The plot has been all around is, in What and How. We now receive the Why, which reveals motives. In this case, we learn that the Red God is, much like Mammon and Gog-Agog, mentally unstable.
His instability is hardly comparable to Mammon’s senility of Gog’s lack of focus- he can do what he’s proposing, as far as I can tell. The only questions are whether or not he is right, and whether or not there is another way.
You cannot give your body to the ocean.
For it already belongs to the sea.
You think just because your ancestors crawled out of the foam, you are not still a being of the ocean? You are born of it, and you will return, sooner or later.
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
This is the wheel and lying counts. You can’t negotiate with the ocean but you may well be able to bullshit it that you can breathe water. Or just that the ocean needs to be somewhere else, urgently.
“The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
“Escape will make me God.”
Leave it to Jagganoth to have an even more dire exit plan than Durandal.
Durandal is one of the only people I never assigned any sort of mental voice to. The inside of my head is quiet when I read his words, and I credit this with experiencing Marathon at a really young age and understanding that *this is an AI* talking to me. That’s probably weird. But I really miss Durandal’s antics, as well.
Indeed. Marathon’s plot, unlike its (innovative, for its time) gameplay, has remained fond to me, and one of the few things that would warrant a replay.
For a moment I was really really confused about why a legendary sword would speak and rant about time ; then I realised it was just something named AFTER Durandal and not the actual sword of Roland.
Hmmmn, the golden nails/angel feathers definitely appear to have gone now, and with them Jaggy’s invulnerability.
Sadly though Jaggy’s goal would result in a possibly sterile, unchanging world, though that depends on how YISUN set the underpinning structure of all things.
After all pain serves an important purpose, to tell you that you are injured.
He didn’t say “without time” he implied “outside of the bounds of time”. There are several perfectly valid ways to implement a nonstatic system without simple linear time. Especially when pesky things like conservation of energy are not relevant to your starting point.
A really simple example is if everybody was intrinsically capable of time travel.
What I find interesting is the question of if Jagganoth’s proposed restructuring of time has anything to do with how Zoss keeps showing up
You make a very interesting point about Zoss’s apparent disregard for conventional chronology. Perhaps Zoss is several steps ahead of the others on this point and Jagganoth is the only one who is somewhat aware?
Time is subjective anyway. The past influences the present as much as the future, and one can never remain wholly in the present for more than a few minutes. Unless you’ve reached enlightenment, which sort of anchors you to it.
He was depicted straddling the Wheel, facing off against the impossibly looming Metatron. If t this is true, then Jagganoth cannot succeed for his mastery of the wheel.
The more proper shape is a crooked spiral. If the path of energy does not bend, vectors do not become dimensional; if the path of energy does not divide, boundaries cannot be crossed and solidity is meaningless; if the path of energy does not unify, solidity cannot be formed and boundaries are meaningless. Time is never a perfect circle, or the cycle could never be changed. That which sits outside time already contains the pattern. To move forward is to replicate the cycle, but also to change it. To attain every change, bend the path in new ways.
This is one thing I learned from studying the relationship of time and energy.
Spirally polarized light: the crooked spiral path.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_polarization
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
“History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
““History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.””
He will run it as the new god. Only in his world none will want to overthrow his non-existence. He will have the first, last and only word. He will be co-eternal with his annihilation, his non-existence, and his universe. A paradox. very similar to YISUN, only dead and sterile, like his own red self.
Why do people keep conflating “an existence beyond the prison of time” with “statically frozen in a single moment”? That’s the exact opposite of what The Jagganoth Bitch wants.
Does the table *have* to be run? If one has omnipotence, why can’t the rules and logic of reality itself as we know it simply be changed? The result would be illogical and incomprehensible to us who are bound to 3 dimensions of linear space-time, but it would be completely normal to one that lives in said reality.
“So many stories and no one to tell them to.” This was the lament of Yisun. There are not that many sets of logical reality making rules that are stable enough to allow stories to unfold and dynamic enough to make them worth living out. It is arrogant to believe that a piece of YISUN can do better than the whole.
time is ꙩne ꙩf the greatest blessings ꙩf YISUN, specifically because ꙩf its asymmetry and lack ꙩf circularity! Dꙩes Jagganꙩth intend tꙩ restꙩre everything tꙩ perfect, sterile unity? Blasphemy!
“Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”
Beware of the one that tries to create perfection, because perfection only exists in the moments of fleeting simplicity.
Jaggaroth has fallen into the sin of believing that perfection is possible beyond the momentary and the transitory.
Or…is he still being used to enact a further agenda?
