BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-144
Prim came to a part of the road that was well worn. The path split and furrowed into pleasant little runoff trails, that twisted and snaked their way through groves of gently rustling trees. The undergrowth was thick and green and warm with insects and flowers. Prim felt some of the tension drain from her body and she rested a while under a tree, feeling quite relaxed.
After a while, she took a short and refreshing nap, and awoke to the distant voices of travelers a short ways down the trail. When she went out to greet them, she saw them clothed in white, and their faces and features were quite nondescript, as though washed in the ocean a while.
“Hello sister,” said they, “Who are you?”
“I am called Prim, who was the slave of Hansa, and now slave of the road,” said Prim.
“You are in luck, sister,” said the white-clothed people. “This is the end of the road. You are free!”
Prim gazed past the travelers through the treetops to see a broad and verdant valley, spotted with the trim rooftops of innumerable houses, each sporting a neat little plume of smoke. It looked like a very nice place to be, and Prim’s heart burned with a certain kind of longing she had not felt in a long while.
“What is this place?” asked Prim.
The travelers looked at each other, as if it was an odd question. “This the valley of Eternal Life,” they said. Prim was taken aback, as Immortality was one of the Three Forbidden Punishments. Seeing her expression, the travelers laughed stupidly, as though they had stumbled across a small and confused child.
“Don’t be so shocked,” said one of the travelers,”it’s true! Nobody knows want, hunger, or sickness. Our days are spent tending our gardens, talking to our neighbors and families, and praising God, who has granted us this boon. Death does not touch us here. People are neither born, nor die in this land. Our needs are cared for and the land is pleasant and green. What else could we want?”
“You should join us, sister,” added one of the travelers, “as God is good, you will know nothing but happiness in this valley.”
“Can you leave?” said Prim, who had an expression like she had tasted something sour. The travelers looked at each other in confusion. “Of course not,” said they, “why would we want to? It is impossible to leave the valley.”
“What else do you get up to?” said Prim tentatively, “Other than praising god, tending to your gardens, and talking to your neighbors?”
The travelers were very confused indeed, and seemed to think this was a very odd question. “Are you happy?” added Prim, as if this would help.
“Yes, of course,” said the travelers, smiling blithely. The expression on their faces was hard to read, but to Prim their words came out like a warm paste. “You will know nothing but happiness in this valley.”
“This land is terribly cursed,” said Prim, and moved on.
It appears this will be my last one. Got less than a week left. Wish I could see how this masterpiece turns out.
“Here is a useful fact: inside every man is his death, wearing him like a thinning skin. Eventually his death will hollow him out like an old glove and replace him. It is no shame to release a man’s death, but rather an honor. His death is a much more permanent shape than he will ever take in life.
Regard each death with respect, all you dead men. Otherwise you will forget yourselves.”
-Jantris, Storm-born
Don’t forget to KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS
I’m sorry to hear that. 🙁
I’m happy you could come on this journey with all of us, at least.
Then I hope however you have, it ends up being as amazing as it can be <3
🙁
Erm. If my memory serves right, she, for a big part of the story, just wanted to get back home, to get back to her former life. All the while she’s been peer pressured real hard to act on her ‘new role’. Is Jadis just saying all her thoughts out loud? Is that all she does?
The Chakravartin, immortal and untouchable? I believe Asura has something to say about that.
“Would you be happier had I a good reason?
If my motives met with your approval, would you no longer resent the outcome? If so, then perhaps a beast’s skin would suit you better.
Duty. Honor. Morality. All constructs of convenience when put to proof. Surely the war taught you how easily power becomes the tool of the self-righteous. How the people’s “justice” was merely a means to their ends?
Yet you would ask me why.
Ask any creature of this star and those above for answers, and they will tell you what suits their fancy. And they would be right to do so. What meaning there is to be found in the petty vicissitudes of your existence must be gleaned by you, and you alone.”
– Zenos Yae Galvus
“Yet if you only pursue your hedonistic pleasures, and pay no heed to the plight of others, then no one will give you the time of day.
You will never get what you want–not even the battle you pine for so dearly.
You’ll be alone for an eternity, and you’ll deserve every agonizing second of it.”
–Alisaie
The man who presses on anyway, even though he is lost in the desert and aware he will soon be a dead, is an idiot.
But what a magnificent idiot he is.
Jadis is allied to Jagganoth … her price was to be slain last.
Tenses are a bit weird in Jadis’ rant. “Your friends WILL suffer and die”: but they suffered already and Cio died on camera. “Your home … HAS been destroyed”: but AFAICS neither Allison’s Earth nor her apartment on Throne has been trashed yet.
Jadis is suffering from Omniscience.
Tends to play hell with perspective
I personally don’t see this as a big deal. Okay, sure – there’s no *objective* meaning…but isn’t that a good thing? It gives me the freedom to focus on my own *subjective* meaning, purpose, and morals. Lets me act more freely, and lets me stick to what I feel is right. Let’s me focus on my girlfriend, my life, my morals…instead of fretting about a greater purpose I don’t understand. I see nihilism as a good thing!
I think you are misinterpreting Jadis’s nihilism.
Jadis didn’t go insane because nothing matters. Jadis went insane because nothing matters AND free will doesn’t exist. Everything that is going to happen is as immutable fact as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. “Frozen in amber” is the phrase she used.
