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[danvolodar]

On failures

I am quite puzzled by some of the Dunmeshi fans calling Marcille "a girlfailure".

I mean, she's highly intelligent, extremely competent in her field of study (to the point of being able to pick up the skills needed for dungeoneering over a couple weeks), socially competent, fit and very beautiful. She has her life together and absolutely carries the party both as a damage dealer and as a healer.

Whatever makes her a failure?! Being Italian? Having an expressive face?

[danvolodar]

On picking sides

On a side note, I really love how the WHA fandom effortlessly combines "oh no, the Compromise sucks, the limitations on magic from the Day of the Pact suck, and the Knights Moralis who enforce the Pact also suck!" with "oh no, the Ezrest royalty are so shady, they must be plotting something against the Compromise and the limitations on magic!"

[danvolodar]

On small-scale societies

With the anime introducing different accents to the characters' speech, the true nature of Zozah Peninsula is becoming ever more apparent.

Consider: the peninsula is rather small; its population, too. From what I gather, it has but a handful of towns and a single city, Ezrest.

With the map, we can give a first order of magnitude estimation of the peninsula's size. When Qifrey and Olruggio escape the Great Hall, they can see the cliffs surrounding it by naked eye. Horizon distance at sea level is about 5 km; thus the distance on the map between the Great Hall and the cliffs surrounding it is no more than 5 km also, and thus the entire peninsula is about 90 km in size. Again, that's a very imprecise, order of magnitude estimation, but it gives us a rough idea.

In this territory, with this population, they have different accents (despite the people frequently interacting with each other, even witches and the Unknowing) and multiple different distinct races (despite no laws banning interracial marriage existing, as Atwert-Galga pair demonstrates). We haven't heard of any invasion, mass migration or conquest that'd maintain this diversity, the way conquests of England split its accents.

As discussed prior, the generally accepted version of the peninsula's history also includes events like a very small spellcasting share of the population mind-wiping everyone else, including all the other, much more numerous, spellcasters.

To me, all these combined suggest but a single explanation: the peninsula is an externally-run sociological experiment. Whoever runs the experiment maintain the diversity of the population, which would've otherwise inevitably homogenised over a couple generations; they were also the ones to aid with mind-wiping everyone at the Day of the Pact.

[danvolodar]

On being a cranky old man about Witch Hat Atelier: Tartah and Coco's first test

Alright, the laws of magic hardly make sense; but how's the magical system itself?

Consider Tartah. His disability is a notable plot point in the manga, as his colour blindness prevents him from being a witch.

But wait a moment, we never see any of the spells used in the first 96 chapters using colour ink. Not a single time, not by the kids, not by the adults, not even in situations life-threatening for the entirety of the capital city's population.

So magic is not really consistent in WHA. There's actually an example that combines this inconsistency, strange character choices and insane Pointy Hat nepotism: Coco's first trial.

All the trials are apparently a highly personal affair between the young witches and the Wise, since it appears the Wise dispatch a proctor to watch them take the trial personally. Except in this case, no proctor is dispatched, and Coco's still treated as if she's successfully taken the trial - apparently only because Qifrey is Beldaruit's apprentice. Olruggio also turns a blind eye to it, as a part of the same all-pervasive nepotism.

The flying shoes, which at no point anywhere else in the manga are shown to have any meaningful limitations, for this case only are said to be useless for reaching the necessary elevation, with no further explanation.

And of course, Agott's lies being extremely obvious (Coco had no way to know about the test, and certainly couldn't go take it on her own accord if only because she didn't know the teleporter code), no one of the adults addresses her putting a sister apprentice in mortal danger in any way.

So all in all, I love the manga, but sometimes its setting, magic as a part of said setting, and the way its characters interact are all treated in ways that don't make much sense to me, which somewhat spoils the overall impression.

[danvolodar]

On being a cranky old man about Witch Hat Atelier: Olruggio and the laws of magic

I've bemoaned the setting and the institutions we (don't) see in Zozah in the previous post; this one is more on the way the witches' common sense differs from ours, and the laws they allow to govern their magic.

I think it striking how much the witches and their mores differ from our own, while the manga doesn't draw attention to that clearly at all.

For instance, they appear to be fully devoid of parental instinct towards their biological children. Sending kids to a boarding school (which an atelier essentially is) is one thing; never coming to see them, when it's just a question of setting up teleporter coordinates, is quite another.

