We'll pick back up from a set of Chinese restaurant napkins that survived the purge. The reader will see that, pursuing a tangent in a tangent, my ramblings barely mention Rose or Orphanhood. They originate from what I take to be a shared therapy idea between her and semi-Orphan Henry - Rose’s narrative mentions she went to therapy (111: ‘Her secret: she’d been in therapy for ages now and could stop stalking any time she wanted’), and Henry later goes himself. This diverges into an interpretation of his noodlings in The Overdream as a form of post-Orphan therapy in accordance with the seventh Jungian/shadow/therapy plot-layer. For the sake of scholastic honesty, and in case my blunderings prove helpful to any investigators in the future, I leave in my original spelling errors, non-split wall of text format, and bracketed self-notes.
—napkins: '…In the Overdream, where the transferral of plots between archetypal siblings is most fluid, much like figures substituting for each other in the dreams the device simulates and expands, the bizarre ‘Flying Crabs’ that populate his island farm could be re-analysed as mutations of the Dependent Innocents of Saana’s NPCs, and Henry’s interactions with these ugly creatures duplicates, exposes, and exaggerates the Orphan-like psychosis inherited together with Rose. During the first Floating Leaf episode, while Henry follows the crabs’ migration (migration – Suchi’s migratory Sandfolk, a link? Check later), while he observes their mass annihilation to some gluttonous giant pelican-whale things (monsters of the savannah? check link in Kolonian worm-guy narrative), his feelings of old resurge as he develops an unwise level of attachment to these suffering creatures, to what are—objectively—simulations of suffering within a simulation of suffering. Losing sense of reality yet again, Henry’s Semi-Orphanhood resurging, he goes so far in the projection of himself upon the crabs as to inherit their instinct to migrate wherever they migrate, making a continuation of his journey with the crabs one of the primary goals of his cyborg tangents. This goal of migrating, if not initially, eventually becomes in The Overdream a deliberative, ironical choice on Henry’s part, an intentional strategy utilising The Cap as a therapeutic device to explore and master his psychological baggage (connect more explicitly to Jungian nonsense). The subsequent sessions show him steadily working through the intertwining madnesses. At times, he plunges deeper into his psychosis while building the various technological and martial capabilities necessary to pass the barrier of a jungle. At others, he hones the opposite skills that will allow him to escape his psychosis, e.g. the Pliant Vine episode on detachment, during which he cultivates an elaborate forest garden (garden? farm? check term consistency) only to abandon the garden and meditate on its decay, the garden yet another abstracted Innocent substitute, substituting for the crabs, substituting for the NPCs, substituting for his deceased mother. In the end, after the jungle of bamboo things (search specifics for clarity) that block his migration is traversed, Henry fails in the resolution of the migration but succeeds in the more essential resolution to the insanity that first compelled him to migrate. As a test of his therepeuetic(?) growth, his journey beyond the jungle is obstructed yet again by an even greater barrier, by the continent terminating in an ocean that he cannot cross without wings (check precise cause of obstruction: wings or boat?). His lesson learned, instead of escalating to whatever next multi-century research program might grant him flight (?), Henry chooses to stop there, to wave with his non-winged limbs the winged crabs off, to move on to other pursuits contended with everything gained following these decrepit creatures and—more than these decrepit creatures—the other decrepit, unreal beings that they simulate, i.e. Saana’s NPCs. Thus, in the archetypal-Jungian-Shadow-dream-therepuetictherapy dimension, involving characters and troubles mutating far beyond any identifiable resemblance to their origin, we observe the conclusion of the psychodrama on Henry’s side of Semi-Orphanhood, and with it, the conclusion of the thereputic 7th Jungian layer and the intertwining 3rd(?) melodrama layer – at least for the cyborg Henry, capable of cramming centuries of personal growth into two weeks. What that conclusion actually was, I lack any further brain capacity to describe, nor can I handle the apparent contradiction of him continuing to be a nutjob in the subsequent episodes with the tool-forging psychosis, murder-king roleplay, this tournament, etcetera (recheck when sober – conclusion/contradictions might be clearer then).'
And thus, tagged for rechecking, tucked into a coat compartment and forgotten, the napkins escaped the pogrom of their less fortunate siblings by a cleaner mistaking them for rubbish.
I’ve additionally since recovered a google doc on my phone, on which I was apparently free associating to synthesise moral truths based on the saga’s primary manifestations of the Orphan archetype. Here, too, I preserve my unadulterated theorycrafting.
