Between the last non-chapter and this one is not so much a step but a titanic leap of research, countless hours frenetically scouring the text for love triangles and one full-week devoted to binge-investigating Korean soap operas, the historical zenith of the love triangle genre. The latter tangent, fruitless, produced nothing but a contrast against which to lament this saga’s terrible, blue-balled take on romance. As Silver Wolf synchronically forewarned us, ‘“This is the worst execution of a love triangle I've ever seen!”’ (148) My analysis has done nothing to refute the authoress. In fact, it only bolsters her assessment, casting severe doubts on whether this story’s love triangles can even qualify as ‘love triangles’. Both elements of the term, the ‘love’ and the ‘triangles’, exhibit the same tendency to confusion and failure, mirroring the joint romantic confusion and failure of the saga’s archetypal suitors.

(Non-author’s addendum: Since almost everyone ends up a reject, including—in Henry’s tragicomic case—the Obtuse Target at the triangle’s fulcrum, I’ll have to give a terminological addendum to avoid ambiguity. Previously, SaNguiNe and Miller’s archetype, the most heartbroken of the suitors, has been labelled the ‘Spurned Lover’. They will henceforth be the ‘Greatest Losers’, in distinction from the ‘Lesser Losers’, who are, a little bit, better off but still not a winner.)

(Non-author’s addendum two: As I was editing, it occurred to me that this choice was also ambiguous, it being unclear whether the ‘Greatest Loser’ is the greatest at losing or the loser who is the romantically greatest and therefore, paradoxically, the least great at losing. I’ve since mass search-replaced the terms to the ‘More Obvious Loser’, or MOL, and the ‘Less Obvious Loser’, or LOL. If I missed any old examples, I apologise, and I leave my initial addendum as an explanation for these errors.)

Before honing in on Miller’s sub-archetype, the More Obvious Loser, I’m going to present a rough sketch of the larger love triangle drama. It is only a sketch because, as a super-drama of super-dramas, this plotline has been far beyond my mental capacity to solve, encompassing as it does so many characters and sub-archetypes in complex interaction. Fortunately, although the wider love triangle might prove elusive, the super-drama of Miller and his MOL siblings is relatively easy to pin-down. All of them are constrained by the fact their love definitively ends in failure and, aware of this themselves, they convert their sexual frustration into weird, murderous vendettas.

The Love Triangle Super-Super-Drama

The following is a table of episodes for the saga’s most prominent love triangles. They are arranged, loosely, into the most coherent linear arc-structure my brain could manage. Due to the immensity of characters and episodes, the table is best read in parallel with the subsequent commentary. Once again, I’ve omitted most of the hundreds of supporting quotes that would multiply the size of this table, but I will provide them on petition for those too scholastically lazy to search the text themselves.

Love Triangles Henry#1 - Main Henry#2 - Australian Hyper-Cringe Henry#3 - Ultimate Pleb-Bait Henry#3.5 - Marathon Quadrilateral SaNguiNe-Artemis Pre-Rookie Tournament Egyptian Setting Barren Landscape Rose’s first duel in snow-blasted steppe, Silver Wolf in Australia Australia Steppeland (85: ‘The Steppes Tetralogy’) Northern Suchi Starts at a ‘Pain on The Plains’ tournament Slums

Cast

Obtuse Target Henry Henry Silver MC Parody Crying Girl Artemis Dina More Obvious Loser – Physically powerful, Mentally-Weak Rose The Pretty Assassin Little Liu’s Fake Dead Mother (loses by dying) Nomad NPC Indecisive Beta-Orbiter SaNguiNe The Wrestler El-Masry The Sculptor Less Obvious Loser – Genius/Skills oriented, Wealthy/Prestigious Silver Wolf The Author Candace The Student Vampire High School Jock (wins?) Flute-playing Beta-orbiter Henry The Guild Leader Henry The Tourney Juggler

Cross-Triangle Relations

Less Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Insecurity, Doubt <-> Rejection, Mockery, Tsundere Antagonism Avoidance <-> Sexual Harassment ? <-> ? Some Actions Taken <-> Violent Attack with a bone Avoidance <-> Stalking Harassment, Tsundere Antagonism Ignorance <-> Praise, Flirtation More Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Stalking, Physical Attempts <-> Misleads, Pseudo-Date, Rejection, Mockery, Physical Proximity Gifting a Fake Child <-> Comedy, Mockery, Fake Lovemaking Self-Sabotage <-> ? Repetitive Fawning <-> Physical Proximity in Emergency Intensive Fawning <-> Early Flirtation, Later Violence Making Statue <-> Ignorance, Later Insulting More Obvious Loser x Less Obvious Loser Hostility <-> Confused/Ignorance Support Via Fake Son <-> Confusion/Insecurity/ ? <-> ? Friendship <-> Friendship (encouragement) Hostility <-> Ignorance, Guidance, Mentorship Hostility <-> Playing Cupid

Pre-Drama

Incompatibility NPC Melodrama Fake Son Liu Meta-Fictional Incompatibility, ‘Duty’ Fourth Person, ‘Him’ Artemis is a transgender ? More Obvious Loser Precedes Less Obvious Loser Henry duels Rose in Saana II Fake Mother has Little Liu Nomad Model is from Saana II Indecisive Beta-Orbiter recounts previous failure with ‘Him’ SaNguiNe trains with Artemis before Henry appears El-Masry is Dina’s classmate

I. Beginnings & Development

Pronoun/Referent Mystery A. Obscurity of Henry’s pick, B. Obscurity of Incompatibility ? Silver/Candace mixup A. Meaning of ‘Duty’. B. Henry first/third-person meta-fictional confusion Fourth Corner ‘Him’ Loki’s genderswapping ? Masks/Inauthenticity/Deception/Censorship Rose pretending to be exchange student; Rose stealing Silver’s face. Henry’s tournament silence Silver Wolf Hiding Identity Secret Jock Vampire ? Concurrent: Loki’s disguise swaps Loki’s disguise swaps Karnon pretending to be female sculpting judge Obscured Motivations and Inexplicable Quandaries NPC Melodrama; Romantic Incompatibility Silver Wolf’s disguise; Henry’s motivations harassing her Meta-Fictional Confusion; NPC Nomad self-sabotages romance ‘Him’; Karnon’s pre-prank clues of a cockblocked king etc Romantic jealousy mutates into irrational vendetta Questions why this intermission is even happening Target Switches Focus from More Obvious Loser to Less Obvious Loser Henry changes hobby from duelling to literature Henry meets Silver in Australia ? Flute-player makes more overt moves Loki-Artemis joins Byzantium Dina switches tournaments More Obvious Loser Commits to Vengeance against Less Obvious Loser ? Rose parodying Silver at the tournament ? ? ? SaNguiNe’s plot to spoil Henry’s tournament El-Masry blows up tournament Escalating Absurdity A. Plains event. B. Real-life harassment. C. Date shenanigans Henry’s avant-garde sexual harassment ? Clue hunt devolved into unleashing a corpse-monster A. Initial rhino-goring. B. Tournament embarrassments with Third Gate Decimating slums

Climax

Violent Hyper Spectacle A. Exposed to public via Ramiro duel. B. Tournament duel between Rose and Henry Harassment interrupted with Henry executing criminals and subsequent blood explosion ? Future plans to release story to the world A. Trio is killed by a monster B. Karnon exposes The Pope’s Penis Third Gate's parody theatre Stadium attack Impalements A. Henry stabs Ramiro with sword B. Henry stabs Rose through eyeball with sword Loosened criminals are impaled by Caramel Henry stabs nomad in omitted nightmare with pickaxe A. Two of trio impaled by monster. B. God Nerin impales Karnon SaNguiNe gored on rhinoceros during duel with Loki El-Masry killed by Nerin [via impalement] Romantic Resolution – Does Anyone End up Together? No No ? Only first volume released No No No

Post-Drama

Polygonal Expansion – Could there be a fourth person? Literally - Indy Johnson; Metaphorically – Henry’s alternative ego, The Tyrant. ? Fake Son Little Liu ? Maybe Henry The Author Explicitly - ‘him’ Metaphorically – Loki’s other identity ? His collaborator Alice Wilson Cyclical Epilogue Rose returns after rejection for duel Silver joins a post-harassment dinner ? Girl returns to ‘Him’ SaNguiNe’s entire story is post-failure ? Alice Wilson repeating The Redeemer’s demise

