#ME SHAKING EVERYONE LIKE AHHH GOD I LOVE THINKING ABOUT LEVIATHAN SO MUCH

[theendofviolet]

“dots” vs “lines”

leviathan is full to the brim of the contrasts between stagnation and progress forward. the penultimate battle and vergilius’s internal fight and discussion with carmen are an encapsulation of that. 

there’s a noted repeated concept about “the flow”. to garnet, vergilius explains it as such:

the “flow” seems to be, to vergilius, this idea of something that pulls you forward in life - like water down a river, unable to be diverted. the water has no choice but to follow it. but of note is that the “flow” is still movement of a kind. the water should not stay in one place. however, to vergilius, his so-called flow has slowed to the point of being “weak” and “stalled”. he had a dream once, a dream to change the world that he shared with roland, which eventually became snuffed out by the immense tragedy of tomerry and the orphanage incident

meanwhile, jumsoon, mister “dotty” himself, is obsessed with the idea of capturing moments frozen in time. its likely why Schadenfreude was born from his body, as the very idea of the abnormality is a “gaze” trapped in a box. to him, time can be broken up into moments to be witnessed, gazed at, one at a time. “dots”. to him, a child with a vibrant life can be crushed into a single beautiful gem to witness. even the objects being sold at the auction are of things captured as representation of a flash of time - such as the man dancing, everlasting, in a glass box

this of course is why vergilius eventually succeeds against him, and also succeeds against the manipulations of carmen, because what both are focused on is “momentary satisfaction”. this is not enough for vergilius. to him, the flow is everything, and as long as the flow can be followed, “dots” become “lines”

"For a person who is moving, a point is just a fleeting moment. The dot is just a moment. If the countless moments of despair that came to me pile up and become years, the moments that were just dots will become lines and create a path of possibility."

vergilius ends leviathan with a new course, a new goal. he will move forward even if this takes him “into the hell of my karma” where he “will rest there alone”. he cannot be stagnant or stalled any longer.

after all, the flow cannot be stopped