—phone doc: 'moral diamonds on orphanhood according to sagasenders:
* henry – dead mother as substitute for gilgamesh’s dead friend enkidu, ‘cure orphanhood by becoming immortal’ / orphan archetype as child of immortality theme inversed / heroes as generated through abandonment and death / lesson: ‘abandon your kids by getting cancer and they will become genius billionaire cyborgs’
* karnon – orphanhood as the ultimate prank / orphanhood as creating unruly pests / ‘maybe don’t abandon your kids’
* ramiro – to parents, avoid a premature death or kid might grow up to become a cannibal / orphans unable to escape worst of parents / ‘you can abandon your kids, it doesn’t matter, they will still grow up to be like you’ / or ‘solve world orphan problem through cannibalism a la swift’s modest proposal’
* karnon x henry – orphanhood as madness, as danger of earthfriend/furry / orphanhood as confusion / as confusing plotlines / as confusing monologues / ‘don’t abandon kids or you will create speakers of confusing monologues’
* henry x ramiro – lmaooooo, ‘to parents, avoid a premature death or kid might grow up to become a videogamer’ gg synchronocally ez
* ramiro x karnon - ? ‘orphans should collaborate with other orphans to make a cool orphan family’ / ‘orphanhood cyclical, creating more orphans’
* henry x ramiro x karnon – orphan triangle, love triangle, a triangle missing love like miller ??? / ‘orphanhood not good’
* septic rose – spoiled flower, orphan as tainted by an impossible to recover past
* henry flower x septic rose – hero as generated through abandonment and cruelty / shared flower motif, metaphor of parent to orphan as plant to seed / orphanhood as potential independence, beautiful flowers sprouting on their own from composting brothers/mother / ‘orphanhood actually good’
* all together + rose – ‘orphanhood sometimes good, maybe’'
(‘Author’s’ note within an ‘author’s’ note: ‘Enchi, why the hell weren’t you taking all your notes on your phone, then?’ I’m somewhat of an antiquarian and, as can be seen from above, the extra cognitive burden of navigating a phone keyboard drops my effective IQ to around 70, far below what’s necessary to comprehend this saga’s mythological super-stratum. For that reason, I only resort to the phone out of practical necessity when researching in bathrooms. Despite the risks attested by my misfortunes, the highest, most intelligent, and most conducive mode of interpretation for this section is napkin-sized notes that can be re-assembled on demand into novel synchronic patterns. This is likely the only feasible path to cracking the mystery of whether or not Henry’s saga has a plot before super A.I.)
I may have failed to reassemble Rose’s face-swap motivation from these fragments. Nevertheless, they do remind me of the saga’s archetypal puzzle-game that her example illustrated. This archetypal puzzle-game, related to the earlier theme puzzles, revolves around a continuous back and forth between the following two mechanics.
Mechanic One - Shared Plotlines and Episodes
I requote, ‘where the transferral of plots between archetypal siblings is most fluid’, and highlight the intersectional nature of my restroom moral synthesising.
The saga abounds with stories that are shared across its cast, the manifestations of each archetype, or ‘archetypal siblings’, repeating each other’s ambitions, troubles, strategies, and actions as part of a pan-archetypal super-drama, or, in simpler terms, a story 'plot'.
These archetypal plots can be conceived from at least two different angles. We might read them according to the saga’s 8th layer, as myth’s repetitive synchronic tendency condensing into human shape. Such is the interpretation I’ve taken, and I’ve found it perfectly sufficient for my analysis, which is concerned with the deciphering of a single individual. A wider, more nuanced interpretation, however, is likely available in the saga’s seventh, Jungian layer and that Swede psychoanalyst’s theories of a collective human unconscious. Burned out, I've left that interpretation to the cyborgs of the future, but it was highly tempting and I forsake it with regret. It has occurred to me that, with a total grasp of the archetypes, it might be possible to leap beyond the smaller feat of explanation to the miracle of prediction - logically, if the plots are shared, and if we’ve seen the endings of plots for some characters, then it follows that we’ve also seen the ending of their archetypal siblings.
As part of the 8th-layer myth-puzzle, these archetypal plots become so cryptic that their identification on any straight-forward, linear reading of the text is borderline impossible. While the plotlines do repeat abundantly, we're prevented from noticing this pattern due to constant fragmentation. For any given sibling, certain key episodes of the plot might be omitted or, more bewildering, inverted, suggesting perhaps a deeper concept of which the more frequent episode is only a binary polarity. At times, a sibling may very well feature an episode but the episode is obscured through deceit or de-emphasis, their interior monologue reducing to a single, easy-to-miss sentence events that might for a sibling be magnified with multiple chapters worth of material. At other times, the omission is a consequence of the plotlines being non-linear, key episodes for any given sibling occurring prior to the two-week window of this duelling tournament or, potentially, after the window.