Unsorted Miscellany

Multi-Layered/Ironical Elitism Henry calling everyone a pleb Henry's wooing attempts Ironic saga layers Henry's pretentious creative process Non-competitive tournament setting El-Masry sculpture tournament victory Cyborg-Technology Theme ? Henry is a cyborg Technocommunist architecture; tour guide is part cyborg Nomad NPC protagonist ? A Thousand Tools as SaNguiNe’s enemy ? In-Human Granted Animacy Rose freed from robotic autism Little Liu gains speech ? NPC Nomad granted love Trio summons a flesh golem ? Sculpture comes to life Assassins Rose Henry fears assassination in apartment ? Fourth Character is a Hitman Loki is an assassin ? Henry sniping Wilson Poisons Henry poisons Rose on first encounter Fake mother ODs on Dragon Dust ? Henry tricked by Karnon into drinking urine ? ? Death Rose’s Brother Fake Mother Nomad Warriors Trio graphically killed SaNguiNe gored by rhino Terrorist attacks Phallicism ? After execution interlude, Karnon makes phallic puns then creates a picture of the Pope’s penis in blood ? Art: Nomad Sabre Arc ends with Pope’s penis Artemis stealing genitals for global transgender apocalypse operation Alice Wilson threatening castration Presence of Karnon At marathon and Rose date Interrupting episode at Trading Post ? Plot trio’s clue-hunt and death Loki-Karnon trickster-god connection Likely plotted El-Masry and Wilson drama

As with the puzzle-game of the other archetypes, many examples above lack certain episodes. In the El-Masry case, especially patchy, I've drawn occasionally from the parallel plotline of Alice Wilson, the yoga lady whom Henry beheads during the intermission, with whose story El-Masry’s intersects, both, narratively, as assailants collaborating under Karnon’s scheme, and symbolically, as a masculine-feminine pairing of violence resulting from potential psychosexual frustration.

There are also ambiguities that might result in other researchers deciding different classifications. Even in terms of the triplet archetypal positions, it can be challenging to determine who belongs in which position, the saga jumbling the characteristics within the groupings at random. I’ve applied my best judgment according to the general pattern, but I’m still open to potential re-classification. For example, with the Australian Hyper-Cringe love triangle, I’ve labelled Little Liu’s fake mother as the More Obvious Loser over Silver Wolf due to the former’s romantic failure of dying by drug overdose. An alternative synchronic analysis might upgrade her to the Less Obvious Loser position for retrospectively making more (fake) physical progress or even the Winner for (fake) successfully producing offspring with a billionaire hyper-genius international celebrity, which, arguably, constitutes a Darwinian triumph regardless of the (fake) mother’s brief time on the planet.

The Triangles

No review is necessary of Henry’s main love triangle with Silver Wolf and Rose, nor SaNguiNe’s with Artemis and Henry. Due to heavy synchronic overlap, both have already been covered exhaustively - SaNguiNe’s through his archetypal parallels with Miller and the castration analysis of Loki as an agent of the transgenders, Henry through the explanation of Rose stealing Silver’s face. Henry’s main love triangle, additionally, repeats in a non-archetypal sense through several of these other love triangles as members of the original trio adopt disguises or are converted into satirical characters. Personally, I've divested from his romance, dismissing it as an anti-climactic farce by the saga-senders, but some readers might find interesting my novel discoveries on it documented in this section while examining its variations.

Henry#2 - Australian Hyper-Cringe

Henry runs into an undisguised Silver in real-life and post-maximally hits on her. The other member of this love triangle is a fake dead mother of ‘Little Larry’, pseudonym of Little Liu, concocted by Henry in a romanto-machiavellian scheme to garner sympathy while failing to pick up other women.

—168, Henry plotting with the child: ‘“When you hear 'heaven', that's your cue to switch on Little-Larry-The-Son mode. For a memory aid and more authentic backstory, your mother, my unwed girlfriend, went to heaven after ODing on dragon dust, both of us having troubling histories with stimulant addiction. That's the canon explanation for your muteness – fetal brain damage.”’

After Silver accidentally triggers the code word, ‘“For heaven's sake…”’ (178), Little Liu calls Henry his father, which misleads the authoress into believing that their archetypal Incompatibility is this child instead of Henry being a shadow emperor in a videogame.

There is probably a great deal of synchronic evidence in these chapters, the most purely devoted to ‘romance’. However, I maintain my refusal to re-read this section, and what I’ve collected is only from memory combined with keyword searches.

Henry#3 - The Ultimate Plebbait

During his first Overdream session, Henry—beginning the literary crusade whose pretentious, wafty essays I’ve made the editorial decision to omit—pens a multi-layered ‘plebbait’.

—126: ‘...the ultimate pleb-bait, a story that ticked every cliché box and fulfilled every unrealistic wish.’

The surface plot of this story is an absurdist teenage love triangle.

—148A: ‘…[Silver Wolf] opened up a chapter in which the baldness-inducingly-clueless MC complained about her poor romantic prospects while failing to detect the blatant interest of the twelve-millennia-old alien-vampire and the muscular stallion-riding barbarian NPC…“This is the worst execution of a love triangle I've ever seen!”’

Its cast is a satire/pastiche of a real love triangle that Henry is in - although not the RosexSilver love triangle. Silver becomes the first-person narrator. Henry turns himself into a barbarian NPC.

—178, Silver in Australia: ‘…the wild jacked horse-riding barbarian NPC, despite the total dissimilarity in lifestyle and physique, that'd been Henry.’

The third character, the vampire jock, is copied from an adventure-companion of Silver’s, ‘Indy Johnson’.

—178: ‘One male lead, the twelve-thousand-year-old rich jock musician alien vampire, was roughly modelled after an American friend of hers, Indy, the leader of the group she adventured with.’

I’ve excluded this guy or this love triangle in my analysis due to his narrative/evidential sparsity, his sightings being as rare as an endangered bird. One mention of him is by Henry’s little sister, reading one of Silver Wolf’s novels in a moment of sublime irony that I would boast about if I’d authored it.

—211: “All that’s missing is romance," [Henry’s sister] said. "I can’t figure out why she doesn’t date Indy? He’s kind; he’s hot. He clearly likes her. What’s getting in the way?” Friend[watching the Ramiro duel]: “…your brother?” Sister: "My brother? How would my brother block their relationship? Friend: “Sophie, isn’t this guy your brother? Henry?” The friend showed her a clip paused on a grinning figure with sweat-soaked hair and a face smeared red.’

Another sighting is during the tournament, in chapter 318, when The Third Gate films a parody scene of herself as Silver Wolf making out with this adventurer and claiming she’d rejected Henry for being cringe, an astute synchronic observation by the mystic regarding the previous variation of this love triangle.

It does seem, however, that—contrary to the public perception inspiring these episodes—this ‘Indy’ fellow is a More Obvious Loser. Silver’s internal monologue never ruminates on him. The one instance he even comes up is dismissive as the authoress struggles to figure out why Henry’s fictional doppelganger is framed as his pleb-bait’s loser.

—178: '...this relegation of [Henry] to the position of the eventual loser, had made her doubt whether his story was intended to be a confession. Henry might be under the false belief that the guy she'd been moronic enough to like was her adventure-mate.”

That choice of Henry’s to insert himself as a barbarian loser is a multi-layered fascination, Silver only succeeding in dissecting some of its angles. As mentioned previously in my attempted formulation of the saga’s melodramatic plot, this character is derived not just from Henry but his first NPC friends.

–212: ‘One of the male leads had been a nomadic warrior NPC; that character featured traits of himself and his problems, but it was also a composite of his first significant virtual buddies, a memorial of the young soldiers whose comradery had removed the blinding veil from his eyes…’

–36: ‘Back in Saana II, [Henry’d] been taught horse archery by a tribe of nomads...’

–113: ‘[Henry] did an apprenticeship in command under Septic Rose’s brother during their alliance’s unification of the nomadic steppe tribes...’

From one angle, the second underlined statement situates these barbarians in the beginning of his career as The Tyrant and, from this allusion to his career, gives a forecast detected in the pleb-bait by Silver of himself getting rejected. More melodramatically, Henry is seen to be self-identifying with these barbarians by fusing them and himself psychically into the pleb-bait's MOL. As this melodrama rises to mythology, these barbarians combine into the character of Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s wild best friend whose death initiates the king’s quest for immortality, and we could, based on the tone of the first underlined clause above, re-interpret Henry’s writings as a literary path to memorialising/reviving these dead comrades. And, from a yet more obscure angle, the Henry who wrote the pleb-bait is, basically, an NPC, his cyborg immortality adding extra dimensions of obstacle, ethic, and sympathy. The last will be a noteworthy factoid for later considerations of Henry and Miller's cyborg love triangle.

