Our man I deduce, from the best pattern that I can fit his actions and episodes into, is the More Obvious Loser of his love triangle, on a vengeance-driven vendetta against Henry, the Less Obvious Loser, who's stolen his robot duelling girlfriend.
In Miller’s case, we have only the archetypal pattern and none of the backstory. At no point will our man weep over his romantic losses, nor will he communicate them to Henry in any more definite form than his self-hating insult of ‘bot-lover’. This is a fact that at first suggests there is no girlfriend, but, as we observe with other characters in the saga, most of them are no longer by the time of their climactic duels thinking or speaking coherently about the motives that inspired their crazed vengeances, especially not the Future Has-Beens who disavow all personal history and identity in their ideal of a strategic silence. Thankfully, although our man does not speak, his siblings have already spoken a thousand times in his mute stead - his story, and his explanation, is, was, and will always be the same as theirs.
For the sake of practicality, I’m going to present that explanation in a somewhat reverse order from that trekked through to get here. We’ll start with Miller’s derived story. Then, for any requiring evidence and details, we’ll examine the wider pattern of archetypal repetitions that’ve manifested from this story and corroborate it. After that, I’ll give the first, briefer conclusion of two conclusions, followed by the duel itself, no longer an orgy of inexplicableness. I’ll lastly close the duel with my highest explanation of Miller’s mystery, attempting to stretch beyond his love triangle to its heavily foreshadowed love quadrilateral. To spoil that—embracing the saga’s synchronic indifference to normal presentation order—Miller’s girlfriend is not the only robot lover here, so is our hero. Henry is, like Loki imitating a lady for SaNguiNe’s love triangle, a two-century-old cyborg duplicitously imitating a teenager in a romantic crisis and assisting him(self) to reincarnate from his rejection as a woman-juggling love god.
Miller as The Most Obvious Loser
This is the story of Miller’s vendetta according to the MOL’s super-drama. Below each sub-episode, I attach the observable material from the duel ahead that aligns with it.
Pre-Drama
More Obvious Loser falls in love with Obtuse Target during a shared pursuit: Miller, at an unspecified time, practised duelling with a robot girlfriend, either impressed by his tournament placements or who granted him his skills, or maybe a reciprocal relation of these two.
* Known record as duelling champion. Constant flashbacks of duellists being finished off [by girlfriend].
MOL’s love for OT is unsuccessful because of a secret incompatibility: Miller’s girlfriend was an advanced duelling robot.
* Miller’s SVEC background. Inhuman duel analysis essays [from girlfriend]. ‘Bot-Lover’ spat [with self-loathing].
Introduction
Obtuse Target suddenly sights Less Obvious Loser: Henry gains international notoriety for A Thousand Tools.
OT is attracted by LOL’s superiority at pursuit or other pursuit: Robot girlfriend begins to obsessively study A Thousand Tools, the technique of the superior duellist-lover.
* Inhuman duel analysis essays obsessing over Henry's technique [from girlfriend]. ‘Bot-Lover’ spat [with jealousy and longing].
OT discards the MOL cruelly: While studying A Thousand Tools, the girlfriend forgets Miller, a duelling has-been, with instantaneous robot speed and unemotionality.
* Miller's irrational vendetta. Inhuman duel analysis essays [from girlfriend] discuss him with callous indifference. [Robot girlfriend's cyborg love transition speed]
More Obvious Loser commits to a violent vendetta against Less Obvious Loser: Miller, jealous like SaNguiNe and other greatest losers, renounces robots and tournament duelling and determines to slay Henry.
* Miller’s guard assignment. Indifference to competition. Request for duel to the death.
Development
More Obvious Loser takes absurd measures in their vendetta: Miller, giving up on the tournament and its prize winnings completely, demotes to a lower category where his odds of killing Henry are better.
* Narrative rationale for demotion. Grandma Ru’s analysis. SaNguiNe winning off-the-record duel with Henry.
MOL’s vendetta becomes progressively irrational, inexplicable, and silent: Focused on his vendetta, Miller’s motivations become increasingly twisted, his former love for his robot girlfriend mutating into hatred. By the time he arrives at the duel, he’s a silent monster, conversing only in saliva and slurs, thinking only in violence.
* ‘Bot-lover’ spat [as a slur]. The absence of explanation that prompted my research. Miller’s refusal to employ Legendary sword.
Love-Triangle Deity Karnon enters to phallically increase the fun: During Miller’s training, he meets the trickster god, who gifts him a Legendary sword, Worldpiercer, stolen from Henry as part of the wider pattern of attacks engineered by the god, such as the thief Z and El-Masry.