Adding to those fragmentary difficulties, many characters, especially Henry, are complex amalgams of multiple archetypes. This creates an ambiguity as to which moment in their individual story should be ascribed to a given super-drama. Worse, some moments seem to apply to multiple, intersecting super-dramas, the saga frequently resorting to symbolism, referent ambiguities, and entendre to hit several points at once.
A great example of this archetypal multiplicity is the following declaration by Henry to Mrtyu in the last match of a duel series, recovered by myself while investigating an ‘Immortality Seeker’ archetype.
—231: ‘“In life, the end is always the same; all that changes is which of the thousand paths we choose to reach it by.” [Henry juggles weapons]. “Yours will be the sword.”’
In isolation, this is a bizarre statement for a videogame match, and we might imagine Henry, The Cripple, i.e. an archetypal Ironic Jester, parodying the dialogue of a samurai manga. Yet Henry, as an Immortality Seeker, might be with full sincerity talking down to Death here, the Sanskrit translation of Mrtyu’s name, Henry in this scene recalling his complex historical relation to mortality and settling, in the latest flirtation, on a strategy of slaying death first with a sword. As yet another, murkier archetype, significant in Henry’s current duel with Miller, where Miller hesitates over using a Legendary sword, we might re-re-frame Henry as one of the saga’s Sword Bearers, an archetype revolving around a repeating set of 'Ortheerian' weapons. In that role, he dismisses all the drama of this latest duel a thousand pages earlier. Just as the Immortality Seeker is fated to die, the Sword Bearer may be fated to duel over the ownership of their blade; accepting that destiny, moving on from purposeless anxieties, they can reorient their focus on the smaller set of options actually at hand: will they duel with or without the weapon. Henry chooses to duel with the sword - both in that duel against Mrtyu and in this one against Miller, where Henry eventually wields a different Ortheerian sword.
All three of those archetypal plots, and maybe more, are packed into that single declaration. And the saga, the more I’ve studied it, uses this technique constantly, its mysterious senders being fiends for layers and irony. Strong hotspots for these layers are the frequent moments of absurdity and confusion. Occasionally, these episodes are a consequence of the satirical layer, but, more often, they’re generated by the intrusion of one or more overlapping plots, pushing emotions and actions jarringly out of sync with whatever’s happening superficially. Henry’s bizarro monologue at Justinian about castration is another example of this. The hysteria of our hero is absurd if we regard him only as addressing the roleplayer. It makes much more sense, though, when we realise that Henry, a metaphorical Sword Bearer, is simultaneously speaking to his cryptic anti-sword transgenderist foes. To this second audience, Henry, by flaunting his soldiers’ re-attached ‘swords’, is declaring that ‘there will be no more genital robbery – not under my lawful regime.’ In light of this demonic danger, our hero's hysteria might be perfectly appropriate if not somewhat subdued.
Mechanic Two - Clues through Proximity and Shared Features
Another key mechanic of the archetypal plotlines, whose explanation I assume was lost, is that the saga graciously does provide some clues as to which characters might be archetypal siblings. Their relations are emphasised through anomalies that, on the surface, would seem statistically impossible. One mode of emphasis, less anomalous, is the saga forcing the siblings into close proximity, both physical proximity, the pairs often meeting and conducting prolonged conversations that make no sense until one comprehends their archetypal linkage, and mental proximity as they obsess over their siblings. A second mode of emphasis, highly anomalous, are shared characteristics between siblings.
Henry, linked in characteristic with the other Orphans siblings, is a former Cutthroat like Rose, an Earthfriend like Karnon, and an empire builder like Ramiro. Proximally, Rose shadows Henry while calling him ‘Big Bro’ as if family, Karnon’s orphan past is revealed by Henry’s Overdream investigations, and Ramiro is duelled by Henry over the corpse of a dead orphan acting as a third proximity clue. If we were to continue the comparisons between the others and the rest of the saga’s Orphans, it’s possible to diagram an elaborate, criss-crossing network of characters unified at the centre by their archetypal status. An incomplete version of this trait network, just based on my memory, might look like this:
Shared Traits (Excluding Orphanhood)
Henry
Ramiro
Karnon
Rose
Delivery Roaches
Kolonian Worm-Guy
Little Liu
Geri and Freki
Henry
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Ramiro
Empire Builder, Insane, Retired Ruler
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Karnon
Earthfriend, Genius, Retired Ruler, Insane, Assassin, Ironical Jester, Schemer
Retired Ruler, Insane, Son of Abusive Father, Murderer
-
-
-
-
-
-
Rose
Chinese, Cutthroats turned Earthfriends, Assassin, Duellist, Insane
Murderer, Insane
Assassin, Earthfriend, Murderer, Insane
-
-
-
-
-
Delivery Roaches
Child of Poverty
Slumdweller
?