No matter the angle, it’s evident that Henry is meditating through the pleb-bait on his own romance. In the Jungian shadowy therapy layer, as a modality of ‘art therapy’, the book enables him to confess a little of both love and guilt, to grieve his rejection in advance, to fantasise about alternative scenarios (to requote, 126: 'fulfilled every unrealistic wish' - his own wishes), to examine his core assumptions, to experiment with the veracity of these assumptions as he continues to during his date with Rose, a possibly forced attempt to test whether he can master the disgust for the videogame assassin that he knows Silver holds for him as a videogame tyrant. We might, as readers and non-authors, step back and contemplate whether the book and similar measures were not, in fact, glimmering successes on this therapeutic front. Henry, merely a week after rejection, shows no visible trace of heartbreak as he entertains the audiences of multiple tournaments. This is yet another factoid to return to later when we compare him to the saga’s less socially-well-adjusted More Obvious Losers seething, spitting, and stabbing their way through their insane vendettas. Our hero’s difference might be an inversion—and moral recommendation—against that archetypal tragedy.

Henry#3.5 - A Love Quadrilateral

The pleb-bait, alone, is insufficient art therapy. After Silver’s arrival in Suchi, during an outing on the plains with her and Rose for an Empire community event, Henry exceeds his pretentiousness and romantic geometrising with a mixed-media, poetry/sketch artwork in the Tang-dynasty ‘Mountains and Streams’ (149) style, the subject of which is a love quadrilateral.

In this case, fact and fiction undergo a continuous merger, as Henry transforms random sights from throughout the day into scenes. The piece’s inspiration are three Singaporean kids he observes during a marathon, a girl orbited by two betas while weeping hysterically over a fourth individual.

—149: ‘He'd glimpsed a young trio in their early 20s: a bawling girl, a boy playing a bone-flute in a failed attempt to cheer her up, and a third boy wanting to offer a similar comfort but frozen in indecision. “I'm not going back!" she'd been yelling, "He's crazy if he thinks I will!" Her words, ringing falsely, were evidently meant for a lover who was neither of the two by her side…’

The saga, further blending fiction and reality, follows this trio as they’re gradually entangled in a cryptic scheme with Karnon, probably spying on Henry’s writing.

—150: 'Karnon: "I've got the hook up on an epic prank. Nothing but the finest, most illegal ingredients: a sleep-deprived demon, a love triangle, a cockblocked king, and, for tonight's mystery guest, a set of divine genitals."'

This scheme culminates in a reunion of the Singaporean love triangle with Henry's main love triangle, the kids accidentally awakening that ‘sleep-deprived demon’, luring it over to him, and being squashed by it.

—158: ‘Before the beta-orbiter could react, the [demon’s] hand flattened him with a splat. The impact snapping his bones, his guts spewed out of his melodious mouth like meat from a sausage grinder…a few tresses of these organ ropes stretched out from the demon's face to apprehend the two Singaporean kids. Some bound them in a python-constriction; others punched holes in their bellies and greedily scooped out their innards. The pair died screaming…’

The demon then forces Henry into a romantic trolley-game between rescuing Rose or Silver, during which he exposes the favouritism of his heart by saving the author and ditching Rose to videogame seppuku in tears.

—158: ‘[Rose’s] face scrunched up, her lips quivering, she seemed on the verge of tears, a bout of ugly crying where one loses all composure and regresses to a bawling infant. Lowering her head in despair, the girl committed suicide…’

A Minor Mystery of The Fourth Corner - ‘him’

In the background of the Singaporean love quadrilateral, and what qualifies it as a quadrilateral, is a mild mystery around an anonymous fourth corner, who’s referred to—in a repetition of the saga’s Pronoun Ambiguity theme—simply as ‘him’, the betas refusing to use or think their rival’s name.

-151: ‘When he saw her being lured back to that old temptation, his heart screamed at him to grip her by the shoulders and shake her and shout. But he couldn't. Wouldn't that make him the same as him?’

-156: ‘This wasn't the first time. He was enacting a story that'd unfolded before, with him. Because of his indecision back then, he'd missed his chance and ended up wasting a year and a half in the torture of being a 'friend' – decaying on the fringes, waiting, hoping, hurting.’

This ‘him’ mystery, at first glance the latest strange example of Henry and the saga's avant-garde eccentricities, constitutes one of the arc’s most intensive synchronic puzzle-games, much more complicated and challenging than Karnon’s cryptic scheme during this episode. There are suggestions that not only are the Singaporeans in a love quadrilateral but so is Henry. This is likely the very reason he’s inspired by them, their predicament resonating with himself and his own, obscure fourth person.

But who is Henry's fourth? There are multiple solutions to this question that I’ve yet to fully synthesise.

At the simplest, most literal level, Henry’s fourth would seem to be the adventurer, Indy Johnson, written about once as a rival in the pleb-bait and repeated in this latest story as his love triangle with Silver has since expanded to a quadrilateral after Rose’s introduction.

Archetypally, the ‘him’ is not this adventurer—totally dismissed by Silver Wolf—but Henry’s own alter-ego, The Tyrant. This solution came to me after noticing the archetypal function of this fourth person in the Singaporean love triangle. He is, for them, their pre-drama ‘Incompatibility’, an obstacle that precedes the love triangle and dooms it to an all-corner failure. This Incompatibility, in Henry’s own case, is his NPC melodrama, causing him to loathe Rose and for Silver to loathe him. This incompatibility, if we attempted to personify it, could be framed as ‘The Tyrant’, who is referred to all throughout the saga with the same, capitalised pronoun ambiguity of ‘Him’ and named by Henry himself at the moment of his romantic demise.

—213: “I’m The Tyrant,” Henry interrupted [Silver Wolf], coming right out with it. “It’s not Alex Wong. He’s just my stooge.”

According to this solution, the ‘Him’ mystery is merely one, weird example of the ambiguous phrasing that plagues Henry’s flopped romance, joining terms like ‘duties’ and ‘incompatibilities’ alluding to various aspects of his career.

—178, a conversation with Silver in real-life: ‘Silver Wolf: "…it's not your first time...giving up?” Henry: “With that one…well, nothing much happened at all. I identified the incompatibility before any progress had been made, cancelled the campaign on the spot, and moved on.” [Note the underlined campaign terminology, linking sub-consciously to The Tyrant’s general role]

-192: ‘The real incompatibility? Saana. When you cleared away the dross, fundamentally, Henry’s first romance had been killed by nothing but a videogame.’

In retrospect, the saga is not even subtle with this solution, which it emphasises through a two-scene juxtaposition in chapter 159 (title: ‘Him’). The first scene is the Singaporeans finally meeting their ‘him’.

—159: ‘A tall fellow, he had a heavy build and the confident, erect posture that develops in all habituated to succeeding. Within a glance, one sized him up to be the antonym of the beta: the alpha. Here was the fourth corner of their love quadrilateral, the other guy whose shadow had been cast over them, him. Glued to the alpha's hip was the girl the beta-orbiters had been pining after, nuzzling against his chest for security.’

In a second scene after, Henry has an epiphany that Justinian, constantly roleplaying a grudge against a vague ‘Him’, has been insulting himself.

—159: ‘Justinian: “I, without caveat or qualification, do formally invite you to join me in the crusade against Him and His shadowy legion.” Henry: “Firstly, you keep using vague, masculine pronouns: Him, He, His. He is The Tyrant, yes?” The Crusader roleplayed tensing up in fright. "Foul not your tongue with His accursed epithet…”’

Between these scenes is a synchronic assertion. Henry’s love triangle also has a fourth, love-killing corner, and that corner is himself. This insight enables us to decipher why the initial scene of the Singaporean girl weeping captures our hero’s attention.

—149: ‘…he'd glimpsed a young trio in their early 20s: a bawling girl, a boy playing a bone-flute in a failed attempt to cheer her up, and a third boy wanting to offer a similar comfort but frozen in indecision. "I'm not going back!" she'd been yelling, "He's crazy if he thinks I will!" Her words, ringing falsely, were evidently meant for a lover who was neither of the two by her side…tried to think of a sensible explanation for the confounding scene. In his search, he conjured many backstories between the weeping girl and her companions. A love quadrilateral...two boys and a third in the background...all of them in their prime, expending their youthful manliness in pursuit of one lady…'

Scrambled in this moment are various pieces repeating and projected out of Henry’s melodrama. More than a love triangle, we get his own grief not so hysterically declared, his own identity mystery, and, in the underlined, in the back-and-forth between this girl and her lover, his own conflicted struggle with his alter-ego, constituting maybe for our hero a metaphorical ‘lover’ more seductive than either girl.