* Karnon’s background presence. Duelling anomalies. Miller possessing ‘Worldpiercer’, Henry’s former Legendary rapier, stolen by Karnon.
Climax
More Obvious Loser’s vendetta expands into a spectacle of violence involving more parties: After getting Henry to agree to a duel to the death, their fight is complicated by extra guys piling in to create a multi-member gorefest.
Someone gets impaled and dies: Their duel ends with a sword-thrust.
Nobody succeeds in love: The duel does not, superficially, have a single moment of romantic fulfilment.
Post-Drama
Revelation of Romantic Incompatibility/Hidden Fourth Corner: Henry, rather than a bot lover, is actually a bot lover, i.e. a cyborg Romeo, just like Miller’s robot girlfriend.
After the pains of reconstructing his background, it becomes a synchronic breeze to explain why Miller refuses to employ his legendary sword.
(‘author’s’ edit in an ‘author’s note: It now strikes me that, like the saga, I’ve only mentioned this key detail in random tangents that could’ve been missed or forgotten during my essay. The sword contested over by Miller, ‘Worldpiercer’, is the same Legendary rapier that Henry obtains in Volume I and that is subsequently stolen by Karnon after he blows up a Trading Post. From this context, and the episode with the thief Z picking up another Legendary sword during his duel with Henry arranged by the god, it’s deducible that Miller receives the Legendary sword from Karnon in a similar, omitted background scheme, this being the latest mid-tourney prank, much like the El-Masry and Alice Wilson attacks. I apologise for not explaining this better earlier, but, research-wise, the deduction was so much easier than the archetypal puzzle that I solved it right at the beginning of my investigation and subsequently forgot its importance.)
The source of the weapon from Karnon, an NPC, puts Miller into a moral quandary. On the one hand, Miller wants to kill Henry for stealing his robot girlfriend, and Worldpiercer is useful in this vendetta. On the other hand, Miller—whose jealous path has transformed him into what we might label an anti-robot racist, calling as he does everyone bot-lovers—views it an act of treachery to collaborate with Karnon, who as an NPC, is factionally equivalent with his ex-girlfriend.
That quandary, continuing into his duel, and condensed within its brief duration, repeats and mirrors the same blunderings of fellow MOL Rose copying her enemy LOL Silver’s face and MOL SaNguiNe’s transgender difficulties with OT Artemis. SaNguiNe offers an especially close analogy - just as the wrestler is troubled over Artemis’s hidden ‘sword’ (read: penis), so is Miller troubled over his own sword. The weapon, in a double symbolism, as a Legendary, represents the high-tech, beyond-human features of his duelling robot girlfriend, and, as a Legendary specifically with extendible, phallic properties, Miller’s retracting and transforming love.
And, yeah, that’s our man’s explanation. His irrationality is a consequence of being in a convoluted love triangle with a cyborg duelling GF and Henry.
His Synchronic Pattern
In support of that story, we can revisit the episodes of Miller’s duel transferred into the larger love triangle pattern. I’ve included Henry and SaNguiNe’s triangles for ease of comparison. Non-italics signify incontestable elements observed from the ground facts of the narrative and the duel. Italics signify those that I reverse engineer from the robot GF epiphany. A few slots are empty but this has also been true with many of the other triangles, performing only sections of the super drama, and the number of omissions in Miller’s case is archetypally conventional.
