BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-143
Prim, after some time, began to grow tired of the road.
She had become accustomed to it, in the way that the shapes of her body fit its grooves and whorls in a kind of tired obedience. Her feet were hardened and calloused from years of walking. Since leaving her father’s house, she had done nothing but walk. Even though prim was very small and white, and had very small hands, she was not like the soft and tender-footed maidens with full stomachs that populated the crepuscular palaces of the outer realms at that time. She was wiry and dust-blown, and bent constantly towards the horizon.
On her travels, Prim had met many sages, warriors, and poets. She had traveled through many realms, and trod across the soil of many lands. Through it all she had summered with princes, taken refuge at countless hermitages, and even lived as an errant musician for a while, sleeping tucked into an attic in a many hued city, shored up with the intoxication of youth and the faint warmth of drifting and forgotten friendships.
And yet, all that was behind her. The road always pulled her back, making rapid past tense of everything, gobbling it up like a starving stray, and she was sick of seeing it. Her heart was glad to be free of the iron cage of her childhood, and yet it longed for a resting place, a nook in which to nestle until the soreness could drain from her body.
She began, then, to wonder where the road ended.
– Prim Masters the Road
*mental breakdown*
“yep, you got it”
“Dread those with the terrible star on their brow, for they are my kin. They trade in flesh, smoke, and star-knowledge. Their reins of power are made of coursing flame, and their chariot wheels trample the world in any direction they wish. When you see them you will know there are many ways to fill a man with death, and the walls of the world will feel thin to you indeed.”
Oh, buck up and grow a pair Allison. So the universe is meaningless, is it? Get out there and make some meaning. Live in the moment. Kill some Gods.
Oh, my god (choose one), Jadis is Jaga’s friend and ally. She is deceiving Allison.
Think: it has already been stablished that Alisson is an new variable, so this iteration is different. Jagganoth has never faced her (go back to the Rayuba battle, it’s all there). So the future IS different now, and Jadis is pissed off because Alisson messed with her amber.
Also, *humans* are mortal, but not angels or demons. It was one of the first stablished truths in this story that they are “immortal flames”. So Cio *must* come back, for the sake of canon and continuity
So, *maybe*, our heroine will not die 35 years from now.
So true. Yet also consider this: our heroine has merged her essence with both white flame and black flame in ways I recall were deemed most foolish at the time. IS she mortal? I think not. Not anymore.
Cio was a product of her soul, her mask, and her name. All of these components are essential. While her soul is immortal, it is a primal devil, a part of the chaotic and untameable hot black flame with no identity. The mask is important as Cio recounted of her husband putting Yabalchoath’s back together to bring her back, but even then she did not return as Yabalchoath. For Cio to return, one would have to recreate her mask and somehow give her the same name, if that’s possible.
Hmmm.
But remembering the nothing in turn makes it something, doesn’t it?
I feel like there is an interpretation in which she did not see “nothing”, she simply does not remember what she saw.
How I understood it, what she saw was so incomprehensible that at first her brain didn’t *let* her remember it. Only now she’s slowly starting to put some of it together in a way she can at least remember, if not necessarily understand.
Somewhat like White Chain being unable to remember Metatron’s words. “But every word of it was true!”
Another interpretation my yet hing on understanding what exactly Alice is referring to. She may well have seen everything, but in doing so also saw it’s purpose: Nothing.
A monk asked Jōshū, “Has a dog the Buddha Nature?” Jōshū answered, “Nothing.”
MUMON’S VERSE
The dog, the Buddha Nature,
The pronouncement, perfect and final.
Before you say it has or has not,
You are dead on the spot.
all i remember is that it’s not a sphere.
Yo that fish sucking itself off fr
What?
Funniest description of an ouroboros I’ve ever heard
tryin not to crack up at work here jerk
God damn it, Billy. Hahahahah
You make my day.
Billy this is why Lucius keeps chasing you through the Warp. This right here.
But why is she glad, other than the fact that she always says she is?
If all progression is immutable, what is the point of her having any feeling about… anything? Allison’s response should be nothing more than another box ticked. Convincing her of anything shouldn’t matter.
She has got to have quite the ego to be Jadis and omniscient at the same time at all, I think.
Being Polite in Conversation is something she does.
It’s not like one can simply stop having feelings because they don’t make sense.
In this particular case it is impossible to know if she even is having a feeling about it. Jadis may not care, she simply always makes a comment indicating she does. Why that would be the case… who knows. It’s a peculiar place the narrative has taken us.