A third, minor candidate for ‘Him’, is SaNguiNe’s crush, Artemis/Loki. This spy has a prominent duel against Henry during the same plains excursion with Rose and Silver, and we could, maybe, draw a meaningful connection from a common Pronoun Ambiguity theme between Henry’s romantic ‘Him’ and Artemis/Loki’s transgenderist ‘her/him’. The inference, however, ‘Artemis/Loki is Henry’s hidden “him”’, strikes me as romantically nonsense and synchronically laughable. Our castration theme analysis has already exposed Henry and his saga as avowed enemies of the transgenders, this faction constantly slandered via monologue and cryptography. My best interpretation thus is that Artemis/Loki’s inclusion in this sub-arc is a romantically-unrelated repetition of this slander. We might envision the saga-senders, as it/they are handling the pronoun ambiguity of these love triangles/squares, recalling suddenly that it/they hate the transgender and taking an aside to pettily transfer the activation of this theme to its/their cross-time, cross-gender nemesis. “Hey this romance stuff is fine but notice that this Loki wants you to believe he’s a girl,” says the saga. “Ignore him. You should stay chromosomally focused and call him a ‘him’ lest he rob your genitals.”

This ‘Him’ mystery gives two extra points that I’ve found noteworthy but have failed to fully assimilate with the above. Firstly, Henry accurately guesses the identity of the girl’s hidden lover.

—156, beta-orbiter perspective: ‘…one of Merlion Village's leaders was a person whose presence none of them could stomach right now,,

—159, beta-orbiter perspective: ‘The campsite for Merlion Village…a tall fellow, he had a heavy build and the confident, erect posture that develops in all habituated to succeeding…’

—159, Henry’s: ‘For the love quadrilateral's fourth corner, the girl's boyfriend, Henry'd modelled the character on Merlion Village's arena trainer, a Long-Term Villager who'd been a hitman during Suchi's gang era.’

Does that have any greater meaning than our hero being a hyper-genius who’s always eventually proven correct? I’m unsure.

For point two, the Singaporean girl ends up back with her ‘Him’. This ending, if we’re contemplating her as an archetypal sibling for Henry, repeating and foreshadowing his plot, adds extra, synchronic flavour to his response to Justinian in the same chapter.

—159, Henry refusing an offer to join forces: ‘“I'm all-aboard The Tyrant Train, morally. You can find me in the engine room, shovelling fat heaps of coal into the furnace. Choo-choo-choo, let's go, Tyrant…” Henry, kicking the roleplayer off, jumped back into the driver's seat and continued on without a second thought…’

I’ve highlighted the symbolic entendre - the two, now competing in our tournament, are at this point riding away from the plains event on a wagon, and it’s this vehicle’s driver seat that Henry literally jumps back onto, yet we could also imagine him, metaphorically, jumping back into the driver’s seat of ‘The Tyrant Train’.

It’s very curious, isn't it? Henry’s rejection by Silver Wolf is framed—by himself—as her rejecting him. Archetypally, however, this is false. Henry, in his triangle with her and Rose, is the Obtuse Target, the one who ultimately decides, and we could re-interpret him through his Singaporean sister as selecting this fourth corner, Himself, as a priority over both the assassin and the authoress, who, just like the knight roleplayer, are ejected from his wagon ‘without a second thought.’

Preposterous? I remark that after ‘his’ rejection, Henry has literally not had a second thought about Silver Wolf. A text search of her name reveals an astonishing, 220k-word gap without a single instance between Chapters 221 and 301. Absent during this period, as Henry trains for his tournaments and administers a duelling workshop, is all the grief one would expect from a heartbroken teenager, especially the type of teen who transforms his romance into books and poetry. What’s more, the resumption point, when her name returns, corresponds exclusively with others speculating on his rejection. The termination point, meanwhile, had a fascinating pronoun ambiguity.

—221, Henry talking to Alex and another guild-mate the morning after his rejection. ‘“Rose was a firm no.” “And Silver Wolf?” Henry laughed pathetically. “I was a firm no.”...

“I was a firm no.” The implied meaning of this, contrasted against the former statement for Rose, would be that Henry is rejected, but a much more straightforward parsing suggests that he is the one giving a firm no. His friends afterwards deliberate on the reasons for his romantic defeat, but Henry?

—221: His companions were confused, unable to understand why he would be rejected …“[Are you too famous?]” guessed Elmer “Is she in an enemy guild?” asked Alex… Henry shrugged. He'd moved on.’

And—by all outward appearances—our hero has moved on, instantly and forever, not like someone rejected but someone rejecting.

However, before we leap too far into retconning that Henry is synchronically not a loser but on a ten-trillion-RQ (Romance Quotient) mission that grants immortality against all heartbreak or something, there are several counterfactuals: 1) Silver Wolf is the Obtuse Target of the love triangle with Henry and the adventurer, Indy Johnson, who might also be ‘Him’, 2) archetypally, not all the sibling episodes play out identically, some providing variations or inversions, and we might regard the Singaporean quad's Obtuse Target returning to her 'him' as merely manifesting a passing possibility for OT Henry and Himself, contemplated through this cryptic manner and later rejected, 3) mythologically, time is an illusion and, as stated earlier, Henry’s art-therapy-based grieving before his rejection could adequately substitute for the absence after.

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We’ll return to this love quadrilateral conundrum of Henry’s at the end of his duel with Miller, where I offer my best attempt to resolve these contradictions by re-examining our hero’s 15-tourney juggle as yet another post-maximal romantic project like his pleb-bait.

El-Masry-Dina-Henry

A final, tiny love triangle, which we might take as a synchronic reminder keeping the archetypes fresh, occurs during the pre-rookie intermission narrated by a 2150s historian. There, we get fragments of a story about an Egyptian sculptor, ‘Mustafa El-Masry’. He wins a competition by creating a statue of his muse, Dina, only for her to flake on attending his competition, drawn as she is by the larger sexuo-violent magnetism of Henry’s arena gauntlet. While fuming over this betrayal, the sculptor—just like the Singaporean trio—runs into either a gender-swapped Karnon or a female agent of the god.

—308: ‘From behind the judge who'd fawned over his statue appeared after an extended chase through the festival's crowded alleys….her features weren't remarkable—besides a shock of azure hair, bluer than his ribbon—but the look of appreciation warmed an artist's lonesome heart…’

Some mysterious time later, the sculptor has unlocked a Legendary Class. Using its power, he goes on a destruction spree while opening a livestream and calling his former muse a prostitute.

Features and Structure of the Love Triangle Super-Drama

Setting - Barren Landscape. Most of the love triangles begin in landscapes even more ecologically desolate than the saga’s general setting of a shanty town bordering a tree-less savannah. Rose’s debut duel with Henry, for one impossible-to-recall example, is in a snowy steppe.

-109: ‘Saana II. The Great Mammoth Steppe, a frost-bitten grassland without a hill or ditch…’

On a mythological level, we might take this for another thematic variation of the flatness theme that repeats in the saga’s title and acts as a continuous altitudinal contrast with its mountain theme. Romantically, these barren settings could also signify and foreshadow the fact that all of these love triangles are ultimately barren, concluding on anti-climaxes that deprive all three members, and ourselves reading, of any satisfying resolution.

Archetype One - The Obtuse Target. Archetypally, the person at the centre of the love triangle is an obtuse moron, someone so clueless and indecisive that their having even a single romantic suitor would seem impossible, let alone two suitors. Obtuse Target Henry’s Australian Hyper-Cringe is marked by an absurd non-recognition of Silver Wolf’s real-life appearance despite copious contextual clues. He is preceded in this foolishness by his OT pleb-bait parody of Silver, who is so blind as to apparently curse the reader with hairloss.

—148: ‘…baldness-inducingly-clueless MC…’

With this characteristic of obtuseness, the saga, for once, is perfectly conventional, adhering to the same romanto-archetypal standard exemplified in Korean soap operas. Obtuseness, on a deep analysis, is a genre necessity since love triangles would be otherwise impossible. Any person of standard intelligence could solve this ‘dilemma’ through a quick comparison table of each suitor’s pros and cons, while a romantic hyper genius, capable of ‘More’ than us monogamous simpletons, possesses numerous avant-garde strategies to date both suitors at once, such as frauding a second identity and juggling separate family lives or out-debating their suitors into a harem.