On the contrary, evil must exist for good to have any meaning. You can’t have enjoyment of bliss without knowledge of suffering, it is how we are made. Fickle attention spans.
If no one was capable of evil, there would never be drama, or conflict, or character growth, or learning, or exploration, everyone would always do the perfect best thing and there wouldn’t be anything interesting at all.
The capacity for good and evil must exist, or else morality is meaningless, and everyone would be slaves to some perfect moral norm. If the capacity for good and evil exists, for it to have meaning, for it to be a choice, someone, somewhere, must choose evil. That choice is what makes choosing good worthwhile.
I would further posit that just as Buddha sought enlightenment through experience, one must actually experience reality to learn from it. If it was all nondescript morally grey perfect nothingness, the thing that would be hurt would be not our bodies, but our minds.
Jagganoth is Thanos with extra steps. He wishes a world where no one need suffer, but misses the point that suffering must exist, or no one would appreciate the good times. He misses the point that (barring time-loops as has been postulated) experience must ever move onward, and it is up to the individual to struggle towards greatness.
All throughout the book we have seen “reach heaven through violence” and that doesn’t mean “kill all who oppose you” it means struggle towards a better future. If there is no better future to struggle towards, there is no point to going anywhere or doing anything.
If the Wheel has been stuck in a loop, then yes, I admire his wish to escape, to live life in an infinitely long line of linear time, such as you and I experience, but if not, I don’t see what escaping time has to do with it.
If the universe works like ours does, where people can struggle towards a better future, then escaping time destroys either the future, or the struggle, making them meaningless.
Perfection isn’t possible, but progress towards better is always possible.
Bah, yet again the heresy of Dualism rears it’s ugly, illogical head.
😛
/ahem
Anyhow – avoiding the full urge to snark – from empirical observation we can see much of existence falls into spectrums, whether it be the intensity of light, heat, life* or more dubiously, ethics and morality. Thus it can and has been argued that we do not need cold to have hot, more dark to have light, not when “not hot” and “not cold” or even “not evil”/”not in pain” exists.
So recognise dualism for what it is – a rule of thumb used by our brains to make sense of things, but sadly doesn’t correspond to reality well enough to be actually useful in philosophy et al.
______________________________________________
*Fun thing – the more we look into the process of death in organisms, the more annoyingly complex and non binary and apparently reversible it becomes. Aside from the more traumatic forms of death, bit hard to reverse those let alone significant brain damage.
The living dead pig brains are a nice place to start, although for the rest you’re going to want some molecular cell bio and gene regulation 101 stuff on hand to fully grok it. Because cell death is beautifully complex 😛
This One Wonders of Other Alternatives…
Outcomes defined neither by Evil nor Good.
Without Time – Might that be Simultaneity ?
The Tearing of one Reality into endless Chaotic Fractal Realms ?
Or would All Things, All Possibilities become frozen and exhausted
Upon the sterile Infinite straight lines of the Plains of Law ?
If those lines Converge, would they not gather Ultimately back
into a Being like YISUN ?
YISUN divided Xis Self. For being Omnipotent,
There was naught else, and nowhere to go.
YISUN longed for Possibility, Opportunity, Story,
and was Willing to accept Imperfections to escape stasis.
Lord Jagganoth may have a Vision,
of an Ideal Cosmos.
Yet if it is free of pain, fear, suffering and corruption,
I cannot grasp it.
What kind of beings might dwell
in such a purified realm ?
Jagganoth longs to Cleanse and Amend the Wheel,
then to Remove himself.
Not an easy task – to Amend the Works
of the Multiplicity of 777,777 Creator Deities.
If they could not stop Zoss,
What hope have the Aeons ‘gainst the Red God
Should he abandon this scrum and press home
towards Metatron – his True target ?
Is it truly that without evil there would be no exploration, or drama, or growth? How many stories do we follow where the opponent is not evil, but merely IS?
The fight against nature. Against a world that merely Is. Against a universe that merely Exists.
A movie that comes to mind is The Grey. The survivors have two major opponents – nature itself and the wolves.
A wolf, by its nature, is not evil. It Exists. There is no malice in its intent. It merely wants to survive. But the wolves harry the survivors throughout the movie, and are a constant threat.
Nature is not evil. It merely Is. That one survivor drowns in a cold river does not make the river evil.
The idea of Good and Evil in stories are between people. So a more accurate statement would be that without evil in people, the only Good would be from aiding others in the fight against the World, not fighting the evil within others.