In a setting where abuse of apprentices exists (as Knights Moralis witness first-hand in the manga), Richeh's parents don't care about Riliphin so much that he has scars from continued abuse all over his forearms, yet they seemingly don't know a lick of it before Richeh herself blows a whistle. They and Adina Arklaum are also seemingly comfortable leaving their children (and two other preteen girls) with an adult man out in the boonies, the aforementioned Pointy Hat nepotism allowing the Watchful Eye to be his best childhood friend (whose memories he also regularly wipes without consequences). And they don't pay a single visit throughout the manga (that we see)!

The laws of magic also ensure apprentices also don't learn any magic that can be cast on others to harm; but we see brigands killing Dagda just a short distance away from the atelier. Somehow, none of the parents question that kind of laws. And the children themselves mindbogglingly also don't tinker with destructive spells, not even the boys. Agott with her flamethrower spell against the dragon is the only exception that comes to mind; even Luluci uses what amounts to a flashbang against her attempted rapist.

The other laws are not much better. Most crucially, they forbid healing spells for no reason at all. The justification that healing can be used for torture does not hold up to scrutiny, since applying it consistently would also see mundane healing banned. The Brimhats are right to question it - but for all we see, there exists no procedure for changing unfair laws to begin with! No institutions - no way for legitimate change at all! Even when the Three Wise agree to something (such as the counterclock contraption), they seemingly have no way to enforce that decision, other than purely through their own charisma, as Easthies and everyone's reactions to his childish fit demonstrate.

Meanwhile, solving the Brimhat issue would be banal if only the Pointy Hats were not allergic to institutions. The solution, of course, is mandatory personalised additives to the magical ink, and treating any witch carrying non-personalised ink or ink personalised for another the way people concealed carrying illicit automatic weapons are in our world.

Finding illicit trees would be a lot easier than finding Brimhat witches, yet ensuring a monopoly on magic ink supplies would require some organisation to ensure Silvertrees only exist under Pointy Hat oversight, and the Pointy Hats can't have that!

It all comes together to bear pretty terrible fruit, as I'll cover in the next post.

[danvolodar]

On being a cranky old man about Witch Hat Atelier: Knights Moralis and the Wise

Now that there's an anime released, I've reread the manga, and boy, is it hard not to be a cranky old man about it!

But before I start grumbling, I want to note: it's a great manga, which you should read if you still haven't; I like most of its messages; and of course, it's absolutely fabulously drawn, with great interior designs, intricate items meant to conceal the magic seals, and fantastic animals.

What's more important, being a cishet man and a non-artist, I understand that it wasn't written for me or the likes of me. So all the thinking about all the obviously useful spells that the witches could've used but do not, or the intricacies of the setting's economy (the labour cost of drawing contraptions vs the price demanded for them from the Unknowing), or the reasons why spells aren't simply stamped on contraptions when the first stamps were used in Ancient Egypt, etc, all goes right out of the window.

Spoilers below this line.

Same thing for the cursed yaoi plotline with the silvertree. Alright, that's conventional storytelling for the genre, and the genre wasn't made for me, pointless to comment here.

What I will comment on, though, are three things: the setting of the manga, the way it writes its characters, and the way its magic interacts with all that.

And in what comes to the setting, if you recall, my biggest gripe with K6BD is how rudimentary the institutions are in that setting, and how the characters who should absolutely know better (thanks to coming from our world, with humanities background) cannot be bothered to do anything about that, despite being in positions of power. Well, in WHA's Zozah, no institutions exist to speak about, not even these taken from the Antiquity for the Wheel in K6BD.

There doesn't seem to be a written code of law; there seems to be no court for proper judgement. Which means Zozah has less institutions than the Ancient Mesopotamia - that one at least famously had Hammurabi's Laws!

The Knights Moralis are an obvious example of that. Fans often compare them to cops; but cops explicitly enforce a set of laws, for perpetrators to be brought before court, with legally defined due procedure. With Knights, none of this exists. It would appear they're just a vigilante gang of seven, answering no one not of their number (the Wise of Principles is a Knight!), and passing judgement that amounts to destroying people's personalities via a full mind wipe all on their lonesome, not even in a council of their peers. They don't even really want justice to begin with: there's a spell that enforces speaking the truth (which the Brimhats placed on Tartah's and Coco's bracelets); the Knights get to cast forbidden mind-wiping magic, but not the forbidden truth-speaking magic! They just enforce the pact! Its terms are extremely vaguely defined, and it is apparently considered normal (and not absolutely insane) for a member to contest a ruling of the Three Wise on the legality of a contraption with personal fighting power, the way Easthies does. Imagine a cop taking their firearm and shooting up a court as a way of protesting a verdict, who would treat him as anything other than violently insane?