I’ve been on both sides of this conversation before. One where you come to a horrible, awful realization in the middle of a pleasant setting, and the other one where you recognize the face someone is making from a horrible, awful realization that you yourself once made because you also had that same realization at one point. The former is horribly awful, but the latter can still be rough, though it’s at least tempered somewhat by now having someone else who can empathize with you. From that perspective, I can see her being glad, even if she already knew that it was going to happen.
That’s not kindness, it’s the suffocating appearance of such. Gaslighting
For the same reason why she saved Allison. It’s simply what she does. Her omniscience does not make her immune to fate.
Omniciscients take 50% more damage from fate, and are more likely to receive critical hits from fate-based damage.
The deeply ignorant are immune to fate.
Because she has no other option than to be glad, of course. It’s not something she can choose.
Iä, glory to the redtext, returned
Yes, Alison, the Time Knife, we KNOW, we’ve ALL seen it, please do keep up,…
This is as far from The Good Place as you can get.
This gets better and better every panel.
“It do be like that sometimes”
– YISUN
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
…Except it wasn’t nothing, was it? Allison witnessed the true shape of the Universe, and thus now knows the secret name of the Universe, “I”.
To see the Universe and call it nothing, is to see yourself as nothing. Allison feels weak, but must come to grasp the enormity of what she’s learned, and what it means for her next steps. I await eagerly.
Appropriate reaction!
Oh, good, looks like we skipped right over bargaining. Hopefully Allison will be able to keep up and get to acceptance before the end of the chapter.
Considering this is supposed to be the last chapter, she’d better!
🎵 I don’t understand, I don’t understand, bitch I don’t understand 🎵
Same
Ah, how appropriate, to see a new KSBD page the same day with the final volume of “Pargoronian Tales”. It all gets increasingly Lovecraftian (actually, saliva-dripping Allison suddenly reminds me very acutely of some hapless cultists from “The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom”), and I’m rather glad to see good ole’ Atru tales back. (Not to mention the site background without cosmic special effects – they were badass, but constant use of Ctrl+A hurts).
Well, when you have to ponder a horrible truth, it’s best to do it on a full stomach. Even in a meaningless nothing-world, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
rather, isn’t it the gnawing mundane urges of your filthy flesh prison that remind you how everything is different and nothing has changed? to be sated is to lose awareness of oneself and be lost in the largeness of it all
Ah. Yes. Ctrl+A. What a brilliant idea that I 100% thought of. Glad I didn’t spend an unbearably long time squinting at the comments like a mole while there was an easily available solution I just entirely forgot existed!!!! Because that would have been… Painful. Yes.
waaaaaaiiittt a minute
she didn’t see nothing, she saw a radiant event horizon drawing all of time and space into it like a rainbow superhighway the size of everything and imploding into an impossibly thin tower of pure light
but now she thinks she saw nothing…because it was literally too big for her mind?
allison can’t remember what she saw
*and neither can jadis*
jadis didn’t see nothing either! jadis saw everything and just *didn’t recognize it*
*she’s a nihilist by mistake*
That makes sense and might be the way that Allison forces Jadis to continue to want to grow again.
Nihilism is the way you survive the Sight.
I guess that’s not exactly the thing – she does remember, it’s just a sort of denial phase. “It did not happen, I refuse to believe those horrif***ing memories, I didn’t see anything, I tell you!”, that sort of thing.
She didn’t say she didn’t see anything, the said she saw nothing.
I think you’re wrong here.
I don’t think this page is saying that Allison thinks she LITERALLY saw nothing. Only that she saw everything, and it all amounted to nothing. Those are two VERY different things.
Remember, Jadis is, explicitly, omniscient. She knows everything. All of the things. Anything that can possibly, theoretically, BE KNOWN, IS KNOWN, by her.
She can’t do something “by mistake” because that would imply, somehow, that she did a thing without knowing what the result of that action would be, or did the “incorrect” action instead of what she intended to do. You literally can’t do that when you’re omniscient, otherwise you, well, AREN’T omniscient. And that would mean that Abbadon has been explicitly lying to the audience, since he has stated very clearly outside of the pages of the webcomic that Jadis is omniscient.
So she would know exactly what Allison saw, because she’s omniscient. She knows what Allison will say, because she is omniscient. And when she tells Allison that she has lost, and everything is over, she is saying this because she knows, and she is omniscient.
I really, really am getting tired of having to repeat this same point over and over again, because I feel like this might be the single worst plot point that Abbadon has ever written. It completely wrecks the whole suspension of disbelief, it ruins all tension in the story, and makes the entire conflict and stakes of everything that has happened become meaningless.
