WHEEL SMASHING LORD 1-15 to 1-17
Chapter: 1
“Listen well, peasant girl. The time is long past I teach you the ultimate technique, as I have promised.
The only thing you must understand about this technique is it is purely for killing. This is the cut of no cuts, the form of no form. It doesn’t have a name. There is no school it belongs to. There is no master it belongs to, not even you. There is no purpose it belongs to. It is a poisonous technique, the product of a thousand venoms distilled from one master to the next, back to the line of the Gods. All my master used it for is stacking corpses, and his master before him, and his master before that, and that is all you shall use it for as well.”
-Ryo, to his student Meti.
Oh I’ve just noticed something interesting. The descriptions of these pages is marking how “Quelling Breath” or “Quelling the Breath of Man” gets passed down, from Galde to Ryam to Ryo to Meti and then presumably to Maya. I assumed this was the broken blade technique, but Demiurge Maya here has whole swords. So Quelling Breath isn’t the broken blade, but also in the transition from Ryam to Ryo it becomes the “Life Cut”, and from Ryo to Meti the technique loses its name entirely. Maya however calls the broken blade technique the Maybe Sword, so I’m wondering who really invented it and how it built on the previous Ultimate Techniques.
It’s the same technique “The product of a thousand venoms distilled from one master to the next”. It’s the same technique being built upon by each generation of student.
The Maybe Sword doesn’t actually need the pommel, it’s the cut that is entirely pure in itself. you don’t need a sword to do it, it’s simply the act of itself, and it results in corpses.
Ten Meti’s Maybe Sword may be based on Meti’s Cutting Down Your Opponent, which may be based on the nameless technique.
“It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it. To have fallen so far and learned nothing, that is your failure.”
Would fit the context…
I’m betting on some variation on “Who will that save/help”
Maya panicked when saying that a man is a “featherless biped” and she showed her a plucked chicken and said “Behold I’ve brought you a man!”
“What will be left after your end?”
“If I am killed, then who was phone?”
“do you want some updog?”
What profits it a woman, if she gains the whole world, but loses her soul?
I think it was “And who will you share it with.” It explains Incubus’ face and why she thinks of her family.
I think this is it, basically. To conquer the world, you must surround yourself with murderers and cutthroats. By the time you are done, there will be no-one else left – and the one with the most blood on their hands, the most weight on their conscience, is you.
Others suggested “then what?” as the question, which is similar in many ways. The aftermath of conquering the world is pretty grim.
Oh and of course it goes without saying that you will lose all those who truly loved you early in the world-conquering process.
“How many noodle girls have you killed?”
oh, this! i quite like this one!
“The barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question is, does the barber shave himself?”
You’re not a swordsman, Incubus.
You’re a barber with terrible aim.
Wait a dog gone second, is this how Maya become Royalty?
Feh. Ten strokes for a failed decapitation is indeed proof of poor swordsmanship, or at the very least, a poor sword. Hone your soul with an invincible will, temper the blade of self in the black fires of infinite hatred, and there will not exist anything that you cannot cleave.
I think people forget that the question Meti asked has something to do with Jagganoth. That’s where we got to this scene from; Alison asking “How do I kill/defeat him?”, and those being wrong questions.
So I suspect Meti’s question went something like this:
“When you have killed all of the other gods, and stand before Jagganoth–who will murder your entire army without thought or mercy, and who has grown in power ten times as much as you have– how, then, will you prevent him from murdering you and any allies you have just as easily as he murders everyone else?”
Maya realized that no matter how strong she was, Jagganoth was still stronger, and she could think of no answer to Meti’s question.
Does she have an answer now? Does Alison have an answer? Is there an answer that can be found?
“And then I will have the world itself!”
“And then what?”
“D:”
I thought the question should be “What will you give up to achieve this?”. But “And then what?”, suggested above, is better. And it implies “What will you give up?”.
Because, in Allison’s case, it may be necessary to destroy creation to save it from Jagganoth.