?
-
-
-
-
Kolonian Worm-Guy
Child of Poverty, Crusader, Scammer, Son of Mother Killed by Disease, Schemer
Slumdweller
Schemer
?
Slumdweller, Child of Poverty
-
-
-
Little Liu
Chinese, Mute, Son of Mother Killed by Disease (Fake), Nephew
?
?
Mute
Child
?
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
-
-
Geri and Freki
Norse Figure
?
Non-Human
Wolf (stolen face)
Child
?
Child
-
Archdeacon Mohon
Child of Poverty
Suchidweller
?
?
Suchidweller, Child of Poverty
Suchidweller, Child of Poverty, Religious Zealot
?
?
Some of those traits belong to the Orphan, others to other archetypes or pure coincidence. The most straight-forward method for differentiating which assignment is to compare frequency. 'Child of Poverty', repeating across 4 out of 9, is definitely archetypal, the loss of parents too early usually inflicting financial troubles. 'Wolf', occurring twice, I'd call mere coincidence. 'Norse Figure', occurring twice, is not archetypal for the Orphan but is part of a different archetypo-apocalyptic complex related to Loki and Henry The Hydra/Jörmungandr.
Behind these anomalies, we might sense a background force, a gravity or mythological magnetism, which continuously draws the siblings together, smashing them into each other and jumbling their characteristics. Less mystically, that background force is their common archetypal struggle, causing the siblings to adopt similar strategies and behaviours, to pause and contemplate the shocking recognition of themselves in the sibling as a mirror image, and to seek out their siblings for mutual assistance. This dynamic is best dramatised in a scene of Ramiro in Chapters 179 and 180. While standing in front of a literal mirror, he studies footage projected onto his reflection of his archetypal brother Henry beheading Donkey Bro’s driver, and Ramiro has a cryptic rumination that suggests he’s identified Henry as The Tyrant, long before anyone else. The pan-Orphan in Ramiro recognises The Company’s financial inefficiencies caused by its orphan baggage, eliminates Alex Wong as a puppet too happy and optimistic without its orphan baggage, and selects Henry from the crowd as its brother due to the teen’s baggage-learned hesitancies before a street assassination, an act that contains beneath an ironical facade the same melodramatic morbidity as Ramiro’s own street-urchin cannibalism.
Our own contemplation of these shared traits and proximities in rationalistic terms can be a valuable method for dredging up hidden elements of the archetypal plots. Is Henry and Ramiro, for example, being empire builders in a videogame a magical coincidence? Not at all. From what I recall of a lost napkin, Ramiro has deliberately imitated Henry’s hybrid humanitarian-imperial guild structure, a design that likely resonated with Ramiro not due to the imperial half but the obscurer humanitarian half rippling out of their mutual semi-orphan nature.
I will warn, however, against attempts to overrationalise these anomalous clues. My impression after studying them across multiple archetypes is that their existence is still a little mystical. Three quarters of them might be explained by the archetypal super-drama, but there remains an inexplicable fourth, attributable perhaps to the saga-sender’s presentational biases or Saana’s deeper cyclicality mechanisms. On top of this, with the pan-Orphan and intersecting archetypes, there is an additional residue of anomaly caused by the background meddlings of Orphan Karnon, teleporting his siblings around for an incomprehensible scheme.
The Archetypal Puzzle Game
Those two mechanics, the shared plots and the shared clues, co-ordinate as phases of the archetypal puzzle-game. Through the clues, we find the siblings and their episodes of the super-drama, and, while attempting to sort, match, and clarify these sibling episodes into the overlapping archetypes, we inevitably find missed clues and missed siblings. As we vacillate between these phases, the evidence gradually stacks up around us and the episodes arrange into the clearer, linear form of the super-dramas hidden in the saga's puzzling layers. Due to these difficulties, one might comprehend the need for note-based research methods since the evidence must be continuously reshuffled according to ever-evolving insights. That arduous exercise, as it relates to the pan-Orphan, I won’t be repeating in full, both the notes and my false attachments to them lost, but I must point it out. When we return to Miller, his love triangle is a puzzle amongst puzzles, the duellist gifting us few explicit episodes but an abundance of archetypal clues from which those missing episodes can be reverse engineered.
