So now we can at last return to our man with all the tools needed to reconstruct him.
This saga, we’ve learned, is a myth. As a myth, it abandons conventional, readably-paced, ‘diachronic’ plots for an alternative mode of puzzle-game or ‘synchronic’ plot based around the cryptic repetitions of themes and archetypes. Examination of these archetypes reveals super-dramas or, in non-synchronic terms, possibly, the saga’s missing sub-plots, repeating patchily and non-linearly across siblings of each archetype, whose anomalously shared characteristics and proximities assist us in formulating them and their shared super-dramas.
Miller, during his mysterious duel, may have stubbornly denied us any coherent rationale behind his actions. But within the above mythological framework, his volunteering of this information ceases to be necessary. Why? The logical deduction, after all this repetition, is that we must already have received Miller’s explanation from others - repeatedly. The true challenge is therefore to decide whose explanation and simply recall it.
His Ground Facts
To help that recollection, let’s revisit the known qualities of Miller established at the outset of my essay.
—326-II: ‘On an irrational vendetta, old-ish, from SVEC, in love (and out of love) with tech - these are our man's grounded facts…’
No longer are these mere factoids in a man’s woefully-incomplete biography. Each functions, within the saga’s archetypal layer, as an essential clue. By asking ourselves who else has worn these traits in earlier pages, we can discover the siblings of Miller, and, from them, the shared super-drama of which his confusing episode gains clarity as a mere repetition and variation.
Of the above characteristics, my research has focused primarily on the first, the irrational vendetta, as the most informative clue when paired with Miller’s close proximity to several other individuals sharing it. Before elaborating on that, however, I will give a very brief treatment of the other traits. As examples like Henry and Grandma Ru from previous non-chapters have shown, many figures in the saga are composites of multiple, overlapping archetypes. Miller is no exception to this rule, and it is quite possible to interpret him from several valid angles. Researcher A might describe the embarrassed redness of his archetypal cheeks. Researcher B might describe the resentful temperature of his archetypal spit. Neither is wrong - they only fail in collating the larger portrait. My final assessment of Miller, as a Spurned Lover in a romantic cyborg love triangle, is my best attempt to synthesise all these angles under one unified, most powerful explanation, capable of solving if not every single mystery in his duel then the vast majority of them.
From SVEC
Miller is from Appalachia, a.k.a. The Silicon Valley of The East. At the beginning of my essay, I actually didn’t think his homeland could be archetypal, dismissing it as a minor repetition of ‘The Machine’s’ high-tech theme. A recent correction of an embarrassing geographical misreading on my part has caused me to re-evaluate his homeland’s importance.
The brief story of a non-author’s geographical embarrassment: After returning from a hiking trip to nurse my foot at a friend’s home in San Francisco, feeling partially recovered, I asked them for bus directions to Western Silicon Valley, sibling of Miller’s home The Silicon Valley of The East. My friend, looking at me as if my foot injury had spread to my brain, informed me that I’d already been to Silicon Valley. I’d gone during a fun day trip to San Jose in search of Grandma Ru’s dog park featured at the start of this tournament arc in chapter 289. San Jose, astonishingly, is in Silicon Valley.
(In a foreigner’s defence, San Jose is not visibly high tech. After visiting Shenzhen, a.k.a. China’s Silicon Valley, I was expecting an industrial megalopolis with crowded gadget markets and less archaic transport infrastructure.)
The saga has thus given us—and I refuse to believe this is coincidental—not one but two Americans from the nation’s high-tech poles. Hinted is a potential Silicon-Valley-ian archetype. Unfortunately, if there is such an archetype, two siblings are not sufficient material to reconstruct it without copious miscorrelations and additional embarrassment. We can only hope the saga offers us a third before it ends.
Old-ish
A cyborg reader with perfect recall might recognise that I’ve already completed an archetypal analysis based on Miller’s age, inducing as I did from the other Gen Zalphas an intersecting love for technology. At the time, it may have seemed a scholastic absurdity, as if I was deriving a whole generational stereotype based on three individuals and transferring it to a fourth. Now, it should be evident that this is perfectly reasonable due to the synchrony abounding in the saga, which has—even if there might be other Zalphas with differing relationships to tech—paraded cryptically before our attention a selection with a repeated, unified love.
