So. What's the opposite of a sacrifice?
With the final episode looming it's a question we've been turning in our heads, so I wanted to give my best guess/analysis as to what it might be before Jon and Muna come to tear our hearts out in the final episode.
This is the question Hayward asks Paige, and later Carpenter, and it seems to be the underlying thematic statement of the series, in response to Carpenter's exposition in the first episode of the Silt Verses that introduces us to the fundamentals of the world and system they live in:
CARPENTER:
A god must feed.
A god must be fed.
This is a fact agreed upon across every territory in the Peninsula. And so, really, the only difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...
...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make.
There is a God for anything in their world as long as there is someone believing in it. But all Gods need human sacrifices. A god must feed. A god must be fed.
These simple rules have been used as fascinating and horrifying metaphors of our modern society, and to explore themes of faith and sacrifice throughout the story.
And so the final question the last season proposes is if we can find a way to make something better, that can exist outside of this ultimately unsustainable exploitative system and the harm it inflicts upon ourselves and the world, when it has come to define so much of the way we live and how we think. And that means figuring out the opposite of a sacrifice, if they want to kill the idea, the lie, that is at the heart of their world.
At first I thought the opposite of a sacrifice, of offering up to the gods, was about killing your gods. Starving them out. Refusing to offer up anything. And that is part of it, I think. I mean it's literally been a repeating mantra of multiple characters this season once they've reached they're breaking points. Violence in revolution as a tool to overthrow oppresive systems is sometimes needed and necessary. But what about after? What kind of future or vision for a better world can there be? There needs to be something at the heart of that movement that isn't just about violence against their opressors, because you then define yourself in relation to them.
This is even illustrated in the Many Below god Paige created having predator and prey emeshed together, a movement defined by their resistance against the predators of the world, the beasts, cannot seperate themselves to meaningfully create a better future that exists outside of that dichotomy. I think Hayward realises that even earlier in S2:
HAYWARD:
There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied.
A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare.
Both animals are dead.
Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin.
Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably.
The god must have struck just as the prey died.
White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.
(Unhappily)
And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid.
It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages
I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.
Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.
There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.
Which then makes sense why he's the one proposing the question of what the opposite of a sacrifice is to Paige (and Carpenter), for this very reason.
I think the answer is pretty simple and yet, like most simple truths in this world, it's forgotten and overlooked or twisted as naïve.
Preservation. The opposite of a sacrifice is preservation. To better explain this let me use an example:
If someone who cared about you tells you you're working too hard at your thankless job, sacrificing your sleep, your time, your personal relationships, your physical and mental wellbeing, far past the point considered sane, they'd tell you to stop. To make sure you take care of yourself. Instead of endlessly feeding yourself into a machine to justify your existence.
Applied to the world of the Silt Verses, it's not just self preservation and caring for yourself. It's about caring for, protecting, and preserving the lives of those around you, that is the ultimate act of rebellion and political warfare, the first steps forward towards a better world. Caring for humanity.
Whenever our characters reach a breaking point of turning against their gods, there's a common thread of wanting to save their fellow man, and realising the inadequacy of a god's ability to do that. Whether that's somebody close to them (like Faulkner and Paige):
Or humanity as a whole (VAL and Shrue):
SHRUE:
Use them, pass them on, do not forget the suffering that keeps the engines of this world turning, forget the name of your god and cherish the name of your neighbour that was swallowed up by it-
Cherish your neighbour. Be kinder to one another.
This can even go back to Carpenter's rejection of the Trawler-Man back in S1, her fury at the fact those she loved had been eaten (her family) and would continue to be eaten (Faulkner).
CARPENTER:
(Yelling to the river)
It's over between us, you twin mouthed prick!
Do you hear me?
Does that stir you from your torpor? Pry the barnacles loose from your sodden ears?
My father and mother were Gregory and Sandra Glass. My grandmother was Adalina Glass. My brother was Em.
They died for you.
Every single one of them died for you and they thought it meant something.
My name is Carpenter. And I am still alive!
I have loved you for so long. I have tried to know you for so, so much longer.
And I'm done with you. Here and now. I'm not laying down my life for you.
I'm not dying, do you hear?
The same breaking point for Faulkner at turning against his parish and finally snapping is the idea of Carpenter being offered as a sacrifice, an offering returned, begging for her to live.
I must clarify this is my own interpretation of the question and themes the story proposes. I'm
I'm not sure we'll actually get a hard answer so much as different characters offering their own answers and us as the audience encouraged to think for ourselves what it might be. I think this is what Hayward's answer might be at least, anyway, because like me he's a corny motherfucker:
If a sacrifice is the idea that the most meaningful and transformative thing you can do is to give up your life, your sense of self, to die, then the opposite of that would be to try to keep on living, and finding meaning and transformation in that, surely?