The Hero Without Parents' Brief Return
To assist other researchers, I'll give a snippet of my methodology with the lost pan-Orphan story.
Building off my pre-napkin-loss exposition’s terminating point, Henry and Ramiro, as potential Orphans siblings, provide complimentary insights into each other, and the larger Orphan super-drama, that are not readily apparent in their individual stories. Through Ramiro’s narrative, we get still cryptic but more pronounced episodes of the Orphan's parental angst and darker inclinations that Henry’s POV represses. More than anger, we also get from Ramiro the emphasis on Orphanhood that is absent for Henry, who, having abstracted his familial troubles so far into Saana, practically never thinks about them, not even indirectly in the manner Ramiro does, such that we could easily forget Henry even possesses a family, living or dead. Conversely, through Henry’s narrative, we get some of Ramiro’s absent positive motivation that has developed from his Orphan drama, his title as 'The Saviour' springing from a campaign to reform Suchi's slum that mirrors Henry's larger campaign to reform the rest of Saana.
–4: ‘The victorious gang, led by an Argentinian mastermind, Ramiro—known locally as 'The Saviour'—had restructured and rebranded themselves to gain legitimacy into a pseudo-empire. The conquered gangs were now stylised as 'Kingdoms', 'Duchies', 'Villages'.’
–199, Ramiro’s interior monologue: ‘Ugly and paltry as The Slums might’ve been, it'd been no small feat to conquer. He'd poured into the task the effort of an emperor. Let anyone else try to arrange this heap of sand, driftwood, criminals, and beggars into a united, productive organisation of millions...’
I believe a quote I’ve lost made this more explicit, Henry explaining that the slums under Ramiro’s regime had improved significantly compared to a visit of his months or years earlier.
This plays into one of the saga’s more obscure meta-themes between the two leaders, which—if I try to articulate it with my minimal comprehension of politics—seems to frame human progress in cynical, politicorealist terms. Posited are shifting limits upon civil rights, which are constrained to material circumstances and transitory stages of socioeconomic development that can’t be skipped and that occasionally require ideologically-inconsistent practises to successfully transcend. This might be an illustration of what Karl Marx called ‘historical materialism’, although I won’t pretend to understand any of his ideas, having pre-conceded on reading Das Kapital in order to decipher this saga’s references due to a precursory need to read Hegel and Adam Smith. (For a minor boast and commiseration with any fellow dilettantes of philosophy, I actually did, somehow, read a little of Hegel, including the labyrinth needed to get him that tracks from Kant all the way back to Plato. My peon brain was ultimately filtered by Smith’s The Wealth of Nations when it began its tenth droll discourse on 18th-century exchange rates for silver.) Regardless, from whatever the cynical politico-realist theme in this saga is, we get the paradoxical fact that Henry, despite being an avowed humanist, also executes the extended families of defectors for the mere crime of blood association, a cryptic plotline that runs synchronically in the background of the Archdeacon Mohon adoption stuff and his exsanguination of a Senior Director Okai Van.
–6: ‘Henry pretended to be an agent of a covert necromancer prince and threatened the Senior Director back that he'd murder the dude's family and turn them into skeleton puppets.’
–161: ‘To keep them loyal and prevent them breaking away with the realms he was having them infiltrate, he retained their family members as hostages’
–1179, Henry talking to the Senior Director before execution: ‘“They sailed away this morning,” Henry whispered. 'They' were [The Senior Director’s] Slumdweller wife and their half-caste kids, who'd been placed under The Company's protection in exchange for his co-operation.’ [I underline ‘protection’ as a possible euphemism.]
–222: ‘The Senior Director had volunteered information on The Empire in exchange for the safety of his wife and children because, in the usual circumstances of treason, the punishment was applied to the perpetrator’s family.’
–275: ‘…killing people's families absolutely works…’
Likewise, on his Orphan brother Ramiro’s end, to unify a gang-riddled slum, you might need to be at ease with even greater moral contradictions, to be simultaneously an ardent protector of street urchins and an ardent cannibal predator.
Whether the saga is actually suggesting this necessity, I’m not sure, since, again, I haven’t studied the requisite political theory, and it could also just be portraying a myth about corruption, documenting the deranged rationalisations of the pan-Orphan before it consumes itself.
That episode of the archetypal plot, ‘Orphanhood Corruption’, repeats non-linearly across both Henry and Ramiro. Ramiro’s state, emphasised at his lowest, foretells where Henry might eventually go, himself transforming into a ‘Hog’. This self-understanding by Henry, in turn, provides the missing explanation for his urgency to retire, which, from a superficial view, and even from the view of his closest friends, like Alex Wong, seems melodramatic. We learn that Henry, a hyper-genius, may have comprehended his own future in a synchronic pattern too elaborate for our peasant brains to hold, has tasted his own child-cannibal-esque destiny through Ramiro and similar villains encountered in his career.