The end result of the grand whole of all creation is NOTHING, and an omniscient character has explicitly told and shown that fact to us. Why not just end the story here? At least then it would make a fantastic exercise in trolling.
Knowing everything is not the same as understanding everything. Example: she knows that Zaid is the reincarnation of Zoss, but fails to understand that the pattern has been broken and Alison is the true heir.
Okay, I obviously missed something here (in fact, I need to re-read the whole comic, because I missed so much). How did you get to this conclusion that Zaid is Zoss?
Zaid is not the reincarnation of Zoss. He was the previous heir in the previous time loop (as far as I am aware). We’re actually not 100% sure that Zoss is dead to begin with, are we? All we know is that Zoss occasionally is in contact with her through her mind/spirit/whatever.
For the primary point, however, you’re ignoring that Jadis is, as I have pointed out, literally omniscient. How can a person know everything without understanding everything? If she doesn’t understand everything, then she can’t be omniscient.
Abbadon’s quote from Tumblr is that Jadis is “quite literally, omniscient.” The literal meaning of omniscience is “all-knowing.” She has complete and accurate access to every datapoint in every permutation of every universe, past, present, and future. But (lifting heavily from Bloom’s Taxonomy here), beyond knowledge are skills like comprehension, analysis, and application.
Even within the past few pages, Jadis knows what Allison is experiencing (thoughts and physical reactions, particularly), but she is incapable of truly understanding her distress because empathy and intuition are skills outside of her omniscience.
She has infallible knowledge over WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and HOW, but WHY is the crack in her armor. Her understanding of the knowledge she possesses has limits, and so the conclusions and prophesies she scrafts are fallible and suspect.
And this doesn’t even get into her personal motivations and whether omniscience compels truth.
If I may punt or defer on the Zoss issue, I may have misread or misunderstood that section of the comic. In this context, he’s relevant merely because Jadis stated “He is the heir” when all evidence given to us since her prophesy has shown that to be incorrect for this cycle.
Adding one final thought – Above and beyond everything, Jadis’s motivations are incredibly important here. Jadis has one sincere wish, per Abbadon: to die.
It may very well be that the destruction of all things by Jagganoth, and for Allison to believe his victory is inevitable, is the only way for her to accomplish that goal.
“I really, really am getting tired of having to repeat this same point over and over again, because I feel like this might be the single worst plot point that Abbadon has ever written. It completely wrecks the whole suspension of disbelief, it ruins all tension in the story, and makes the entire conflict and stakes of everything that has happened become meaningless.
The end result of the grand whole of all creation is NOTHING, and an omniscient character has explicitly told and shown that fact to us. Why not just end the story here? At least then it would make a fantastic exercise in trolling.”
damn imagine having this hard a time accepting determinism
Jadis, Breaker of Infinities 4-134: “Action itself is illusion. The totality of space and time is a beautiful piece of amber, in which we are frozen…Upon this amber, all our decisions, all our triumphs, all our sins, in all possible worlds, are permanently engraved.”
My problem isn’t that I’m not accepting determinism, my problem is that everything is OVER. Jadis said it as clear as she could in her insane state: There is literally nothing Allison or anyone in the entirety of the universes can do to stop Jagganoth’s rampaging destruction of literally everything, everywhere, in all worlds.
This has nothing to do with philosophy or the nature of reality or metaphysical science or religion or either accepting or rejecting the concept of free will. This is, 100%, from the first word I’ve typed in these comments to the last, an issue I have with STORYTELLING.
For comparison, let’s talk about the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.
The antagonist of that film, Jobu Tupaki, is someone who can be easily compared to Jadis. There’s a reason why there have been so many references to the “Everything Bagel” in this part of the webcomic, after all. The main difference, however, is that Jobu was NOT omniscient; they were simply capable of seeing and moving through all of the universes and timelines, manipulating the worlds around them as they saw fit. They could be caught by surprise, or angered, or otherwise have someone catch them off guard because they couldn’t, with 100% accuracy, actually PREDICT every single thing. And we the audience clearly see this in the first scene that the main character meets Jobu and claims that they did something to her daughter, and Jobu’s response was essentially a confused “Seriously? Did…did you actually think that? Really?”
Jadis, however, doesn’t have to predict anything. She knows what will happen. She is omniscient. She knows everything, and how it is impossible to change or prevent anything that has happened or will happen.