Fate is completely immovable, and all of your choices were already chosed before you even knew you had to make them. A day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, a century down the line, there is NOTHING you can do to change ANYTHING that will happen.
THAT is why Allison is breaking down. Nothing she does matters, free will is a cruel lie because the universe has set everything in all time as frozen in amber, and everyone and everything she ever cared for is going to die horribly and violently without a chance to stop it.
Omniscience means Jadis knows everything. She’s only doing all this because she knows she is supposed to do this.
Which means Jadis telling Allison all this is part of the divine plan, which means that Allison’s next choice of action is already known by Jadis, which means trying to convince her is meaningless, which means it could only be done by Jadis, which means AAAAAAH MY HEAD HURTS
And now you understand why I, personally, have not been a fan of this part of the webcomic.
The entirety of this webcomic is completely deterministic. You can go back to read chapter 1 again, and you will know ahead of time what choices Allison ends up making, and she will never, ever choose differently regardless of how many times you re-read the chapter. All of this has been set in stone before you were even aware that there will be a next chapter.
The problem is NOT that the webcomic is deterministic. I have never disputed that. Obviously, anyone can tell you that, because the webcomic is written and drawn a person that has planned the story out. All works of fiction are deterministic, although HOW deterministic they are is questionable once we get into collaborative storytelling, but that’s beyond the scope of my point.
No, my point is that I am being FORCED to recognize the deterministic nature of this story by the author through Jadis. The “suspension of disbelief” is destroyed. THAT is the critique. Not my personal beliefs on free will or fate or the place you, I, or the rest of the world have in the universe. The story has destroyed my ability to pretend that it is more than a story. Its artificiality is permanently on display, immobile and unchanging.
The reason people care about fictional characters is because the people connecting with them are able to pretend that the people they see ARE real. The audience suspends their disbelief of the world they see, the lies being told, and accepts what they see in the story as “reality”. And because the story is “reality”, the characters become “real”, and thus the audience connects to them.
You don’t have to believe Jadis.
She might be lying. She might be wrong.
Please, provide a definition of free will that can exist. Can you provide a third alternative to determinism or randomness?
Free will not being real…again, isn’t a new concept to me. After all; are there any elements of truly random chance in the universe? If not, maybe everything happens to be predetermined from the Big Bang, simply because of the trajectory it happened to set all the matter and energy on. With any choice I make, perhaps I was destined to make that choice simply because the path-of-least-resistance for the electrons in my brain dictated that. The only counter-arguments I can conceive of rely on concepts as theoretical as quantum physics and souls. (Which I *do* happen to believe in.)
But whether free will is entirely real, or if everything was set in place by coincidences in how everything was created…it doesn’t really make a difference? The factors determining my decision happen to date back a few billion years…but why does that matter? I still get to make my own choices.
Answers in questions. Journey to travel. Behold to see.
Ah yes, the old verse in which Prim encounters the dreaded land of Suburbia.
Godspeed lass. Out the fucking porch and never back again.
its been said but I’m really happy about how creepy jadis looks in all of these
I see no issue here: The issue is present in the life of every living being, that every story is a tragedy first suffered through living, then suffered again through reminiscence, then forgotten, then repeated until there is nothing left that can repeat it. This is truth.
But so what? We move forward because we wish it, because moments have value, and most importantly because we have the faith that we can be wrong. That grand, obvious truisms such as I have spoken are utter horsehockey and that our undeniable predictions may be denied. Men have been certain before and wrong before and shall be wrong again.
-Why have you chosen the path of suffering ?
-I was very drunk at this point
-Oh yeah, that’s usually how it goes. Just wanted to make sure.
“You must be able to see it, Ms. Allison. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Ms. Allison? Why? Why do you persist?”
A poem to Jadis:
A pawn that crosses the board can be queened.
Life is suffering, without inherent meaning or destiny
Lost in a trap of scaffolding, barred and shackle-bolted
You are a goose in a glass bottle, tired of tapping and growing
“If my actions, and the result are predetermined, why do you need to convince me?”
And what is Jadis getting at, asking this question? What’s her reason?
Jadis and her hat of +4 gaslighting seem to be briefing Allison again the cyclic reset. If creation be reset, Jadis has to do all this again, and it’s just old. If not, then Jadis gets to die, finally, which is what she’s wanted for a long time.
“Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?”
“Because I choose to.”
“Why,” said Jadis, “Why continue down this road to ruin?”
Allison shrugged her shoulder hard, the effort of it leaving her out of breath. “I- I dunno,” she struggled to get out. “I guess because pushing the limits of traditional comics orientation is neat. I mean, that ‘Center of Everything’ page as the background was pretty cool, right?”
“Because it must be done.”
– Boris Scherbina
Feel like I’m detecting Motive here
What is the most important step a person can take?
The next. And the next. And so on.
Maybe that’s the question that will differentiate between Jadis and Alyson.
Given they both have knowledge of the inevitability of their actions, one meets it with pasty resignation but how does Alyson meet it? Maybe the difference is ‘royalty’?
Since this corpse woman knows EVERYTHING, is there anything she says or does that ISN’T manipulative? Why does she even have to try? The “know everything” shtick can’t possibly, within anyone’s mind set, work, so the fact must be that she does not know everything and she’s lying through her projection’s teeth.
Or insane. Not much different. When a demi-god needs a sorority sister to move forward, something is rotten.
Ah.
And here’s the true test.
Well played, queen of sloth.