The tech love springs from the archetypal schema in the next table with various High-Tech Oldies in interaction against Henry adopting the counter-archetype of an Obnoxious Roboboomer. The basic mini-arc is a comical inversion of typical adult-youth dynamics around tech. Henry, the younger archetype, insults his elder’s modern hobbies, often with a rambling, out-of-touch lecture. The Oldie then, in love as they are with technology, their hearts hurt by the insult, retaliates with disproportionate anger and violence like a toddler throwing a tantrum after a teacher confiscates their phone. I’ve added Grandma Ru to this table after learning she was from Western Silicon Valley. Her inclusion expands the original Zalpha archetype into a more generic cyber geriatric.
High-Tech Oldies (formerly High-Tech Zalphas)
Village Head Walker and Citizen Higgs
Grandma Ru
Professor Ray Abrams
Emerson Miller
High Tech Theme
In-Game Architecture, Game Drugs
From SVEW
Transhumanist Cyborg Implants, Technocommunist Architecture of University
From SVEC, 'The Machine'
High Tech Hobby
Virtual recreation of historical buildings
VR Duelling
Inverted - Literary Minimalism
VR Duelling
Henry The Obnoxious Roboboomer belittles their Hobby
Insults the building as hollow/empty
Insults duelling tournament integrity by gambling, insults her chances of winning
Insults literary minimalism
Insults duelling by equating it to fannypack design
Oldie Gets Irrationally Mad
Suppressed during their conversation
Threats to snitch about his gambling; Swearing at end of conversation
Insults post-maximalism despite this being the future of literature
Spitting at Henry
Oldie Attacks Obnoxious Roboboomer
Walker duels Henry
Prevented by Henry’s guards
Prevented by real-life illegality
Miller duels Henry
This schema re-explains multiple episodes prior to Miller.
Grandma Ru believes during her conversation with Henry that the guards are stationed to force her to listen to a torturous lecture.
—323: ‘…re-examining the other guards camping the corners with their weapons out, she had a second realisation. This kid had trapped her. She was being forcibly subjected to this monologue…’
That may be true, but the guards act doubly as a precaution. Henry has synchronically learned that the High-Tech Oldie has an infantile violent streak when their technology is insulted.
That insult also provides the missing sub-text of his conversation with Village Head Walker (241-243) that devolves bafflingly into duelling after a non-sequitur monologue by Henry about art history. The monologue’s theme of ‘hollowness’, reinterpreted as trash-talk, becomes a snide assertion that the recreation Hagia Sophia that Henry and Walker, friend of the building’s architect, are chatting inside of is nothing but a monument to wasted hours, videogame constructions being immaterial and economically worthless.
—241-243A: ‘[Henry] used his spear to tap one of the church’s columns again, emphasising the hollow sound of the wood imitating marble. “Even with limitless resources, this hollowness of replication is inevitable…”’
—241-243B: ‘When Henry’d first arrived and beheld these Byzantine buildings, his impression had been largely negative. They were crude, tacky, impractical.’
—241-243C: ‘“…we must also feed our minds and our souls to overcome our intellectual and spiritual decline…”’
Hollowness, decline - in 20s analogies, one might liken Henry’s speech to a grandpa squinting at his granddaughter’s thousand-hour Minecraft save, lamenting that the time could have been used to build a real house, and sighing at the degenerated condition of his progeny. Village Head Walker, matured by his age, initially manages to suppress the anger felt on behalf of his insulted friend but later loses his self-composure, resulting in a quick and sweet duel.
This same High-Tech Oldie drama offers a partial rationale for Miller’s challenge. Henry throughout the saga constantly insults our man’s speciality of duelling - in present times, the teen argues that the hobby is of less intellectual difficulty than fannypack design; in the synchronic bygones, his ‘Cripple’ persona was an offensively-ironic anime-samurai satire of duelling. These insults provide a valid reason for a mild grudge, and they do explain why several other duellists like Mrtyu have challenged Henry. They do not, however, get us the full or even most of the explanatory distance for Miller, who exhibits his own contradictory dismissal of the arena.
—327, Miller on duelling: ‘I don't give a rat's black ass 'bout all the gussyin' up of this competition.’
A defence of VR Duelling is not what teleported our man into the ring, nor is it what has reduced him to spitting. Miller’s rage, more personal than this, might stem from a much more literal love of technology than his Oldie siblings.
An Irrational Vendetta
Finally, after exploring these other traits and discovering little extra bits of Miller, we reach the ultimate, most unexplained of his traits, which forms the unexplained heart of his unexplained duel: his irrational vendetta against our hero.
