Taking a short breath before we blow the mysteries off of Miller, giving a minor send-off to the straggling orphans, there are two interesting pieces of archetypal miscellany I found or re-found while failing to salvage an explanation for Rose’s face-theft plot. (Non-author’s note within a non-author’s note: and a third, the finally remembered explanation for Rose, which upgraded this from an addendum to a full non-chapter). The first is a totally different archetype that may apply to Grandma Ru. The second is a key episode in the pan-Orphan superplot that generalises the cannibalism episodes and re-explains them in more archetypally-congruent terms of vengeful familicide, of like killing (and devouring) like.
Miscellany 1: Grandma Ru The Cruel Mother
Scattered in the grandma’s narrative are mentions of a daughter, ‘Cassie’, and some issue that connects with her divorcing her husband. Although I can’t recall the details and, frankly, can’t be bothered searching for them after wrapping the old lady synchronically up, we could imagine her, in this maternal function, as a soft or pseudo-version of the inverse archetype of the Orphan, i.e. the Cruel Parent, whose methods traumatise and generate the Orphan. The following table shows episodes from Orphans in this scheme. I’ve expanded it to include mentors as well as parents, as part of a more generalised notion of an older, parental figure.
Cruel Parent/Mentor
Orphan/Protégé
Mechanism of Cruelty
The Laughing Man
Karnon
Prank combat hazing
The Eternal One
King Jazeer
Training in murder rituals
Heavy-Fingers
Henry The Cripple
Verbal abuse; Beatings
Rose's Brother
Henry The Tyrant
Inflicts NPC-empathy curse; Kills other mentor
Professor Karnon
Professor T
Unwanted pranks
Ramiro The Saviour
Delivery Roaches
Cannibalism
Ramiro’s Serial Killer Father
Ramiro
Strangulation; Stories of cannibalism
Henry The Tutorialist
Geri and Freki
Fed their slaughtered kin
Alex Wong
Little Liu The Mute
Non-Parenting while gaming
Birth Mother
Kolonian Crusader
Abandonment
Henry’s Mother
Henry
Abandonment [by dying]
Grandma Ru
? Cassie
?
Grandma Ru’s daughter is not an orphan, nor do we by my recollection observe any episodes of Orphan negligence. There is nevertheless a background tension between them in her narrative and a strong, strong clue that this archetypal dynamic is pivotal in her story. Firstly (or lastly)—after the drugs, after enlightenment—her closing action in her closing chapter is to insult her ex-husband and child.
–325: ‘“[Ex-husband], you’re a has-been…Politely kill yourself…Cassie… [you’re] a domineering bitch.”’ (non-ANwanon-AN: Note the archetypal deflection)
That insult follows in the wake of Henry, both Orphan and Cruel Parent as The Tyrant, joining Grandma Ru to trashtalk the daughter when their conversation derails randomly onto the same point.
–324: ‘“You should’ve had More kids because that one is a dud! Impertinent roach!”’
What is the mythological lesson here? Why does the saga enshrine/approve of this action by placing it in the post-climax clarity of the grandma’s quest?
It would seem—with the scanty evidence available—a suggestion that Cruel Parents should double down and collaborate in their methodology, connecting perhaps to one of the moral diamonds I synthesised on the crapper: ‘orphanhood sometimes good, maybe’. Orphanhood, I re-interpret myself, for all its challenges, carries a potential positive outcome by creating virtuous heroes like Hercules, Moses, and Henry. Thus, logically, one should, occasionally, be cruel to their kids or perhaps a disposable portion of their kids to harden them into epic individuals. At the same time, applying my recent Buddhist insights to the parental side of orphanhood, children—just like cyclical gaming—could be conceived as another root cause of life’s sufferings that one should abandon in the quest for maximal personal spiritual growth.
These lessons do sound slightly erroneous to me. However, I’ll fully admit to lacking the grey matter to grasp the nuances of both Buddhism and this saga’s highest cryptic moral agendas. I leave any better clarification of 'Cruel Mother' Ru to others.
Miscellany 2: An Episode of Familicide
A related Orphan episode to the above emerged while attempting to reconstruct my pre-napkin-loss conclusion that the Orphan Archdeacon Mohon would be slain by Cruel Parent Henry during some future rebellion plot.
-326-VI-A: ‘…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….’
