#if you can’t tell I’m really mad about the Hindu/buddhism thing

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

what is this pattern where fgo overstates how ~special~ and ~overpowered~ japanese servants are? genuine question bc none of the grand servants or candidates are japanese. there are no japanese lostbelt kings. none of the japanese servants listed on ooku's event bonus even stand out to me as especially strong in lore

It’s one of those weird things that you at first don’t think is a thing and then you start actually reading and it’s like. O_O.

Like Japanese buddhist religious interpretations are given a stronger influence than other religions that run parallel to Buddhism (see kama/mara: mara is only really linked to kama in Buddhism and it’s basically maras presence alone making them an assassin despite both kama AND Sakura being notable archers, also the fact Indian god kama decided to make a Japanese themed hell depravity pit and that no Indian servants besides kama and parvati have bonuses despite ooku being a lb4 prelude and kama also being an Indian god as an example; also how the Buddhist priestess kiara is essentially always one step ahead of kama even if she does get destroyed at one point) this is also linked to how fate tends to sort of be anti god in the sense they don’t really believe in humans ‘relying’ on gods-whether through worship or actual divine intervention

There’s also the fact that they’ve just straight up released far, far more Japanese servants than other nations. Obvs some of this is just a familiarity bias, but when you also look at how there’s basically no African or South America heroic spirits it’s a bad look that they keep putting them out

This is an older map and it’s just Asia, but you can get a decent idea of just how heavily weighted it is

That being said, even if there are no grand servants who are Japanese they’ve still been either hyped up plenty in story. Fgo went out of its way to establish that more modern heroic spirits are always going to be weaker than ones with greater mystery, yet the shinsengumi and artists like hokusai or bakin are both ssrs and treated as powerful characters by the narrative. In Babylon king gilgamesh specifically tries for summoning Japanese heroes bc, in his words ‘they’re better at slaying demonic creatures’ (says this in the anime at least)(like…there are lots of cultures that have legends of heroes killing monsters????) and out of the eight servant he summons, only two, leonidas and Merlin, aren’t Japanese.

There’s also the fact that writers are implied to be weak heroic spirits, and as a result shakespeare and hans are both low rarity units-but then both sei AND murasaki, semi-obscure-outside-of-Japan authors, are 5stars? They also noticeably buffed murasaki’s combat ability by giving her the ability to use onmyouji, something which she herself says she never really used in life. Of course unit rarity doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but why is Sei so much more powerful than Shakespeare? Shakespeare is literally one of the most famous authors in the world, and his noble phantasm is described as being able to completely mentally cripple someone, yet this isn’t reflected in his gameplay at all

There’s also the fact tametomo is a grand archer candidate, can easily and effortlessly pierce through things such as Constantine’s np with his own, and was able to apparently create a large struggle for a group consisting or servants like super orion (an actual grand archer) Chiron, arjuna, and Ishtar simply to stop one of his arrows. For a guy who’s legend was sinking a boat with his shot. It’s true he had grails powering him both times, but it does read very ‘our guy is the most specialist and coolest of them all’

Musashi also runs into this issue tbh-she’s a much more modern swordswoman, but she had mystic probability deducing eyes, can cut the void, leap through reality, everyone loves her, while non-Japanese people from the similar time period are usually given far less to work with. Or how they insist you need to have a strong, well known legend to manifest as a servant, but then choose relatively obscure tales like the cut tongue sparrow and make her a limited 5 star.

Like idk there’s more to proving a certain group gets favored than JUST having grand servants. I’m not sure how much sense this makes bc it’s late and my typing is NOT working but I hope the gist comes across? I think the thing is we expect there to be SOME favoritism and prioritizing of Japanese myths and history, it is made in japan after all and may hold biases, but it’s annoying when that’s all they ever do

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on House of X#2

I fell way behind on writing these even as I devoured each issue, so I thought I might as well knock these off as the HoX/PoX miniseries come to an end and the “Dawn of X” looms over the horizon. (Also I did a re-read recently and it got my mind buzzing.) 

So let’s get into it!

Moira’s Ten Lives:

It turns out that, like everyone else, I was sort of right/wrong about time travel shenanigans. It’s technically a semi-stable time loop, but I’m not about to quibble. (Incidentally, on a re-read one of the things that’s been really impressive to see with the benefit of hindsight is the way in which Hickman et al. top each issue with the newest high concept or reveal, like some mad plate-spinning act.)

Here’s how the individual lives break down:

Life 1: 

Because everything in this life takes place prior to the activation of her mutant gene (which, talk about a hell of an additive retcon), Moira’s first life is a romanticized, bucolic portrait of innocence not corrupted by worldly knowledge. The emphasis is strongly on family and nature (note the tree motif, which isn’t as prominent as the tower motif but still) as opposed to scientific pursuits.