I’m going to present this section according to my own three-step discovery process. In the first step, I noticed the clues of archetypal siblinghood between Miller and another competitor - SaNguiNe of all duellists. In the second step, I formulated a precursory archetype between these two and Henry - a ‘Future Has-Been’, a fascinating variation of the Has-Been documented for Grandma Ru. In the third step, several gaps of non-explanation remaining, I had an epiphany that this archetype was just a phase within an even larger archetypal drama belonging to the ‘Spurned Lover’ of the saga’s repetitive love triangles.
Simpler methods of presentation do occur to me, but I preserve this step-wise process out of intellectual honesty and a desire to capture the human-limited, interconnected, branching nature of the saga’s myth puzzle-game. (Also, it saves me time re-formatting.) It’s quite possible other researchers, driven by their own biases and expertise, would’ve reached my identical solution through other, more efficient archetypal paths. One could’ve started with the traits of Oldness and Silicon-Valley-ness Miller shares with Grandma Ru as an archetypal Divorcee. Another could’ve skipped directly into the love triangle via the Inexplicableness, Dagger-ness, and Sword-Impalement-Ending-ness he shares with Spurned Lover Rose. These alternatives—obvious to me in the retrospect of cracking the mystery—were not apparent on a dozen initial readings of the duel, and the scholar in my soul refuses to pretend they were my route to Miller’s explanation.
Step 1 - Parallels and Proximities with Brother SaNguiNe
So, who else, we might ask, in this saga is driven by an irrational vendetta? To save the reader many migraines pouring through the text, the saga has—through the additional archetypal clue of proximity—been dangling a prime candidate right before our nose, in the form of one of the other tournament contestants. Miller’s main sibling is SaNguiNe, the wrestler who—rejected by Loki/Artemis, only interested in Henry and his guild—directs his romantic grief into ruining Henry’s tournament, only to be eliminated by The Third Gate after ruthless theatre mockery.
An equivalency between Miller and SaNguiNe might sound preposterous but further digging unearths an abundance of trait parallels:
Physical-Style Orientation. Although their classes differ—SaNguiNe a Miracleworker, Miller a Fighter—both employ highly physical, highly-reflexive, close-combat styles.
Cerebral Earthfriend Opponents. Both of their duels in the tournament are contrasted against Earthfriends (Grandma Ru, The Third Gate) with slower-paced, cognitively-biased styles, invoking one of the saga’s repetitive binary oppositions between brawn and brain that underlies A Thousand Tools. This fist-v-mind dynamic, again, repeats in Miller’s duel against Henry, another Earthfriend – although, as will be seen, the fight discards the paradigm in less than a minute, Henry switching to a weapon-magic-juggling stab-fest after the first intrusive complexity begins.
Outdated. Both Miller and SaNguiNe enter the tournament with very slightly outdated styles. SaNguiNe practises a local dagger-grappling art, ‘Boulderfoot Wrestling’, and Miller practises whatever anonymous technique enabled him to reign as duelling champion before A Thousand Tools. This outdated feature, as we tap into it, reveals a larger, connected network of archetypal parallels.
Throne Threatened. Both outdated duellists are dislocated from previous positions of significance as a consequence of Henry, whose art and tournament monopoly eclipses their achievements. Miller, although a previous season winner, is expected by no one except Grandma Ru to win. SaNguiNe, a former member of the region’s top three duellists, undergoes his demotion well before A Thousand Tools, when Henry, merely as ‘HF’, steals the spotlight in a Volume III duel against Artemis/Loki.
—209: ‘…HF’s bout with Artemis had dealt him a second blow. In Suchi’s insular community, SaNguiNe had been treated like a living god after rising to the top three…Artemis and HF’s battle, however, with its secretive style-switching and HF’s final play of guiding the Earth Golem’s spear into the pillar, had reminded SaNguiNe of the paltry size of this city and himself. A gigantic chasm remained between himself and the true geniuses of the arena.’
Both appear to be acutely aware of their demotion to Henry, SaNguiNe consciously above, and, although we don’t observe the same of Miller, we might project a similar thought process into his choice to enter the rookie tournament from the pontifications of others in his place.
—313, general tournament narrative: ‘…Miller may have recognised his greater odds for a successful win in this lowbie format, where the old art of the body still reigned over the new art of the weapon…’
—322, Grandma Ru: ‘…the veteran's outdated style…’
But Fleetingly Supreme. Yet, just as they glimpse the ends of their careers, both also glimpse a fleeting opportunity within the transitionary period between their old arts and the new. They will one day be surpassed, but a last chance at victory might still be possible. Grandma Ru explains this rationale in her assessment of why Miller would defeat both Whitefrog and Henry.