Archetypes Two and Three: The More and The Less Obvious Losers. Where the archetypes defy convention is in the comparison between The More Obvious Loser and the Less Obvious Loser. The saga’s More Obvious Losers tend to be physically advantaged yet mentally deficient, while its Less Obvious Losers are the opposite, their mental talents often manifesting in rare artistic skill. This inverts the genre gold-standard of Korean soaps. In those, the romantic superior is more physically masculine but has a glaring mental handicap, like anger problems and/or childhood trauma, which the Obtuse Target’s love eventually cures. The romantic inferior, in the other corner, is mentally complete from the beginning but fails to excite the Obtuse Target due to lacking the LOL's bigger muscles and the LOL's gratifying puzzle-game of solving his mental debilitations.

A fun synchronic mini-puzzle identifies the saga’s inverted dynamic between MOL Rose and LOL Silver, although it requires eliminating constant misdirection caused by OT Henry’s extreme narrative obtuseness.

Silver, mentally and contrary to our hero’s banter, is a writer of talent.

—149: ‘Although he teased the alpha pleb, according to The Official 7-Point Pleb-Patrician Grading Scale he'd designed while researching for the ultimate pleb-bait, she was actually a Rank 5 Mid-Tier Patrician in literature.’

Her real-life physical disadvantage, obscured by Henry calling her an Aphrodite during his Australian sexual harassment, becomes evident in the reason she goes unrecognised in real-life. The authoress has deceived our obtuse hero that her avatar is genuine when it's a fakery to shield her average looks.

—178: ‘Her? She used her real appearance. Well, to be precise, she'd used her real appearance – she had at a previous point…the issue, she soon realised, wasn't how you looked but how everyone else looked… standing beside [their beautified avatars] turned you, an average Jane Public, into Gollum...’,

This story about beautification can be synchronically contrasted with Rose.

—110, an observation by Henry: ‘Rose was back, too, and, apparently, using an avatar with her real-life appearance…’

—211, an observation by one of Rose’s guildmates: ‘Festering Iris gazed up…at the girl…Assassins often swapped avatars during missions, but Septic Rose’s current one seemed unusual in a hard to pin-point way…when Festering Iris recognised a vague similarity with Genocidelol, it clicked - this avatar was unaltered. “Septic Rose?” remarked the Company Cutthroat. “Wow, you’re, like, really pretty.”

The implication in the second observation—the very fact that Rose’s real-life appearance does not immediately stand out like ‘Gollum’ as Silver phrases it—suggests the assassin is indeed ‘“like, really pretty.”’ This quality, if it’s not remarked upon by Henry, is likely because, for him, as Rose’s pseudo-orphan brother, the prettiness is buried beneath the off-putting familial resemblance with their Cruel Brother-Father. To Rose’s superior looks, we can add the additional athletic plus of her role’s combat skills and she, clearly, defeats the author in the physical battle.

Where she loses, however—and where all the More Obvious Losers lose— is in the love triangle’s higher, cognitive battle, Rose being disqualified due to her autism and anti-social stalking.

The saga has thus taken the rather radical, anti-Korean-drama stance that the most attractive beauty is not external but internal. We might thus re-interpret our hero—narratively blind to the one form of beauty, sexually harassing the other form in real-life—as exemplifying this core moral lesson.

—214: ‘The main quality he’d been attracted to in Silver wasn’t her looks…'

—172: ‘Henry continued to stand transfixed by the beauty… her face…possessed the austere but charming Celtic loveliness of Joyce's Ireland…with the unapproachable elegance of Proust's Oriane de Guermantes…Henry swore, at once conscious of his miserly state…But never mind, he thought. If this Aphrodite was of the class of human he suspected her of being, then his trifling outer layer would be inconsequential to her assessment.’

Could the underlined not also apply to himself? Could his Uberpatrician eyeballs, perceiving only the interior aspects of beauty, not be confusing it and fusing it with the ‘trifling outer layer’?

Perhaps, but before we get carried away in praise of the saga’s contrarianism, it does adhere to genre convention with another key romantic factor. As in Korean soaps, almost all of our More Obvious Losers are less wealthy and prestigious than their favoured LOL rivals - MOL SaNguiNe and MOL El-Masry can’t compare to billionaire duelling playboy supreme LOL Henry, nor can the pleb-bait’s MOL horse-only-owning barbarian compare to its LOL ‘wealthy bandleader jock genius secret-twelve-millennia-old alien-vampire’. The love triangle thus repeats, and through this repetition supports, the ethos contained in Henry’s radical pro-gold-digger manifesto. ‘Inner beauty is supreme,’ we are told, ‘but wealth is also supreme.’

Cross-Triangle Interactions. The interactions between the corners are far too jumbled for me to make many concrete declarations. Roughly, if were to rank episodes in a hierarchy, with those of the Obtuse Target scoring highest and the More Obvious Loser scoring worst, hostility appears to make one a romantic loser, as does avoidance and mute ruminations. Despite the artsy type being the LOL, the actual act of creating art for the target is portrayed negatively, as seen in MOL El-Masry shaping a statue of OT Dina and OT Henry’s Australian Hyper-Cringe, the saga suggesting one should be a genius but should not employ these skills with too much desperation or should perhaps re-direct them into wealth accumulation. Ignorance, confusion, and playful mockery are the possessions of the superior not so emotionally invested in the romance.

An ambivalent strategy is to counter-intuitively assist the loser in their romantic quest, as is performed by the MOL barbarian bowing out from the triangle in favour of the LOL vampire jock, MOL fake dead mother indirectly through Little Liu/Larry inviting LOL Silver to a real-life dinner and by LOL Henry with MOL El-Masry when he joins a call between the sculptor and OT Dina to try to repair their relationship.

—312: ‘The reporter then added to the interview a second surprise guest caller: The Tyrant of Saana. Lee tried to mediate the romantic dissonance between the sculptor and his muse.'

Another ambivalent strategy is stalking. MOL Rose applies this to no success, while, in the bizarre Loki-Artemis and Australian cases, the Obtuse Target stalks their suitors.

The most consistent trend is a lopsided interaction between the MOL and the LOL. The More Obvious Loser overtly, often violently, hates the Less Obvious Loser, while the LOL reciprocates this hatred with confusion if not the paradoxical romantic assistance detailed above. This lopsided interaction is key to earmark for our return to Emerson Miller. It is, ostensibly, the exact dynamic portrayed between him and Henry.

Pre-Drama

All of the love triangles have histories that precede the events shown in the saga. Buried in this history is some or other romantic incompatibility that dooms the triangle to failure, e.g. Henry’s NPC melodrama and Artemis-Loki’s transgender tucking.

One curious historic trend is that the Less Obvious Loser typically has a shallower past with the Obtuse Target - e.g. OT Henry meets LOL Silver in Saana III but MOL Rose is from Saana II and connects with both his Cripple era and, through her brother, his Tyrant era. This contradicts the Korean soap gold-standard, in which depth of history correlates highly with destiny. From a romantic angle, the divergence is arguably just bad narrative form. By discarding all the emotional currency accumulated through the past, it creates a half-empty, unsatisfying ending. If there’s any upside or purpose to this anti-historico-destiny setup, I’m not seeing it. The best I can reason is that sometimes writers/saga-senders mistake their contrarianism for originality.

Beginnings & Development

I’ve not separated the super-drama’s beginning and developmental phases due to being unable to identify any firm boundaries between them.

Mystery Complex. From the start and continuing throughout, exacerbating the love triangles’ mystery beyond the Target’s archetypal obtuseness, are several cryptic devices that circle loosely around the Incompatibility hidden in the pre-drama.

The first device is a linguistic ambiguity in terms of referents, often but not always utilising the saga’s repetitive Pronoun Ambiguity theme. The Pleb-bait is an example that employs both pronoun and non-pronoun referent ambiguities. For the non-pronoun method, Silver notices in the tragicomic layer that the More Obvious Loser barbarian, based on Henry, has an undefined ‘duty’ that causes it to self-sabotage its relationship with the Obtuse lead.

—178: ‘…wedged between his parody and his pastiche was another plot, a tragicomedy…the self-insert had been conducting many subtle exploits of self-sabotage…his character's motivation for holding back had not been explained, but there were a ton of allusions to shadows and duty…’

Outside the book, the reader might link these allusions to Henry’s career ‘duties’ as the shadow-themed Tyrant persona. That meta-fictional linkage is, however, made yet-more difficult by the pronoun ambiguity of Henry always talking in the third-person about his plagiarised characters.