Like stories of people diving into sinking ferries to save people from drowning…
I have heard many people say that evil has to exist for good to have meaning, and every time I have remained unconvinced. I don’t need to taste bad bitter foods to understand that I like sweets. I don’t have to feel a biting chill to enjoy the sensation of warm sunlight. comparing good things and bad things might give us some useful perspective, it might help some people appreciate what they have, but you don’t need to suffer to understand joy.
Isn’t the point that for things which actually have true opposites, like hot and cold, you must have both for either to actually exist?
Evil and good are not absolute values, but logic breaks down without the *existence* of both concepts. E.g. that good and evil both stem from the fundamental existence of human beings, that of animals with free will and opinions.
I’m unsure.
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
In RL, “cold” is a privative: an absence of heat, so you really can’t have hot without at least the potential of cold. If you actually have an absence of cold, that’s heat death of the universe.
In KSBD physics is different to RL (and differs between worlds), and metaphysics is different too (e.g. “all life is basically fire”). Concepts like “cold” and “good” can be different and might exist without their opposites.
Perhaps I can shed a small amount of, if any, light.
When people speak of the necessity of opposites, stated as “Dualism” above, I find that the core of the point has nothing to do with “opposites” at all.
The real question is not “Must there be evil to be good”, or any similar dichotomy, but rather “What gives meaning to things”. It seems obvious to most that a world where all things are the same is a world that is static, unchanging, non-dynamic, and ultimately without meaning, merit, worth, etc. It my as well not exist.
Don’t think of it as “good” vs “Evil”, think of it as the nature of change, or difference. Dynamics, if you will. Things must be *different* in order for meaning to exist in any capacity, specifically they must be *meaningfully* different in the sense that it must be possible for a relationship or some kind to exist. A world that is comprised of only two colors and literally nothing else, just two endless expanses of a singular chromatic form, said universe is not meaningfully dynamic.
So, in a way, there must exist evil in order for there to exist good. More specifically, the *decision* to do something good has no meaning if it is only possible to make good decisions. There must be a “not good” decision in order for it to be possible to distinguish the idea or concept of good from the decisions present. If all decisions are good decisions, then what point is there in assigning “good” to them. It’s just a decision, the good might as well not exist.
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
Panel after panel of fierce battle, several finishing blows, and a three-part fusion…all just to bind him for one minute. The Red One really does live up to the legends.
Atleast the Avengers got a drop of blood.
Also, it looks like he wants to destroy the current cycle of decay and institute a new multiverse utopia, without change or suffering. Stagnant, but clean.
He just aimed to stop the problems associated with overpopulation and overuse of resources. And he was proven right when his home planet succumbed.
His solution? Kill half of the living beings in the universe, randomly, so the other half wouldn’t squabble over the resources. No rhyme or reason to who got ‘disappeared’… it was just a coin flip.
Jaggy’s aim seems to be ‘trash everything, then rebuild from the ashes’.
Half the population
Half the people working in agriculture
Half the people working IT
Half the people running deliveries
Half of everything means half of everything.
And that would be just a stop-gap measure. Humanity jumped from around a billion to 7 billions in some 200 years. Before we’d know it we would be back to the starting point and there would be no Infinity Stones to repeat the process.
Honestly in my mind Thanos was just plain insane, driven mad by the fall of his world. He NEEDED to prove that he was right, that his solution would have worked. Everything else was rationalizing.
He was utterly ignorant of the cause of the problem he was trying to solve, and so tackled a symptom rather than the true problem. He somehow didn’t understand that a universe-spanning problem wasn’t just a fluke, that it would just repeat because the same pressures and environment would still exist after as before. He didn’t understand that systems can be either resilient or fragile, that they’ll either just bounce back after a disruption, or shatter. Effective change requires altering the system, not just hitting it really hard.
That’s in the movies. In the comics, as Danel points out above, Thanos literally wants to annihilate everything within the universe (in order to impress/fuck the personification of death).
If Jagganoth were aware he was inside a comic, i would scream. THough i do like the thought that he doesn’t just want to destroy everything for the sake of destroying it
We were promised untold depths from the Jagganoth, after all. Yet I wonder if on some level, the Red God’s talk of utopia is just a lie he tells himself to justify indulging an unquenchable thirst for battle against the only beings who can even still challenge him.
The problem with that is, I believe jagganoth is too cerebral to not have considered the results of his actions. His motives may be suspect, but if he is as intelligent as he seems, surely he must have considered what happens next.
If all he desires is infinite bloodshed, against actual opponents, sure, but what happens when he loses? What happens when he wins?
Wouldn’t it be easier to not fight? To seek personal growth through personal work? If his bloodthirst was literally unquenchable, wouldn’t it be easier to consider the suffering caused by that thirst, and kill himself instead?