—322: After researching Miller during her pre-bracket preparations, she ranked his prospects above the pro’s. The weakness of the younger duellist was his being in the early phase of a new art. He’d yet to iron out its complex kinks, yet to adapt his body to its alien demands. While his usage of A Thousand Tools would eventually surpass the veteran's outdated style, his current mastery of A Thousand Tools had not. The pro, she thus expected, would lose. And Grandma’s spicy predictions didn’t stop there. Although less certain about this one, she believed all of the above applied to The Tyrant, too…’
A re-reading of SaNguiNe’s narrative uncovers an identical view of himself, contained in a hyper-focus on timing and the present.
—259A, the wrestler before the tournament: ‘[SaNguiNe] would switch eventually. But not now. For now, he’d stake everything on his arm and his dagger, on the simple but effective brutality that’d preceded these cerebralised advancements…’
—259B: ‘You could stake your claim on nothing more than that which you had the strength to defend in this instant. The rest were just tissues to soak your tears with after defeat.’
—259C: ‘To slay him was far beyond his strength – certainly. But such was not SaNguiNe’s aspiration. Accepting his mortal insignificance, he would be satisfied if he could steal one single move, one single moment.’
—320, the wrestler to Henry after his elimination: ‘“I could’ve beaten you…” he declared with frustration…“The transition...you would not have had the speed...for my transition…”’ [Note: 'Transition', betraying SaNguiNe's subliminal angst, is a transgender word for switching shapeshift modes, synonymous with 'tucking']
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Strange Victory Strategies. SaNguiNe, in a mirror of Miller’s bizarre choice to demote categories, puts everything else aside, refuses to learn A Thousand Tools, and hyper-specialises against Henry while ascending to the highest in the region’s ladder. Grandma Ru acting—again—as a third-party link between SaNguiNe and Miller, describes this strategy before the finale.
—304: ‘[SaNguiNe] hadn’t exactly been low-key with his first-place zone ranking, which any unbiased analysis would show to be justified. From her perspective, he was a sweatlord, anti-Thousand-Tools meta-gamer like herself.’
SaNguiNe is so confident in this anti-transition strategy—just as Grandma Ru is of Miller’s—that he gives his own ‘spicy prediction’.
—259: ‘This tournament ahead, its end had not been settled yet. There was at least one category this kid wouldn't be winning.’
Pedantic Correctness of Strange Strategy. The prediction made by Grandma about Miller, that by demoting he would win, appears to be validated by the saga in the narrative immediately before and after this interrupting essay note.
—326-I: ‘If one could peer through that expression into The Tyrant’s calculating brain, they would discover something astonishing - an acknowledgement of destiny, a resignation to destiny. He, the teen was realising, had just lost this tournament.’
When the story resumes and Miller stops the countdown to propose a single duel to the death instead, Henry asks if the older player is certain. Our hero—embodying the virtue of honesty—admits openly that Miller was just about to win but that a format switch to death-rules would be a guaranteed defeat. The reasons for this are not explained, but my guess after research is a pedantic technicality due to the official format eliminating players at random health points that fluctuate based on matchup – if Henry’s Earthfriend class receives a health handicap to negate its healing and shield spells, then a duel to the death without this handicap swings the balance in his direction and away from a duel Miller would’ve won. Regardless, Miller doubles down on his indifference to the tournament, and Henry, with a shrug, agrees to the format switch, thanks him for the free pass, and charitably dismisses his guards so they can’t interfere. Miller’s Legendary sword then appears to re-adjust the balance again.
A similar, pedantic semi-correctness applies to SaNguiNe. Although the prediction of himself defeating Henry proves ultimately false due to an early knock-out, the wrestler does seem right on a weird, technical level. Firstly, Henry—as the saga-senders have spoiled—does not win this category.
—259, SaNguiNe: ‘This tournament ahead, its end had not been settled yet. There was at least one category this kid wouldn't be winning.’
—313, the Saga: ‘This tournament, alone, he’d not be winning. One of the other eight would be taking him out…’
Secondly, when SaNguiNe spars Henry after his elimination, the former manages to steal the match.
—320: ‘The wrestler opened by blasting the teen’s juggle with a spare shield. Twenty-seven seconds later, using his over-drilled countertactics, SaNguiNe forced the concession.’
Even if the ‘official’ result is wrong, SaNguiNe slapped off-the-bullseye at the end by meeting the wrong opponent, the theory pursued by the wrestler might not have been wrong. Henry is vulnerable, and someone, perhaps replicating SaNguiNe’s own strategies, will beat him. We might thus, synchronically, explain the wrestler’s jubilant closing scene of celebration.