—148: ‘Ah, so first-person exposes its flaws again...no, the MC isn't a copy of you. She's a character, not a person.’

The trait correspondences between the characters and their real-life equivalents are, on close assessment, not entirely uniform. Henry, in a point that’s missed by Silver, seems to have transferred to the pleb-bait’s Less Obvious Loser vampire jock his own immortality, wealth, and polymathic genius.

—178: ’One male lead, the twelve-thousand-year-old rich jock musician alien vampire...’

Another device contributing to the mystery is the prominence of masks/disguises. The Loki-SaNguiNe-Henry love triangle features these most abundantly, ‘Artemis’ being a disguise and Loki’s duel against Henry (153-155) showcasing other personas retired from earlier spy missions. Rose, for another example, when she first arrives in Suchi, pretends to be a foreign exchange student friend of Abigail’s, ‘Zhangmei’.

The triangles also intertwine, even beyond romance, with other inexplicable, multi-layered mysteries. The pleb-bait weaves 8 plots. The Singaporean love triangle are a mere step in Karnon’s prank to release a demon and to pants Suchi’s Pope. The persona of ‘Artemis’ is an identity within an identity within an identity. If my memory of that serves, the spy, ‘Loki’, is being kicked from his guild on one layer, is undergoing on the next layer, as ‘Hugo’, an identity crisis due to this ejection that’s designed to draw sympathy with Henry also undergoing a post-retirement identity crisis, and then, on the last layer, is actually still ‘Loki’, not kicked, and merely using these layers to momentarily confuse Henry into lowering his guard for a reason I’ve either forgotten or was never stated by the saga. And then, at some layer beyond even those, and maybe offering that absent reason, there lurks Artemis-Loki’s transgender genital-theft agenda? Baffling. If this is the state of gaming in 2050, the saga is absolutely correct to advocate for outlawing the hobby.

A Rival Enters. The love triangle assumes its shape when the Less Obvious Loser, with their shallower history, enters the scene and draws the Obtuse Target’s attentions away from the More Obvious Loser. OT Dina abandons MOL El-Masry’s sculpting tournament for LOL Henry’s arena tournament. One glimpse in Australia of LOL Silver Wolf prompts OT Henry to totally forget the MOL fake dead mother used in his pick-up attempts of other women that day. This rival-entry incident, in half the cases, constituting perhaps an MOL sub-type, is followed by the MOL, abandoned and resentful, setting out on a whacky vengeance plot against the LOL. MOL SaNguiNe overtrains to ruin LOL Henry’s tournament. MOL Rose, if we try to force her into this scheme, might be interpreted as adorning LOL Silver’s face so that OT Henry, when they duel, will have to mutilate his favoured of the losers.

(Non-author’s note within a non-author’s note: As I reflect upon this now, this is probably the non-synchronic, non-Orphan-familicide-conspiracy explanation of Rose’s scheme. If it receives no emphasis from the saga, this may be due to a pre-failure caused by her strategic miscalculation. Henry has a perceptional immunity to such ploys because, as we learned analysing his real-life sexual harassment, he dwells on a higher romantic plane where one judges others only according to inner and financial beauty.)

Escalating Absurdity. Although the super-drama begins absurd, the middle phase cranks up the tempo through a series of increasingly preposterous episodes. SaNguiNe, after a week of angsty training, is humiliated repeatedly by The Third Gate, using her roleplay powers to satirise both his crush, OT Artemis, and himself in his terminating duel. In Australia, Henry spams absurdities as he synthesises a duelling routine with pick-up artistry to flex piano improv concerts and deranged proposals.

Climax

Violent Hyper Spectacle. Within the preceding escalation of absurdity, the number of eyeballs fixed upon the love triangle continuously multiply, and the triangle becomes increasingly divorced from the original romantic motive, which mutates and degenerates into hatred. Those movements culminate in a climax of violent hyper spectacle. El-Masry demolishes part of the stadium. The Singaporeans are pulverised by a flesh golem. One day in the future, Henry, a literary psychopath, will publish his pleb-bait of himself satirising the girl who rejected him. Rose’s date with Henry turns into the duel with Ramiro The Hog. Even the Australian love triangle has this ending. After a day of avant-garde romance, our lover-boy hero, randomly, logs back online to perform an execution that then devolves into several thousand people in his Trading Post getting vaporised by Karnon into a blood mural of Suchi’s pope flashing his penis.

Impalements. Every single love triangle in these climaxes involves a graphic impalement, often by phallic-shaped objects. Henry, in the duel with Ramiro during his Rose date, stabs the saviour through the heart, and then, in his last duel with Rose, stabs her through the eyeball.

—321: ‘…she appeared to have moved a little in the direction of peace around her rejection when one of his lunges pierced her eyeball…’

The execution that interrupts the Australian date has its final sequence initiated by Henry arranging multiple criminals in a row for his friend Caramel to skewer them with the extendable Legendary Worldpiercer.

—185: ‘The tip sank through the Miracleworker's shirt, into the soft flesh of their stomach…[it] didn't stop with its destruction there. Its growing blade invaded the swirling smoke, seeking the lives of those being lined up inside and the two frozen on the opposite end.’

Henry’s nightmare companion, based on the pleb-bait’s Most Obvious loser barbarian, gets pick-axed in the dream I didn’t translate.

The Singaporeans receive the following treatment:

—158: ‘A few tresses of these organ ropes stretched out from the demon's face to apprehend the two Singaporean kids. Some bound them in a python-constriction; others punched holes in their bellies and greedily scooped out their innards. The pair died screaming.’

SaNguiNe’s last official duel ends instead with his spine being snapped but, in a synchronic shuffle, his love triangle begins with him being shoved by Artemis-Loki before a crowd onto a Rhino horn.

—152: ‘…[Loki’s dagger] point wedged through the gap in the vertebrae of the Miracleworker’s neck, severing the spinal cord, before angling up through foramen magnum at the base of the skull to penetrate the brainstem. He shoved SaNguiNe’s paralysed body toward a waiting rhino, and the monster gored the kid through abdomen out the shoulder blade…’

El-Masry, although the impalement’s not explicit, ends his demolition running into Suchi’s spear-spinning protector, Nerin.

—312: ‘Tunnelling under the wall ran [El-Masry] instantly into the zone’s goat-herd protector [Nerin] frowning on the other side. A global notification advertised his death.’

What are we to make of these repetitive impalements? I interpret them as a metaphor in gore, the thrust of death symbolising the romanto-sexual penetration that in these triangles has escalated and deformed into violence.

Romantic Irresolution. We thus finish on a romantic anti-climax, none of the parties succeeding, as the violence that love has transformed into could not possibly unite anyone, as the Incompatibility that lurked in the pre-drama and earlier mystery condenses into a recognisable form. SaNguiNe, post-rhino, is left to brood over his crush being a secret man. The marathon quadrilateral ends with the girl returning to the ‘him’ wept over at the beginning.

Post-Drama

Cyclical Epilogue. A quirky feature of the love triangles are bizarre continuances after their conclusion and the thorough exhaustion of any interest. Rose, rejected on the evening with Ramiro, returns to this rookie tournament to get rejected again. In Australia, Silver—despite the apparent failure of Henry’s romantic harassment, which no sane person would be convinced of—voluntarily turns up at his apartment. Why?

Polygonal Expansion. Bridging the cyclical epilogue and the romantic irresolution, and perhaps granting us the why of that cyclicality, is an interesting synchronic puzzle. All the love triangles end in anti-climax, yes, but this might actually be due to the falsity of our original geometric premise, the love triangles not being love triangles but secret love quadrilaterals, larger shapes that do have romantic climaxes. The Singaporean love quadrilateral is the most explicit in this proposition, with its Obtuse Target successfully achieving (or re-achieving) love as she reunites with her anonymous ‘him’ in the epilogue. But, as mentioned with my earlier analysis of Henry and his Tyrant alter-ego, it’s quite possible to extend this polygonal expansion to most of the others by asking if they could also have a missing fourth person. We might, for example, reframe Artemis’s transgender incompatibility as the fourth corner person of Loki, related to his persona but not identical. Henry’s main love triangle, on a far less symbolic level, becomes a quadrilateral after the inclusion of Silver Wolf’s adventure companion, and, synchronically, the saga provides abundant evidence of those two linking up in the form of Henry’s own pleb-bait, The Third Gate’s parody theatre, and general public consensus. I will, again, return to this topic much later with Miller and Henry’s cyborg love ‘triangle’, but I do invite the reader to think independently who, based on the above reasoning, could qualify as this duel’s hidden fourth corner.