Love Triangles Miller's Love Triangle Henry#1 - Main
SaNguiNe-Artemis
Setting Barren Landscape Inverted – Miller is from the prosperous mountains of Appalachia, a.k.a. SVEC Rose’s first duel in snow-blasted steppe, Silver Wolf in Australia
Starts at a ‘Pain on The Plains’ tournament
Cast
Obtuse Target Hidden cyborg duelling GF Henry Artemis More Obvious Loser – Physically powerful, Mentally-Weak Miller The Machine Rose The Pretty Assassin
SaNguiNe The Wrestler
Less Obvious Loser – Genius/Skills oriented, Wealthy/Prestigious Henry The Weapon Juggler Silver Wolf The Author
Henry The Guild Leader
Cross-Triangle Relations
Less Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Ignorance <-> Duelling Analysis Insecurity, Doubt <-> Rejection, Mockery, Tsundere Antagonism
Avoidance <-> Stalking Harassment, Tsundere Antagonism
More Obvious Loser x Obtuse Target Duelling past <-> Rejects him for superior duellist Stalking, Physical Attempts <-> Misleads, Pseudo-Date, Rejection, Mockery, Physical Proximity
Intensive Fawning <-> Early Flirtation, Later Violence
More Obvious Loser x Less Obvious Loser Hostility <-> Confused/Ignorance, Mentorship Hostility <-> Confused/Ignorance
Hostility <-> Ignorance, Guidance, Mentorship
Pre-Drama
Incompatibility GF is a robot NPC Melodrama
Artemis is a transgender
More Obvious Loser Precedes Less Obvious Loser Miller's flashbacks to girlfriend's duels Henry duels Rose in Saana II
SaNguiNe trains with Artemis before Henry appears
I. Beginnings & Development
Pronoun/Referent Mystery Bot-Lover' accusations A. Obscurity of Henry’s pick, B. Obscurity of Incompatibility
Loki’s genderswapping
Masks/Inauthenticity/Deception/Censorship Mask-Wearing Loki as background presence. Duelling flashbacks censor out girlfriend Rose pretending to be exchange student; Rose stealing Silver’s face. Henry’s tournament silence
Loki’s disguise swaps
Obscured Motivations and Inexplicable Quandaries Romantic jealousy mutates into irrational vendetta NPC Melodrama; Romantic Incompatibility
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 Henry changes hobby from duelling to literature
Loki-Artemis joins Byzantium
More Obvious Loser Commits to Vengeance against Less Obvious Loser Miller's challenge to the death ? Rose parodying Silver at the tournament
SaNguiNe’s plot to spoil Henry’s tournament
Escalating Absurdity Multi-phasal bloodbath into royal rumble A. Plains event. B. Real-life harassment. C. Date shenanigans
A. Initial rhino-goring. B. Tournament embarrassments with Third Gate
Climax
Violent Hyper Spectacle Entire duel A. Exposed to public via Ramiro duel. B. Tournament duel between Rose and Henry
Third Gate's parody theatre
Impalements Dozens during duel, plus sword finisher A. Henry stabs Ramiro with sword B. Henry stabs Rose through eyeball with sword
SaNguiNe gored on rhinoceros during duel with Loki
Romantic Resolution – Does Anyone End up Together? Semi-Inverted. Miller was dating the robot gf, but now he isn’t No No
Post-Drama
Polygonal Expansion – Could there be a fourth person? Henry is also a cyborg Literally - Indy Johnson; Metaphorically – Henry’s alternative ego, The Tyrant.
Metaphorically – Loki’s other identity
Cyclical Epilogue Miller only picks up the sword after the royal rumble’s conclusion Rose returns after rejection for duel
SaNguiNe’s entire story is post-failure
Unsorted Miscellany
Multi-Layered/Ironical Elitism Non-competitive tournament setting Henry calling everyone a pleb
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 ? Henry is a cyborg
A Thousand Tools as SaNguiNe’s enemy
In-Human Granted Animacy Robot GF granted Miller's animating love Rose freed from robotic autism ? Assassins Loki. Intruder #1 Fenrir of Loki affiliation tries to assassinate Henry mid-duel Rose
Loki is an assassin
Poisons Intruder #2 Snackman gets Poisoned by Monster Companion Henry poisons Rose on first encounter ? Death Two humans, one humanoid, multiple Monsters Rose’s Brother
SaNguiNe gored by rhino
Phallicism Penile qualities of Legendary swords: Worldpiercer – extends; Worldwalker –penetrates the impenetrable. ?
Artemis stealing genitals for global transgender apocalypse operation
Presence of Karnon Collaborates with Miller. Makes duel complicated At marathon and Rose date
Loki-Karnon trickster-god connection
Explanations Galore
After transposing Miller into his archetypal structure as a Most Obvious Loser, we can now machine gun down the absurdities and digressions of his duel with coherent explanation bullets.
Bot-Lover. Within the pronoun/referent mystery, Miller angrily calling Henry a bot-lover makes sense from the very fact that it doesn’t make sense. All love triangles in this saga are mystified by strange linguistic puzzles, and the challenge is to carefully unpack the language and re-evaluate it according to the hidden motives that the language flags.
As a More Obvious Loser, Miller’s slur of ‘bot-lover’ conveys at least three cryptic, intertwined meanings.
