BREAKER OF INFINITIES 4-167 to 4-168
Chapter: 4
“Prim strode on, and the road stretched before her, taunting. The horizon unfurled itself again and again at each dawn, the sickening play of sunrise and sunset a never-ending, nauseating whirl, meaningless and endless.
After a thousand more days of walking, something broke in Prim, and her gaze no longer turned to the side of the road, nor caught on its many culverts, streams, or diversions. It no longer rested on the idea of a pleasant end, but the idea of ending. A primal dread and a terrible fury caught a hold of her and animated her limbs.
Prim began to run. And after a hundred days more, she began to sprint. She neither slept nor rested, and became a wild, tattered thing.”
– Prim masters the road.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.
The path of suffering is the path of existence, any other path you may as wrll be dead.
On one hand, yes, fight the apathy!
On the other hand, I don’t think that returning to being a cripple is a good or healthy way of “accepting your loss”. Then again, maybe Allison will make her own prosthetics out of magic?
Allison no longer has an other hand.
Damn it Alison! That’s a perfectly good cybernetic eye! Enjoy your kick ass prosthetics! Most amputees would kill for those!
wait, are you telling me Jadis’s big naturals are *not* natural?
impossible. heresy. unspeakable. heresy.
Told you guys she was hiding from her problems and not healing.
Though I didn’t expect the robot reveal.
Jadis’ face here is a good reminder that just because you know something unpleasant is coming doesn’t make it any more fun when it happens.
Apropos of Jadis being fatalistic after seeing the shape of the wheel:
When one talks about history, you begin the narrative at a point arbitrarily chosen by you. This unavoidably injects bias. For instance, if you talk about World War II and begin your narrative in 1930, the story looks a certain way. But if you begin your narrative in 1910, it looks different. And if you begin your narrative somewhere in the 1800’s, it looks different still.
Jadis has seen history as a closed curve, so whatever point she chooses to begin her evaluation is inevitably flawed. That is her mistake, and also the mistake of Zoss. Allison has rejected the bigger picture, and so may break the wheel.
Nah she’s just depressed because she’s technically lost sentientce after gaining omnipotence. All of her responses are tinted by this.
Look at Jadis’s headpiece in the second to last panel. This only means one thing.
ABBADON IS LOOMINARTI CUNFURMED!!
Why remove it? Just don’t forget that they are prosthetics.
Just because you have wounds and they are part of your past doesn’t mean you can replace the weak flesh.
This hurts. A lot.
It hurts me to see damage to eyes and hands, a trigger for me. And one can’t look away because it’s now central to the plot.
It hurts me to see Allison crazy enough for this kind of self-harm. She doesn’t have to do this, she could just walk out _with_ the body parts. She is temporarily out of her mind, and her mental illness is worse than her physical loss.
It really, really, hurts that this terrible self-mutilation is implied to be a _good thing_. We know that Allison makes terrible choices and gains from them by luck and plot armour, and this is probably another of those things. But the implied moral, that gross self-harm might be good for one’s soul, appalls me.
/rant, but FFS can we get a covering note that this approach is Not Right in real life?
Allison never consented to the prosthetics in the first place. She is within her rights to reject them. I would prefer the narrative had chosen a less ad-hock unsanitary means of doing so, but the 1:1 comparison of UNDOING nonconsensual “improvements” made to ones own flesh with self-harm (both by you and to an extent the comics presentation) strikes me as itself potentially insensitive. Which, well, I guess I do agree it could be handled better (I.E. less as a drastic physiological re-dismemberment) so while I came here to disagree there is a point in what you say.
Yeah, I’m seconding the uncomfortable feeling here. After seeing our protag go through unimaginable suffering, seeing her cut up her arm “down the stream” as the solution to her problem does not sit right. I think that editing the amount of blood or mixing it with oil or something would have it go a long way towards the effect the author intends instead of reminding a few of us of something painful.
Worlds burning, nihilism, brutal deaths, but a little realism/gore is enough to make ya squirm? Your lucky the art style is so gestural.
She’s going to walk out with her prosthetics SHOWING rather than hidden, which is the way of the Ruling King.
The implied (or rather, stated) moral, is that pretending that a harm never happened is worse than acknowledging that harm.
It wasn’t her arm, so how is it self-mutilation?
You forget that Allison is in a horrible, broken world full of monsters who have done nothing but manipulate and abuse her for years. On multiple occasions, demiurges have changed her body without consent, or invaded her mind and used her as a puppet. Even now, she is hidden away in a very beautiful jail cell. She is in a desperate situation, and nobody is playing by the rules of ethics and morals. Her reaction is understandable – and people do act irrationally, especially in desperate situations, especially in fictional stories full of symbolism and metaphor. It is up to the reader to interpret this, not for the author to dictate how you should feel.