The explanation is that, within the pan-Orphan super-drama, there is a key episode of cyclical murder, the Orphan, after losing one relation, proceeding to lose/kill another relation. Behold them:
Cruel Parent
Orphan
Additional Familicide
Target Valence
Cannibalism
Approval by Saga
The Laughing Man
Karnon
Karnon kills The Laughing Man
Reciprocation
Y
Positive
The Eternal One
King Jazeer
King Jazeer kills The Eternal One
Reciprocation
Y
Positive
Heavy-Fingers
Henry The Cripple
[Rose’s brother] kills Heavy-Fingers
[Indirect] Reciprocation
N
Negative
Rose's Brother
Henry The Tyrant
[Rose’s Brother] kills Rose’s Brother
[Indirect] Reciprocation
N
? Positive
Ramiro The Saviour
Delivery Roaches
Orphans are killed
Transference
Y
Negative
Ramiro's Serial Killer Father
Ramiro
Ramiro kills slum orphans
Transference
Y
Negative
Henry The Tutorialist
Geri and Freki
[Henry] kills Kin
[Indirect] Transference
Y
Neutral
Alex Wong
Little Liu
[Henry prevents death of Little Liu]
[Prevented] Transference
N
?
Birth Mother
Kolonian Crusader
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
[Plague] kills birth mother
[Muggers] kill adoptive mother
[Indirect] Reciprocation
[Indirect] Transference
Y
Negative/Negative
Henry’s Mother
Henry
[Henry prevents death of Sister/Father]
Henry [simulates] cannibalism of mother
[Prevented] Transference
[Simulated] Reciprocation
N/Y
?/?
Some of the familicides are executed by the Orphan, others indirectly. By ‘Target Valence’, I’ve categorised the killed target by whether they are the Cruel Parent, receiving the death back reciprocally for their misparenting or nonparenting, or a different relation onto which the Orphan’s trauma has been transferred.
Within this schema, cannibalism might become a metaphor in extreme for the orphan’s deeper, more generalised familicidal trait. The point is not so much that one eats people but—as we see with Henry’s adopted wolves—that one eats kin, the orphan channelling their history, their resentment for the one lost/cruel relative, into the most severe act imaginable of anti-familial violence and desecration.
Where I’ve claimed Henry prevents familicides, this originates from a fascinating little rabbit hole. His moving out of home could in archetypal terms be reframed as a familicidal precaution due to his nightmares having a combative sleepwalking element. This motive is drip-fed to us, beginning in euphemism, (28: ‘He'd moved out of home because the place was too crowded and, his work keeping him up at random hours of the night, he didn't want to disturb his family.’) and only later being stated explicitly at the most random of points, (222: …the nightmares made it somewhat unsafe for him to sleep around others. They could get quite intense at times, and he'd rather not accidentally snap his little sister’s neck in a moment of hallucinatory panic…’) His familicidal precautions are illustrated during his travels with Little Liu, when, at the start, while napping on the plane ride over, he ties himself up [to not familicide the child] and, at the end, when he sleeps separately in a lounge from the child [to not familicide the child]. Henry thus, synchronically, shows himself to be smarter than the other Orphans, escaping the familicidal cycle through a diligent practice of self-isolation.
Except, in the case of Archdeacon Mohon, it seems—based on the repeated method of exsanguination—Henry, the cruel, adoptive All-Father, makes one teeny slip. Is that bad? It’s hard to judge an event so remote, and I do remark the saga’s ambivalence on Orphanhood like with Grandma Ru’s positive, pro-child-cruelty message. The cases classed as ‘Transference’ above, i.e. the Orphan killing the wrong kin, tend to be framed by the saga as negative, while most of the ‘Reciprocations’, the familicides of the cruel parents, are framed neutrally or even positively, e.g. semi-Orphan Henry encourages pseudo-Orphan Rose to celebrate pseudo-Cruel-Father Genocidelol’s death, which the two—laughing as they play ninja-samurai—subsequently do appear to celebrate.
–321: '[Henry]: "I hope that frown you’re dragging about is a frown of celebration."'
–321: ‘The teenage commander and the teenage assassin, at first, exchanged sporadic giggles. These eventually progressed to full-blown belly laughter.’
The moral diamond of this pan-archetypal episode thus seems to be a nuanced take on historical resentment, which becomes bad only if it’s misdirected. An evil Orphan is one who transfers their baggage onto others. A good (or maybe less evil) Orphan, maintaining a focus on the cause of their baggage, returns their baggage murderously back to its source, i.e. the cruel parents.
–phone doc: ‘orphanhood sometimes good, maybe’
Yes, the saga repeats, sometimes you should kill your parents, should—if you’re not already—transform yourself into a heroic orphan. Thus, bizarrely, we seem to get the pro-patricide/matricide message of the anti-natalist egg-purchasing myth I did not, officially or legally, hallucinate on ayahuasca while attempting to summon desert spirits to explain this saga. Parental murder is, most radically, an official plotline in this story…maybe.