I am going to be that person and say that this page bugs me as hell since it’s about a woman who has achieved a lot and then throwing it away to be happy, but that happiness involves having children. As a person AFAB I have been told that I should have children and having a family in the suburbs is happiness and that womanhood is defined by raising a family. I know the context is very different, but it just rubs the the wrong way like a corny movie where a successful woman throws away her career to learn her place and be a wife and mom in the countryside and that that is happiness.
I believe that children are a metaphor for creation and renewal. The opposite of the cycle: pure and infertile. The battle and embrace of Yis and Un that birthed the multiverse is another example. Meaning through family is extremely common and has become cliche, but is only one of the endless alternatives to zero sum violence that would otherwise dominate the human existence.
This story is still playing out; let’s withhold judgment on its themes and morals until it has reached its conclusion.
That wasn’t her place either I think. It feels like who she’s now is who she’s supposed to be, and that both being a literal goddess and having a quaint quiet life were not.
It could turn out different, but to me it seems important that she doesn’t say anything about what happened to her children or husband, we just assume they’re killed. She talks about swordsmanship instead.
Meti has no children and considers herself happy. Children is not the answer to the question Meti posed.
“What Rats were saved by the souls you have slain.” may be is closer.
But the question has to relate to Alison’s question. How do I kill the unkillable.
I saw this comment the day it was posted and I see where you’re coming from, as someone afab myself, but I also disagree, and I wanted to get my thoughts in order before I explained why. This felt, to me, a lot more like the backstory of a wandering samurai from those old samurai films than the ‘big city lawyer girl gives up her prodigal career to settle down with the humble farm boy’ trope- to the point where if Maya was a man, I think a lot of people would be calling it a direct and on-the-nose reference to those films. Maya has been a badass lone wolf pretty much 99% of the time she’s been onscreen, she’s got pretty much exactly the personality for it, she’s even got a bit of the ‘drunken master’ thing going for her. Her husband, in the flashback, is so inconsequential that we don’t even know what his name was. Even the adopted-sibling-turned-mortal-enemy thing with Incubus is a callback to the samurai trope.
I don’t think you’re wrong, exactly, to have an instinctive distaste for portrayals of otherwise badass women settling down and having kids, but I do think that this story has well earned this scene, for having a whole roster of other badass women for whom children isn’t even something that would occur for them to have.
Thank you for expressing this so clearly. I agree.
The “successful career” in this case involves death on a scale that would make Hitler’s eyes water, which kinda makes it a little different from a woman being successful as a doctor or accountant. The whole series represents people like Maya at this stage, of all sexes and genders, as monsters.
And that’s a very good point too.. lol.
How does it feel to become that which you so despised?
I think Incubus’ look of pain was genuine. He’s a man who can understand what people want, but not what they need. A man who understands hunger but not satisfaction. In his mind his oldest companion abandoned him from the nonsense words of a miserable old fool. And indeed Meti is a miserable old fool. That’s why her words mean to much
You’re forgetting that Solomon David underwent this as a father, and that Yaun/Jagganoth underwent this as a child. We’re seeing how different people respond to the inexorable coming of violence, to take and consume what happiness is them.
Compare and contrast these three, instead of thinking about Maya just in a vacuum.
i don’t know how my reply ended up over here, replying to this comment. it was meant for someone commenting how giving mathengi a family undermines her.
I think it would make for an interesting pairing, if, as Maya here presents a question, that the answer was from her mirror. The question is not, ‘How do I kill him.’ It’s not ‘how do I DEFEAT him.’ It’s not even ‘How do I survive.’ The question is, as Incubus puts, “How do I win?”
For Solomon, winning was creating an eternal empire. But eternity is a long, long time. For Incubus, he wants to kill and feel powerful. It’s as quick as the swing of a sword. You can’t hesitate, you must have clear direction. When you pick up the blade, you make it your being, your entire life. You must become a single swing moving to a singular end, a sword stroke of want. And if you master the law of the sword, that singular end can only be separating men from their ghosts.
“What do you think about death?”
I am pretty confident that the question is “And what will up you do then?”, or something along those lines. I can’t remember exactly where it’s from, but I believe it’s the classic challenge to a conquerer.
Even the best swordsman is an exceptionally poor swordsman!
Diogenes strikes again