He seems convinced that existence is suffering, and therefore is fine with ending all life, Amon style, to end all suffering, but somehow, I don’t think his motives are endless bloodthirst. There’s something going on we don’t know yet, with metatron, and him.
Good points, there’s for sure a lot we don’t know (and hopefully we’re about to find out).
I didn’t mean literally endless bloodthirst though, exactly, more like… he sees things like someone playing a video game. (Probably Dark Souls or something.) Since the end of the universal war he’s spent eons grinding OP endgame skills and loot, and now he’s ready to take on the final bosses. The last cutscene wrapping things up with his personal favorite ending before the credits roll is nice, but the real satisfaction is from that sweet 100% completion achievement.
What he can’t conceive of – what died with Yaun – is that at any time he could stop to play a different game.
There’s something so incredibly sad about causing this much pain in the process of trying to free everyone from pain forever. Jagganoth went through hell and wants to save everyone from it. Like, empathy through a dark mirror.
I believe its purposeful! During some types of speech, it is approach in english to take a very short pause (usually to breathe or briefly think) that is too short for even the shortest punctuation, and continue.
It only ever happens with conjunctions such as then, but, or and.
Dude’s about to break through the 4th wall
please don’t end in another author insert
Name checks out
The universe will end, not in shouts, but in neighs.
How ironic that the universe ends in the proximity of some horses.
Bad Horse is at it again
Book 5: Book 5: Intermission 1
Newcastle United : 4
West Bromwich Albion : 1
boy i wish we could upvote comments here
The final page will just be Tom getting kicked in the junk repeatedly by Jagganoth.
Ooh. Plot.
The plot has been all around is, in What and How. We now receive the Why, which reveals motives. In this case, we learn that the Red God is, much like Mammon and Gog-Agog, mentally unstable.
His instability is hardly comparable to Mammon’s senility of Gog’s lack of focus- he can do what he’s proposing, as far as I can tell. The only questions are whether or not he is right, and whether or not there is another way.
Enough time to make a hot-pocket.
No way you’re only zapping Hot Pockets for a minute…seek help lad
You betray your cowardly heart so easily. Turn the power of the microwave up. Unshackle your mind.
Alter the defrost settings. Enter CHAOS MODE
LUTHOR, YOU’RE A MADMAN.
Your mind is as shackled as your existence.
Sweet.
You can try and parley with the ocean, in the end you’ll just drown
Um, there is a, ah, “fish?” Here, that wants to, em, talk to you?
This exchange is perfect, I love it. Stealing it and gonna say it is mine.
The only way to negotiate with a mountain is by tricking yourself into thinking that the avalanche is your idea.
Actually, you can feel free to negotiate with me. I’ll give you a good lot of stuff for your tasty soul, you know?
How much for my body? I need gambling money.
You cannot give your body to the ocean.
For it already belongs to the sea.
You think just because your ancestors crawled out of the foam, you are not still a being of the ocean? You are born of it, and you will return, sooner or later.
This is the wheel and lying counts. You can’t negotiate with the ocean but you may well be able to bullshit it that you can breathe water. Or just that the ocean needs to be somewhere else, urgently.
“The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
“Escape will make me God.”
Leave it to Jagganoth to have an even more dire exit plan than Durandal.
I miss the interesting semi-villain villains like Durandal. Who I keep hearing in my mind as being voiced by Hugo Weaving in full Agent Smith mode.
Durandal is one of the only people I never assigned any sort of mental voice to. The inside of my head is quiet when I read his words, and I credit this with experiencing Marathon at a really young age and understanding that *this is an AI* talking to me. That’s probably weird. But I really miss Durandal’s antics, as well.
Indeed. Marathon’s plot, unlike its (innovative, for its time) gameplay, has remained fond to me, and one of the few things that would warrant a replay.
For a moment I was really really confused about why a legendary sword would speak and rant about time ; then I realised it was just something named AFTER Durandal and not the actual sword of Roland.
That’s OK, Durandal himself was occasionally confused on that exact same point.
Durandal, Cortona, and Joyuse were legendarily forged from the same pour of steel… still waiting for Bungie to complete the trio.
You mean Cortana?
“I have defied gods and demons. I am your shield. I am your sword. I know you. Your past. Your future. This is the way the world ends.”
Durandal, Curtana, Joyeuse. All part of Charlemagne legends.
The Paladins
“Still waiting for Bungie to complete the trio.”
