get one reason for Henry’s flopped triangle choice of Silver over Rose. The former alone shares in his neurosis and, perhaps, as a non-assassin, offers a gentleness that better satiates his maternal void.
–214: ‘The main quality he’d been attracted to in Silver wasn’t her looks nor her intelligence but a spiritual beauty, her empathy.’
But there’s another, much more logical romantic barrier yet with Rose, which we’ll learn once her own orphanhood’s exposed in part three.
Part Two. The Orphan Lost Between The Orphans
The saga’s archetypes shoot to the synchronic heights when we start to compare the recurring details of their manifestations, to recognise, across them, the intermeshed complex of repeating ideas, messages, and, ultimately, plots. Ramiro, Karnon, and Henry in the above descriptions are not simply linked by a generic commonality of Orphanhood. All three share around this archetype a highly specific, highly anomalous set of circumstances and tendencies.
* Abusive/negligent fathers
* Dead mothers
* Moral deterioration
* Proclivities to murder
* Imperial reigns followed by catastrophic downfalls
* Recruitment of other orphans
* Abstractions of the original trauma into outlets removed by so many degrees as to be unrecognisable (i.e., hands, pranks, videogame crusades)
These, together, I argue, constitute the myth of one archetypal Orphan. Each is an act or scene in a non-linear pan-Orphan super drama that repeats between the Orphans. Scrambled as these moments of the super drama are, their arrangement into a coherent myth poses a challenge of profound synchronic difficulty. We’re tasked with not only identifying what’s common between each manifestation of the pan-Orphan but also filling in the many gaps that exist for each by borrowings from their archetypal siblings.
Henry x Ramiro
Comparing Ramiro to Henry, although we glimpse the former at his most depraved—a corrupt slumboss pilfering stadium construction funds, running hits on rivals, eating kids—there are suggestions from his title of ‘The Saviour’ and from his non-defecting troops that his crusade had some level of humanist benevolence, much like the saga insists of Henry’s crusade.
–181: ‘Not that anyone would believe [Ramiro] should his nocturnal experiments be revealed, but, following his metamorphosis, there'd been genuine human empathy in his campaign to unify The Slums. He'd sincerely come to relate to the Slumdwellers' suffering and felt he could provide them with a better life than their then-subjugators.’
Conversely, as I learned while chasing the Mohon rabbithole, Henry has, like Ramiro, scoured the slums for orphans, has crept through these same streets, peeking into its shacks and inspecting with a microscopic view the calibre of its orphan flesh.
–135: ‘Henry'd specifically scouted the children of former nobility…In The Slums, where the excommunicated of the world fled, these people could be found everywhere, under every piece of rotting driftwood.’
Also like Ramiro, we’ve actually observed Henry killing these orphans. The above quote is pulled from a private debut of A Thousand Tools, when he uses the art to anonymously extinguish a cannibal cult, some of whom are rejected candidates of his successor recruitment scheme. In that episode we reason without any shred of moral conflict that the orphan killing is warranted, each orphan guilty of cannibalism. So in turn might Ramiro have rationalised his own orphan killings, comprehending in a way that few others ever would the future in store for those outside his regime’s protective umbrella, doomed to enter gangs and cannibal cabals. That is not to say this is his current motive, or even his initial motive. Ramiro, in fact, starts according to Oliver’s investigation of ‘The Hog’ as a serial killer before advancing to politics.
–170: ‘The Hog's first recorded sighting had been 18 months earlier, and after that, over a period of half a year, they'd averaged one incident every three real-life days, before tapering off the killings. This termination point happened to align with Ramiro starting the mission to unify The Slums, when his sadistic fancy must have switched from murdering lone children to entire gangs and families.’
However—within the synchronic, non-linear myth of the pan-Orphan—it likely is a rationale at some point, a method of resolving the moral contradictions that develop when transitioning from nightstalker to saviour. ‘Why do I still kill these orphans? Because life for them is bleaker. Death is also a kindness.’ Delusional? Indeed.
In chapter 199, ‘The Saints Who Dine on Filth’ (not Saint, Saints), when Henry and Ramiro meet to duel over an orphan’s half-eaten corpse, the two, as fellow orphans who kill orphans, instantly recognise each other through the mutual history that generates such delusional thinking.
–199: ‘Ramiro: “Delusional or not, my efforts to fix this place were earnest. Can you believe that?” Henry: “Sure.”’
‘Sure,’ says Henry, bound to the same mad myth but at a different synchronic stage. That one clipped word admits to a degree of comprehension with his archetypal sibling far beyond what any outsider might realise. Both are ‘delusional’ by any rational analysis, yet they, also, by not allowing the statement to end with that confession, feel themselves owed a further say, feel ‘earnest’, if not justified.
Ramiro reciprocates the acknowledgement.
–199: ‘Henry: “No individual amounts to enough to tolerate such sins. You are not essential to the world. You can always be replaced by someone without your faults.” Ramiro: “You include yourself.” Henry: “I’m only one teen.” Ramiro: “Please. Save this modesty for others. You know full well that none of the puritans were willing or capable…”’
Henry, by chastising Ramiro here, chastises himself, and Ramiro, by defending Henry, defends himself. Through the mouths of both, the pan-Orphan uniting them debates with itself a moral quandary ludicrous to anyone else. We might hear it asking, in the background of their utterances, ‘Should I eat or not eat the other orphans? How many orphans should I eat? At what precise number of orphans should I desist eating them? What’s my next step now that everyone has witnessed me eating orphans, retiring from eating orphans or starting anew?’ Then, in lieu of any logical answers, the orphan lets its conflicted parts settle their argument through a duel.
Beyond the duel, before the duel, Ramiro’s organisation, The Empire, if my recollection serves, is modelled directly after The Company. Ramiro has copied Henry’s mercantile mix of imperialism and totalitarian market liberalism (?) and adapted it to the local conditions with supplementary gang-tactics and technocommunism (?).
Part Nothing. The Orphan Simply Lost
It is here where my original exposition on the Orphan archetype abruptly terminates. While fact-checking the pair's organisational structures, too syncretically complex for my human memory to retain, I had to attend a dinner. During that intermission, my research migrated from a mixed media laptop-notescrap hotel setup to the restaurant napkins subsequently lost. And thus the archetype of the Orphan—after several weeks of holidaying and research digressions between—was also lost, along with the explanation of Rose’s orphan-esque madness.
In the next non-chapter, utilising one set of napkins that escaped a hotel cleaner’s inspection, I’ll reassemble what was essential in my analysis for Miller from the Orphan’s remains. (‘Author’s’ note within an ‘author’s’ note: And, as stated in my semi-cancelled apology, I actually did manage to eventually recover Orphan Rose.)