More Marxist Michael

winter's tale

In an Obscure Corner of the Light

I’m not tough enough to avert my gaze and ignore them. Then again, neither am I so cocky as to set my sights on becoming their competition. Maybe I just never know when to give up, or maybe this is me refusing to discover the limits of my own abilities. I’m stuck between my inability to run away or to square off—something I find utterly pathetic about myself. “What? Don’t let it knock the stuffing out of you, Kadoc. Feeling inferior to geniuses count as some talent in itself. To actually keep yourself motivated in the face of cruel reality is what I consider the talent of the ordinary. Pathetic? Hardly. Unrelenting is the word you’re looking for. I’m speaking from experience when I say you folks do a better job at surviving than geniuses. I know all too well because of my line of work!" Only on that day did the cheery chatter of my big brother figure, as he likes to call himself, strike a chord with me. He’s right. I don’t have any talents or titles or achievements of great renown. But even if I have nothing to be proud of, that doesn’t mean I should let myself lose heart. I am my own person. I can never be someone else. So no matter how out of place I may feel, I’ll put up a fight until my final breath.

was kinoko nasu trying to deny the bisexuality of his characters when he gave nero and musashi multiple repeated lines where they explicitly say they are interested in both men and women

"we're just watching a movie"

the first thing you'll realise about Fate/stay night is that it's kind of stupid. you realise this when someone recommends it to you and explains the premise

what makes this realisation funny is that, after you've read it, you will forget this realisation entirely. you will begin to recommend it to a friend with all the sincerity someone deeply emotionally touched by a work can muster, at which point you'll realise how you sound

because at its core, Fate/stay night is one of the most sickeningly sincere manifestos about love and idealism ever written, but it's also a story about going on dates with genderbent king arthur and being the bone of your sword. you can't have one without the other

dealing with the worst case scenario

your condom breaks

you feel a lump on your breast

your friends are ignoring you

you’re stranded on an island 

you got rejected by a crush

you get into a car accident

you got stung by a bee/wasp

you got fired from your job

you’re in an earthquake

your tattoo gets infected

your house is on fire

you’re lost in the woods

you get arrested abroad

you get robbed

your partner cheated on you

you’re on a ship that’s sinking

you fall into ice

you’re stuck in an elevator

you hit a deer with your car

you have food poisoning

your pet passed away

you fall off of a horse

you or your friend has alcohol poisoning

you have toxic shock syndrome

your house has a gas leak

What's this from? I thought From Lostbelt ended?

CHASMATIS

especially after the events of olympus it is paramount that fgo players understand that they are not above the narrative, and the story’s antagonists will never be as cartoonish and one-dimensional as they might think they are. their motivations, their thoughts, and their goals will always be more complex than the most surface level reading, and often you will not know what they are right away. passing judgment upon them is stupid, the decisions they’ve made come from far more gray and far less lenient circumstances. it’s always been that way. you are not immune to making those same choices. that’s the point. from the earliest days of the fate series, way back during the original vn era, one of the most compelling and prevalent ideas within the story was you might have something in common with your worst enemy. you might have also walked down their path had your roles been reversed. you cannot say you could have objectively done better or worse simply because you have the benefit of hindsight and because your experiences were different. shit, ubw smacks you on the head with this by making its main protagonist and main antagonist the same fucking person.

this is especially evident with the crypters. everyone wants to brand them as insecure, jealous, holier-than-thou mass murderers. this is disproven as early as lostbelt 1. kadoc didn’t take part in the bleaching of the earth’s surface. he says explicitly that when he woke up from cryostasis, the world had already been bleached. he wasn’t truly jealous of you, he was taking out the trauma of being denied a purpose and then dying out on someone like him. had guda been in his position, they would’ve reacted the same. he cools off in lostbelt 2, which is why he is kinder and happy to see your gaze has regained some measure of resolve.