That leaves just Joyeuse of the trio for Bungie to pull from.
joyeuse does make a cameo in destiny and it seems like that’s the most that will happen but I’m hoping for more, def
Durandal? A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
*marathon logo emoji*
Damn but it’s good to know that people still remember Durandal and the jolly ship MARATHON.
Good times. Good times.
Hmmmn, the golden nails/angel feathers definitely appear to have gone now, and with them Jaggy’s invulnerability.
Sadly though Jaggy’s goal would result in a possibly sterile, unchanging world, though that depends on how YISUN set the underpinning structure of all things.
After all pain serves an important purpose, to tell you that you are injured.
Without time, things woule not change, but they would not remain the same either. Neither concept would have meaning.
Timelessness would not be sterile, but it would be incomprehensible to us.
He didn’t say “without time” he implied “outside of the bounds of time”. There are several perfectly valid ways to implement a nonstatic system without simple linear time. Especially when pesky things like conservation of energy are not relevant to your starting point.
A really simple example is if everybody was intrinsically capable of time travel.
What I find interesting is the question of if Jagganoth’s proposed restructuring of time has anything to do with how Zoss keeps showing up
Your last point is the most interesting possibility I’ve seen in the comment section, period. There’s a lot to contemplate there.
You make a very interesting point about Zoss’s apparent disregard for conventional chronology. Perhaps Zoss is several steps ahead of the others on this point and Jagganoth is the only one who is somewhat aware?
and let’s not forget YISUNS apparent disregard for chronology as well
Time is subjective anyway. The past influences the present as much as the future, and one can never remain wholly in the present for more than a few minutes. Unless you’ve reached enlightenment, which sort of anchors you to it.
There is no past or future. The dichotomy is just one aspect of the Lie of Division.
I was going to be impressed with this realization then I remembered that I was just pretending not to have known it all along!
Perhaps Zoss tried the same thing- and failed?
He was depicted straddling the Wheel, facing off against the impossibly looming Metatron. If t this is true, then Jagganoth cannot succeed for his mastery of the wheel.
Isn’t a sterile, unchanging world what 2 Michael said he wanted?
Jag seems to be aligned with 2 Michael, who said he was aligned with Metatron. Jag seems to be doing Metatron’s work, still?
I hope Aspected Chaos can think about this in light of White Chain’s memories.
2 Micheal wants time in a circle, I think – the cycle time has been implied to have been stuck in.
Jagganoth seems to want to break that… by collapsing time to a point.
Perhaps the constituents of The Fool will save us from both by unfolding time into a straight line?
The more proper shape is a crooked spiral. If the path of energy does not bend, vectors do not become dimensional; if the path of energy does not divide, boundaries cannot be crossed and solidity is meaningless; if the path of energy does not unify, solidity cannot be formed and boundaries are meaningless. Time is never a perfect circle, or the cycle could never be changed. That which sits outside time already contains the pattern. To move forward is to replicate the cycle, but also to change it. To attain every change, bend the path in new ways.
This is one thing I learned from studying the relationship of time and energy.
Spirally polarized light: the crooked spiral path.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_polarization
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
“History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
““History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.””
quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
Nails are not gone. He just became temporarily monochrome.
Well-aimed fog.
Moment’s Peace a pauper all-star to this day.
Wear the weather, and you’ll never (always) be naked.
New title Card for Jaggy:
Supreme Divine Art: Censors-Evading Penis Obscuration
ASPECTED CHAOS casts DIVINE PARLAY
Madness. If you flip the board, who will run the table?
He will run it as the new god. Only in his world none will want to overthrow his non-existence. He will have the first, last and only word. He will be co-eternal with his annihilation, his non-existence, and his universe. A paradox. very similar to YISUN, only dead and sterile, like his own red self.
Why do people keep conflating “an existence beyond the prison of time” with “statically frozen in a single moment”? That’s the exact opposite of what The Jagganoth Bitch wants.
True royalty involves not being bound by causality, not destroying causality. Is this what the “JB” is trying gift everyone with?
Does the table *have* to be run? If one has omnipotence, why can’t the rules and logic of reality itself as we know it simply be changed? The result would be illogical and incomprehensible to us who are bound to 3 dimensions of linear space-time, but it would be completely normal to one that lives in said reality.
“So many stories and no one to tell them to.” This was the lament of Yisun. There are not that many sets of logical reality making rules that are stable enough to allow stories to unfold and dynamic enough to make them worth living out. It is arrogant to believe that a piece of YISUN can do better than the whole.
Am I the manifestation of that one daydream Yisun had that didn’t really go anywhere?
It’s astounding.
Time is fleeting.
Madness has been sitting back and eating popcorn the whole time.
