So, I have a problem. Maybe it’s just me, maybe other people are having this problem. But my problem is this:
Why aren’t we done?
Like, this should be it. Allison is defeated. She is being forced to comprehend the entirety of everything at one singular moment, an action which has driven a being exponentially more powerful, smarter, and more prepared than her to nihilistic abandonment.
And even ignoring that, said nihilistic being, a being that has perfect knowledge of all things that are, were, and will be at all possible points of time and space, has explicitly stated that everything is done, fate is written, Allison can’t change anything, everyone lost, game over, good bye.
What else IS there? Why should I keep reading? I know we’re supposed to suspend our disbelief, but there’s only so much I can hold in the air for so long.
The pictures and colors are pretty and the art is nice and I just don’t know how I’m supposed to care when the story has told me I shouldn’t.
Can someone smarter than me please help? And for the love of all that you think is good, don’t do some pseudo-koan zen teacher stuff I see so often in the comments. You aren’t wise, you just sound pretentious and your audience (that is, me) will not listen to you.
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
1. A Zoss/Metatron reset lets Allison try again with better preparation.
2. Jadis actually died a couple of pages ago (panel with her candle-hat burning out), so Allison now has freedom of action.
3. Jadis is lying (or mistaken) about predestination, and Allison now sees this, having witnessed the shape.
4. Allison seeing the Shape has changed the fixed future, possibly to one where Jadis is no threat.
5. Jadis is a deadly enemy, but gets taken out by Incubus and his army before she can finish Allison.
… plus many more exotic threads that can’t be predicted analytically.
I’m guessing some mix of 4 and 5, but #3 also works. #1 implies either a weak ending or a _lot_ of story to follow (which is unlikely, given that Abbadon originally thought it would fit into 5 books). #2 alone gives a weird ending where Allison goes inevitably to her fixed doom, but doesn’t know what that is except for fragments she’s seen herself in the Shape.
1 and 2 are boring and stupid, so let’s throw them out.
3 doesn’t make any sense. Why would Jadis be lying about any of this, or what could her mistake have been? She has been confirmed to be omniscient by the author and the text itself, she knows everything. How can someone who knows everything ever be wrong?
5 is so anti-climactic that I hate it, and it fundamentally doesn’t do anything for the story. You don’t tell a story like this and have this whole detour just to have someone else handle the problem. And it does nothing to refute or otherwise challenge Jadis’s core point several pages ago that Jagganoth has won and will destroy everything in his suicidal cosmic temper tantrum.
So that leaves 4. Which raises another question. Let’s suppose Allison seeing the shape changed the fixed future. Wouldn’t that mean the future was changed into a DIFFERENT fixed future, instead of one with free will? What’s stopping Jadis from, once again, using her omniscience to know everything about what will happen?
And NONE of this seems to answer the main question of just what exactly Allison or anyone else can do about any of this. The world has ended, thanks for playing, this is how it was always meant to go, goodbye. Jadis explicitly said everything was done, Allison had lost to Jagganoth and Incubus.
THAT is the core question. An individual with complete omniscience has said you lost. Why should anyone bother with trying to win when the game is over?
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
Re option 4: yes, it quite probably DOES mean changing to another fixed future. Since it’s from Allison’s vision, Jadis does not know that timeline, is no longer omniscient, and is less of a threat.
In option 4, Allison can rescue creation by making a clever and kind choice of future (I’m assuming that she can see more than one). But she’s defined as “the girl who always makes the worst decisions”, so that doesn’t bode well.
Note that “meta-fucked by fixed future” and “Jadis as active antagonist” are separate problems. Both need to be sorted for a happy (at least, non-tragic) ending. That’s why Incubus dealing with Jadis seems plausible to me. It frees Allison to deal with the larger, metaphysical issue.
818 Beholds the Destiny of Creation in One Instant
In the event that I knew every possibility, I would also know exactly what to say and do in order to bring about any desired ability. The most ideal lies would spring to my mind and it would be as easy to tell them at the perfect moment as it would be to draw in the breath needed to tell them.
