#stultifera navis

[endspeaker]

goo goo baby

[sleepyminty]

From genshin to whatever the fuck limbus and arknights are doing right now, how fun is your water stage of your game?

[dankashuartist]

based on

[hawberries]

if you’re wondering how it feels to have Corroserum and Hoshiguma at E2 during Stultifera Navis, it feels good

[cerastes]

Didi!?

[000yul]

i appreciate that arknights went beyond what you would expect out of a eldritch horror cult story and into the detail of why people would join such a cult (or at least be sympathetic), why it continues to persist, why iberia has been so unsuccessful at eradicating it.. it's a really refreshing perspective. the seaborn are completely alien amoral monsters, sure, but the people who align with them do so for very human reasons. revenge, spite, a longing for something more, a rejection of iberian society - these apply to both the native iberians who no longer feel any community with or allegiance to from a cruel, overbearing ruling power, and the aegir refugees exploited and thrown away like trash…

this skill in fleshing out the many facets of human response to uncontrollable misfortune is a strength in arknights writing - the catastrophes and how society responds to them, as well as oripathy etc. being the prime example of course. i just think it's particularly notable here because of how much eldritch abominations are traditionally an external, Other threat, but here, the writing conveys a strong message: humans divided themselves along clumsy lines and failed their own, and that's not something you can blame the seaborn for

(saint carmen said something like 50% of the aegir taken from gran faro back then had cult links. the flip side of that: 50% did not. nonetheless - no one returned from their time with the inquisition. and how many liberi did they miss in their mad rush back then? amaia was a liberi, after all…)

fitting that their enemy is the seaborn - a species that is the purest, ultimate representation of the us-vs-them mentality (kin or not kin)—to the complete exclusion of all culture, the ability to relate to those not their own, and everything that defines humanity

[hanteeyo]

captain alfonso and his chiefmate

arknights gave me sad old men love in the bg of this event

[gonewiththevoid]

Captain Alfonso truly is An Arknights NPC Of All Time.

He’s an old timey sailor. He’s been undergoing monsterification via eating monster remains for 60 years. He’s bisexual. He’s about 60 years older than he should be. He’s an Iberian Legend. He considers his ship to be the true Iberia and refers to the mainland as Old Iberia. He talks shit to Abyssal Hunters and gets away with it. He’s old friends with one of the top dogs of the Inquisition who’s also, coincidentally, got an artificially extended lifespan. He doesn’t remember his monster lover’s original race, gender, or even form. He wonders, upon learning his ship will sink, what flame grilled sea monster will taste like. He has been doing a Tom and Jerry routine with a tiny blue bastard for 60 years. The last monster he slew was himself.

[ammyamarant]

The original event teaser for Stultifera Navis is so funny because it implies the main conflict will be between Specter and Irene, but in the actual event Specter is flirting with Irene so much she practically sticks her head between Irene's legs.

[matt-lifesage]

Arknights can please you chill with the insane worldbuilding implications for FIVE MINUTES?

[czerwonywilk]

just a few more days AND THEN

[sunder-the-gold]

What was Amaia's deal? ["Stultifera Navis", Arknights]

Some characters are harder to understand than others, either because they're good at lying to themselves, good at lying to others, or both.

Amaia is one of those characters, and [Stultifera Navis] did the readers no favors in getting to understand her when it waited until later into the event's story to reveal anything about her true motivations, at a time when too many other things are happening, and only in a flashback that we see after she’s dead.

Misanthropy

As a native Liberi rather than a descendant of Cultist Aegirians washed up on the shore, Amaia would not have grown up indoctrinated in the Church of the Deep's philosophies, and would have joined it later in life, as an outsider, with a deliberate purpose.

Amaia hated humanity, to the point of self-loathing. We never learn the reason why, though someone else speculated that her throw-away comment about "artificial borders" suggested she had a bad experience with international war. She definitely has strong and negative opinions about human sacrifice, which suggests to me that someone important to her laid down their life for a country or cause, while she thought they died in vain for people who didn't care about them at all.