On the other hand, you definitely get the sense that the perfect nature of this life is a distortion caused by nostalgia, as we’ll see in the next life.

Life 2:

Moira reincarnates for the first time with full knowledge of her previous life, which for all that HoX/PoX has been analyzed through the lens of both Christian and Jewish theology, can’t help but draw from Hindu and Buddhist thought.

One key aspect of her power is that Moira is given an enormous developmental leg up, being born with all of the skills of a grown adult. Suprisingly, we don’t actually get to see Moira make much use of some of the broader implications of her mutant power.

As a good scientist, Moira uses observation and experimentation to prove to herself that her memories are real and that she can change the future through her actions, two critical pieces of information.

Speaking of Buddhism, Moira’s “curse” concept is tied to the Second Noble Truth, that suffering comes from attachment. In this case, Moira’s problem is an attachment to her memories of her idealized first life: when she meets Kenneth Cowan for the second time, the emotional connection isn’t there because her foreknowledge of her first life changes her perceptions.  

At the same time, I wonder how much of her reaction to this upheaval is due to her realizing that her first life wasn’t as perfect as she thought it was (the flaws she focuses on), or that she herself has changed and isn’t content to live and die as a rural schoolteacher.

In this timeline, Charles decides to come out of the closet as a mutant on national television, which is a different tack to how he’s approached pro-mutant activism in the past, although there is a common theme of putting his faith in public debate. Sadly a faith that will be broken. 

Despite her misgivings about her own mutant gifts, Moira decides to fly to America to meet Charles...and dies in a plane crash. I wonder how much of her heel turn in life 3 is due to the Kenneth Cowan issue and how much of it comes from her experiencing violent death for the first time?

Life 3:

In Moira’s third life, she turns sharply away from Charles (nicely symbolized by her turning away on a pub stool) to try to cure the mutant gene, which brings her face-to-mask with Destiny, who is the closest thing that this issue has to an antagonist (at least in the sense an outside force acting on Moira and changing her behavior).

The conversation between them is split in two: in the first, Destiny does a good job of laying out why narrative of individual choice/consumerism don’t really work with regard to mutant cures, because of pre-existing structures of power and inequality that will turn an option into a mandate. Something that Whedon’s “Gifted” arc and X3 should have maybe mentioned. 

(Incidentally, even before we got the later infographic from Powers of X #4 about mutant genocides, I thought this didn’t bode well for Wanda Maximoff.)

After setting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation - if you don’t change your behavior, this scenario will keep recurring - Destiny then gives us the next big reveal of the issue. Moira’s powers of resurrection only give her ten or eleven lives, that there is a way out of the cycle of endless rebirth if she makes the “right choice.” (Word is still out on the other aspects of the Eightfold Path.) I don’t know what the eleventh signifies - after House of X #5, I saw a lot of people suggesting pod-rebirth as her eleventh life, but I dunno. 

However, I did spot something this time: Destiny “see[s] ten lives...eleven if you make the right choice at the end.” This may be me reaching, but it suggests that Destiny knows already that Moira isn’t going to get it right in lives four through nine, but isn’t telling her. Which, given the immense potential involved in combining their powers, suggests that it’s not just about Rube Goldberging her way to the Good Ending but rather that Moira has to experience her defeats personally in order to grow into the person who would make the right choice. 

Life 4:

Having received a fiery “swift spiritual kick to the head,” Moira makes two changes in her life. First, she begins to approach the question of mutancy from a systems perspective - although I have some significant issues with Hickman’s evolutionary biology. Second, she looks deeper past Charles Xavier’s “confidence...arrogance,” to see the real Charles beneath, and the two fall in love (which makes the second time in her lives).

The result seems to be the 616, breaking down into the Gifted Years (the Kirby/Lee years), the Time of Hate and Fear (the All-New X-Men given to us by Claremont et al.), and “the lost decade,” which given the associated panel is a pretty clear slam on the last ten years of X-Men storytelling, most pointedly Avengers vs. X-Men. 

This page (p. 17) has made me somewhat out of step with a lot of folks who’ve been arguing online that Moira’s sixth life must be the 616 - a trend we’re going to see repeating.

Regardless, this timeline is the first to end with Sentinel genocide, resulting in Moira for the first time seeing the dystopian dilemma. Much of what follows is a series of unsuccessful iterative attempts to solve this dilemma.

Life 5:

In her first go, Moira decides to see if accelerating the process will work, showing Charles what happened to his dream in her past lives. Hickman’s use of the term “radicalized” is key here to understanding what’s going on with Krakoa in X^1, because as Moira learns (and Charles will learn), separatism alone will not do the trick. Mutants got an 11-year head start to build up their defenses, and the Sentinels came anyway.