When it comes to viewing the shape, it’s worth noting here that Allison has averted her gaze, and very likely failed to gain the true revelation of perceiving it. She has denied the chance to know what Jadis knows. This is likely to be the start to Allison rejecting Jadis’s nihilistic conclusion about the world.
As for finding the related idea that Jadis is basically right in her nihilistic fatalism unsatisfying, well, unfortunately I don’t think we have a good answer yet for how Abbadon is going to rebut it. The easy way to reject Jadis is to reject complete determinism in favor of some level of indeterminism, but from Abbadon’s twitter comments that seems unlikely. (Fans in the comments have certainly pined for the breaking of destiny through Royalty though, and I’d certainly like to see it)
A few possibilities:
1. Allison rejects the premise that she needs to engage with Jadis and her perception of things. As our perspective character has also rejected the shape, we could wind up in a narrative where we, as the readers, can ignore the potential for determinism just as we do in real life. Determinism is after all, entirely useless to all human endeavor and is the pedant’s philosophy. Even if correct, its hardly a helpful truth.
2. Allison embraces some other form of determinism. She could rationally hold the belief that just because her present state was determined by past states, her actions still matter because they will determine future states. She could also point out that Jadis’s predictions are physical events in the world that will determine future states. I.e. Jadis’s revelations will motivate (read: determine) Allison’s next actions, which will lead to Allison following a different path from the one Jadis foresaw. Jadis believes the universe has a script, Allison could rightly believe that the Universe is merely predictable.
3. It could also be the case that Allison will eventually break the wheel/obtain royalty/etc and obtain free will in the process. The KSBD universe is functionally a panpsychic one, where the cosmic consciousness of Yisun created reality as we know it by dividing itself into smaller identities. As Yisun is the prime mover and uncaused, it may be the case that someone assuming Yisun’s cosmic vastness would gain the entity’s indeterministic properties.
But she saw the shape. The page before this one was literally her seeing the shape. Why does it matter that she didn’t look at it for a specific amount of time? She still saw enough.
The problem I have with Jadis is that she has, very clearly, said “we lost”. “We” meaning “everyone fighting against Jagganoth to prevent him from destroying everything” (unless that means something else that I haven’t picked up on). Assuming that she isn’t lying (and I have yet so believe she has any reason to do so), then only way Allison can fight back and this entire story NOT be the single most beautiful waste of time and money I will never get back is to prove that Jadis is wrong. And win.
Which a literal omniscient character has said Allison can’t do.
Allison has to, effectively, do something that is explicitly impossible. And not just White Chain punching David Solomon impossible, factually, clearly stated, impossible.
Might as well just sit back and wait for the comic to end, Abbadon has earned that much from me.
She did see it, but she also covered her eyes and didn’t get anywhere near as wrecked as mummy-jadis. I’m working on the assumption that her averting her gaze is consequential narratively. Otherwise why draw her doing it instead of drawing her eyes melting like Aesma and Jadis?
Time spent viewing could be relevant in the same way that a glimpse of, say, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t impart as much information as staring and scrutinizing it for hours on end.
As for your problem with Jadis and what she said. I get you. I’m not happy with the idea that Jadis has author confirmed omniscience and that her proclamations imply this whole journey is a shaggy dog story either. I’m not happy we have no clue when or if White Chain will rejoin the story and that Cio is dead, and I would abhor an ending that amounts to “You’re fucked, determinism says so, you can’t change this shitty violent universe in a positive way.”
I too want Jadis to be wrong. And ideally in my book not in a way that can only say “determinism doesn’t have to be fatalistically depressing.” I want Allison to kick fate in the nuts, get Cio back, and team up again with White Chain.
I think when Jadis said we lost she was referring to the previous battle after all she says Allision is going to live another 35 years, it seems in fact more likely that Allison will win. Jadis’s point is that winning is no better than losing. The wheel spins on.
Jadis knows everything. Everything. To her life is a momentary blib of light against an eternity of darkness, just a short lived construction of matter no more significant than a rock with an unusual mineral composition.
She is like a critic complaining a painting is not beautiful from 10 light years off. Sure maybe everything averages out in the end, the world never becomes permanently better than it was yesterday but it is patiently ridiculous to say we can do nothing at all to make it better, for now if not forever.
