WHEEL SMASHING LORD 3-56 to 3-57
Chapter: 3
“The law of peace is the weakest law. But the law of the strong is no better. A man who lives his life by this law will very quickly find himself alone – with no foundation, he is constantly at risk and his next step may see him plummeting to his doom.”
– Xte Xte Xto, Yellow Monk
Solomon looks so damn cool with his new hobo design like DAMN
Truly, White Chain’s new wings are something to behold.
Heartbreaking – The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.
What were the words, again? Ah,
“Violence is inescapable.”
That was it, wasn’t it. It seems that this is, too.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Beat a man with a fish and you force a man to stop fishing and get off his ass.
Give a man a fish, he is fed for a day.
Teach a man to fish, he is fed for a life.
Turn a man into a fish, that’ll teach his as to piss off a wizard!
ass*
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he’ll disappear for days, lie to everyone and spend ridiculous amounts of money on fishing gear and beer.
You know you’re grown when you’re kicking your dad through a mountain.
White Chain is the People’s Choice
So, what *is* White Chains plan here?
If she just wanted to beat up Salami David here for being an asshole in the past. Fine. Kind of useless and wasting precious time, but fine. She wants revenge, not a constructive trait against an utterly defeated opponent, but understandable.
She wants him to take back power? That’s cowardly. She wanted him to change the empire, but now she doesn’t have the will to shape it into what it needs to be to survive the end. She didn’t want the power, but she accepted it, and is this all just a desperate attempt at avoiding the growth needed to become a good leader, and the burdens that comes with that?
Either she cares enough about the people she wants to protect to make this change, now with the perfect opportunity of having all the power and authority to actually do this, or her caring about others is just something that is surface level and she doesn’t want to make these particular personal sacrifices to do it.
She hated how Solomon did things, but the terrifying prospect of having to follow in his footsteps makes her want to force back his tyranny out of fear.
She wants him to help out again Jaggy? Fine, but that doesn’t seem supported by her actions and words here. She wants him to help not as an advisor, she wants to shed the responsibility of being the one doing what she believes is needed.
Either way, at this moment it doesn’t seem she believes in her dream of the republic, herself, or the people she wants to protect.
Maybe beating on Salami will force her to adknowledge this, but for now it’s a pretty low point for White Chain.
This one ponders the nature of Keys and their power. Are not the keys of the demiurges mere facimilies copied from the King’s key? And was not the King’s key forged under Metatron’s will? If power is a curse, then shatter it. What was made can be unmade. Open every door, shatter every key!
And break the first angel, who in his malice and spite set the wheel to turn.
This fight is a bit like the fight between Thrall and Garosh from World of Warcraft. except that Garosh came with his complaint much faster and is aware that such power poses a risk of abuse
what kind of aid she asked for ? to bring law to the republic ? with the fact she is now casting warm black flame ? what are the angels risking ? this is so fucking stupid.
“your time is past” and “take back your power” seem kinda contradictory
Death is lighter than a feather, while duty is heavier than a mountain.
The crown of a king is not so easily returned, once it has mounted the brow of another. The successor already carries more authority than the monarch of old, were the old king to accept back his crown, his authority would be second to hers, always. The old king is dead, long live the king.
How odd for an angel to shirk responsibility.
Perhaps in taking on new flesh, White Chain now has more in common with the renegade angels than she would have liked to admit.
Solomon: “Tag, you’re it.”
White Chain: “Tag, you’re -”
Solomon: “You can’t catch me!”
Ah, ye glory of designs. Perceiving this anthropoangelic appearance with eyes sprouting a flame full of eyes is a rare delight, especially in so vibrant colours.
Replace Salami Dave with a soccer ball
A warrior king, a philosopher, a god. Kicked like a football.
NO DADDY NOOOO !!
I honestly think that there’s some potential in building a system beyond the autocratic demiurge regimes, where white chain becomes a constitutional monarch who has some limited powers and responsibilities but subordinates herself to the will of the people and their elected representatives.
White Chain, you are umpteen thousands of years old. Stop thrashing about like a toddler having a tantrum.
WC is afraid that in mastering her new powers she would become more like Solomon
Of course she will. But if she committed to it, she could pull it off in a morally defensible way. The problem is she is frightened.
Man, White chain has been a complete hypocrite from the start, but this is starting to be a bit much now.
I love the terrible dissonance of what White Chain is demanding. “Your time is past! Take back your power!”
She doesn’t want to be part of this hierarchical authoritarian system anymore. She doesn’t want to be one of the strict hierarchy of angels she doesn’t fit into anymore. She doesn’t want to be one of the tyrants. She’s never really fit into it, and now that she has the power to do whatever she wants within that system all she wants is out. She wants to break the system’s chains.
But she doesn’t know what *different* looks like.
She has all the power now. She doesn’t have to be part of the system anymore. But she can’t imagine a world without that system, so the only out she can imagine is using that power to declare that she’s out and then … giving it back to the very tyrant she hated? Remaking the system she sought to break? She doesn’t know what a world without an ultimate divine* right authority looks like.
*Where you reach heaven through violence.
She’s kind of like Maya. Maya is obsessing endlessly over violence and peace and the paradox of how one cannot achieve peace without violence and how obsessing over violence enough to ensure peace destroys any hope of peace. And to her it’s an impossible problem. But she misses the obvious solution: Stop obsessing so godsdamn much over violence! (and its total absence, by corollary) Just start asking yourself what you want the world to look like and then take the steps necessary to get there. Be cautious about the means you use, but stop obsessing over them for half a second and think about something else.
And White Chain … well she’s obsessing over whether to be a cog in the machine or the hand turning the wheel that grinds up bodies in the churning of the machinery. She’s obsessed with how much she hates being the cog and how much she hates turning the wheel. She hates them both and when she’s the cog she wants to turn the wheel and when she turns the wheel she wants to be a cog. But in obsessing over them she’s missing the alternative possibility.
Even with their Lord absent, with a well-oiled bureaucracy and democratic elections acting a stopgaps … everything has been running just fine. Even in the middle of ruin and disaster, they’ve made it work.
They do not need a king.
It’s like once you receive unstoppable power, you realize that you don’t want to have unstoppable power – all you really want is to gri– I mean, fish.
> everything has been running just fine
Not really. I enjoy your analysis otherwise, but … White Chain’s current approach is *not* making everything “just fine.”
What a lovely dream.
Man just wants to fish. He put Jaggy in the Purple Zone for a while, that should buy him some slack.