Then, of course, Orphan Henry—I’ll repeat from an earlier quote in this author’s note—actually does become a cannibal during his Left Hand King training.
—276: ‘[Henry] ate that little orphan tailor girl.’
Not only does he imitate Ramiro, albeit in a simulation of simulation, Henry exceeds The Hog in a certain grotesque respect by driving this cannibalism even closer to the Orphan’s ur-trauma of parental loss.
—276: ‘[Henry] sculpted a fleshy puppet of his dead mother, emaciated and bulbous-eyed in the last stages of her cancer, and he ate her, too.’
In this form, as a single sentence, Henry’s recreation and consumption of his parent can easily slip the attention between the bulk of pages dedicated to game lore. But we could, through the archetypal puzzle, magnify the act by transferring the skimmed details from the saga’s less hurried account of its other cannibalistic orphan, Ramiro. We might imagine Henry utilising the Overdream’s creative functions to sculpture his dead mother with all the craft and patience of Ramiro luring kids into a shack, Henry performing Left Hand rituals over the thin, unhealthy-coloured corpse of his mother much like Ramiro summoning a scavenger god to bear witness, Henry deliberating on which part of his dead mother to begin eating first and choosing, perhaps, in place of the hand-fixated Ramiro her ‘bulbous-eye’—punctured eyes are a repetitive gore-theme in our hero’s tale—Henry scooping out his mother’s eye with the same delicacy as Ramiro sawing through the wrist, Henry, like Ramiro snacking on the hand with a crunch, suppressing his gag reflex as the liquid of his mother’s eyeball squirts into his cheeks.
Henry's cannibalism episode, amplified in this synchronic regard, provokes multiple new questions, or perhaps old questions, rehashed from Ramiro. Why eat people? Why eat your mother specifically? What practical goal could such a ritual possibly be useful for? The Left Hand concluding section pretends to answer this by revealing that Henry has invented a method for rationing energy during a tournament marathon, but this explanation severely misaligns with the extremity of the measure. What’s more, there’s a synchronic falsity when we reflect that Henry—from what we’ve observed during the tournament—is quite blasé about the event, using it to monologue, brew teas, and gamble. There is a gap to Henry’s depravity that a tournament does not sufficiently explain and has, really, never explained.
The true motive, assuming there is one, is likely wedged somewhere in the synchronic puzzle of Ramiro and Henry as Orphan siblings. I won’t profess to fully understand this depravity, but, assuming Henry, once again, has comprehended things beyond my non-cyborg brain, I could stretch for an explanation from the Jungian therapeutic shadow layer.
From one lost note on the Swede’s theories, I dimly recall an analysis of medieval alchemy, interpreting the ancient quest to transmute lead into gold as an analogy for the psychological process of ‘sublimation’, of controlling a person’s lower, base instincts, like lust, and refining these into higher, more abstract states, like romantic, familial, and universal love. Behind this are several deeper psychoanalytic ideas, which I'll attempt to summon back to memory if only for an illustration of how burdensome the saga's Jungian layer can get:
* 1) Higher human values/activities are constructed out of lower drives, which must be controlled due to a perpetual psycho-energetic competition with the former. Commercial exchange to acquire resources, for example, could be regarded as a sublimation of using violence to acquire resources. Both employ similar core principles of greed, hostility, risk assessment, and win-loss calculation. Where they differ is in the calibration of these, e.g. hostility reduced and converted into a business smile and the win-loss calculation raised into a more abstract principle of win-win, and the embedding of commerce in more complex systems of civility that eliminate violent gain as an option by labelling and policing it as 'theft'. The navigation of commerce, due to its increased complexity, carries a higher cognitive demand that requires an almost total sublimation of the lower drives, which, if they ever surge—e.g hunger during a famine—can cause a rapid devolution of commerce back into its cruder form.
* 2) It’s possible to indirectly boost our internal psychology, which manages this sublimation and other mental tasks, by working on an external, superficially non-psychological activity. This happens because the deeper neurological mechanisms of thought and action are the same. A person who learns to say hold a surgeon's scalpel without shaking does so by inhibiting wayward neural paths, a cerebral feat required also for driving at the speed-limit, not over-eating, and avoiding social gaffes. We might see this same theory's application in modern art therapy or recommendations to exercise to alleviate depression.