ophelia, akuta, and pepe also reinforce this. none of them took part of the bleaching, and they killed no one. the bleaching was all the alien god. the lostbelts were all the work of the alien god. the only thing here that matters is that the alien god chose wodime as their emissary, and the other crypters were expendable. kirschtaria did not accept this. he would not abandon his friends, his comrades, his family. the choice was to cooperate with the alien god or die. could you have seriously, in all honesty, chosen differently? could you, knowing the entire earth was doomed by a product of its history, honestly have decided to keel over and taken your loved ones down with you? could you look me in the eye with zero bullshit and zero hesitation and tell me to my face you wouldn’t have chosen to cooperate if it meant you had an opportunity to turn things around so none of those billions of deaths were for nothing and the world wouldn’t belong to the being behind that destruction?

the lostbelt competition was a foregone conclusion. everyone knew kirschtaria was going to win, because the contest was designed that way. the alien god only intended for kirschtaria to win, and kirschtaria knew this. which is why he used his connection to the crypters as leverage. the other lostbelts were never meant to survive, they were kirschtaria’s way of keeping the crypters out of the alien god’s watch. that’s why kadoc, pepe, and beryl weren’t killed by kirschtaria when their lostbelts went SNAFU. it is an immensely cruel thing to do to all those worlds and all those lives, yet would you have done differently? if the lives of your loved ones were at stake, if you were being surveilled at all times with a gun to your head ready to pull the trigger at the slightest disobedience, would you have been so reckless as to put the people you cared about in harm’s way? because that’s what kirschtaria’s position was. the alien god was ready to crush kirschtaria’s heart if he broke their contract, and tipping off the crypters that he intended to do so would’ve gotten them all killed.

ultimately, that’s what drives the conflict between chaldea and the crypters. the shared need to survive pitting them against each other. there is no guarantee chaldea can restore proper human history, and wodime could not take that chance when he had a plan of his own and the clear methods with which to accomplish it. a new world, a new humanity, free to make new mistakes and reach new heights, free from the grip of the gods, free from the grip of the systemic forces that plagued not just the lostbelts but proper human history itself.

and i need to stress that the story isn’t trying to justify the deaths (if we can even call them that, in all likelihood) of 7 billion people by trying to say “maybe wodime was right!” what the story is saying is that, if there was a staggering loss of life, what alternative would humanity have to even have hope of moving forward? through lostbelts 1 - 4, you may be helping these worlds die peacefully, but you are still letting them die over the chance that you might restore proper human history. your success is an uncertain inkling, yet you have no choice but to move forward and accrue suffering to make sure NONE of those deaths are in vain. you are not judged for it, because the story knows there is no right or wrong answer to this kind of conflict, and the same principle applies to the crypters.

need i remind you that olympus ends with people being crushed by buildings, abandoning all hope, quivering and perishing in absolute terror as the only world they’ve ever known crumbles around them and the only beings that could save them were killed by your hand and by your order because there was no other way out. it is a gruesome death, an unsightly death. and it is brought about by your actions, and it is a terrible burden. and it is the exact same burden carried by kirschtaria, because he was a member of team A tasked with safeguarding humanity, and he failed. he does not claim that proper human history is full of too many mistakes to salvage because he is above them. he claims so because he also made mistakes in his own limited existence and doesn’t want that for whatever humanity can still exist in the world he means to make.

and you know what? kirschtaria even understands what you’re doing. he is the only one who can. he cannot agree but he understands. which is why he never denies you the opportunity to prove yourself. he opposes you, challenges you, dares you. but he never denies you. he says “you think you can bring back proper human history? prove it. prove you have the conviction necessary to bear it and beat me with it.” and then you do. because he wanted you to, because he believed in you from the very start that you could do it if you set your mind to it because kirschtaria wodime for better or worse believes in mankind, and you do too.

so, tl;dr you and the crypters are the same do not be so arrogant as to pretend you are better than the story and you are the perfect blameless unbiased judge of everything ever because you look really stupid doing that

reposting bc the prolifers found my old post and i dont want them to have nice things

space buddies