And she said Allison has lost. The story is over. The villain has won, and the 777,777 worlds that comprise the multiverse made by YISUN shall spiral into ruin.
If you want to do your thought-terminating “imagine…” response cliche, go right ahead, but don’t expect me to reply to you anymore if you do.
You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. Either trust Abaddon to make it make sense or don’t and leave.
…and you believe her?…
I think you’re getting caught up on one facet of the lore to the detriment of some of the spiritual subtext that gives this part of the story its momentum: that Allison is continually getting closer to Yisun’s true desire for their disciples, which is a dogged insistence in the face of “immutably” bad odds.
In 4-71, the lore reads:
“YISUN was questioned once by their disciples at their speaking house. The questions were the following:
‘What is the ultimate reason for existence?’
To which YISUN replied, ‘Self-deception.’
‘How can a man live in perfect harmony?’
To which YISUN replied, ‘Non-existence.’
‘What is the ultimate result of all action?’
To which YISUN replied, ‘Futility.’
‘How best can we serve your will?’
To which YISUN replied, ‘Kindly ignore my first three answers.’ ”
-Spasm 8
When asked What’s The Point, Yisun, omniscient, omnipotent, gives the terribly dissatisfying answer that life and all the actions that a person takes while in its throes are ultimately futile (though not meaningless!), and the only way to achieve any peace is to not live at all (bc to live is to struggle, right? If you’re active you can’t stay neutral, because to live is to work to sustain life). Okay, cool, then that’s true and Jadis is right about that part for sure, according to Yisun. Except when asked how best their disciples can serve their will, Yisun says to ignore these “truths,” because Yisun does not want a static world. Stagnancy, this constant repetition of the same flawed approach, is the real tragedy at the heart of this story. Jadis, as wide-reaching as her knowledge is, is stuck on the enervating forces of self-deception, non-existence, futility, and this limits her ascent to royalty as the lore seems to suggest it. Allison, now seeing those universal truths, has a choice: she can keep going forward, a “magnificent idiot,” doggedly defying the odds, or she can accept her fate and remain stagnant like Jadis and the other demiurges. I don’t know that this story has ever been as clean as a simple victory; I think it has always been in favor of the irrational leap from outwardness to inwardness, that weird Kierkegaardian leap from rationality to subjectivity.
Anyway, Yisun is constantly putting this point forward in the Spasms, this idea of action in the face of futility, and reiterates it here:
YISUN said, “Listen, here are three types of looking. Three men make a pilgrimage but despite their best efforts, lose the path. The desert is hot, and the men will soon be dead. They have run out of water. The first man doesn’t know he has run out of water, nor does he bother to check. He blithely continues onwards until he is shocked to find his own death coming up from the sand to meet him. The second man checks his canteen and sees immediately he is out of water. He gives up and curls up in a ball, and dies quite piteously, obsessing over his failures. A miserable man.” Hansa said, “An ominous riddle.” “The third man,” YISUN said, “checks his canteen, and finds he will soon be a dead man. Yet he is resolute, and presses onwards anyway, looking for his destination.” “Does he find it?” asked Hansa. “No,” said YISUN, “Quite plainly. His death finds him at the appointed time. Yet he presses on anyway, until the moment his corpse hits the dust.” “What an idiot,” said Hansa. “Absolutely,” said YISUN. “What a magnificent idiot,” added Hansa. “Hansa is observant,” said YISUN.
The whole point, according to these teachings, is to continue onwards in the face of certain defeat, futility of action, to insist, quite plainly, on trying anyway, in spite of your enemies, in spite of fate or god, because that is where true change, true growth, is possible.
We’ve seen this before in smaller ways: with White Chain, for example, in choosing to defy all angelic lore and social tradition in pursuit of her personal truth. These personal transformations are very meaningful to the story. It’s what leads me to believe we are currently at a crossroads for Allison on her path to royalty. I think the focus right now is on the subjective lesson she’s grappling with.
And anyway, death in this story, reality in this story, is all a matter of perception and will. I don’t think that omniscience necessarily has the clout that it normally would, because the rules of reality and of truth are a little more flexible here.
“Only once was there a question which YISUN hesitated to answer. Strangely enough, it was asked by Aesma, the least wise of their companions. They trode a stony road together, and Aesma’s feet grew hot and sore. She swore and spat, and clutched her feet, and asked YISUN a stupid question.
“Lord!” said she, in roiling frustration, “Before you said there is no such thing as Universal Truth!”
“It was so,” said YISUN.