But the Void will keep calling. In our hearts we know this to be true.
Still, I have to say, this is really good popcorn.
Madness takes its toll
But listen closely
Not for very much longer
I’ve got to keep control
Come up to the lab
And see who’s on the slab
Aspected Chaos
Has the gift of gab!
A timeless universe. You can never get late to work tho!
You can never get started early, either. You are always at work, and not, and so.
Does your head hurt too? Must be the shackle things. Booze? Hangovers are temporal.
And no overtime pay, I would suspect
To misquote a classic, “Death is but a doorway, time is but a window. Zoss will be back.”
The past is history, the future a mystery, but today, today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.
Oh, the sun’s gonna shine tomorrow! maybe.
“… today is a gift.”
It bears noting that Gift in German means “poison”.
I suppose it depends on what kind of “today” one is experiencing.
time is ꙩne ꙩf the greatest blessings ꙩf YISUN, specifically because ꙩf its asymmetry and lack ꙩf circularity! Dꙩes Jagganꙩth intend tꙩ restꙩre everything tꙩ perfect, sterile unity? Blasphemy!
Excepting, ꙩf cꙩurse, the case that, as has been theꙩrized priꙩr, time is stuck in an infinite repeating lꙩꙩp, due tꙩ the machinatiꙩns ꙩf Zꙩss.
“Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”
Beware of the one that tries to create perfection, because perfection only exists in the moments of fleeting simplicity.
Jaggaroth has fallen into the sin of believing that perfection is possible beyond the momentary and the transitory.
Or…is he still being used to enact a further agenda?
On the contrary, evil must exist for good to have any meaning. You can’t have enjoyment of bliss without knowledge of suffering, it is how we are made. Fickle attention spans.
If no one was capable of evil, there would never be drama, or conflict, or character growth, or learning, or exploration, everyone would always do the perfect best thing and there wouldn’t be anything interesting at all.
The capacity for good and evil must exist, or else morality is meaningless, and everyone would be slaves to some perfect moral norm. If the capacity for good and evil exists, for it to have meaning, for it to be a choice, someone, somewhere, must choose evil. That choice is what makes choosing good worthwhile.
I would further posit that just as Buddha sought enlightenment through experience, one must actually experience reality to learn from it. If it was all nondescript morally grey perfect nothingness, the thing that would be hurt would be not our bodies, but our minds.
Jagganoth is Thanos with extra steps. He wishes a world where no one need suffer, but misses the point that suffering must exist, or no one would appreciate the good times. He misses the point that (barring time-loops as has been postulated) experience must ever move onward, and it is up to the individual to struggle towards greatness.
All throughout the book we have seen “reach heaven through violence” and that doesn’t mean “kill all who oppose you” it means struggle towards a better future. If there is no better future to struggle towards, there is no point to going anywhere or doing anything.
If the Wheel has been stuck in a loop, then yes, I admire his wish to escape, to live life in an infinitely long line of linear time, such as you and I experience, but if not, I don’t see what escaping time has to do with it.
If the universe works like ours does, where people can struggle towards a better future, then escaping time destroys either the future, or the struggle, making them meaningless.
Perfection isn’t possible, but progress towards better is always possible.
Bah, yet again the heresy of Dualism rears it’s ugly, illogical head.
😛
/ahem
Anyhow – avoiding the full urge to snark – from empirical observation we can see much of existence falls into spectrums, whether it be the intensity of light, heat, life* or more dubiously, ethics and morality. Thus it can and has been argued that we do not need cold to have hot, more dark to have light, not when “not hot” and “not cold” or even “not evil”/”not in pain” exists.
So recognise dualism for what it is – a rule of thumb used by our brains to make sense of things, but sadly doesn’t correspond to reality well enough to be actually useful in philosophy et al.
______________________________________________
*Fun thing – the more we look into the process of death in organisms, the more annoyingly complex and non binary and apparently reversible it becomes. Aside from the more traumatic forms of death, bit hard to reverse those let alone significant brain damage.
The living dead pig brains are a nice place to start, although for the rest you’re going to want some molecular cell bio and gene regulation 101 stuff on hand to fully grok it. Because cell death is beautifully complex 😛
This One Wonders of Other Alternatives…
Outcomes defined neither by Evil nor Good.
Without Time – Might that be Simultaneity ?
The Tearing of one Reality into endless Chaotic Fractal Realms ?
Or would All Things, All Possibilities become frozen and exhausted
Upon the sterile Infinite straight lines of the Plains of Law ?
If those lines Converge, would they not gather Ultimately back
into a Being like YISUN ?