Really I hope Jadis is right, the quest for freedom would be far too easy if freedom actually existed.
When observing the shape of infinity, one may experience the following side effects: intense feelings of insignificance and all-consuming cosmic dread; difficulty breathing; irregular heartbeat; lack of sensation and/or hyper-sensation in the extremities; experience of hyper-awareness of one’s surroundings; severe spatial-temporal disassociation; out-of-body experiences; in-body-experiences; dramatic, dangerous swings in body temperature and/or chemistry; severe trauma to unshielded neural and ocular tissues; spontaneous molecular disassociation; a sudden sense that any plants in the vicinity are watching and plotting against you.
If you experience any or all of these side effects, do not bother to contact a physician, they cannot save you from the consequences of your actions.
818 Beholds the Destiny of Creation in One Instant
Why are you crying, Allison, when at last you are confronted with the singular miracle of existence? This vast nothingness is the womb of all that is beautiful. Your flame and those of all others, dancing to life together in the infinite cold of the void. This is an awe-inspiring moment- not one of terror, but of happiness. Cherish it, and all that you are. You are the universe, loving itself into being.
The literary angel 42 Douglas Adams Hitchhikes Through Conceptual Space had already discerned this:
The Total Perspective Vortex is the most savage psychic torture a sentient being can undergo.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here”
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.
– from “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” – Douglas Adams
The plants look like the ones next to her bed when she was so badly wounded in the beginning of this chapter/segment of the story. But she still has her hair and both arms. Reality? Dream? Vision? Mindfuckery?
Spent a couple of weeks without Internet and thus got a bunch of pages in one chunk. Ohhhh. Eye-boilingly spectacular. Sudden corpse-Jadis was quite eerie. And as for what’s happening right now… I dare not even make any predictions, and that’s great.
The plants look like the ones next to her bed when she was so badly wounded in the beginning of this chapter/segment of the story. But she still has her hair and both arms. Reality? Dream? Vision? Mindfuckery?
So, I have a problem. Maybe it’s just me, maybe other people are having this problem. But my problem is this:
Why aren’t we done?
Like, this should be it. Allison is defeated. She is being forced to comprehend the entirety of everything at one singular moment, an action which has driven a being exponentially more powerful, smarter, and more prepared than her to nihilistic abandonment.
And even ignoring that, said nihilistic being, a being that has perfect knowledge of all things that are, were, and will be at all possible points of time and space, has explicitly stated that everything is done, fate is written, Allison can’t change anything, everyone lost, game over, good bye.
What else IS there? Why should I keep reading? I know we’re supposed to suspend our disbelief, but there’s only so much I can hold in the air for so long.
The pictures and colors are pretty and the art is nice and I just don’t know how I’m supposed to care when the story has told me I shouldn’t.
Can someone smarter than me please help? And for the love of all that you think is good, don’t do some pseudo-koan zen teacher stuff I see so often in the comments. You aren’t wise, you just sound pretentious and your audience (that is, me) will not listen to you.
Some narrative ways out of an impasse:
1. A Zoss/Metatron reset lets Allison try again with better preparation.
2. Jadis actually died a couple of pages ago (panel with her candle-hat burning out), so Allison now has freedom of action.
3. Jadis is lying (or mistaken) about predestination, and Allison now sees this, having witnessed the shape.
4. Allison seeing the Shape has changed the fixed future, possibly to one where Jadis is no threat.
5. Jadis is a deadly enemy, but gets taken out by Incubus and his army before she can finish Allison.
… plus many more exotic threads that can’t be predicted analytically.
I’m guessing some mix of 4 and 5, but #3 also works. #1 implies either a weak ending or a _lot_ of story to follow (which is unlikely, given that Abbadon originally thought it would fit into 5 books). #2 alone gives a weird ending where Allison goes inevitably to her fixed doom, but doesn’t know what that is except for fragments she’s seen herself in the Shape.
Let’s go through the list:
1 and 2 are boring and stupid, so let’s throw them out.
3 doesn’t make any sense. Why would Jadis be lying about any of this, or what could her mistake have been? She has been confirmed to be omniscient by the author and the text itself, she knows everything. How can someone who knows everything ever be wrong?