Similarly, during the Staircase River rescue, Qifrey's apprentices attack the Knights with the intent of obstructing justice (what passes for justice amongst the Knights, anyway); then Qifrey himself threatens Easthies with a blade. In any human society since Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia treating law enforcement like this would've had dire consequences. Yet in Zozah, it apparently merits not even an investigation, because the Knights don't represent a wider institution that'd want its will enforced without failure at all times, without obstruction.

That alone would've been bad enough, but it would appear the rest of the setting is just as bare-bones. The Wise, apparently, hold all the political and economical power, through redistributing the spellcasting tax that the secular authorities pay them, while the witches are obliged to perform three acts of service per season for free (we never see money changing hands during these). What do they use that power for? Why, nepotism, of course.

But since the results of said nepotism are intertwined with how the manga treats its characters, I think I'll continue in a next post, not to make this one too long.

[danvolodar]

О том, как быть ворчливым стариком - теперь про Зайчика!

Вот часто можно услышать жалобы, что пятая глава Зайчика барахло, все испортила и так далее. Оставляя в стороне АИ-"арт" и очевидную безвкусицу типа мотыльков в голове вместо мозга и мужика из рекламы Теле2, который обливает бензином и сжигает Бяшу, концовки-то, имо, не хуже основного нарратива.

В первую очередь в глаза кидается проблема с основным моральным выбором, который нужно совершить протагонисту: "мясом накормить зверей", в смысле, отдать чертям кого-то на съедение. В чем смысл терзаний, если звери запросто жрут детей из поселка сами, безо всякой помощи? В исходном рассказе ладно, там можно спорить, что это способ отказаться от привязанностей в миру и вот это вот все, а в игре-то? Ну ладно, в пятой главе звери вообще Тошкиному дому крышняк срывают в одной из концовок, что уж совсем делает выбор, кого им отдавать, бессмыслицей, но ведь дети пропадают начиная с первой главы.

Кстати, о пропадающих детях - а куда они пропадают-то? Вот Сёма Бабурин в первой главе пропал - видимо, стал Медвежуткой на полную ставку. Но в Черном Гараже, когда Антон с Ромычем в нем старосту на котлетки вертели, его не было. Он что, в берлоге просидел все время до пятой главы?

Кстати, о Сёме - чтобы неверные менты помогли от страшной Заячьей Губы, нужно собрать четыре улики. Но сёмин перстень нужно ведь стащить у них же - они что, сами себе не верят?

Кстати, о Губе - а чего он постоянно в окрестностях Антошки-то пасся, у школы там, еще где? У него же наводка, вроде как, на Бориса была, ему не Антон был нужен, а отец его.

В общем, пока играешь, особо не задумываясь, терзания героя от всей этой бессмыслицы отвлекают; но если потом в голове покрутить, совсем ведь беда. Не лучше концовки, во всяком случае.

[danvolodar]

On making people believe class separation is innate

One has to wonder how the pointy hat establishment convinced the entirety of the Unknowing that being a witch is inborn and heritable on the Day of the Pact. Supposedly during the Age of Chaos, magic was available to be learned by anyone - and even if some of those who were to become the Unknowing did not know magic itself, surely a lot of people personally knew the ones selected to become the master race witches?

Essentially that means that the first pointy hats had to memory wipe the entirety of the peninsula's population, including the nobles, the opposing witch factions, and the royal family (which used to be one of said factions, apparently). A project of absolutely insane scale and complexity!

The whole thing looks more like an artificial sociological experiment than an organically self-developed society, frankly.

[danvolodar]

On depending on the very rules you want broken

The Brimhats sure seem absurdly dependent on the pointy hat apprentices sticking to the pointy hat magic rules such as never casting magic upon others with the intent to harm. Especially so given that one of their goals is making Coco break these very pointy hat magic rules, to begin with.

Just with the seals described so far in the manga, I can think about a dozen ways to turn any human-sized target in front of a witch into mincemeat/ash/ice block/internally temporally incoherent mess with nothing but a small touch of a quill completing the activation circle. For all practical intents and purposes, a witch is concealed carrying a loaded gun with the safety off at all times, except that gun is closer to a howitzer in destructive power.

And given that to the best of my knowledge no Contingency-type spells exist in the setting, so no Brimhat can cast a spell upon themselves that'd shield them in reaction to being attacked, floating to lecture but an arm's reach away from Coco and the other Qifrey's girls just seems a suicidally hazardous tactic.

[danvolodar]

On using what we have

You know how adult humans rarely if ever jump or run in their daily lives? You bet if we had wings, we'd fly even less frequently than that! Flying is harder, less energy-efficient, and unfurling the kind of wings that'd carry a human would require a lot of space!