Miscellany 3: The Rose Unmasked
Blessed synchronic heavens, I have now re-solved the mystery of Rose’s face-swap scheme. The last pieces forgotten from the puzzle slotted into place during my research of the familicides above. While trying to decide whether the saga approved or disapproved of the death of Genocidelol, I had an overwhelming surge of déjà vu. My previous research, I realised, had concluded on his demise being justified to a degree totally aligned with Rose and Henry’s post-suicide flippancy.
Rose’s core plotline in this saga is not—as the diachronic sequence of events suggests—to embarrass herself in a rookie tournament by dressing up as her romantic superior and then getting hacked to pieces while millions gawk. She is, instead, an exemplar of the indirect, reciprocal sub-variation of the Orphan familicide sub-plot, in which the death-vengeance is enacted against the Cruel Parent by a third, linked party – e.g. Genocidelol himself eye-raping Orphan Henry’s Cruel Father Heavy-Fingers. This blood brother of Rose is her archetypal Cruel Parent, who mentors and conditions her into an assassin just as he does Henry into a general. The killing of this Cruel Parent is conducted by another, not only by Genocidelol himself via suicide but by Henry through a yet more indirect series of actions preceding and leading to the suicide.
These scattered quotes reveal our hero’s brilliant scheme:
Henry, six months earlier, destroys Rose’s brother in a military campaign.
—169: ‘…The Schism of The Tyrants campaign, in which The Tyrant of Saana destroyed the coalition of The Company's defectors under The Eastern Tyrant [a.k.a. Rose’s brother] and their enemies…’
Henry, post-victory, suppresses any comebacks from the brother, perhaps through his guild’s blacklist mechanisms.
—167, Henry on a phonecall with him: ‘“Must I clip your wings even shorter, you rabid fucking dog's cunt?”’
—181: ‘The worst malefactors became practice targets for the guild's assassins, who between missions honed their art tracking the blacklisted across their new characters…’
—243: ‘...permanently blacklisted along with everyone else here, and all their assets, including this recreation architecture, would have been confiscated or demolished...’
—297: ‘…permanently blacklisted, and spawncamped for the next three years...’
One lost quote I dimly recall but couldn’t relocate makes this suppression more explicit, the brother’s faction hiding in Saana’s western continent, where The Company has less influence. But, by ‘clipping’ the brother's wings, Henry makes Saana unplayable and curses him with the same Has-Been retirement troubles that afflict himself.
–147, a real-life scene in Canada: ‘Geno’s’ eyes, observing their surroundings with a monk's detachment…’ [a potential depression parallel between detachment and flatness?]
And the brother, unable to endure these torments, jumps off a high-rise building onto concrete.
—321: ‘DUE TO: Descent from Great Height.’
—324, Henry to Grandma Ru: ‘“Hey, you still exceeded many…by not jumping off a highrise onto concrete.”’
Now, it’s possible that Henry, hyper-genius that he is, has actually plotted the suicidal ending of his former mentor, just like someone organising an online bullying campaign to kill their Twitter nemesis. That would explain a series of anomalies: 1) Henry’s total lack of surprise upon receiving the news from Rose, 2) his immediate insight into the motivation behind the death (321: ‘I always knew he lacked perseverance…’ [Perseverance of what? Henry’s online bullying?]), 3) Henry’s dagger-stabbing and sword-show against the dead brother’s sister afterwards as a form of post-assassination BM, and 4) Henry’s determination of the exact mechanism of death between chapters 321 and 324 above without any explicit confirmation by Rose. A plotted suicide would also align with Henry’s stated desires.
—321: ‘“Just wish he’d killed himself a bit earlier.”’
Henry—without irony or humour—wanted Rose’s brother to die and not just in a videogame. Now, whether or not the death is genuinely orchestrated, archetypally, as an Orphan familicide, it’s a raving success, and, after the brother’s demise, Rose is qualified as a pseudo-Orphan, leading to my original considerations of her under this archetype.
The Explanation of Rose stealing Silver’s face
Within this archetypal vengeance scheme, the assassin’s theft of Silver Wolf’s face gains three explanations, all of which are a little strange but—together—add up to one coherent purpose and story. The disguise, across all three of these explanations, is a mask mutating in meaning.