Life 6:

Because this life remains completely redacted, the fandom has gone absolutely nuts in speculation. One common speculation I’ve seen is that the X^3 timeline is Life 6, which I find quite puzzling. The reveal in Powers of X #1 that Cylobel is stuck in Nimrod’s femtofluid database is strongly suggestive that X^3 is Life 9, unless we’re going to say that in alternate timelines in which so many variables change, there’s always going to be a black brain hound mutant who looks identical to Cylobel and who dies in the exact same way. Which strikes me as falling afoul of Occam’s Razor.

Life 7:

Here’s where we really start zeroing in on the dystopic dliemma, as Moira tries to forestall the inevitable by eliminating the Trask bloodline. It doesn’t work because of the whole idea that AI is a discovery not an invention, and as a result Sentinels will always come about and the only thing that can be changed is the name of the person who’ll discover them.

Here is where Hickman’s obsession with mechanical vs. biological transhumanism (and/or singularities) really come into play. If you’ve read his book Transhuman (which I don’t necessarily recommend, as it comes with some rather nasty sophomoric undercurrents that have aged very badly in the last ten years), you’ll know that Hickman considers biological transhumanism to be superior to the alternative. Something to keep in mind when thinking about mutants vs. the man-machine supremacy, mutants vs. the technarchy, etc. 

Interestingly, we never learn what happened to Xavier or the X-Men in this life.

Once again, Moira is “radicalized” by the seeming inevitability of robotic genocide, although it’s noticeable that her focus is shifting from humans to their creations.

Life 8:

Her solution is to go to Octopusheim and ally with Magneto, presumably because the Master of Magnetism is her first bet to go up against the mutants.

Magneto reacts to “the good news” with thermonuclear war, and gets curb-stomped by a combination of the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

Important note that by this point, Moira dismisses the idea of any great good beyond that only of mutants, and we go for another round of radicalization.

Life 9:

At this point, Moira decides to ally with Apocalypse out of desperation, presumably because Apocalypse is a revolutionary who can’t be killed as easily as Magneto can. 

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this is X^2 (and I think X^3) as well, and while Apocalypse’s power levels allow him to prosecute a war “without end,” it doesn’t solve the strategic stalemate.

Life 10:

I don’t know what the two black panels suggest; it’s quite possible that they’re just pauses for emphasis. 

In her tenth life, Moira takes a step back and focuses instead on “all the old ways of thinking.” Here, I think we see a preview of the Krakoan solution: mutant unity will unlock synergies of cooperation that were not possible while working with limited mindsets and only a part of mutankind. 

Notably, we don’t know when Moira or anyone else found out about the possibilities of Krakoa and mutant biotechnology - we know some of it existed in Life 9 because we see Krakoan flowers being used, but we don’t know if Moira encountered it earlier or whether the higher order stuff was in use. I somehow doubt the resurrection system was intact, because it would seem to make Mister Sinister’s breeding program largely irrelevant.  

Once more, we return to Powers of X #1, as we now know what Xavier learned from Moira’s mind.

Infographics:

The whole circle wrap-around thing is very evocative of other signs we’ve seen (on Cerebro when Xavier uses it for various higher-order stuff, on the Librarian’s face, etc.), but it actively makes the map harder to read, which I think is the point. 

(Also, while I’m complaining: Comixology is not well set up for these large-scale infographics, because it keeps crashing on me when I try to zoom in. Very annoying.)

Note: earlier lives are more leisurely, things more spaced out, and then the pace accelerates as things get more intense.

One interesting difference between Life 4 and 616 canon: Moira and Xavier marry when she’s 23 and establish the Xavier School 12 years later. 

Life 5 is interesting, because we’re seeing repeated themes of Moira in comas, even when it might not be necessary. For example, what’s the dramatic purpose of having the two Sentinel attacks?

In Life 7, I noticed that Larry Trask isn’t killed with the rest of his family. Is it because he turned out to be a mutant?

Life 8 is the first instance where I think the initial panelling let us down. The original one-two punch heavily implied that Magneto was defeated on his first attack on Washington D.C, but here we learn that he ruled America for eight years before being defeated and killed. (Incidentally, this suggests that the visions he’ll have of his failures don’t include this life).

As other people have noted about Life 9, Xavier and Magneto are killed in Years 19 and 21 respectively, which makes it easy to rule out their appearances as happening in Life 9. Also, it’s significant that the first horsemen aren’t on earth (almost certainly on Arakko/No-Place).

Life 10 including Moira’s marriage to Joseph McTaggert despite presumably knowing from earlier lives that he would be abusive suggests that Moira may well have gone into the marriage because she needed Proteus to form the Five. Not sure how I feel about that. Finally, I’m a bit puzzled about what the schism was and whether it was genuine vs. feigned (after all, Moira is faking her death, so there’s plenty of skullduggery going on).