5 is so anti-climactic that I hate it, and it fundamentally doesn’t do anything for the story. You don’t tell a story like this and have this whole detour just to have someone else handle the problem. And it does nothing to refute or otherwise challenge Jadis’s core point several pages ago that Jagganoth has won and will destroy everything in his suicidal cosmic temper tantrum.
So that leaves 4. Which raises another question. Let’s suppose Allison seeing the shape changed the fixed future. Wouldn’t that mean the future was changed into a DIFFERENT fixed future, instead of one with free will? What’s stopping Jadis from, once again, using her omniscience to know everything about what will happen?
And NONE of this seems to answer the main question of just what exactly Allison or anyone else can do about any of this. The world has ended, thanks for playing, this is how it was always meant to go, goodbye. Jadis explicitly said everything was done, Allison had lost to Jagganoth and Incubus.
THAT is the core question. An individual with complete omniscience has said you lost. Why should anyone bother with trying to win when the game is over?
Re option 4: yes, it quite probably DOES mean changing to another fixed future. Since it’s from Allison’s vision, Jadis does not know that timeline, is no longer omniscient, and is less of a threat.
In option 4, Allison can rescue creation by making a clever and kind choice of future (I’m assuming that she can see more than one). But she’s defined as “the girl who always makes the worst decisions”, so that doesn’t bode well.
Note that “meta-fucked by fixed future” and “Jadis as active antagonist” are separate problems. Both need to be sorted for a happy (at least, non-tragic) ending. That’s why Incubus dealing with Jadis seems plausible to me. It frees Allison to deal with the larger, metaphysical issue.
In the event that I knew every possibility, I would also know exactly what to say and do in order to bring about any desired ability. The most ideal lies would spring to my mind and it would be as easy to tell them at the perfect moment as it would be to draw in the breath needed to tell them.
So I get where you’re coming from here.
When it comes to viewing the shape, it’s worth noting here that Allison has averted her gaze, and very likely failed to gain the true revelation of perceiving it. She has denied the chance to know what Jadis knows. This is likely to be the start to Allison rejecting Jadis’s nihilistic conclusion about the world.
As for finding the related idea that Jadis is basically right in her nihilistic fatalism unsatisfying, well, unfortunately I don’t think we have a good answer yet for how Abbadon is going to rebut it. The easy way to reject Jadis is to reject complete determinism in favor of some level of indeterminism, but from Abbadon’s twitter comments that seems unlikely. (Fans in the comments have certainly pined for the breaking of destiny through Royalty though, and I’d certainly like to see it)
A few possibilities:
1. Allison rejects the premise that she needs to engage with Jadis and her perception of things. As our perspective character has also rejected the shape, we could wind up in a narrative where we, as the readers, can ignore the potential for determinism just as we do in real life. Determinism is after all, entirely useless to all human endeavor and is the pedant’s philosophy. Even if correct, its hardly a helpful truth.
2. Allison embraces some other form of determinism. She could rationally hold the belief that just because her present state was determined by past states, her actions still matter because they will determine future states. She could also point out that Jadis’s predictions are physical events in the world that will determine future states. I.e. Jadis’s revelations will motivate (read: determine) Allison’s next actions, which will lead to Allison following a different path from the one Jadis foresaw. Jadis believes the universe has a script, Allison could rightly believe that the Universe is merely predictable.
3. It could also be the case that Allison will eventually break the wheel/obtain royalty/etc and obtain free will in the process. The KSBD universe is functionally a panpsychic one, where the cosmic consciousness of Yisun created reality as we know it by dividing itself into smaller identities. As Yisun is the prime mover and uncaused, it may be the case that someone assuming Yisun’s cosmic vastness would gain the entity’s indeterministic properties.
But she saw the shape. The page before this one was literally her seeing the shape. Why does it matter that she didn’t look at it for a specific amount of time? She still saw enough.
The problem I have with Jadis is that she has, very clearly, said “we lost”. “We” meaning “everyone fighting against Jagganoth to prevent him from destroying everything” (unless that means something else that I haven’t picked up on). Assuming that she isn’t lying (and I have yet so believe she has any reason to do so), then only way Allison can fight back and this entire story NOT be the single most beautiful waste of time and money I will never get back is to prove that Jadis is wrong. And win.