Mask 1 – Assassination Equipment. The mask, as I noted with Loki earlier, is one of the saga’s prime symbols of assassination. The mask—combining with related themes during the matches between her and Henry, such as the daggers and the stealth tactics of their first duel—nods to Rose’s indirect participation in the familicidal plot connecting with Henry, as her archetypal sibling under the same mentor figure, whose death is coloured by these symbols into a more conscious, planned act. It’s not an unrelated suicide, nor is it quite an orchestrated hitjob, but it is somewhere between these, Henry arranging the circumstances of suicide, comprehending the possibility, and choosing to exacerbate it.
Mask 2 – Anti-Incest Device. This is where I believe the ‘septic/tainted’ clue of my previous analysis gains a rationale and function. The mask attempts to combat a mild incest theme present in the background psychodrama of Henry and Rose’s relationship. Henry, her archetypal brother Orphan, before slaying the brother, has adopted many features of her brother, copying the brother’s occupation as a videogame general and the brother’s epithet as ‘The Tyrant’. From another angle, he is, most notably, referred to as ‘Big Bro’ by Rose, a title that creeps out our hero throughout the saga due, most likely, to the connotative link it forms with her detestable blood brother.
—14, Dan and Henry during the tutorial: ‘Dan: “Can I call you Big Bro?” Henry: “Don’t ever use that nickname again.” Big Bro...this was far too similar to what someone else used to call him. Henry couldn't stand it.’
On yet another creepy layer, the Big Bro nickname exposes Rose’s internal regard of Henry as a brother substitute, the assassin’s initial stalking perhaps a consequence of seeking a superior replacement brother. Henry, in turn, perceives something of the brother in Rose. A physical resemblance is how he identifies her when she approaches pretending to be a student acquaintance of Henry’s school friend Abigail, a member of Rose’s assassin guild.
—109, Henry's first meeting with her in Suchi: ‘Henry noticed that her crying eyes were coloured a rare shade for a person of Asian descent, a pale, honey-orange…he was personally acquainted with a Chinese-Canadian guy in real-life with the exact same eye colour—shape, to…The same nose shape...the same tanned, Southern Chinese complexion…”
—321, from Genocidelol’s post-mortem examination: ‘No apparent trauma to the left eye. The iris is an unusual, pale, honey-orange shade.’
These sibling resemblances, both archetypal and overt, present an additional romantic barrier that would’ve remained even if the NPC-based incompatibilities were cured through the therapies that Henry and Rose pursue. Where lesser teens, their virtues corrupted by videogames, might perceive no issue in this incestual dynamic, might even seek to exploit it, ‘Big Bro’ Henry—our perfect moral exemplar—would never, and his familial disgust of Rose remains incorruptible from start to end. Rose, in turn—comprehending the hero’s revulsion—puts on a mask and steals the face of another girl without the same historical spoilage.
Mask 3 – Autistic Mask. The third meaning of the face-swap mask, and a key idea we’ll return to as we synthesise the moral of this sub-plot, is a subtle thematic reminder that Rose is an autistic who becomes silent when not employing the strategy of disguise or ‘autistic masking’.
—192: Henry on the assassin: ‘[Rose] had literal autism, so her baseline 'normal' should still be mildly robotic.’
—Wikipedia: ‘Autistic masking is the act of concealing autistic traits to come across as non-autistic, as if behind a mask…’
Genocidelol’s Justified Assassination
As for why Genocidelol is so guilty as to warrant an indirect assassination, this continued to confuse me.
At first, I assumed that his suicide was not approved by the saga, which uses Grandma Ru as an anti-suicide PSA, and that the celebrations of Henry and Rose were merely another example of the negative consequences of videogames, both players becoming desensitised to real-life death and seeking it without distinction between virtual and earthly settings.
Then, it clicked. The former is a genuine, radical message in the story, but, also, Rose’s brother is—from the saga’s even more radical perspective—guilty of a real-life crime, the crime of introducing his sister to the very videogames that manufacture such psychological distortions.
—105: ‘She’d been only 5 years old. Her parents had left her in the care of her older brother, something they avoided doing for good reason, and he’d lured her into putting on the game’s VR-unit by telling her she could play with life-sized versions of her dolls. She could still hear his cackling as a boar gored her on its horn, could see the white of his teeth and the pink of his tongue...’
Meanwhile, as a brotherly contrast to Geno, Henry, our virtuous champion, prohibits his own sister from playing videogames. The younger sibling complains about this restriction while hanging out—I highlight the social difference with Rose—in real-life with a schoolfriend.
—211: ‘Real life, Auckland, New Zealand, a girl’s bedroom… Two friends were hanging out…Henry’d refused to let [his sister] use [the VR-unit] under the grounds that videogames were harmful to child development…’
‘Videogames were harmful to child development’, I repeat.