—320: ‘SaNguiNe exclaimed at the sky defiantly, smashing his fist against his muscled chest. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” He turned with a twistflip and double flipped-off his teenage opponent. “Get rolled, you slow bitch! Fuck you!”’
Although the potty-mouthed young man remains an official loser, his joy could correspond with him tapping psycho-pedantically into the saga’s Jungian and mythological layers. At those layers—where there is no linear time or distinct identities, where siblings borrow strategies, pick up each other’s lost causes, and march the final hard yards to success—SaNguiNe might be a bonafide archetypal winner, a brother or sister substituting in his place. I'll admit this rationale remains a bit too crazy/weak to fully explain the magnitude of SaNguiNe's reaction; a full comprehension of him would probably require exploring other archetypal facets.
Step 2 - The Archetype of the Future Has-Been
From the above story shared between SaNguiNe and Miller, we discover a fascinating variation of the Has-Been archetype elaborated in Grandma Ru’s analysis, a variation that I call ‘The Future Has-Been’. The Future Has-Been is an elite amongst elite competitors, who, from their exclusive vantage point, simultaneously anticipates their ruin while also comprehending that they’re not eliminated yet, who chooses, in this solitary knowledge, to maximise the timing and go out on a bang, much like a terminally ill person partying their final days. ‘My descent is nigh,’ accepts the archetype bitterly, ‘but that doesn’t mean I can’t drag some others off the cliff with me.’
Henry—despite being the target of the other two Future Has-Beens—also comfortably fits this archetype, lacking only a specific target or vendetta. His retirement—as we’re reminded during his examination as a semi-Orphan—is spurred by a foresight of his Ramiro-esque mental degeneration, yet, in this last volume, like the other two Future Has-Beens vying to spoil Henry’s one tournament, Henry vies—and is quite successful—in spoiling a panoply of tournaments.
The next table shows the archetype’s super-drama repeating across Henry, SaNguiNe, and Miller. I’ll clarify later the asterixed episodes that might not make sense without first reading the duel or supplementary research.
Future Has-Been Brothers
Henry
SaNguiNe
Emerson Miller
Introduction
Current Glory
1st in multiple tournaments
1st in rookie rankings
1st in the latest seasons
Edged-Weapons - Precision/Timing
Dagger, Sword
Dagger
Dagger, Sword
Indifference to the Mass
Calling everyone a pleb
Not studying a thousand tools
Doesn't acknowledge his fans in the crowd once
Threat to The Throne
Endangering Event
Retirement and mental decline
A Thousand Tools
A Thousand Tools
A Last Chance Presents
This tournament
This tournament
This tournament
Scheme and Preparations
Anti-Mass Scheme
Sign up for extra tournaments
Refuse to switch styles
Demote to rookie tournament
Continued Conditioning
Constant Drills
Constant Drills
*Constant Drills
Multiplicity of Victory Factors
Pattern Theme
A Thousand Tools
Dagger Circle technique
Tactical movements in the chaos of the duel
Multiplicity-Singularity
A Thousand Tools
Dagger
Multiple Weapons
Cognitive-Physicality
Cognitive
Physical
Physical
Old-New
New style formed from Old Styles
Old Style
Old Style
Dynamism/Speed
Inverse - Crippled
Rants about timing and gaps
Very fast during duel
Adaptability
Weapon Swaps
Dagger Formation
Weapon Swaps
Cultivation of The Winner's Mindset
Psychopathic Pragmatism
Multiple torture trainings
Steals Dagger Circle technique from A Thousand Tools
Inverse - Refuses to use sword
Hyper-Focus
Inverse - Multiple Tournaments
Beating up Henry
Wanting a duel to the death and nothing else
Olympian/Anti-God
"I was not as much a bitch as God...I never feared to descend to hell to hunt my enemies."
‘To catch a god off-guard, to twist him in an unexpected direction, to stand for half a second over his slack body.'
? Challenging the duelling god
*Silent Commitment
*This whole arc
*Muscular shake offs
*No explanation
Rabid Anger
? Inverted – Buddha-like calm
Suppressed at Henry
Spitting
Climax and Intrusive Tangents
Victory/Defeat
Loses at some point
Loses
[Withheld for spoilers]
Distraction - Theatricality-Anti-Theatricality
Karnon’s random intrusions
Third Gate opponent
?