Unsorted Miscellany

In addition to the above, there are several miscellaneous episodes that I struggle to fit into any specific phase of the super-drama, but which I’ve listed because they’re still useful in matching the pattern to Miller. I’ll skip most of the examples of these minor points, already listed in the table above, and simply give my best interpretation of their possible archetypal function.

Multi-Layered/Ironical Elitism. Elitism, along with the very formation of the triangle and the saga’s anti-historical tendency, emphasises a theme of love not as a fairytale destiny but a competitive struggle in which one’s personal merits and actions determine the severity of defeat.

Cyborg-Technology Theme & In-Human Granted Animacy. In isolation, the Cyborg-Technology Theme could be attributed simply to these triangles existing in the far-distant future. I believe, however, that this tech theme intersects with a repetitive episode in these triangles of in-human things gaining animacy - the Singaporeans summoning a flesh golem, a sculpture of El-Masry’s coming to life before he unlocks his Legendary Class, Little Liu The Mute gaining speech. These two ideas, combined within the love triangle, circle and repeat the saga’s complex theme of personhood, evident in its melodramatic NPC layer and Henry’s ‘humanitarianism’.

My best interpretation of that theme is a suggestion by the saga that human love generates personhood. Not only in a reproductive sense, as lovers create little mini-people, but, more metaphorically, the love of anything, from a robot to a mute toddler, is a gateway emotion to the emotionally-invested contact and interaction between ourselves and a thing that eventually infuses that thing with the many qualities packaged in the notion of ‘personhood’. Those qualities include sentimental memories, empathy, existential and social value, legal rights of preservation against damage, and even a conviction of a psychological animacy, independent of the thing’s material animacy, that unites with these other qualities to become what many cultures describe as a ‘soul’ distinct from mind and body. Pets are another common example, owners after a phase of emotionally-invested contact elevating them to something between an animal and a family member, but the phenomenon can also apply to flowers talked to affectionately while gardening or a beloved sports trophy during the regular polishing of which its owner rubs onto it a psychic share of their own personhood. Personhood, in this dynamic framework, ceases to be intrinsic to a thing. It must instead be gifted externally, the bestowal of love from another in turn bestowing personhood, the retraction of love in turn retracting personhood. Importantly, the individual, living human, to whom this dynamism also applies, is no longer and has never been guaranteed their personhood, which is not a binary, Yes-or-No property but a quantity capable of increase or decrease in correlation with the quantity of love received. The individual might, in certain times and situations, be granted less personhood or none, e.g. the anti-love setting of war. At other times, the individual might need to cultivate their personhood through reciprocal exchanges of love, through forcing themselves into the public and private views of love, through demonstrating their worthiness to be loved, through some higher attempt to increase the larger societal capacity for love.

It’s this personhood-through-love exchange that the love triangle’s animation episodes appear to dramatically symbolise, and, within this framework, the love triangle’s intra-corner battle is elevated into a higher-stakes battle to achieve, maintain, and grow personhood.

This theme is very relevant to Miller’s love triangle, where it combines with his high-tech Appalachian qualities to become a subtle background ethical conundrum about him dating a robot GF.

Assassins, Poisons, Death, Phallicism, & Karnon. These episodes have little apparent romantic meaning alone but, when combined, describe a romantic meta-theme as intricate as the previous one of animacy and potentially related to it.

Assassins, poison, daggers, and death form a morbid complex, present from the beginnings of the love triangles and steadily increasing as they advance to their climax in Violent Hyper Spectacle. This complex clashes heavily with the conventional romantic themes, most especially the archetypal Phallicism, which, on its own, would merely give the triangles a symbolically erotic edge, but which, when paired with the morbidity, creates an uncomfortable, sinister juxtaposition reminiscent of the saga’s Castration theme. Both this morbid and phallic material condense around the one figure of Karnon, present in the background of most of these love triangles, overseeing, complicating, and spectacularising them.

By contemplating the god between these contradictory forces, of death and love, I think we get a mythological representation of him that is slightly more complete than that given to us by Henry of him as an evil chaos trickster. Karnon, more than the opposition between love/order/good versus death/chaos/evil, may represent a wild, primordial domain that has yet to achieve these human binaries, an animal force like that observed in the praying mantis flexibly transmuting its post-coital lust into beheading and devouring its mate. Applying a fading recollection of the Jungian theories, behind all three of those acts—sex, killing, and consumption—are the fluid movements of a deeper libidinal drive, defined by nothing but an energetic impulse to visceral action, and it’s this drive alone that Karnon seeks to magnify with his program of ‘expanding souls’. From the human perspective, which Henry champions, this expansion resembles ‘chaos’ and ‘evil, but only because it demands the erosion of a suppression built into even the most primitive of civilisations against the morbid and sexual outlets of the libido sublimated in favour of higher, more abstract, more pro-social outlets. Karnon, a figure of raw desire, is something like a bull in a china shop whose innocent wish to move his full libidinal bulk causes inadvertent devastation.

He’s thus not mythologically so much a trickster god, a ‘Loki’. That’s rather only the laughing mask of a deity of primordial extremism. This makes him more akin to Pan, with whom he shares his antlers, phallicism, and bestiality, or to Dionysus, a god of wine and, through the disinhibiting effects of wine, the mad revelries of an unsuppressed, ‘expanded’ libido. These qualities force him into a Jungian mytho-archetypo-conflict with Henry, whom we might interpret as a sort of hero of the hyper-sublimated libido, sacrificing every mortal pleasure in the pursuit of his avant-garde ambitions.

That conflict between Henry and Karnon gives us what, I believe, is the highest, mythological explanation for these love triangles being anti-climactic. Love, for the hero, might just be another libidinal sacrifice. This is most apparent in a chapter aptly titled 'The Death of The Hero', just before Henry's rejection by Silver. In this, he randomly ruminates upon a strange Polynesian myth of the demi-god Maui being chopped to pieces while seeking immortality in the serrated vagina of a Death goddess. Henry parses the message of the story thus:

—213: 'When a man obtained love, in many respects his life expanded, and any children that love's nocturnal aspect might produce were a type of immortality. At the same time, however, because of the family for which he became responsible, because of the enlarged personal stakes, the most daring and valiant part of man—the idealistic boy who climbed with a singular focus towards a goal against the dangers of defeat and self-annihilation—this part often perished. In love’s too warm embrace, the hero died.'

Again, as with my fourth corner analysis, we get a suggestion that the one rejecting love is not just Silver Wolf, that Henry, as a hero, mutually regards her with aversion, a type of mythological baggage.

I will add, however, that this interpretation is fraught with many paradoxes. For one—and I can personally attest to this as a New Zealander—the figure of that myth, Maui, is much less known for that feat than he is for being a trickster god, i.e. more archetypally kindred to Karnon. On the opposite paradoxical end, when text-searching for Dionysus, the one self-identifying as this other god of libidinal extremism in the saga is Henry.

—238, Henry, during his castration rant at Justinian: '"I was Dionysus sobering a mean-drunk Apollo."'

—272, a stanza from Henry's nightmare: 'Like the clambering sun reborn in spring that melts Demeter’s snowflakes, he—Dionysus drunk on death, revived by the god’s bordeaux, young Zagreus of rendered flesh, by the titans’ blood rewoke—he’d risen to the strata next, to the Mountain’s elevated showdowns.'

The second figure, 'Zagreus', is sometimes equated with Dionysus. Several mutual myths of reincarnation between them, if one attempts to synthesise them with the Maui death myth, lead us back into the saga's complicated Immortality+ rabbit hole, where these paradoxes might gain resolution as a part of a phasal ultra-drama. I won't be re-pursuing that since it is essentially another path to madness.

There's also a greater question before these questions of our hero sacrificing love for what? A tournament? That isn't exactly heroic.

Anyway, if we apply the Dionysian analysis to Karnon and re-assess the morbid and phallic elements of the love triangles, they gain congruency under the same fundamental drama he embodies of libidinal ambivalence and growth. As he oversees the triangles, love and death are forced into constant proximity. They are cajoled to blend uncomfortably, to translate from one to the other, and, through friction, to destroy their shackles and grow increasingly crazed. There is to the god no fundamental distinction between the love triangles and the what-we-might-call death triangle between himself, Henry, and Ramiro that operates in this tournament’s background. All of these are triangles of the expanding libido.