Someone opening their wings and taking off would be a rarer sight than someone randomly starting to parkour.

[danvolodar]

On keeping productive

Now, after two weeks of vacation doing absolutely jack shit, I can finally feel my creative juices flowing; I can actually write some fanfiction!

Of course, the vacation ends on Monday...

[danvolodar]

Об отечественных визуальных новеллах

Очевидный ОТП в Зайчике - Катон:

Absolutely insane gap moe. Тсундерная Катя, милая только с Антоном, но со временем оттаивающая под его влиянием - 12/10.

Марк Порций Катон - лучший цензор.

Спускать старост в мясорубку - морально неверный поступок.

Похоже, в поселке только у Кати в голове нет демонических паразитов. Ну, еще у тошиного бати, возможно. Уже одно это дисквалифицирует Полину (она же Алиса (она же Барбара Брыльска)).

[danvolodar]

On dubious fanfiction

I've been thinking about Blame! again; and I find that I have a lot of things I like about it, but a lot of things that don't really fit my tastes. And that got me thinking on how the same concept could've been done better.

What I like about Blame!

The vast artificially constructed Megasphere

Hard-eyed protagonist on an epic quest traversing it

Ridiculous over the top destruction of the GBE

Killy being a hardcore badass and a glutton for punishment who cannot be kept down

What I dislike about Blame!

The Megasphere in Blame! is obviously not built for human habitation; it's just an alien artificial space, an architect's dream. The GBE's BLAM!s would be a lot more impactful if the tens of kilometers of matter it destroys were actual human-habitable quarters, factories and transport infrastructure rather than just generic architectural primitives (as I've noted here already)

Almost no character interactions, despite the major roles of Cibo and later Sanakan, and implied existence of some support organisation which Killy interacts with in the first chapter

Weirdly minimal role of the mutated humans (electrofishers, corpers, etc), except for Cibo and to a degree some Toha Industries personnel

Even the areas where the mutated humans live don't really feel lived in; it'd be interesting to see more cultural artifacts created by the denizens of the megasphere

How I'd try to fix these issues

Instead of one Killy, send out a group of Agents, treated much like an adventurer party

With Agents recruiting underlings from the denizens of the megasphere as they pass by its many varied societies, the megasphere can be seen from the human eye level and its cultures explored, rather that being seen through an aiming reticle of the GBE

The Agents with their recruited personnel can be treated like XCOM in its remakes, except with the independent human factions of the games already integrated into its ranks and politicking within its framework

Instead of simply the cybernetic organisms as the antagonists, have a larger variety, from a largely analogous independent cybernetic civilisation that simply doesn't want to let the Agents through and does not want to be destroyed by immune system incursions from a neighbouring sector if the Agents punch through to it, to insane sector control AIs, to local civilisations so strange it's unclear whether they're descendants of aliens or toys of transcendent humans

Underscore the transhumanist nature of the setting by the Agents being destroyed, reinstated, rolled back to a backup, warring among their own copies rolled back from different backups, etc

I've actually done some draft exploration of setting and fiction ideas in a TiddlyWiki here. But I'm not really sure - would that even qualify as fanfiction? It's an obviously a 100% derivative idea; on the other hand, it's meaningfully a different setting with a wholly different cast.

[danvolodar]

On representation

The fandom spaces get so tiring!

"Marcille is gay!" "Dagoth Ur is gay!" "Marceline is gay!"

This bi erasure can not continue!

[danvolodar]

On decision paralysis

Oh, since I've mentioned demiurges without clear agenda in case of their victory in K6BD, I kiiiinda don't really follow the issues Jadis has?

Here's her profile shot from the comic; the hole in the background is the aperture of the machine.

See, ten generations of her ancestors built a vast machine for prognostication. In the end, when it was turned on, giving them perfect omniscience, her relatives were killed, and she was locked permanently in a block of ice. That doesn't really deter her (she teleports across the worlds as needed, and appears as a projection whenever she feels like that). What does is the omniscience - in her own world, the past, the present and the future are inscribed in a piece of amber, vast and unchanging. Thus, to her, there is no purpose to any action at all, since she knows in advance both the actions and their consequences (and in the mechanist, predetermined universe of K6BD perfect predictive omniscience is possible).

And, uh, I struggle with this setup on two issues (well, not only me, of course, Jardiscourse was very common in the fan spaces during her arc).