* 3) Pre-modern cultures, with much less concrete theories of brains and minds, primarily cultivated their interior selves through these external activities. This is especially true for the stranger activities that seem materially pointless but, by the very fact they’re not constrained to material circumstances, allow for a much greater freedom of psychological play/development, e.g. alchemy, yoga, kabbalah, religious rituals in general.
* 4) Today, this external approach to improving mental function can still be advantageous at times. It enables one to target issues that are too emotionally sensitive to fix directly or that a person might not have an adequate mental model to comprehend. It also continues to be a core mechanic of education, which, in addition to teaching specific skillsets, uses those skillsets as an indirect path to cultivating the mental discipline required to participate in modernity.
So, in the case of the alchemists, the Swede Carl Jung (or my memory of the Swede Carl Jung) argued that, while the alchemists failed to transmute gold, they were successful in transmuting themselves. Their work progressed their minds and—our minds—from the feuding knights of the dark ages to the self-controlled nerds of today, who've sublimated so much of our base drives into boosting smarts that we actually can, through modern chemistry as a descendant of alchemy, make lead into gold, albeit not with any economic efficiency.
Attempting to link these Jungian theories to Ramiro, a similar sounding concept to alchemical transmutation, ‘transubstantiation’, is mentioned during the account of his cannibalism.
—198: 'Hosanna to this alone, the highest and holiest of delights. The NPC had been transubstantiated into the flesh of a little girl, and from the little girl into the sacrificial lamb who offered herself to their stomach so that they might be redeemed for their iniquities.'
We might extend the parallel between alchemy and psychological development to this ritualistic cannibalism and digestion, recognising the last, too, as a yet another process of refining lower substances into higher, more productive substances. As Ramiro dismembers and digests his victims, he could, like the medieval alchemists, also be—psychologically—dismembering and digesting his pan-Orphan baggage. In the acids of the stomach, the positive elements of his archetypal history are separated from the negative. The former are converted into fuel and nutrients, into the moral impetus to help other orphans by developing Suchi’s slums. The negative, the contradictory desire to kill other orphans, is meanwhile expelled through the step after digestion.
Is this rationale insane? Again, I don’t profess to comprehend the saga. Ramiro’s downfall as The Hog certainly suggests an error of judgement and practise, that this is not only a path to insanity but the conclusive arrival at insanity, the checking into a hotel with insanity, and the ordering of a dinner for two gobbled down by one with insanity.
Henry, his Orphan brother, might have taken up the same cannibalism for the same reason, and might, similarly, have become insane. Although, in Henry's case, we do receive a defence of his cannibalism right after his admission, given to us synchronically by the letter writer, The Eternal One, joined to both Henry and Ramiro under an intersecting archetype of a Corrupt Despot Cannibal.
—276: ‘The screaming masses tugged me back. “Evil fiend! Do you not see, that yours is the wrong direction?! Do you not see that you join the heaps who've fallen?!” “No,” I replied, throwing off their weak grip and spitting in their faces. “This was the right path, just not the right people. Where they have fallen, where you would fall, I, whose grip is stronger than all of yours, will succeed in my ascent.”’
Although Henry, his mouth full, is not the one responding, the saga’s juxtaposition, and his archetypal relation, suggests he could be. The assertion is that, unlike his Orphan brothers, our hero possesses a higher faculty, of mind or morality, that enables him to gain whatever mastery the weaker saviour was searching for in these dark cannibal rituals before his ruin. Of course, we could doubt the truth of Henry’s exceptionalism, asking if this isn’t simply the Orphan’s schizo mental gymnastics as it repeats its siblings’ ruined fate.
I’m not sure what the real answer to that is, but we could further mine the saga’s position on using cannibalism to improve mental health by going beyond Henry and Ramiro, comparing the shared episodes between them above—A) parental angst, B) mental degeneration, C) cannibalism—to the other archetypal orphans. If we cross-reference these with Karnon’s biography in The Laughing Sons chapters, we re-discover the parental against and cannibalism condensed into a single sentence.
—161: ‘Karnon, shapeshifted into a giant reptile, chewed [his adoptive father’s] laughing face off…’
While these parts of the Orphan puzzle are minimised for Karnon, we get the saga’s lengthiest, most in-depth description of the archetype’s mental degeneration. Henry, employing an in-game research technique called ‘Deitological Thematic Induction Modelling’ (164), details how the various elements of the trickster’s story, such as ‘Anti-Colonialism’ and ‘Pious Mischief’, combine and mutate into the final ethos of ‘Soul Expansion’, committing mass-murder-pranks in a quest for amplified sensation. As Henry dissects Karnon’s decline so, we might also see that he is—simultaneously, connected with Karnon as an Orphan—dissecting his own and Ramiro’s decline, providing the missing developmental explanation for how one evolves from a videogame crusader to an eater of family members.