That ambivalence has brought me to yet another of my cognitive limits. Theoretically, our archetypal love triangles could be upgraded into a broader love-death triangle analysis that encompasses many other trios like HenryxAlice-WilsonxEl-Masry of the Intermission or HenryxRamiroxOliver-Spears. The multiplication of research this would require is far too onerous for me, and I’ve already fled the task in pre-submission.

But, constraining ourselves to the romantic half, this Dionyso-Karnonian interpretation has the saga offering yet another fascinating angle on the subject, a view of love as flexible, spectacular, possessed of magnitude, and dangerous when unmanaged.

Given all these complex themes, the reader can hopefully better sympathise with this non-author’s inability to formulate the love triangle’s full super-drama. For explaining Miller, this is thankfully unnecessary due to its vengeful simplicity. Although we'll now be progressing that, I’ll quickly flash how his story slots into this larger triangle drama before its episodes fade out of memory. This table is shown exclusively for the pattern. Much of its content will be incomprehensible at this point, but we’ll return to it shortly when that’s no longer true.

Miller's Love Triangle Setting Barren Landscape Inverted – Miller is from the prosperous mountains of Appalachia, a.k.a. SVEC

Cast

Obtuse Target Hidden cyborg duelling GF More Obvious Loser – Physically powerful, Mentally-Weak Miller The Machine Less Obvious Loser – Genius/Skills oriented, Wealthy/Prestigious Henry The Weapon Juggler

Cross-Triangle Relations

Less Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Ignorance <-> Duelling Analysis More Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Duelling past <-> Rejected for superior duellist More Obvious Loser x Less Obvious Loser Hostility <-> Confused/Ignorance, Mentorship

Pre-Drama

Incompatibility GF is a robot More Obvious Loser Precedes Less Obvious Loser Miller's flashbacks to girlfriend's duels

I. Beginnings & Development

Pronoun/Referent Mystery Bot-Lover' accusations Masks/Inauthenticity/Deception/Censorship Mask-Wearing Loki as background presence. Duelling flashbacks censor out girlfriend Obscured Motivations and Inexplicable Quandaries Romantic jealousy mutates into irrational vendetta Target Switches Focus from More Obvious Loser to Less Obvious Loser Intensive commentary on Henry's technique by robot GF More Obvious Loser Commits to Vengeance against Less Obvious Loser Miller's challenge to the death Escalating Absurdity Multi-phasal bloodbath into royal rumble

Climax

Violent Hyper Spectacle Entire duel Impalements Dozens during duel, plus sword finisher Romantic Resolution – Does Anyone End up Together? Semi-Inverted. Miller was dating the robot gf, but now he isn’t

Post-Drama

Polygonal Expansion – Could there be a fourth person? Henry is also a cyborg Cyclical Epilogue Miller only picks up the sword after the royal rumble’s conclusion

Unsorted Miscellany

Multi-Layered/Ironical Elitism Non-competitive tournament setting Cyborg-Technology Theme Miller The Tech-Lover from SVEC. A Thousand Tools as Miller’s Enemy. Poetry. Inhuman duelling analysis by Robot Girlfriend In-Human Granted Animacy Robot GF granted Miller's animating love Assassins Loki. Intruder #1 Fenrir of Loki affiliation tries to assassinate Henry mid-duel Poisons Intruder #2 Snackman gets Poisoned by Monster Companion Death Two humans, one humanoid, multiple Monsters Phallicism Penile qualities of Legendary swords: Worldpiercer – extends; Worldwalker –penetrates the impenetrable. Presence of Karnon Collaborates with Miller. Makes duel complicated

The pattern couldn't be clearer. It's the latest love triangle.

The Super-Drama of The More Obvious Loser

From that larger pool of episodes, I’ve configured the following dramatic schema for Miller’s sub-archetype of the More Obvious Loser. The love triangle, from their most rejected perspective, transforms into a vengeance plot. Their vengeance is directed, at first, against the LOL but grows after a series of absurdities encouraged by Karnon into an indiscriminate orgy of resentful violence.

I’ll show the generic schema first before applying it to Miller in the next and final non-chapter of this non-author's note essay. Two sibling examples have been selected for each.

Pre-Drama

More Obvious Loser falls in love with Obtuse Target during a shared pursuit: El-Masry falls in love with Dina during university classes / Rose falls in love with Henry during their duelling in Saana II

MOL’s love for OT is unsuccessful because of a secret incompatibility: SaNguiNe’s love for Artemis is unsuccessful because Artemis is an agent of the transgenders / Rose’s love for Henry is unsuccessful because Henry [in the synchronic future] hates assassins and is her archetypal Orphan brother

Introduction

Obtuse Target suddenly sights Less Obvious Loser: Henry (Australian Hyper-Cringe) suddenly sights a disguised Silver Wolf / Artemis (Loki of Asatru) suddenly sights HF (The Tyrant of Saana)

OT is attracted by LOL’s superiority at pursuit or other pursuit: Dina is attracted by Henry’s superior tournament run / Henry (main) is attracted by Silver’s superior literary abilities

OT discards the MOL cruelly: Artemis discards SaNguiNe onto a rhinoceros horn / Henry (Australian hyper-cringe) discards Fake Dead Mother by commanding Little Larry to forget her

More Obvious Loser commits to a violent vendetta against Less Obvious Loser: El-Masry commits to destroying the stadium of Henry / SaNguiNe commits to spoiling the tournament of Henry

Development

More Obvious Loser takes absurd measures in their vendetta: SaNguiNe refuses to upgrade his style to A Thousand Tools / Henry (MOL of SilverXExplorer) writes a satirical novel

MOL’s vendetta becomes progressively irrational, inexplicable, and silent: Rose appears on stage wearing Silver’s face without explanation / El-Masry blows up city and [inversion of silence] gives livestream commentary while chatting with Henry and Dina ‘The Thug-Dick-Riding Whore’

Love-Triangle Deity Karnon enters to phallically increase the fun: Karnon gives Legendary classes to El-Masry [and to Alice Wilson on a mission to castrate the patriarchy] / Karnon interrupts the execution interrupting the Australian Hyper-Cringe and explodes thousands of people into a blood mural of the Pope's penis

Climax

More Obvious Loser’s vendetta expands into a spectacle of violence involving more parties: Singaporeans unleash a flesh monster upon main love triangle / El-Masry and Alice Wilson destroy the slums

Someone gets impaled and dies: Rose gets stabbed in the eyeball / Pleb-bait nomad in lost nightmare gets pick-axed in the head

Nobody succeeds in love: Rose gets rejected; Henry gets rejected / El-Masry just dies

Post-Drama

Revelation of Romantic Incompatibility/Hidden Fourth Corner: Singaporeans wallow as girl returns to ‘him’ / [chronologically inverted] Artemis is exposed as a man

A keen synchronic eye might spot the overlap of these episodes and the form of the MOL’s super-drama with the Has-Been super-drama, beginning with a status quo of dissatisfaction, going through a phase of desperation, and concluding in misery. In SaNguiNe and Miller’s case, this overlap is not coincidental since their Has-Been arc is a sub-phase of the romance, but it might nevertheless be, theoretically, possible to build from these a more generic, super-super-drama of archetypal losers maladaptively converting their threatened aspirations into violence.

The additional character analyses that task would require exceeds my cognitive capacity, as does an even greater potential synthesis of the pan-Orphan familicidal super-drama, whose phases of madness and vengeance might be unified with both these super-drama through an equation via loss between lost loves, lost careers, and lost parents - to which, a cyborg-assisted researcher of the future might even somehow assimilate a castration super-drama of lost genitals, formulating a hyper-drama around loss. And higher yet, someone with deity-like research powers might reduce this loss hyper-drama into merely the downward, death phase of an Immortal+ ur-drama, oscillating forever between death/retirement/orphanhood/castration/death/flatness and love/glory/parenthood/penile-restitution/reincarnation/mountains.

That mystical drama, what might even be this saga’s plot, I have sensed on many occasions at the highest elevations of my journey into Henry's myth, a vague figure in the snowstorms of the peak mutating through this one archetypal shape and others.

Had sensed...alas, I did not have the mental strength to reach the altitude required to even see the plot clearly let alone to touch it, and, now, typing this at the closure of my holiday and our return to Miller at the base, the plot has lost even the little clarity it once had up there. I can already feel how time is dismantling it, reducing it to a spectre, a tale as hole-riddled and indistinct as a childhood dream forgotten until it's recounted second-hand by a mother mumbling on her deathbed.

Oh well...a least we still have these triangle plots...at least we still have love. Some of us - not Miller. Our man's love is dead, for sure.