Jadis gave her prosthetics without even telling her. Why on earth would she trust her, and keep them? The feeling you are getting from this, that gross self-harm is NOT good for one’s soul, is of course perfectly valid. But I don’t think that is what the author is implying.
*Sorry, I meant I don’t think that the author is implying that self-harm IS good.
I should clarify that I don’t think that Allison’s reaction is unrealistic, or badly written, or wrong for the story. Narratively, it’s somewhere between inevitable and necessary. My horror is that she’s in a situation where this _is_ her best choice, in the special context of a fantastic story.
Also, I’ve been waiting 5 books for Allison to make a free choice that wasn’t suggested to her by another character. And now she’s done so.
Jadis is like :{
Now she looks like the book cover.
SUFFER! BITCH!!!
I’m a little worried that this is a little anti-prosthetic, but if they’re making her passive that would make sense.
As someone else points out, these were non-consensual. That makes a huge difference.
Yeah I wouldn’t read into it being an anti-prosthetic statement. There’s more going in with it between Alison and Jadis.
It’s not anti-prosthetic. It’s anti-pretending-your-prostethtic-arm-is-still-flesh-and-blood-so-you-don’t-have-to-deal-with-the-loss-and-can-instead-wallow-in-nihilism.
The Allison on the cover page and the K6BD “don’t wear it out” has prosthetics, they’re just not covered with synthetic skin and, more importantly to what’s actually happening in these pages, their existence isn’t being kept a secret from her. Alison isn’t rejecting prosthetics, she’s rejecting medical procedures and objects being added to her body *without her knowledge or consent* with the justification that it’s better for her not to ever have to know or think about it.
Don’t wear it out.
So saying that all the lost tissue was replaced was a little misleading, then. It wasn’t replaced with her natural tissue, it was replaced with… weird magic machinery. And she didn’t tell her that. That’s suspicious.
And so no longer being thrust into suffering, Alison chooses it; Just as she was fated to do, just as it is necessary for the suffering that is to come
This comic rules
Anyone else measure their weeks in KSBD updates?
Some weeks are long.
A giant’s stride takes an ant a week to surpass.
No fate but what we make.
Jadis? Yeah, that is about the reaction I would have too in your stead.
Truly, Jadis’ greatest crime as a demiurge has been against Fashion.
Why would you HIDE something as METAL as a fully functional robot arm?!
Though now that we think about it, we DO have to at least acknowledge that in this moment of defeat for her ideological position, Jadis has chosen to dress in mourning garb and ALSO dress as a pyramid with an all-seeing eye hat. So perhaps the demiurge is not *truly* lost to us…
Bear not false flesh, but embrace the metal.
Wear your scars on your sleeves, rather than hiding them.
Push forwards, unto the horizons that must be travelled.
Discharge yourself from this So-called hospital.
Buzz Buzz
Ya’know, it’s been nagging me for a bit about Jadis. We know she’s seen the True Shape of the Universe. We also know she claims to know everything is/was/will be, that is fate it set, and we lack free will. Certainly she has the prophetic chops to back those claims up a bit.
But she seems caught flat-footed sometimes, or perhaps more accurately *confused*. I wonder if she suffers the same problem her worshipers do: Misinterpretation. You can memorize the words in a book without actually understanding what was written with them, after all.
I feel like Jadis has seen everything, but is (and pardon the pun) viewing it from the wrong angle.
She’s not confused, she’s upset about the way things are playing out. Even though she knew this would happen, she’s choosing to express her grief at the appropriate time. Well, SHE isn’t choosing, because she’s not in control of the narrative. Her behaviour is scripted so that it makes sense to other people and to outside observers (us).
I just realized that on the title page for this chapter we don’t see Cio.
She’s really gone, isn’t she? =\
Maybe! Nadia, who was to all appearances made extremely dead, is seen on that title image to be seemingly in fighting shape at a time after Alison leaves this place. Though I suppose that might not be her: Someone else could have taken up witchcraft and the traditional style of dress associated with Mother Om.
Nah, the title page isn’t showing a particular moment in time. It’s representing various things that happen in this book, all at once. It might be that Cio isn’t shown because she is dead, but I think it’s just a stylistic choice. Mottom is definitely dead and gone.
Yeah, that’s more likely, though if Nyave for some reason took up the red arts during the time skip, and happened to start wearing the same robes for ceremonial reasons, she could look remarkably similar from that angle.