Calculated Weighing of Additional Opponents
? Does lose this tournament to an unfactored opponent
Loses to Third Gate
*Stands to the side during royal rumble
Aberrant Contradictions to Victory
Making tea mid-tournament
*Celebrates after getting eliminated
Refusal to use helpful sword
Irrational Vendetta Against One Person
Inverse - beats up everyone calmly and rationally
Against Henry
Against Henry
Hidden Motivation
Love Triangle
***SilverxRose
HenryxArtemis
***Cyborg Love Triangle
The Future Has-Been Super-Drama
The episodes and arcs of this super-drama mutate out of the general Has-Been documented earlier. The Future Has-Been possess several additional characteristics - an indifference to the public beneath them and a proficiency with edged weapons, symbolising their status on the cutting edge of competition. The Past Glory of their archetypal cousins upgrades to a Current Glory, the Future Has-Been officially still the best in some respect - even SaNguiNe is ranked number one right until his elimination. The Crippling Event becomes an Endangering Event threatening their title, and the Second Chance at glory becomes a Last Chance, which they pursue in a scheme that appears pointless or counter-intuitive to an ignorant plebeian mass but is, in fact, a highly-strategical, highly-pedantic calculation - don’t learn A Thousand Tools, sign up for a rookie tournament, sign up for fifteen tournaments.
The Intrusive Tangents (Secret Cures) of their Has-Been cousins split function. For split one, during a preparation phase, the multiplicity of the tangents becomes training in a multiplicity of esoteric competitive factors. The Future Has-Been, a monster of the peak, doesn’t give a winner’s crap about pathetic mental problems, and they cast their brain and body spirit-deep into various, torturous martial paradigms of speed-and-patience, old-and-new, multiplicity-and-singularity. Henry’s Overdream vignettes illustrate this abundantly in their martial duality with their therapeutic function. Split two shunts the Intrusive Tangents to the climax, the Future Has-Been beset in their last showdown with a torrent of challenges and opponents far beyond their initial planning.
But prior to that mess, in the transition between training and the end, the Future Has-Been evolves the ideal mindset for victory. They begin with a hyper-focus on the goal and psychopathic pragmatism, SaNguiNe for example indifferent to the contradiction of shunning A Thousand Tools yet stealing its dagger circle technique - the Future Has-Been will forsake its own core rules of conduct if that means victory. That pragmatism rises to a state of blasphemous delusion as they psych themselves up into visions of murdering gods. This Olympian bloodlust then condenses into an absolute mental commitment that communicates and thinks in nothing but violence. That deranged mindset becomes necessary if they are to succeed over the additional intruders at the climax, who, depending on exact calculations, can become either allies or obstacles for taking down their initial target.
Finally, in the crux moment, just when victory is on the line, the Future Has-Been whips out several inexplicable moves that appear to contradict the goal of victory. Later synchronic meditations in search of explanation reveal that—actually—this super-drama is a mere vengeance sub-plot in a larger love triangle super-drama.
Clarifications of Asterixed Episodes
I'll fill out, and develop, this story by explaining the less obvious components above.
Continued Conditioning, Constant Drills - Miller. Miller is not, directly, observed drilling for his showdown like his siblings. However, in his first, anonymous appearance, Handsome Dan remarks the following.
–258: ‘…[Miller] wore the standard issue Tier-0 duelling gear, and it was smeared with a few fresh red strains from rolling in the dirt – he must’ve been resting up after training nearby.
The synchronic deduction is that he’s been subjecting himself to identical hardcore preparations.
Climax, Calculated Weighing of Additional Opponents - Miller. The duel with Henry at its sensational peak erupts into a royal rumble with cameos from several other, higher-level, Legendary-wielding enemies, likely teleported into the arena by Karnon, whose deity blessing boosts Miller to save his low character from an instant death. Miller, while ducking stray shots, freezes up in a contemplation of whether to join the others against Henry. Ultimately—incongruent with the vendetta, and much like his refusal to use the sword—he chooses to sit this whole segment out, removes Karnon’s blessing, and catches his breath while the others are massacred by Henry juggling various artefacts.
Silent Commitment - All Three. The generic Has-Been, as mentioned with Grandma Ru, employs a mode of self-censorship, refusing to explicitly declare their embarrassing, doomed quest for glory. The Future Has-Been, whose quest they themselves comprehend to be pedantically achievable, adopts this same characteristic silence but for a different reason of strategy. On one, practical level, they hold their tongue because they don't want the competition scouting out their skills - a tactic best illustrated by Henry using a blacksite to hide his tournament preparation. On another, mental level, in their extreme quest for performance, the Future Has-Been cultivates a somewhat psychotic hostility to communication, thought, and—meta-non-fictionally—narrations of personal history, all of which are regarded as distractions from the duel.