Firstly, it has a bitter, jealous origin as Miller reveals his insecurities that Henry will cuckold him by making love to his stolen robot girlfriend. The hysterics—and inaccuracy, our hero a professed virgin of unassailable purity (152: ‘Cathy: "You're a virgin, too." Henry: “[Yes, I am. Thank you for pointing out this Christian fact.]”’)—mirror El-Masry labelling his muse Dina a ‘thug-dick-riding whore’ simply for attending Henry’s tournament, the saga’s More Obvious Losers becoming mentally and verbally deranged by their rejection.
The second meaning of ‘bot-lover’ is a self-incrimination. Miller was himself a bot-lover, but, post-breakup, he has renounced bot love as unconscionable. Much like a divorced uncle swearing off all women and diving too deep into TikTok rabbit holes, Miller might be envisioned as making it his life’s mission to inform others of how traitorous, bitch-like, and hypergamous robots are, their lack of morality and authentic emotional attachments enabling them to switch affections to superior duellists on a whim.
And the third, most cryptic, hyper-ironical meaning is that Henry, unbeknownst to the raving Miller, IS a 'bot lover' - a cyborg who loves.
Spitting. Why does Millers spit? In addition to an expression of bitter hatred, symbolically, within the love triangle, I believe it represents a rejected kiss, spitting being a sad, one-way-only cousin in saliva transfer. (I will admit this explanation might be a synchronic overreach.)
Henry’s charitable treatment of Miller. The interaction between Henry and Miller is bizarrely lopsided. Our man of mystery turns up, randomly cursing, spitting, and challenging Henry to a duel to the death. Our hero, to this abuse, responds with confusion and then kindness. Henry, agreeing to the duel, offers better conditions for his opponent - his guards are dismissed, Miller is encouraged to retrieve his Legendary sword, and Henry promises to kill the older duellist without his own artefacts.
Henry’s charitability here has no sensible explanation until we recognise Miller and himself as repeating this super-drama's lopsided episode of the More Obvious Loser interacting with the Less Obvious Loser. After the jealous MOL confronts the LOL, the latter, manifested by Henry in this example, shows themselves so superior to the romantic issue that they struggle to comprehend it or the MOL’s derivative vendetta, even while themselves being a loser. The LOL, to the degree that they do understand their rejection-ruined inferior, responds with sympathy and tries their best to help the MOL recover from their failures. In this episode, we might read the saga’s radical pro-social advocacy. The LOL, not only beating the MOL in mental and artistic capacity, exceeds them in moral virtue, driven by so much compassion that they’re willing even to sacrifice their love for another who needs it more. ‘What a pathetic, miserable wretch,’ weeps MOL Henry for Miller, ‘I guess I’ll create a more balanced duel for him so he can impress his robot girlfriend and win back her steel heart.’ An alternative, more cynical interpretation might frame the LOL’s charity as a boast, a proclamation that, even with their assistance, the MOL cannot win. My higher, quadrilateral re-analysis at the conclusion of this duel will prove that both of those are quantumly true, that the LOL’s charitability is both sincere and strategically adroit when one perceives the larger geometry of love.
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Poetics. Why are there poems scattered throughout the duel? A reader might first blame this non-author, translating scenes into amateur poetry out of boredom again, but I’ve since learned my lesson after the negative reception. No, these poems are from the saga. And I think their inclusion is because, romantically, poetry is the language of passion and confession, and its random juxtaposition throughout the match acts as yet another signal for the lack of explicit declaration of a love triangle. The device might be likened to my analysis of Henry’s non-self-defence when simulating cannibalism in his Left-Hand training, the refutation coming not from his own lips but the paired letter of the mad king. In this duel, where our man is too concentrated to stop and wax lyrically about heartbreak, the saga is using this poetry to indirectly express his censored feelings. A thematic analysis of the poems reveals the same conflicted love as Miller with his ex-girlfriend. The authors at times profess a hatred and disavowal of technology; at others, they humanise technology and whisper a nostalgic desire for technology’s return. My guess is that these authors, similar to our man, are part of a niche art movement based around cyborg romance, the poets channelling into their works the far-distant-futuristic sci-fi drama we might imagine as their boyfriends forget them due to hard-drive glitches or as family members—attempting but failing to be supportive—inquire about the practical aspects of making love to a robot and whether the couple plan to adopt a human child or a robot child or maybe one of each type of child.