YISUN divided Xis Self. For being Omnipotent,
There was naught else, and nowhere to go.
YISUN longed for Possibility, Opportunity, Story,
and was Willing to accept Imperfections to escape stasis.
Lord Jagganoth may have a Vision,
of an Ideal Cosmos.
Yet if it is free of pain, fear, suffering and corruption,
I cannot grasp it.
What kind of beings might dwell
in such a purified realm ?
Jagganoth longs to Cleanse and Amend the Wheel,
then to Remove himself.
Not an easy task – to Amend the Works
of the Multiplicity of 777,777 Creator Deities.
If they could not stop Zoss,
What hope have the Aeons ‘gainst the Red God
Should he abandon this scrum and press home
towards Metatron – his True target ?
Is it truly that without evil there would be no exploration, or drama, or growth? How many stories do we follow where the opponent is not evil, but merely IS?
The fight against nature. Against a world that merely Is. Against a universe that merely Exists.
A movie that comes to mind is The Grey. The survivors have two major opponents – nature itself and the wolves.
A wolf, by its nature, is not evil. It Exists. There is no malice in its intent. It merely wants to survive. But the wolves harry the survivors throughout the movie, and are a constant threat.
Nature is not evil. It merely Is. That one survivor drowns in a cold river does not make the river evil.
The idea of Good and Evil in stories are between people. So a more accurate statement would be that without evil in people, the only Good would be from aiding others in the fight against the World, not fighting the evil within others.
Like stories of people diving into sinking ferries to save people from drowning…
I have heard many people say that evil has to exist for good to have meaning, and every time I have remained unconvinced. I don’t need to taste bad bitter foods to understand that I like sweets. I don’t have to feel a biting chill to enjoy the sensation of warm sunlight. comparing good things and bad things might give us some useful perspective, it might help some people appreciate what they have, but you don’t need to suffer to understand joy.
Isn’t the point that for things which actually have true opposites, like hot and cold, you must have both for either to actually exist?
Evil and good are not absolute values, but logic breaks down without the *existence* of both concepts. E.g. that good and evil both stem from the fundamental existence of human beings, that of animals with free will and opinions.
I’m unsure.
In RL, “cold” is a privative: an absence of heat, so you really can’t have hot without at least the potential of cold. If you actually have an absence of cold, that’s heat death of the universe.
In KSBD physics is different to RL (and differs between worlds), and metaphysics is different too (e.g. “all life is basically fire”). Concepts like “cold” and “good” can be different and might exist without their opposites.
Perhaps I can shed a small amount of, if any, light.
When people speak of the necessity of opposites, stated as “Dualism” above, I find that the core of the point has nothing to do with “opposites” at all.
The real question is not “Must there be evil to be good”, or any similar dichotomy, but rather “What gives meaning to things”. It seems obvious to most that a world where all things are the same is a world that is static, unchanging, non-dynamic, and ultimately without meaning, merit, worth, etc. It my as well not exist.
Don’t think of it as “good” vs “Evil”, think of it as the nature of change, or difference. Dynamics, if you will. Things must be *different* in order for meaning to exist in any capacity, specifically they must be *meaningfully* different in the sense that it must be possible for a relationship or some kind to exist. A world that is comprised of only two colors and literally nothing else, just two endless expanses of a singular chromatic form, said universe is not meaningfully dynamic.
So, in a way, there must exist evil in order for there to exist good. More specifically, the *decision* to do something good has no meaning if it is only possible to make good decisions. There must be a “not good” decision in order for it to be possible to distinguish the idea or concept of good from the decisions present. If all decisions are good decisions, then what point is there in assigning “good” to them. It’s just a decision, the good might as well not exist.
Sounds like he wants to freeze creation into one of those perfect moments.
DORMAMMU! I’VE COME TO BARGAIN.
Panel after panel of fierce battle, several finishing blows, and a three-part fusion…all just to bind him for one minute. The Red One really does live up to the legends.
Atleast the Avengers got a drop of blood.
Also, it looks like he wants to destroy the current cycle of decay and institute a new multiverse utopia, without change or suffering. Stagnant, but clean.
So he mentions erasing himself…
Allison had the Infinity Gauntlet the entire time. She just needs to snap.
I have to say, while Jagganoth is definetly not the only Mad Titan hellbent on destroying the universe, he’s certainly the coolest.
IIRC, Thanos didn’t want to destroy the Universe.
He just aimed to stop the problems associated with overpopulation and overuse of resources. And he was proven right when his home planet succumbed.