SaNguiNe’s narrative is most explicit in this strategy. Whenever he’s troubled by The Third Gate, he repeatedly re-centres his concentration in this silence, suppressing and diverting the energy of his thoughts into his muscles.
–314: ‘SaNguiNe, the wrestler, embodied the solitary essence of the duellist perfectly. He entered the ring in focused silence. His head turned in acknowledgement of no one else, not the audience, not even his opponent, as he kept it trained firmly on the task ahead. For the next quarter of an hour, there was only himself and the limits to which he could push his body.’
–315: ‘The wrestler had since ceased communicating or sparring with the teen as he committed his soul to the silent path of vengeance…’
–317: ‘On the verge of psyching himself out, he dismissed the clips. He jumped upright, and he hopped around, and he shook out from his limbs any lingering residue of defeat.’
The peak duellist is a wordless, worry-less automaton - or a ‘Machine’ as fans call Miller. SaNguiNe’s siblings aren’t observed having these suppressive thoughts, at least not so far as I recall, and Henry has even been generously loquacious at times, gifting his competition hot tips and monologues. Nevertheless, there are larger indications that this strategy is in play for both of them, whose stories, if they make less mention of the strategy, might do so only because, better than the wrestler, they have achieved the truly silent ideal. Such a tactic would explain Henry’s transition from giving us unreadably-long treatises about his duelling methods prior to the tournament to becoming a narrative mute as all accounts in this arc have been delivered third-hand by other competitors, builders, and future historians. For Miller, his silence is what prompted this essay, a non-author needing to re-construct the explanations that this duellist amongst duellists refuses to volunteer.
This silence is—by my assessment, although this may be a delusional byproduct of overcoming so many difficulties to crack it—one of the Future Has-Been’s core and most wonderful traits. Following in the wake of the archetype’s over-the-top preparations and manic, heaven-cursing rants, the Future Has-Been suddenly extinguishes these, burying all history, personality, and evidence of struggle in a crude, uncompromising virtue of ‘shut up and win.’ The contradiction of these phases, the self-annihilation of the past for the present, perfectly encapsulates the Future Has-Been, a competitive demon neck-deep in the rising flood waters of timing, contingency, talent, focus, calculation, and non-calculation. Theirs is, on the one hand, the bleakest of the saga’s super-dramas - the archetype invests ungodly amounts of effort only to erase all appreciable trace of it for a marginally greater chance of victory in a field they are acutely conscious has no future for them. It is, on the other hand, the most uplifting, conveying a Buddha-like injunction to forget yesterday and tomorrow in order to dwell maximally in today.
Hidden Motivation - Love Triangle. Considering the Future Has-Been's silent psychoticism, the mere threat to their prestige would appear to justify their irrational vendetta, the archetype so lost in the competitive sauce that they cease to be a relatable, explainable human.
Yet—paradoxically—around what should be the climax of their story, the Future Has-Been gives strong indications of indifference to the competition. Miller refuses to use his sword or join the gang beating up on Henry. Henry, in the middle of this tournament that he spent thousands of pages and cyborg centuries prepping for, is getting high on tea and rigging stupid bets. SaNguiNe, although not voluntarily, has his last duel hijacked by a goofy roleplay theatre troupe, and then, right after he loses, he celebrates winning a sparring match that counts for nothing.
It is clear that the Future Has-Been's vendetta is not about a tournament. Somewhere in their competitive silence, preceding their silence and continuing to be woefully unexplained in their silence, is a totally different, hidden motive.
So what, we ask, might be this other motive?
In SaNguiNe’s case, his motive is, rather than hidden, just easy to forget within the saga’s inundation of other episodes. An isolated review of his story will clarify everything. Despite his constant denial of it as The Third Gate mocks him, the wrestler is bitterly jealous that Henry stole the attention of Artemis/Loki, and his tournament run begins—and continues to be, at the deepest level—an extended quest for romantic reprisal.
‘Impossible,’ interjects the reader of the 20s. ‘Artemis is a transgender, and that romance must’ve died the moment SaNguiNe knew he’d been tucked.’
Yes, we today find this preposterous, all affection severed upon the moment of discovering ourselves tucked by a demonic shapeshifter intent on severing our genitals. But SaNguiNe, a Roboboomer, likely corrupted morally by videogames, has a different ethico-romantic standard.
