MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING. I KNOW BLISS MEMBERS DON’T REALLY ABIDE BY THOSE SORTS OF THINGS BUT IM ASKING NICELY AND SERIOUSLY TO PERHAPS NOT CLICK ON THIS ONE PLEASE THANK YOU :3
I want to sort of use Stormz’s comment towards Quakitus from yesterday’s stream—“You’re just like Mugm”—to bring up how, like, he’s right but not in the way anybody in the scene actually thinks. Q and Mugm are genuinely very compelling foils because of how extremely similar they are, but both characters are too biased by their own perspective to identify how (that is not a complaint, it actually really adds to this moment). The rest of this post will be sort of divorced from the context that comment was made in, but I feel like talking about the truth in it before discussing it in actuality (that is, discussing the irony of it. post about that here shoutout solis) is interesting in of itself.
I think the ways they’re similar can be read on a surface level: preoccupied with control and power, prescriptive judgements of the nature of other people and of the world around them. There are of course others (that I feel like I would derail this post by talking about). But in regards to those surface level observations, I actually don’t think that’s what makes them truly similar. The way I think they’re similar is specifically because both of their worldviews are efforts to give their suffering and trauma meaning. It’s extremely difficult to face the fact that you might’ve been or are currently being badly hurt with ultimately no grander recompense, so it’s very common for people to try to derive some lesson or purpose out of pain. Most often this is also a form of trying to avoid re-encountering that pain or trauma by warping the rest of the world around it—either to compensate for or avoid acknowledging the existence of that trauma (sometimes both simultaneously, by normalizing/genericizing it). Both Quakitus’s categorization of relationships into Controller and Controlled and Mugm’s understanding of the world as a holy stage in which his role serves the highest purpose are forms of this.
But, like, before we talk about how those mindsets actually accomplish their goals as coping mechanisms we have to understand what they’re coping For. And it kind of happens that those are also extremely similar, in that Q and Mugm are both attempting to rationalize retraumatization (the initial trauma being violent and/or sudden abandonment) under different contexts.
For Mugm:
Wyll’s betrayal in S2’s finale—which lead to emotional and physical humiliation from having to fight the entire server essentially alone— was heavily traumatic for Mugm and he compensated for it in S3 by changing the way he approached teams. He creates an identity centered around servitude and usefulness rather than self-centered domination to make sure a betrayal of that magnitude would never happen again. Obviously, Nezo’s betrayal happens despite all his effort, and it’s a betrayal where Mugm is deliberately singled out and excised for performing role-servitude Too Well (and later his entire time in that team would be recontextualized as him being dehumanized and taken advantage of).
For Quakitus:
Team Friendship is of course an elephant in the room, but I’m kind of reluctant to talk about it until videos come out because we don’t know the precise ways Q coped with Silva leaving the team or what exactly happened afterward. I did want to mention it because Team Friendship is important background for her. But I actually wanted to focus on Team Mesa as sort of an origin point. You can see in her Dragon Games video how much emotional stock she placed in this team (as opposed to Team Friendship whose goals Q didn’t seem actively invested in during its time nor afterward). Mesa really seems like the first team he genuinely identified with, to the extent that he kind of came across as “team lead.” Of course, Mesa ended with both Nezo and Nufuli betraying for Brotherhood in relatively quick succession, instilling deep trust issues and insecurity in their abilities within a team. So Quakitus compensates for this by, for lack of better vocabulary, becoming a follower. They go along with what Wyll wants because doing their own thing got them punished with betrayal and they don’t trust that it won’t repeat, so they do the opposite in an effort to prevent that. Yet like Nezo with Mugm, Wyll betrays anyway and deliberately singles her out as the reason why Gilded falls apart and faults the identity she adopted as a coping mechanism. Alrey would later echo this sentiment, becoming yet another unexpected abandonment.
Both of these are instances of Mugm and Quakitus attempting to cope with their trauma by rationalizing it as a product of themselves, yet being suddenly thrust into the exact same position again even having adapted to avoid that. What this did is teach them they essentially have no control over whether they are hurt or not. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Which is why their mindsets become so expansive and entrenched in their identities—they are accomodating for the perceived contradictions in the “reason” why they were traumatized. I also think it’s notable that both Quakitus and Mugm’s retraumatization involves disparagment of their identity and an assessment of their worth—Quakitus in terms of her relationships and Mugm in terms of his humanity, which is where they differ and what determines the focus of their defensive worldviews.
Quakitus’s mindset causes her to understand the world through lenses of control, where people exist to be useful—The Controlled—and power involves both being able to persuade people into being used and being able to discard someone once they’re useless—The Controller. This rationalizes the circumstances of her abandonments, where she explains Mesa’s betrayals in terms of not being persuasive enough for people to stay (he was a weak Controller) and Wyll’s betrayal in terms of not being useful enough to avoid being discarded (he was an inadequate Controlled).
In her mind, the way to avoid being hurt again is therefore to become the Ultimate Controller. The Ultimate Controller has no risk of being discarded and people seek them out to be controlled by. Quakitus accomplishes both through her recently-contextualized “persona”—he acts nice and kind and moral to attract people toward him, and the fact that it is an act and he supposedly doesn’t truly care allows him to, ideally, be unaffected in the case people don’t stay. Her suffering is given meaning in that it taught her something, and now she is able to be safe and exercise power (attaining mythics and then throwing them away) because of it.
Mugm’s mindset heavily revolves around dehumanization and coping with his own, after Brotherhood was recontextualized for him. I have a separate post about how normalizing his trauma by dehumanizing the rest of the world alongside himself lets him avoid thinking about the specificity of his trauma, but it also saves his ego from the idea that there was something uniquely and categorically wrong about him that caused Nezo’s betrayal (and the subsequent conflicts afterward). In his mind the only difference between him and anyone else is that he is Performing His Role (which has shifted from Protector back again to Villain) better than them. It’s crucial to understand that he doesn’t see the world in terms of evil and good, only this role and performance idea where success and perseverence determines worth.
This idea is only further reinforced by outside factors other people like Wyll and Mani, the latter of which introduces another crucial element that shapes his later worldview—which is the idea of higher purpose. That there’s some divine purpose to certain types of role-performances and those who are good at it are “deserving” as opposed to failure, which is sin. Mugm’s role becomes the most esteemed—the thing that keeps Bliss alive. With nobody to end the server, there will be no new cycle. Bliss will rot and die. Therefore, his suffering is given meaning in that it was and is in pursuit of serving Bliss Itself—a purpose he enjoys fulfilling, literally given to him by the divine.
Now that both of these worldviews are fully developed and entrenched, and neither of these characters are exactly being subjected to such severe stress anymore, they’re able to develop actual concrete goals in accordance to their now-stable mindsets. Quakitus’s motivations as of now are primarily her own fun even at the expense of others (she has fun with the mythics, she has fun manipulating people to act how she wants, and then feel safe in knowing she can throw both away when they aren’t fun anymore), while Mugm’s still revolve almost entirely around performance (he wants a massive, exciting finale with real challenge rather than a simple, boring stomp that nobody will care about afterward). Though both are definitely hedonistic, Quakitus believes the world exists to serve her, while Mugm believes he exists to serve the world.
When looked at through the lens of Bliss being a commentary on it’s own medium as an artform, these two can be interpreted as two different philosophies on art itself—where the end-point Quakitus’s mindset posits that art is for the artist to enjoy making, while Mugm’s mindset posits that art is for the audience to enjoy seeing. And I think that sort of dynamic wouldn’t be nearly as compelling if they weren’t as similar as they are.