Thus, it would appear that the Pan-Orphan super-drama links these episodes into a mini-arc, the archetype’s mental trauma devolving into cannibalism and giving us what is probably not a pro-cannibalism-therapy message.
Further cross-referencing with the minor manifestations gives partial corroboration. For another case of Orphan cannibalism, Geri and Freki, Henry’s adopted wolf pups, may have been fed by him with the wolves he hunts during his battle with the Wolf Empress.
—57: '...feeding them when possible with the wild game that inhabited the forest.'
Likewise, the Kolonian worm-guy is restricted to a diet of meat from salamanders that, in turn, exclusively eat people. For negative cases, neither Rose, Little Liu, nor Archdeacon Mohon have been observed eating people (yet).
Cross-referencing the parental angst episode, this is not evidenced in Little Liu, Archdeacon Mohon, or Geri and Freki’s cases. Rose we might consider an example for her hatred for her brother if we expand the parental target to a more general category of older family members. Kolonian worm-guy, with a similar vagueness, describes his mother’s death with a cold, loveless irony.
—306: 'The birth mother that’d abandoned him had, fittingly, succumbed to a plague.'
Note the archetypal parallel with semi-Orphan Henry's mother succumbing to cancer.
All the analysis thus far collates into the following table, which I’ve expanded a little further yet with the Delivery Roaches and a classification of Rose’s stalking behaviour as the Orphan’s mental degeneration. I’ve tried to arrange the episodes linearly, to illustrate how the Pan-Orphan progresses from a state of parental angst after their abandonment, to mental decline, to eating people.
Pan-Orphan Super-Drama Episodes
Archetypal Sibling
I. Parental Angst
II. Mental Degeneration
III. Cannibalism
Henry
Suppressed at father
Future - reason for retirement
Eats recreated mother
Ramiro
Strangulation imitation
Cannibalism
Eats orphans
Karnon
Kills father
Soul-Expansion
Eats father’s face
? Rose
? Hates brother
Becomes a stalker
?
Archdeacon Mohon
?
?
?
Geri and Freki
?
?
? Eats wolves
Kolonian Worm-Guy
Indifferent to maternal death
Salamander story is deranged
Eats salamanders that eat people
Delivery Roaches
?
?
Are eaten
In this format, the fragmentary spread of the episodes becomes apparent. I’ll add that, based on my documentation of other archetypes, this table is very incomplete with many more episodes yet to be discovered. Other super-dramas, like the love triangle super-drama of Miller, consist of dozens of episodes, forming a much less vague plotline, one with beginnings, developments, climaxes, and twists.
I’ll be halting my reinvestigation of the Orphan there, but a reader might be able to project how the continuation of this process eventually leads to the analysis of my napkin fragments, rambling about a cross-archetypal therapy between Rose and Henry, who resolves his attachment to Saana’s NPCs originating from his Orphanhood by resolving his attachment to the Overdream’s flying crabs, connected as a possible archetype of ‘Sentient Non-Humans’. This analysis may have developed out of the parallels between Henry and Ramiro via the Jungian alchemy-cannibalism therapy logic, Henry tinkering on one stubborn psychological problem indirectly through another, and we could, in turn, re-interpret Ramiro’s cannibalism according to Henry’s motivations, as a strategy to destroy his attachment to the Slumdwellers, which may or may not be more reasonable than eating people for therapy. The therapy link with Rose isn’t too obscure, the assassin enrolled in real-life therapy. As for her qualifications as a pseudo-Orphan, I suppose, applying the generalisations from my table above, if her brother is viewed as an older familial/pseudo-parental figure, then he did recently die and Rose becoming a ‘pseudo-Orphan’ at the end of her story wouldn’t be a contradiction since these archetypal plotlines can be non-linear. I write that, but the interpretation seems deficient, and no memory is ignited that would explain her stealing Silver Wolf’s face.
Given the centrality of this archetypal puzzle-game for deducing Miller’s missing plot, I feel a bit remiss to skip directly onto his analysis after failing to explain Rose’s face-swap scheme, doubting whether I’ve scientifically supported the mechanics involved. As such, I’m going to, in the next non-chapter, quickly present the results of a different contestant in the same tournament solved through this archetypal puzzle game. The person is Grandma Ru. Her explanatory archetype is a 'Has-Been', based on evidence I’ll simply pull forward from a sub-analysis that was necessary for Miller, who is also partially this archetype.