The inhuman robot analysis. An anomaly that won’t stand out to the reader yet before reading the duel is a periodic commentary on Henry’s technique that could not be humanly possible. Others, including Miller, watch him in pure confusion, struggling even to identify which weapon in his juggle inflicts which wound. This anonymous perspective, alone, manages to comprehend his moves and to relate their sequences to a deeper pattern of sub-art martial complexes, activating and de-activating in the duel’s ever-shifting course as part of A Thousand Tool’s hybrid architecture. These complexes, tracked in real-time, connect with hundreds of martial styles, some searchable in the saga’s text, others not, styles that span cultures, continents, and thousands of years of in-game history. This voice, in one unfathomable section—which I won’t even pretend to understand, a whole week of concentrated effort getting me nowhere—appears to critique his moves, pointing out openings and errors that could have been avoided had he just slightly adjusted the proportion of active complexes to others dormant in his armament. In a more bewildering segment yet, this voice then utilises these complexes to anticipate his moves. It predicts with almost perfect accuracy a sequence of seventeen intrusive monsters that Henry eliminates over a half-a-minute-long segment. The predicted order in which these beasts die proves correct; where the voice errors is only in the subtler factor of the finishers, Henry forced to recalibrate his cooldowns in response to an opponent's mistake not anticipated by either him or the commentator.
These passages are, inarguably, inhuman, and they leave us with an alarming question: who is this non-human applying such a concentrated focus on our hero?
The synchronic pattern answers that she's Miller’s ex-robot GF. A prior love affair with the arena’s previous champion would explain her expertise, and the intensity of her current gaze could be the intensity of her love re-orienting on a superior duellist. She also betrays a pre-acquaintanceship with Miller. From the start, his skillset is known so entirely that she treats him as a fixed variable against which her assumptions about Henry are tested and developed.
Her language is, on first glance, devoid of any obvious romantic sentiments for Miller, whom she initially labels ‘the opponent’ before an upgrade, when extra opponents intrude and make this too ambiguous, to ‘the pre-innovation prototype’, referencing Miller’s martial (and romantic) supremacy before A Thousand Tools. This aloofness might be taken as a romantic contraindication, but it aligns with her being a robot capable of switching attachments in milliseconds. Archetypally, it also repeats the core ‘Obtuse’ quality of the Love Triangle’s Obtuse Targets, mirroring how Henry obfuscates his affection in the layers of his pleb-bait or how Dina misbelieves that El-Masry is gay.
—312: ‘“It’s news to me that he had all these pent up feelings…I was convinced that Mustafa fancied other men.”’
One feature derivable from this analysis is that the robot girlfriend is probably an NPC robot rather than an Appalachian robot. This is inferable from the facts that she 1) makes zero allusions to real-world events and 2) is, for all her inhuman accuracy, methodologically crude, her analysis not boosted by any of the computational modelling that an out-of-game robot in 2050 would no doubt employ.
Fact 1 also eliminates a much earlier hypothesis of mine when I was working only with the Has-Been archetypes. My initial guess was that the commentator might be Henry himself, as a cyborg, boredly dissecting A Thousand Tools while pretending to be a teen with less developed technique. The phraseology of the commentator, calling him ‘the boy tyrant’, and the third-person POV didn’t support this either, but I found those in isolation to be weak counter-evidence due to the saga’s repeating Pronoun Ambiguity theme. The analysis itself, to the degree I comprehend it, also doesn’t fit the Cyborg Henry hypothesis, as the commentator uses inductive methods of reasoning to ascertain Henry’s deeper martial thought processes, which, for himself, would not be enigmatic.
Censorship. Another perplexing feature of the duel are Miller’s flashbacks when the action escalates. Our man, whenever wounded, begins to reminisce on old matches whose losing players have received finishers corresponding with his wounds, his brain injuries recalling their brain injuries, his broken kneecap recalling their broken kneecaps, etc.
These old duels have two striking oddities. Firstly, they’re not Miller’s duels - the scenes are observed from the distance of a sideline. This raises many questions, like why isn’t he recalling his own duels instead, and how can these by-stander duels have enough emotional significance to him that they would intrude into this moment of absolute concentration, when he—as a Future Has-Been performing the archetypal strategy of silence—has managed to censor all other extraneous thoughts and dialogue. The second oddity, even odder than the first, is that these duels have no visible opponent, no apparent victor dealing the finishers.
The explanation exists between Miller’s archetypal halves of Future Has-Been and Most Obvious Loser. Our man, a supreme genius of silence, is recalling a doctored version of his former girlfriend’s duels, his brain removing any references to his ex-lover like a dictator removing ex-comrades from their office pictures. Alas, Henry proves this censorship imperfect. The wounds dealt by our hero, the girlfriend’s new amore, have a double sting as they remind Miller of others losing duels likewise, with whom he, a loser in love, is now unconsciously equating himself.