—209: '…[Sanguine had] learned the girl he’d been pining after was a dude. More than that revelation, which wasn’t too astonishing in virtual reality, he’d been pained to learn the insincerity of ‘Artemis’, merely one of several personas the guy portraying her would go on to demonstrate during the bout with HF, with whom he seemed to have a historic connection. And, despite everything, more than anything else, that historic connection was the sore point, SaNguiNe’s silly heart aching with jealousy.'
SaNguiNe would rather you forget that confession, but it was there, once upon a time. As the saga progresses, his internal monologue gradually closes rank to conceal this jealousy. Much later, when we re-meet him after the weeks of bullying, internal conflict, and duelling drillwork to purge his sexual frustrations, the motive has been suppressed and transmuted into an irrational goal to ruin Henry’s tournament, which the wrestler raves about in mythological terms.
—259: '[Sanguine]—who could admit that he'd never been the best and never would be—still planned to climb to the summit and wrestle man-to-man with this figure looking down so imperiously upon them all…to slay him was far beyond his strength – certainly. But such was not SaNguiNe’s aspiration. Accepting his mortal insignificance, he would be satisfied if he could steal one single move, one single moment. To catch a god off-guard, to twist him in an unexpected direction, to stand for half a second over his slack body before it repaired, to make him stride forever afterwards with a memory of a limp from that one day when that one plot did not go so smoothly to plan because some forgotten third-place ant snapped his spine in two…’ [Note the underlined inferiority complex and residual tones of confused homoeroticism.]
By the tournament, his inner monologue has further degenerated into the near-silence of burning muscles and transitions, although the actual rationale continues to occasionally trickle through.
—316: ‘In his current state of focus, Artemis her—himself could have shown up here, and SaNguiNe would have demolished that guy, that guy, that guy, that GUY without one slip-up.’
Why the need to tell himself that Artemis is not a girl? Because our wrestler’s jealous, broken heart is still convinced she is.
This thus gives us the non-synchronic, non-mythological reason for his closing celebration when he beats Henry in an inconsequential sparring match. The wrestler loses the tournament, yes, but he succeeds in the initial objective of beating up the cad who stole his non-girl. SaNguiNe, more than a Future Has-Been, a mere sub-archetype, was one of this saga’s Spurned Lovers, questing for a stab at a triangle-inspired vengeance. That’s his hidden motive, that’s the explanation of his irrational vendetta, and that’s his absent plot.
So how about Miller, then?
Before I make my synchronic proposal based on the one sibling’s story we now recall, I’d ask the reader to engage in a quick thought exercise. Imagine, for a moment, what SaNguiNe’s duel against The Third Gate would’ve looked like had we lacked all of this romantic history, had the wrestler simply materialised out of nowhere like our man Miller and raced into his ridiculous duel. We would be left with several unexplained mysteries.
A) Without his failed love, what sense would we make of SaNguiNe’s deranged mumblings that he’ll crack the spine of a god while losing an amateur 1v1 tournament? B) Without his failed love, how would we interpret the confusion of pronouns in his noggin? C) Without his failed love, what meaning could we possibly project into his opponent inviting extra theatre actors and adorning a seaweed wig and a man-loathing gaze while spinning spears and pretending to shoot a bow? D) Without failed love, what frustration would we experience as we watched the wrestler ignore, again and again, the tips to beating this obnoxious enemy given charitably from history’s greatest duellist cheering for him from the sidelines?
Those episodes, inexplicable without love, were shamelessly plagiarised by the saga and my non-author self from the schema of Miller's unexplained duel - SaNguiNe's archetypal brother A) spits inexplicably, B) confuses Henry for the bot-lover inexplicably, C) stands by as randoms intrude for a royal rumble inexplicably, and D) refuses—frustratingly again and again—to use his sword despite the sanction and encouragement of history’s greatest duellist inexplicably.
So, then, as the many parallels gain clarity, I ask, might SaNguiNe’s hidden motive behind these absurdities—the archetype beyond the Future Has-Been—might this not also have repeated for Miller? I do note, curiously, that the other Future Has-Been wedged against him in the competition, our saga’s immaculate hero, is also a reject from another highly embarrassing romance that preceded this tournament and that’s best forgotten...
Our next, third, and final step into their common history as romantic losers will show that this is no coincidence but the precise archetypal triangulation of our man. We have, at last, found his explanation. It was a triangle all along - a triangle of love.