However she became acquainted with the Church of the Deep, one can suppose her reasons for trying to become a Sea Monster came from a desire to shed her humanity and become part of something where sacrifice was not altruism, but reflex, and appreciated but not celebrated by the community. Creatures that had no capacity for hatred and no need for love, or that only knew love.

But by the time Amaia became a bishop, she knew all too well how even her fellow cultists were ultimately human, even after becoming Seaborn. No matter how much she transformed herself, Amaia found that the only way she could truly lose her humanity to the swarm was to die and feed herself to it.

She wanted to give the monsters the tools to better understand and destroy humanity while counseling the Endspeaker about what parts of her knowledge and understanding she didn't want the Endspeaker to learn.

Anthropology

For someone committed to destroying human civilization and shedding her own humanity, Amaia was curiously involved in cultural pursuits. One could suppose she had already learned how to dance, to write, and to read foreign languages before she lost her faith in humanity, but that doesn't explain why she continued to work as a translator after she had become a full-time bishop for the Church of the Deep.

Perhaps even that, you could dismiss by supposing the cult needed all the legitimate revenue its members could generate, and those were the only skills she could sell.

But that doesn't explain her interest in Aegirian culture.

After the protagonists defeat the jellyfish-bird, we see a memory of Amaia talking with Quintus about Laurentina, whom they’ve already captured and experimented upon. Amaia tries to dissuade Quintus from making "too many comparisons" (experiments) on Specter, lest Specter come to hate them and refuse to tell Amaia any more about Aegir.

Quintus doesn’t understand why she wants to ask Specter more about her life in Aegir, when she could talk to the First To Speak instead.

Amaia makes it clear that she hates Aegir and the Abyssal Hunters. “Self-destructive soldiers, self-righteous country. Falling into a self-inflicted trap.”

She says she wants to “deconstruct, witness, caress, break” human civilization. And even as Specter, Laurentina loved Aegir more than any Aegirian Amaia had ever spoken to, and thus her best source of knowledge about it. (Not entirely surprising, as none of the Aegir Amaia could have met before Laurentina would have ever seen Aegir.)

But I thought that seemed like a lot of effort that did nothing to advance her goals. It’s not like she was trying to learn more about Aegir to more effectively circumvent their defenses, which is probably what Quintus thought she wanted to learn and why he told her to ask The First To Speak instead.

Perhaps Amaia was desperately looking for anything in humanity she thought would be worth preserving. Anything she could love that would convince her to stop helping the Sea Monsters. And who better to give her that reason than someone who loved a native culture which Amaia had never really learned about?

Pleasant Lies

When Laurentina rues how she was found on the beach by rotten people, Amaia protests that she thought she had made a positive first impression on Laurentina.

The flashback shows Amaia arguing against too many experiments on Laurentina.

When Amaia and Specter met in Grand Faro, Amaia invited her to find her again after she had recovered her memories.

When they met again on the golden dreadnought, Amaia engaged in friendly conversation with Laurentina and invited her to dance.

Amaia's final request to the Endspeaker was for it to do whatever Laurentina asked of it, to “pay back the debt” for the data they got out of her.

Ugly Truth

Amaia's first question to Laurentina was not "How are you?" but "How did Aegir make you?"

Amaia was one of the cultists who found Laurentina, deceived her into trusting them, and then eagerly participated in interrogating her, brainwashing her, and experimenting upon her.

In the promotion record for Specter the Unchained, Laurentina says of Amaia, "She was in charge of recording down my mental state and providing feedback after the experiment. Given how knowledgeable and accomplished she was, it's a pity she was so well-suited for this job. She might've treated me the nicest among the experimenters, but you know what, Gladiia? She never actually liked me. In fact, she had a lot of things to say about the way we refused to follow nature's ordained trajectory."

Amaia personally worked to rob Laurentina of her freedom, her identity, her sanity, and her health, with the ultimate purpose of Amaia abandoning her humanity, and helping the Sea Monsters kill Laurentina, her people, all of humanity… all while trying to convince Laurentina that she was her friend.