The speed and accuracy with which her invisible sabre decimates these old duellists also aligns with a robot girlfriend capable of the profound analysis employed on our hero.
Loki. Loki lurks in the background of the duel. He assists a colleague from Asatru, ‘Fenrir’—named after a wolf and the child of the mythological Loki—in infiltrating the royal rumble with an invisibility spell, the spy evidently returning to his original ‘Illusionist’ class since last we met him.
—117: ‘He’d also played an Illusionist, his default class, during The Twilight of The Gods campaign…’
—154: ‘…juggled his personas using his main Loki identity, whose Illusionist class fulfilled a supportive role in large-scale battles by weaving tricks inside tricks to bedazzle enemies…’
His participation in the duel is minor, Loki defying an order by his guild leader to join the fight and watching idly as Fenrir gets killed by Henry and forfeits a Legendary sword. Despite this insignificance, the saga assigns Loki multiple chapters worth of material.
A first section is a dialogue with Karnon about their mythological cousins, mentioned in my Orphan analysis as the trickster god analogises Henry to Odin The All-Father.
A second section follows when Loki’s guild leader, also named Odin, angered by the refusal, accuses the spy of being a ‘closeted trans faggot’ playing at his genuine sex-change fantasies through the guise of ironic spy personas and kicks the spy from the guild. This ejection synchronically fulfils an earlier scheme of Loki’s in which he pretended to be kicked from his guild and, via the persona of a ‘Hugo’, acted out a mask-themed crisis of identity. This time around, Loki exhibits not an ounce of his former, simulated moping. Instead, while evading several assassin squads during a stealthy exit from the venue, he delivers a vitriolic thought-manifesto.
This manifesto, as the reader will get a taste from my summary here, is incomprehensibly digressive. Loki, calling his former guildmates weak-willed, attacks them and the liberal decadence behind 2050’s conservative obsession with socio-virtual identity. He attributes to himself the superior, timeless, integrated, and more noble ultraconservatism of an Italian philosopher Julius Evola, mentioned earlier in the text by Henry as influencing the guild.
—239: ‘Loki and the other Viking LARPers in Asatru…students of the Italian thinker Julius Evola, who’d developed Nietzsche’s ideas in a mystical anti-democratic direction….’
True ultraconservatism, according to Loki, doesn’t define itself by the ethics of the populus or its transient enemies. Possessing a spiritual self-confidence, it sins freely, as he has by dressing up as women, with indifference to ‘hypocrisy’, a populist bugaboo, and it’s capable of joyfully sacrificing lesser values for the obtainment of higher, racial values. The spy demonstrates his ethos by praising early 21st-century Islamic terrorists and Henry as models of fascistic excellence. Both, his enemies or not, have far exceeded his own faction in the ultraconservative virtues of asceticism, martyrdom, devotion, and martial fanaticism. Loki argues that Henry’s superiority in these qualities, his underlying willingness to master his opponents’ strengths and subordinate them beneath his untermensch Hydra agenda, is what enabled his destruction of Asatru, and that this accomplishment makes Henry, in action and in legacy, much closer to the fascist ideal than his guildmates. Asatru in comparison are merely roleplaying a degenerate, online masquerade of their vanquished ancestors, and they’re too mentally feeble to access the Jihadist ecstasies of sacrificing oneself in a genuine, heart-felt struggle between race and death. Loki’s adoption of feminine personas is framed on those same terms of martyrdom. The terrorist voluntarily obliterates their life for Allah. Loki, surpassing them in a certain respect, obliterates qualities of himself even they would choose to die before losing: his virility and masculine image, his creed’s core virtues, and, after he's kicked from his guild, his association with the cause, whose aims he must pursue without support or gratitude.
What, we ask while scratching our heads, does any of this bizarre, pro-terrorism commentary have to do with duelling or Miller or Henry or anything going on right now or at any point in this saga?
The digression is purposeless until we recognise that the one rambling is another member of a deranged love triangle. More than the specific content of the spy’s thoughts, his voice in our ear talking about sacrificing virility reminds us of and emphasises his transgender connection between SaNguiNe and Henry duelling Miller on stage. That, combined with his mythological conversation, assists the researcher in activating the current archetypo-romantic analysis required to give the duel an explanation.
Ramiro’s speeches. In a similar vein to Loki, Ramiro’s speeches, advocating a last, doomed resistance of his troops against Henry and The Company have no discernible relevance to the duel either. If, however, we comprehend the triangular relationship between the slum’s saviour, Henry, and Karnon outside the tournament, then his speeches act as yet another key synchronic clue for the less obvious triangle shape of Henry and Miller’s duel, both of which involve Karnon as a common element, libidinally flexible between the one triangle of love and the other triangle of death.