His solution? Kill half of the living beings in the universe, randomly, so the other half wouldn’t squabble over the resources. No rhyme or reason to who got ‘disappeared’… it was just a coin flip.
Jaggy’s aim seems to be ‘trash everything, then rebuild from the ashes’.
Ugh, that malthusian crap. They should have just made him horny for the personification of death like in the comics version XD
Half the population
Half the people working in agriculture
Half the people working IT
Half the people running deliveries
Half of everything means half of everything.
And that would be just a stop-gap measure. Humanity jumped from around a billion to 7 billions in some 200 years. Before we’d know it we would be back to the starting point and there would be no Infinity Stones to repeat the process.
Honestly in my mind Thanos was just plain insane, driven mad by the fall of his world. He NEEDED to prove that he was right, that his solution would have worked. Everything else was rationalizing.
He was utterly ignorant of the cause of the problem he was trying to solve, and so tackled a symptom rather than the true problem. He somehow didn’t understand that a universe-spanning problem wasn’t just a fluke, that it would just repeat because the same pressures and environment would still exist after as before. He didn’t understand that systems can be either resilient or fragile, that they’ll either just bounce back after a disruption, or shatter. Effective change requires altering the system, not just hitting it really hard.
That’s in the movies. In the comics, as Danel points out above, Thanos literally wants to annihilate everything within the universe (in order to impress/fuck the personification of death).
“It will hold me for one minute” has the same energy as “You may slap it. Once.”
why does this make sense
You may slap the Jaggahog once.
Ah, the Le Guin method of conflict resolution. A powerful yet underused tactic.
My monologue is up, Allison! Time resumes! Wryyyy!!!
Toki wa Ugokidasu!
The Fool speaks! And I notice while Allicio used ‘we’, Aspected Chaos says not “indulge us” but “indulge me.” She is a remarkably perfect fusion.
nice catch!
One questions if The Fool ( Aleph/0/Prime/Wildcard) can be Divided, or even would desire such an outcome.
If Jagganoth were aware he was inside a comic, i would scream. THough i do like the thought that he doesn’t just want to destroy everything for the sake of destroying it
We were promised untold depths from the Jagganoth, after all. Yet I wonder if on some level, the Red God’s talk of utopia is just a lie he tells himself to justify indulging an unquenchable thirst for battle against the only beings who can even still challenge him.
The problem with that is, I believe jagganoth is too cerebral to not have considered the results of his actions. His motives may be suspect, but if he is as intelligent as he seems, surely he must have considered what happens next.
If all he desires is infinite bloodshed, against actual opponents, sure, but what happens when he loses? What happens when he wins?
Wouldn’t it be easier to not fight? To seek personal growth through personal work? If his bloodthirst was literally unquenchable, wouldn’t it be easier to consider the suffering caused by that thirst, and kill himself instead?
He seems convinced that existence is suffering, and therefore is fine with ending all life, Amon style, to end all suffering, but somehow, I don’t think his motives are endless bloodthirst. There’s something going on we don’t know yet, with metatron, and him.
Good points, there’s for sure a lot we don’t know (and hopefully we’re about to find out).
I didn’t mean literally endless bloodthirst though, exactly, more like… he sees things like someone playing a video game. (Probably Dark Souls or something.) Since the end of the universal war he’s spent eons grinding OP endgame skills and loot, and now he’s ready to take on the final bosses. The last cutscene wrapping things up with his personal favorite ending before the credits roll is nice, but the real satisfaction is from that sweet 100% completion achievement.
What he can’t conceive of – what died with Yaun – is that at any time he could stop to play a different game.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to not fight? To seek personal growth through personal work?”
Perhaps he should take up ceramics, or macrame? Or maybe he could knit himself a merkin…
Fourth-wall recursion —
Perhaps he could take up comics.
Perhaps he already has.
Perhaps Jagganoth is Abaddon…
If Jagganoth achieves CHIM then we must riot.
There’s something so incredibly sad about causing this much pain in the process of trying to free everyone from pain forever. Jagganoth went through hell and wants to save everyone from it. Like, empathy through a dark mirror.
Hurt people hurt people. Even his attempt to free from the cycle perpetuates it.
It’s all too realistic, even common. I still remember “In order to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it.”
She has shiny speech balloons. awesome
“only then then i will i be able to”
Came to point this out
I believe its purposeful! During some types of speech, it is approach in english to take a very short pause (usually to breathe or briefly think) that is too short for even the shortest punctuation, and continue.
It only ever happens with conjunctions such as then, but, or and.
The thens can be fine, preferably comma’d, but someone’ll still need to poke an I out. Apt for Jagga.