First is the pointlessness of any action when knowing its end results. Consider that we will all die. Except for a handful of us, a century later no trace of our existence will remain. For the rest, the consequences of their actions might last a little bit longer, but even then, in but a blink on the cosmic scale, they will be gone and forgotten. But that is not stopping us from taking whatever actions we consider proper in whatever time we still have alive, is it?

Second is the omniscience itself, and the paralysis that comes with it. We've seen that she does take some actions - simply as evidenced by the fact that she pulled Allison from Rayuba, and took care of her afterwards.

And however Jadis' omniscience works, I can't quite understand why it should interfere in her decision-making process. Whether she gained a perfect snapshot of the multiverse, which allowed her to predict future and reverse-engineer the past perfectly, or whether she gains continued insight into each and every object of her attention, with perfect predictions of consequences of any given action. I can only see two possible outcomes for possessing such an ability, let's call them omniscience-perfect and omniscience-agnostic.

Omniscience-perfect is Jadis making every decision she ever has to make based on perfect predictive information; that is, always choosing the strictly optimal action. Of course, that shouldn't universally lead to victorious outcomes (she has omniscience, not omnipotence), but there's no reason for her to ever say wrong things when interacting with people, for instance, or to miss her targets with spellcasting. The omniscience-perfect outcome obviously cannot be constant inaction and decision paralysis, because of course inaction is not universally the optimal course of action (although of course sometimes it is).

Omniscience-agnostic is Jadis learning of the decisions she will make aaaaall the way to the future, until her death, the moment the machine is turned on, with the decisions made as if she didn't possess the omniscience, and still frozen in time as inevitable. Then I cannot see what the omniscience changes at all, other than perhaps Jadis' own interiority state, since she's still bound to take the same actions the would've taken without the omniscience to begin with.

In both cases, of course, for an outside observer the decisions Jadis makes are, generally speaking, indistinguishable from not possessing omniscience. The reasons are obvious from the omniscience-agnostic scenario, but even for omniscience-perfect, the perfect decisions made can appear erroneous or random because the observer does not possess the omniscience to factor all the circumstances needed for making them perfect.

And that leads us to the final conundrum about the character - how much of what she says to Allison is true at all? She's shown as a victim of her abusive family that thrusts upon her a curse of universal knowledge that she did not want, which ruins all of her plans for being a benevolent ruler of her worlds, as she's now paralysed by that knowledge. But how much of this is true, given how little sense it makes in any omniscience scenario? And how much is simply manipulating Allison for when she wins (which Jadis of course knows if she does)? After all, using OOC knowledge, Jadis the White Witch in Narnia was a liar.

[danvolodar]

On reaching progress through violence

So I've been rereading K6BD, and one theme in particular stood out, since the plot returns to it regularly. There are spoilers below this line, of course.

So, Meti the swordmaster utterly flabbergasts her student, Maya, when the latter brags about being about to conquer the world, asking: "What then". She also points out that Maya doesn't have any fat happy children, and doesn't even know where her mother is.

82 White Chain asks Allison largely the same question during Solomon's martial art tournament - if they win, what then?

But frankly, to me, this whole idea falls flat. Even the products of the Wheel, the demiurges, have no problems coming up with plans for the occasion of conquering the world. Of course, they have different agendas and circumstances, and, say, decision-paralysed Jadis or senile Mammon don't, really, but otherwise, it's pretty clear what the rest would do should they become the Conquering King, at least for foreseeable millennia. If anything, as Solomon demonstrates, even just producing fat happy children is a lot easier when you're the king of the world! So it's really rather strange how Meti's defeated by such a simple conundrum.

But for Allison in particular the question seems trite. The Wheel in its political development seems stuck at slave-owning Antiquity. For a humanities student from the modern world, with its post-Age of Enlightenment political systems, there's a huge amount of work to be done, if they care to build something larger than themselves. Just establishing legitimacy for state systems not based directly on the personal violence by the head of state is a task to span generations! The locals of course would have trouble coming up with concepts like that themselves, but our contemporary would have all the ideas necessary already in their head!

And to be fair, a modern institution-based state opens many possibilities some would consider to be unnatural. Say, Solomon's conundrum between being an autocratic ruler with extreme concentration of power in his own hands, which stifled the growth of his empire, and the fear to let go lest the population is slaughtered the way it was in his youth, as ki rata masters watched and did nothing, can easily be solved in a functional state with separation of powers by simply appointing him defence minister for life, while an actual workable system of governance with meaningful checks and balances handles the daily running of the state.

[danvolodar]

On titles

With Kill Six Billion Demons entering what looks like its final fight stage and no developments towards the protagonists slaying six billion demons in sight, I am somewhat worried the sex billion demons might remain unslain.