The symposium section of his soldiers debating whether he eats kids, and the revelation of his cannibal serial-killer father, are additionally useful for those attempting any Orphan-based interpretations of the saga.
Synchronic Miscellany
These are not so much explanations but further, smaller pieces that slot within and support the larger archetypal pattern.
Incompatibility. An essential feature, in the pre-drama of the love triangles, is an incompatibility that renders them a three-way failure, e.g. Artemis’s transgenderism. Miller’s ex-girlfriend being a robot slots decently into this episode. It summons to mind a sci-fi-future panoply of ethical questions about the validity and advisability of loving a robot, of extending to a robot—through the related animacy theme—the many qualities of personhood that follow love, like property rights etc. Miller’s case suggests the answer should be no, his human heart incompatible with speed at which robots transition lovers. More bleakly, as an NPC, his ex-girlfriend is trapped within Saana, meaning that even if their relationship had worked out, they would never have been able to consummate it in real-life and, come the instalment’s end, she would be tragically deleted. Her NPCness further bridges the incompatibility triangle to our hero, Henry, who’s quitting this videogame and could therefore not practically date her.
Impalement. Of the hundreds of wounds inflicted in the duel, the finisher, the climactic blow, is the love triangle’s favourite of impalement via phallic object. This a clear archetypo-symbolic metaphor for the love-making act after a Karnon-esque transmutation into violence.
The Phallicism of The Weapons. Related to the impalement ending, the Legendary swords cameo-ing in the duel are genitally evocative. Worldpiercer, the rapier of Volume One, grows to various lengths and girths. Worldwalker—brought into the royal rumble segment by ‘Fenrir’, an assassin apprentice and colleague of Loki’s, and later utilised by Henry after killing this intruder for an ultimate sword-v-sword ultra-phallic clash against Miller—grants an ability to phase through obstacles. The possessor using this spell could be regarded as performing a full-body metaphor for the act of sexual penetration or, less crudely, the by-passing of romantic obstacles.
On their own, we might call these analogues coincidental or meaningless, but assessed as part of the larger romantic extravaganza? I remark that Henry, according to the pre-tournament events, is hoarding dozens of Legendaries, including multiple Ortheerian swords, like Worldlurker from the thief, Z, and a Worldhexer used to slay Alice Wilson. Any of these, less penile swords could have substituted into the duel’s climax without the same saturation of techno-phallo-symbolism. The pairing, to me, reeks of archetypal design.
The Royal Rumble. The duel is confounded by an increasingly large and complicated assortment of extra enemies. This royal rumble, engineered by Karnon, constitutes a metaphor in violence for an orgy/gangbang, the freest, most Dionysian, most ‘soul-expanded’ mode of love. At the same time, these intruders provide a minor cryptological hint to the love triangle and larger romantic polygons. Their addition highlights how we can’t fully decode the saga’s love plotlines without accounting for more parties than the two at first observed.
Intruder#1 Snackman. One of the intruders is an orc archer named ‘Snackman’, whose martial art Henry studied during the Overdream.
—139: ‘Snackman’s Immaculate Arrow…a Bowman player from Austria, who'd been the ninth-best duellist in Saana II…Snackman also bore a slight grudge against Henry. This was because Henry, to persuade the guy to duel him, had pretended to be a buxom goblin girl and lured them out to a remote location for hanky-panky. Then, revealing his true identity as none other than The Cripple and duelling Snackman, he'd tricked the enraged Bowman into entering the nest of a giant man-eating centipede colony. In the end, Snackman had lived up to his name, becoming a man snack, a snack-man.’
Snackman returns for vengeance from these ancient annals of Crippledom. He brings with him a gang of sapient monsters, controlled and boosted through a Legendary ‘Beastman’ Class, which appears, in a moment of absurdist anti-comedy, to just be the game’s pre-existing archer-monster hybrid ‘Beast Tamer’ approached from a path of ignorance. Snackman, interfering with his bow, is a minor manifestation of the saga’s Meddlesome Cupid archetype, just like Henry’s friend Catherine, encouraging him in doomed romances, and Karnon as a supreme love triangle deity. Snackman’s monster gang, adding to Miller’s robot girlfriend, provides a second example of the love triangle’s episode of inhuman things being granted animacy through love, and the orc archer himself, as a humanoid monster, might be conceived as a symbolic lovechild of this message applied bestialitogically.