Henry maintains his role as a stubborn fraternal guardian against videogames with Rose as well, his archetypal sis. During this tournament, whereas his other matches like this one with Miller involve legendary items as incentives and million-dollar wagers, Henry stakes against Rose nothing but the condition of her quitting Saana, while his ‘loss’ outcome is a lesser act of charitable real-life revenge against the videogame-introducing brother he does not yet know his online bullying campaign has successfully assassinated.
—316: ‘“If you lose, you quit this game forever and hire a new shrink. If you win—not that you will—I’ll make my first stopover Vancouver and, personally, slap your brother and your parents.”’
I underline the oddity of Henry's stated intention to brutalise Rose's parents along with the brother. Archetypally, we might read this as him expressing the Orphan's anti-parent familicidal madness explained previously, Orphan Henry transferring a resentment at his own parents onto a set of unrelated parents. Less mystically, I think it's a logical furtherance of Henry's anti-videogame radicalism, he and the saga proclaiming that any parent who permits this malevolent hobby in their household deserves violence.
‘But,’ we in the 20s might ask, ‘what exactly is so evil about letting children play videogames?’
The whole story of Rose, I interpret, is a complex psychological case study of the danger in our far-distant future. She has, through gaming, become an anti-social degenerate prone to violent outbursts, tragically-incestuous romantic preferences, and psychotically-cringe schemes. Her dysfunction is so extreme that Henry—despite fitting many of these archetypal traits himself—accuses her of autism.
—115, Henry: ‘“[Rose] doesn't speak much because she has autism.”’
In reality, however, thanks to her dead pest of a brother, she may not have any of the neurological anomalies typically associated with the condition but may have just skipped while playing toxic videogames all the hours that that should have been invested into cultivating real-life friends (as we observe of Henry’s actual sister) and developing basic human skills, like speech.
Rose’s tragedy thus connects with her mutating face-mask of familial likeness, assassination, and neurodivergence into one of the saga’s most complex and most radical moral hot-takes yet. ‘Videogames are making the youth autistic, and, as an older brother, a “big bro”, thou shalt barricade thy younger siblings from this autism-creating pursuit, and if thou dost not, then thou shalt do everyone a favour by killing thyself.’
Extreme? Indeed, but the saga’s anti-gaming agenda is radically extreme. For introducing his sister to videogames too young, ‘Genocidelol’ is sentenced to a synchronic death, and this alone is what the troubled younger sibling needed most in life, not victory in an amateur duelling tournament, nor an inbred romance with her pseudo-brother Henry.
A quest for intra-familial justice - this was Rose’s myth behind the romantic mask, a myth beginning with a trash brother and ending with a brother trashed.
And the wider archetypal moral lesson?
—phone doc: ‘all together + rose - orphanhood sometimes good, maybe’
While many orphan tales in the saga are tragic, Rose’s orphanhood is one of surprising positivity and redemption - at least according to the moral calculus of those in the 2050s, decades wiser and more socially progressive than us of the 20s. The death of this brother fiend is a genuine cause of laughter-filled, celebrative samurai swordplay. By responding to Henry’s sustained online bullying by jumping off a building, Cruel Father Genocidelol releases Rose and Henry, his pseudo-children as groomed proteges. Their new orphanhood allows them to hasten the healing journey already underway—through therapy, in real-life and in cyborg-dream realm—and to recover their stolen social normalcy. One day, beyond the pages of this saga, beyond videogames, we might conceive Rose, too, like Little Liu—another pseudo-orphan saved from a different parental neglect figure by Henry’s moral magic—emerging from the shackles of her own autistic muteness.
To Henry, to ‘Big Bro Cripple’, to this brotherly exemplar and to this champion defender of all the world’s autistics, a non-author tips the archetypal hat.
‘By Jove, Chef Enchi," the reader applauds, 'you’ve done it again, you’ve taken these mismatched and missing ingredients and scrambled them into yet another sumptuous synchronic omelette.’
Yes, yes, I have. I will now consider the face-swapping mystery re-explained. Recanting my initial apology, I leave it only as a time-saving measure since restructuring this segment to hide my blundering while accommodating the Has-Been filler that now pre-empts the resolution seems way too much of a mental chore for a non-author on holiday. We could also take my screwups as a meta-mythological parable for the journey of synchronic investigation, heroic in its own way, fraught with memory gaps, digressions, and redemption through the stubborn pursuit of digressions. As all roads lead to Rome, so do all this saga’s digressions ultimately lead to the explanation of its cryptic plots. In Rose’s case, her plot turned out to be an assassination plot against her scumbag brother-father.
And now for the cryptic plot of Emerson ‘The Machine’ Miller.