Which a literal omniscient character has said Allison can’t do.
Allison has to, effectively, do something that is explicitly impossible. And not just White Chain punching David Solomon impossible, factually, clearly stated, impossible.
Might as well just sit back and wait for the comic to end, Abbadon has earned that much from me.
She did see it, but she also covered her eyes and didn’t get anywhere near as wrecked as mummy-jadis. I’m working on the assumption that her averting her gaze is consequential narratively. Otherwise why draw her doing it instead of drawing her eyes melting like Aesma and Jadis?
Time spent viewing could be relevant in the same way that a glimpse of, say, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t impart as much information as staring and scrutinizing it for hours on end.
As for your problem with Jadis and what she said. I get you. I’m not happy with the idea that Jadis has author confirmed omniscience and that her proclamations imply this whole journey is a shaggy dog story either. I’m not happy we have no clue when or if White Chain will rejoin the story and that Cio is dead, and I would abhor an ending that amounts to “You’re fucked, determinism says so, you can’t change this shitty violent universe in a positive way.”
I too want Jadis to be wrong. And ideally in my book not in a way that can only say “determinism doesn’t have to be fatalistically depressing.” I want Allison to kick fate in the nuts, get Cio back, and team up again with White Chain.
I think when Jadis said we lost she was referring to the previous battle after all she says Allision is going to live another 35 years, it seems in fact more likely that Allison will win. Jadis’s point is that winning is no better than losing. The wheel spins on.
Jadis knows everything. Everything. To her life is a momentary blib of light against an eternity of darkness, just a short lived construction of matter no more significant than a rock with an unusual mineral composition.
She is like a critic complaining a painting is not beautiful from 10 light years off. Sure maybe everything averages out in the end, the world never becomes permanently better than it was yesterday but it is patiently ridiculous to say we can do nothing at all to make it better, for now if not forever.
Really I hope Jadis is right, the quest for freedom would be far too easy if freedom actually existed.
Maybe Jadis knows how the story ends, but you, the reader don’t. So you keep reading to see what happens to the characters in the end.
“Hey, is that a piece of fairy cake?”
When observing the shape of infinity, one may experience the following side effects: intense feelings of insignificance and all-consuming cosmic dread; difficulty breathing; irregular heartbeat; lack of sensation and/or hyper-sensation in the extremities; experience of hyper-awareness of one’s surroundings; severe spatial-temporal disassociation; out-of-body experiences; in-body-experiences; dramatic, dangerous swings in body temperature and/or chemistry; severe trauma to unshielded neural and ocular tissues; spontaneous molecular disassociation; a sudden sense that any plants in the vicinity are watching and plotting against you.
If you experience any or all of these side effects, do not bother to contact a physician, they cannot save you from the consequences of your actions.
Which part did she see?
Why are you crying, Allison, when at last you are confronted with the singular miracle of existence? This vast nothingness is the womb of all that is beautiful. Your flame and those of all others, dancing to life together in the infinite cold of the void. This is an awe-inspiring moment- not one of terror, but of happiness. Cherish it, and all that you are. You are the universe, loving itself into being.
The literary angel 42 Douglas Adams Hitchhikes Through Conceptual Space had already discerned this:
The Total Perspective Vortex is the most savage psychic torture a sentient being can undergo.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here”
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.
– from “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” – Douglas Adams
The plants look like the ones next to her bed when she was so badly wounded in the beginning of this chapter/segment of the story. But she still has her hair and both arms. Reality? Dream? Vision? Mindfuckery?
It’s the total perspective vortex!
Really. Really? Lady, learn to blink when viewing the endless possibilities of time and space!
Spent a couple of weeks without Internet and thus got a bunch of pages in one chunk. Ohhhh. Eye-boilingly spectacular. Sudden corpse-Jadis was quite eerie. And as for what’s happening right now… I dare not even make any predictions, and that’s great.
The plants look like the ones next to her bed when she was so badly wounded in the beginning of this chapter/segment of the story. But she still has her hair and both arms. Reality? Dream? Vision? Mindfuckery?
Wait… This is the Total Perspective Vortex.