The Love Triangle’s Outstanding Irresolution. In this last point, I may be getting too meta-non-fictional, and my observation is not from any specific episode in this triangle-packed duel but, rather, in the larger pattern of the triangle’s flagrant impertinence to return after all the preceding triangles that went nowhere and caused us to drop any further emotional investment in this anti-plot. All of the triangles, so far, from Henry to SaNguiNe, remain without a proper resolution. That irresolution could very well be the point, the saga-senders attempting to bludgeon us into forfeit with anti-climax after anti-climax. However, the more I’ve studied these triangles, the more I feel that this must be wrong, that the saga would never set up such an abundance of synchronic material only to abandon it. This non-author’s heart, if not my brain, is convinced that these love triangles are, however poorly and digressively, reaching towards a resolution across the characters who repeat them, that Miller, as the latest manifestation of the More Obvious Loser, is picking up his archetype’s story and progressing it, for the small duration of a single duel, a few steps closer towards its finale and a love promised repeatedly in the puzzle.
Conclusion I: What is Love?
Here, as I conclude my analysis, Miller and his mysteries explained, I’ll conclude with a meditation on the larger question still outstanding. What is the love triangle’s explanation, what is the mythological message, or ‘plot’, obscured in its repeating form?
To this, I’ll give two attempts at answer - one now, before the duel, and a second at the duel’s end when the triangular romances have been fully digested and, as Henry might say, we can strive beyond the triangle to even higher explanations and romantic polygons.
My first explanation: The saga conveys a view of love, much like Miller’s match, as a phenomenon that’s confusingly multiplex, multilayered, and multi-party, we individuals and our own loves situated in a larger, globe-wide drama of romance.
Love, we are taught, grants life meaning, explaining unfathomable duels and unfathomable men.
Love is as brief as a poem, as lengthy as an entire volume of better-paced litrpgs.
Love is a series of transformations, love transforming the lover beyond explanation, love itself being transformed by the lover as it mutates across the libidinal polarities of hatred, obsession, and madness, as it reorients its focus across the shifting beloveds of animals, robots, tournaments, and transforming monsters committed to transforming genitals.
Love, in the elevated vision of Henry and Miller, two has-beens clashing over the corpse of love, is a competition, a stressful test of talent, preparation, and silent concentration, an awareness of an ever-expanding field of opposition and one’s dynamic standing amongst them, and the boldness to maximise the fleeting gaps of favourable timing.
Love is elitist, immortalising the best competitor and clapping as the loser leaves the stage.
Love is a spectacular phallic embarrassment, is exposing one’s most private treasures to the universe, and love is the reward for enduring this embarrassment.
Love is at once poison and remedy, capable of repairing the very graphic wounds that it inflicts.
Love is persistence, is getting maimed a hundred times and shrugging off the pain like an invincible demon.
Love is nostalgia for the wounds, a private, crazed absorption in sorrows that one refuses to relinquish out of a memory of a beauty that, although no longer visible to others, one alone remembers in the sorrow as a fragrant ghost.
Love, in this future age, is technological, is a complex augmentation of the soul with steel that will create men of romantic magnitudes inconceivable to those of us who hesitate in fear and refusal.
Love, across the ages, is a timeless myth and the archetypal therapy of myth, is a rumination in the struggle of the ancestral forces that precede and exceed this bewildering moment, a discovery of neglectful parents, of horny gods, and love is an emergence from this struggle if not with complete explanations then a tiny, blood-smeared something growing in our arms that will inherit and repeat our confusions, our vendettas, and our joys.
Love is all of this, announces this post-maximal manifesto of love, and love is More.
And with that, I conclude my ‘author’s’ note essay and my tour abroad. I did not get to visit most of America, which was somewhat larger than an island-nation-dweller expects (wasting time researching this essay also really didn’t help), but of what I did glimpse—from the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Washington (important fact for foreigners: Washington state is different from the capital, Washington, D.C., and the state's capital, Olympia, is not the same place, so if you travel there, you won't get to snoop on the President)—it is a country as fascinating, expansive, and perplexing as the man and duel it spawned. Although I may not have designed Miller’s match, which I’ll be merely compiling once back home, it is extremely tempting to claim authorship so that I might steal the credit for such a masterpiece of romantic allegory. For the first time, non-fiction approaches the dazzling density of emotional turmoil, phallic symbolism, and taxonomical digressions heretofore achieved only in the fiction of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, another exquisite American tale of unexplained men floundering in confused loves.
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