William refusing to definitively gender his own fursona because maybe he just doesn't have the vocabulary to express a nonbinary identity but also definitely to leave room for customers to assume the Spring Bonnie character is Fredbear's love interest.
i'm thinking about mardy fish's breaking point where he was talking about final against federer who was literally murdering him and he said something like "to this day i thinks he dropped some games in second set on purpose so that it won't end in an hour because people bought tickets"
This is an Iok Kujan appreciation post. No, not like that. Obviously, Iok is a spectacular prat whose obliviousness, bull-headedness and all-round stupidity results in multiple catastrophes. It'd stretch a point to say he's responsible for everything bad in the series but for Tekkadan specifically, it would have improved things immeasurably if Hashmal had swatted Iok the moment it woke up.
However, as I noted in one of my previous posts, Iok is the best written character in the show and I don't mean that (entirely) as a joke. I genuinely think he is a masterclass in creating a hatable antagonist.
We should start with who Iok is within that story, or rather what. Iok is heir to one of the Seven Star families making up Gjallarhorn's ruling council. He is part of an aristocracy and specifically, an aristocracy responsible for colonial administration. Being English, my mind immediately goes to the British Empire, sending various chinless wonders out to make everyone's lives miserable. It seems this tradition is alive and well three centuries post-Calamity.
Most of the named Gjallarhorn characters are scions of the ruling families who hold positions of authority. McGillis Fareed and Gaelio Bauduin are inspectors. Carta Issue leads one fleet. Iok is a commander within another. To my mind, it's clear they've all been promoted based on bloodline, not merit. McGillis is perhaps the only one genuinely qualified for his position, and even he gets rocketed up to Brigadier General by dint of taking over as head of his family. Gaelio, meanwhile, though more than a pretty face, doesn't seem temperamentally suited to his job: he's bored and incurious without McGillis' prompting, and overly reliant on brute force in combat. His big strength is he learns to be better, eventually. But then there's Carta who . . .
Well, let's dig into this because Carta is most obviously similar to Iok. The head of a very powerful family, placed under the guardianship of another member of the Seven Stars, with a host of dedicated followers propping up some seriously questionable leadership choices, she ultimately meets an ignoble fate after causing our protagonists heartbreak. It's another of those parallels I talked about last time, and like those, the two arcs have different flavours. You see, we're given room to empathise and even sympathise with Carta. She genuinely is one of McGillis' oldest friends, by dint of urging him towards self-worth, something nobody else had ever done before. McGillis sacrificing her for his greater good has impact precisely because there are glimpses of decency and humanity behind Carta's pomposity and self-importance.
Oh, she absolutely is pompous and self-important. A martinet, clinging to rigid social and military rules without flexibility, she has no qualms over fighting and killing literal children. She's not a good person. But maybe she could have been. She has an actual sense of honour and holds to it stubbornly. She is capable of caring about others and once upon a time, told etiquette to go screw itself for the sake of befriending someone interesting. And I think it's crucial to note she's actually reasonably competent, in spite of her manner. She adapts to Tekkadan's tactics in orbit, promptly dealing with the nano-mirror chaff, and later blind-sides them with an orbital drop. Her main failing is that she doesn't treat combat as a fight for survival but a duel, to be fought accordingly. She simply isn't prepared for the more desperate and utilitarian tactics ranged against her.
The reason this is important is because Iok, by contrast, is profoundly incompetent. It is noted over and over again, by multiple characters in the show, that he doesn't know what he's doing. Carta sticks too rigidly to the rulebook; it's unclear if Iok has even read it. One gets the impression he glanced at it once, got bored within three pages, and blundered on regardless because no one has the authority to fire him.
Rightly or wrongly, one of the best ways to strip the audience's sympathy for a character is to make them incompetent. Not unskilled or dumb – there are plenty of ways to play those as endearing. But actual incompetence, encompassing a lack of awareness over being so, is another matter. Seeing someone fail repeatedly without acknowledgement or effort to improve creates the antitheses of that sweet feeling of watching someone excelling at their job. It's frustrating. It's annoying. It makes you glad to see the back of the character.
