ORT and Subliminal Bigotry: A paranoiac leap
This is a little long. There is discussion of Nasu, xenophobia, racism, and some weirdo thoughts. under the cut contains all of this, so if you are looking for thoughts on lostbelt 7’s whiteness, here you go. also spoilers.
No introduction needed—just look at this thing.
This is what will destroy the planet; a big, foreign, jet-black alien. On the flip-side is that thing’s heart:
Now, for good measure, here’s Camazotz:
These are the two major antagonists of the Lostbelt, besides Daybit and Tezcatlipoca. The one thing in common is that they’re both black, blood-sucking vampires. The story slowly codes specific characters as darker skinned to depict their motifs and their role in the story, and weirdly, it begins with clothes. I made a list:
U-Olga Marie and her tacky ass weird ass design. She is promptly turned into a good guy.
Rasputin, or Kirei Kotomine. He wears a black-ish robe with blue. He’s basically sort of on the side of the heroes.
Daybit and Tezcatlipoca, who both are insanely pasty people, are the bad guys here. They both wear clothing that is jet-black and modern—an allegiance to ORT.
The Black Panther Guy. His army is faceless and has masks, setting up the motif of mask = faceless enemy. You can’t see their emotions.
Kingprotea Alter, who wears latex. She is white, but the latex makes it near impossible. When she dons the mask, she becomes a faceless hostile enemy. When it’s off, she is the gentle white woman.
Nitocris Alter, who serves as “the token dark skin” of Chaldea. She becomes an Alter solely to fight against the evil, destructive Camazotz who goes berserk. At this point, alter is coded as “dark” in the Fate series, so the clear distinction is made that Alter here literally notes a character’s melanin.
Ereshkigal Alter, who is another dark skin. After Nitocris goes, she fills this role.
Camazotz, who is a blood-sucking vampire. He’s the only character who remains fully antagonistic throughout (besides ORT), and transforms into his beast state out of grief and rage. He is literally the de-facto dark-skin here.
ORT, who is jet-black. While without his heart, he is white, ORT progressively advances color after color, reaching a state of brown / bronze before being eliminated. He has no face (repeating the masks as a faceless), and serves as the hostile, Chaldea hating wall.
This escalation is important—it depicts an increasing level of hostility through melanin until we reach the level of blackness. ORT unironically shares fears of destruction from an outsider (he’s an alien) destroying the beautiful nation (which is nahui mictlan), a common conspiracy pointed towards immigrants and other minorities (especially blacks), and ORT steals powers to get stronger and stronger to kill his enemies faster and more efficiently. By the time you reach the Beast Class of Camazotz, you are used to the usual trope of sympathizing with the Beast; they’re people, after all, and they want to change the world in their own stagnant, awful ways. ORT, however, is different. ORT is literally not from here, and ORT doesn’t care.
Veering off this topic, for a moment, which does relate, Nasu depicts America as having the worst magecraft.
TYPE-MOON wiki summarizes here: “[…] but it is also known to be aiming for the complete degradation of Magic into Magecraft through the advancement of human technology. On bad terms with the Clock Tower due to its apparent hostility to the concealment of Mystery as enforced by the Assocation.”
I am bringing this up specifically because primarily, America has been given a bad rap in the Nasuverse. Yes, america sucky doodoo it’s racist and borderline fascist. But it’s mostly because it’s *outside* Japan. What I am positing sounds weird, but Nasu has been known for not really liking his international audience. Authors tend to insert their beliefs into their works, and so Nasu is literally shitting on America. He has always not liked the place. And the thing is that this is easily connected to Nasu’s fear of space — he’s afraid of the damn solar system! He’s afraid of what’s out there! America and his foreign audience can be scary, it can be insane! Hence, his reluctance to get official TLs of Mahoyo, Tsukihime, and other Fate works until very recently.
Veering back to ORT, the reason why I am saying all of this is because ORT is representative of the unknown. The Nasuverse has been known for it’s antiblackness and sometimes flagrant disrespect of deities outside of Britain and Japan (The Australia debacle, for one), and ORT serves as like, this weird “colonizer” metaphor. The black alien monster is going to destroy this beautiful culture, this beautiful world, and I have to stop it, because if I don’t, I can’t get back home. It’s impossible to reason or talk to it or do anything except fight it. It’s not a leftist thing at all. It’s more like James Cameron’s Avatar where it’s a conservative film, fighting off the “globalist” humans in the name of nationalistic interest. And it doesn’t help that ORT is basically the face of blackness here, as far as a reach it may sound. He is the culmination of these themes in Lostbelt 7 surrounding these characters.
Kukulkan also is a major factor in this—when ORT lost his heart, it became *white*. Weak. Kukulkan is white, though, and she’s really nice… she’s strong… she wants to have sex with you…
And really, that’s ORT’s heart! It’s beating, living heart! ORT without it is just an angry angry shell that raves and roars for bloodlust (like it already wasn’t), and ultimately Nasu creates no avenues to talk to ORT. It’s not the point. ORT is the enemy. But we can romance a piece of ORT—the piece that is kind, the piece that loves, the piece that is a whitey, and the rest is trying to attain it’s blackness again so it can finish everyone off.
See, historical accuracy is something I ignore for Fate. It’s impossible. But ORT is not real—and is conducive to a strange reading of antiblackness. This fear that this foreigner, the most powerful thing in existence, is a giant black spider monster who is faceless and can’t talk, and hates you, wants you, your family, your nation dead, and it’s coming, and it will kill you.
Maybe I’m just overthinking this. Maybe ORT being jet-black was just the nightmare vision.