“Then what is all this! This foolery!” said Aesma, with an exaggerated sweep of her ashen arms, “Isn’t creation itself, the entirety of your own grand work, a self-evident truth? The only self evident truth, in fact!”
“It is not so,” said YISUN, stopping their pace.
“Then what is it?” wailed Aesma, starting to tantrum. This was the question that caused YISUN to hesitate. They meditated on it for a short time only, but Aesma was aghast with wonderment at the power of the question.
“My opinion,” said YISUN, finally.
“Is it a correct opinion?” said Aesma, awestruck.
“Aesma is observant,” said YISUN.”
– The Song of Maybe.
Best comment I’ve read here. Wonderful, thank you.
quite frankly: got his ass
Thank you very much for your reply.
There are so many things I want to say but I’m having trouble thinking of how to write them. There’s a reason I post as “The Last One to Get It”, after all. I don’t claim to be intelligent or good with words.
I’ll just say this: You are, effectively, asking me to believe that “omniscient” does not mean “omniscient”. That “A =/= A”.
Do you understand why I am having an issue with that?
Because if words stop meaning what they mean, then we are approaching a complete communication breakdown with no hope of recovery. Words HAVE to mean things, and we have to agree on what they mean. That may just be my English degree talking, though, so take it with skepticism.
Honestly, I fully blame Abbadon for all of this. He just had to remove all ambiguity for his audience and say that Jadis was canonically omniscient. If the only information I had was this webcomic, I’d be right there with you.
i swear it’s like you’ve never read a shonen where the hero defeats literally impossible odds lmao. have you never watched gurren lagann?
like, have you seen the points this comic makes about rationality and people who only ever act rationally? and you think arguing your point with “A =/= A therefore comic bad” is a good idea?
God in this universe is literally a consummate liar for YISUN’s sake
I dunno.
I think it’s crucial to realize that there’re a lot of ways to conceptualize and internalize ‘nothing’.
Mid-film Jobu-Tupaki would have said that everything meant nothing, too. After a little character growth, suddenly things aren’t so meaningless anymore.
It’s all nothing. All of it. Not a thing.
Nothingness be but a lie told by cowards whose eyes seek naught but dimness.
Grasp nothing and cut free your own Purpose with the Sword called ‘I’.
Nothingness is the sum of all potentialities, yet unshaped by strong determination.
Ah yes, I remember the hangover from my first viewing. Being overcome with the all consuming urge to scream for days on end despite lacking any kind of sound-producing organ (let alone any concept of language) was a less than pleasant experience, to say the least.
If she saw nothing, then everything is simply as it should be, yes? If the shape of existence is I, and existence is also a beautiful lie, then… of course there’s nothing. This is no cause for despair–quite the opposite, in fact! After all…
One cannot be crushed by the wheel if they see there is none at all.
Be the wheel real or lie, all the same one must break the wheel lest they be broken upon it.
“Kindly ignore my first three precepts” or whatever YISUN’s exact wording was, indeed…
Honestly Now that my panic attack has also subsided, I’m still reasonably sure this is some sort of Illusion. What she showed Allison is legit, but this… other space is some kind of illusion.
Then again, the shitstorm that she was dragged away from is also quite possible.
Would any of the esteemed who are gathered here happen to know what “Ajash” is? I cannot find any reference to it in my searches.
Yeah I couldn’t either so I figured it’s probably just a made-up in universe food!
I’m imagining that it’s a kind of ajvar (a delicious sauce made from roasted peppers and eggplants)
Reminds me of the notion that if you were to transfer the consciousness of an ant into a human body, all it would be able to do is scream due to its inability to process thoughts and feelings at our brains’ level of complexity. Forgot where I even read that or how to articulate why this makes me think of it (in a way that makes sense), but Allison’s reaction here feels very… that, to me.
[I remember this. A description of madness as the experience of being changed from an ant into a person, capable of understanding and thinking as a person does, before abruptly being returned to an ant.
The anguish comes in having known a flash of intelligence, having gone *unimaginably far* beyond one’s possible ken, then returning to a frame which simply does not have the hardware to cope, forgetting all, being essentially destroyed but still living.
This is knowing one’s own benightedness and being unable to rectify it, yes? An apt enough description, taking my own experiences into account. I have not always been this way, and I know it very well.]
Ominous
ive seen things, ive seen them with my eyes
ive seen things, theyre often in disguise
I’ve seen things, more than meets the eye!
Oh man, that unlocked a part of my brain that hadn’t seen the light of day in a VERY long time.