It can also be funny. Absent sympathy, it's easy to laugh at dingbats who keep messing up. Innumerable shows find humour in this very ancient joke. Iron-Blooded Orphans, however, plays Iok's incompetence deadly straight. The man is a disaster for friend and foe alike: his failures come with a butcher's bill and a body count. Mikazuki's growing paralysis, Naze, Amida and the Turbines, Iok's own soldiers – time and again we are shown the bloody fallout of Iok's blundering.
And time and again, we see him escape without meaningful consequence. Because in a story full of characters walking a razor thin line between success and failure, with their very survival at stake, Iok has the luxury of insulation from harm.
That's the key part. Because Iok is far from the only character to be naïve about how and why things work the way they do. He's definitely not the only one who needs basic fundamentals explained to him in simple terms (*cough* Orga *cough* Kudelia *cough* Shino *cough* – you get the point). But unlike the rest, he can get away with it. He was born into a family with power and connections, he's coddled by a system geared to the advantage of people like him, and he has the reflected glow of his father's legacy granting him supporters who hope he might grow up to be similarly great. This is not someone capable of blowing everything on an ill-advised quest for revenge. The most he suffers for that is being sent to his room. The man nearly causes a city to be wiped off the map and carries on regardless, unpunished.
Which would be bad enough in itself. Being a selfish, entitled prick usually is. But Iok's characterisation goes one step further, in that he is written to have the shape of redeeming qualities. He is brave and forthright. He is willing to lead from the front. He seeks to honour those under his command. In someone else, these could lend a semblance of nobility. But Iok? Iok's bravery merely means he doesn't heed warnings of danger. His attempts at leadership invariably backfire and make every situation worse. And rather than listening to his men's requests to get to safety, he invalidates their sacrifice by rushing back to the front to make himself feel better, forcing more comrades into harm's way. Over and over, we are shown how Iok's self-absorption warps every single positive trait he possesses.
Without this, he'd be a twit who keeps falling on his face. With it, his status as a total jackass is elevated to something so unutterably poisonous that being crushed to jam feels like the least he deserves. And all without ever coming into direct contact with the protagonists. Iok is the vapid embodiment of a callous system that places power in the hands of people who wield it without skill, for the pettiest of reasons, all the while truly believing they are the heroes. He doesn't need to actually shoot anybody; he enables destruction from afar, stoking the schemes of opportunists in an effort to soothe a dented ego. He heaps utter misery on Tekkadan and it is only via sheer fluke – and Iok's rush to do something important – that they get any chance to strike back.
I don't want to claim this is deft. But sometimes you don't need to be. Sometimes you need to craft a character so perfectly hatable that them getting away with things becomes actively painful, in order that their fate will be a moment of triumph, snatched amid tragedy.
In a series shot through with beautifully-rendered violence pitched a little too far towards horrific to enjoy without queasiness, Iok Kujan dying horribly brings nothing so much as a sigh of relief. At least in the end, amidst all the remaining injustices, Akihiro was able to deliver much overdue comeuppance to a man who would never have known it otherwise. And it wouldn't have worked nearly so well if Iok hadn't be pitched to be so perfectly repellent.
Other reference posts include:
IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 1)
IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 2)
IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (corrigendum) [mainly covering my inability to recognise mythical wolves]
IBO reference notes on … three key Yamagi scenes
IBO reference notes on … three key Shino scenes
IBO reference notes on … three key Eugene scenes
IBO reference notes on … three key Ride scenes
IBO reference notes on … the tone of the setting
IBO reference notes on … character parallels and counterpoints
IBO reference notes on … Iron-Blooded Orphans: Gekko
IBO reference notes on … an act of unspeakable cruelty
IBO reference notes on … original(ish) characters [this one is mainly fanfic]