Amaia argued against provoking Specter's hatred, not because she cared about Specter's hatred, but because she hadn't yet learned as much as she wanted from her captive.

Explicitly according to narration, Amaia started a cordial conversation and dance with Laurentina on the ship as a stalling tactic, to give the Endspeaker more time to eat, learn, and evolve.

Even asking the Endspeaker to grant Laurentina any request seems like a nasty joke, given that Laurentina had already made it clear that the only payment she wanted from Amaia for her "debt" was to personally murder Amaia.

After that conversation, and based on Amaia's intimate study of Laurentina's mind, Amaia could not imagine that Laurentina would wish for anything other than the Endspeaker's death, which the Endspeaker would not oblige. The only conclusion to the Endspeaker seeking out Laurentina to make such an offer would be a battle to the death that Amaia expected the Endspeaker would win.

[yuki-kazami]

I'm so glad I've decided to re-read Stultifera Navis now that I've done so much more deep diving into the Arknights story compared to when it was my first event. Back then it was intimidating and mysterious, all of these new elements, a world that exists so far beyond the boundaries of this story, and yet all the same, a driven character tale of how each would struggle against a seemingly immovable enemy.

Now, reading through it once more, knowing the drives of all the characters within, the stakes of the situation, my deeper emotional connections with personal favorites such as the hunters, I'm awed at the scope of it. It is not so many characters as Lonetrail, nor as earthshattering, but the passion for Iberia, for Aegir, for the world as they knew it is so empowering and raw! The driving orchestral music, the dim and grimy tones of the Eye of Iberia, the reckoning of emotions as the Inquisitors finally see the grand scale of what Iberia once was. Jordi's personal journey from a confused townsfolk to finding a passion for saving others.

We have more stereotypical villains, but we get so many interesting players besides. Ulpianus, The Last Knight, Garcia, Alfonso, Amaia. Every one has their own relationship with the sea and it's so compelling to see them all play out. Personalities and weapons clash, cooperation is bargained, sacrifices are made, all for the concept of the world they once thought Golden.

I can't deny that despite their folly, the heady air of Iberia's Golden Age makes me want to see it once more, to see the sort of society that made these grand works fight back once more against the sea that took so much from it.

I'm still only halfway through my re-read, but Stultifera Navis reminds me of why it was my favorite event for so long, and for the sort of narrative it is looking to tell, I think it is still unmatched within Arknights, even if Lonetrail hit my emotions more deeply in its grief and vision for the future.

The Golden Age Will Return Again!

[stormboundally]

UNAUTHORIZED FUCKING THING

BLOW IT UP NOW

[honouredsnakeprincess]

I think we can say, therefore, that Juan Eduardo Cirlot predicted arknights and the stultifera navis event.

[cerastes]

'stultifera navis' is a reference? I mean, when I saw people going "oh it means stupid boat" figured that that wasn't *quite* the whole story but no one's explained what else it means.

You know how we are intimately familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave?

This thing? Alright, so Plato didn't make just one allegory. Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes from Plato's "Republic", specifically Book VII. In Book VI, one can find the Allegory of the Ship of Fools. Long story short, the allegory's intent is to represent the problems of leadership and governance in a political system where the key figures aren't chosen based on expert knowledge, but rather, other things altogether ('divine right' is a good example).

Now, with this in mind, we talk about Stultifera Navis, a satirical allegory from 1494 by one Sebastian Brant, a German humanist. It's other title is Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam, in medieval German, all meaning the same: "Ship of Fools". It's worth noting that the Ship of Fools was a popular concept in this era, much like the internet really likes the Allegory of the Cave! Humanity has always been the same in some regards.

Brant's Stultifera Navis was about a fleet, the Fleet of Fools, bound for the Paradise of Fools and, without getting too into it, because it's a decently long read consisting of over one hundred brief satires, it serves as a criticism towards the Christian Church and how it was, largely, a mangle of underqualified fools not only having WAY too much agency in the lives of WAY too many people, but also, it was driving itself in such a hilariously self-destructive manner that it eventually sinking was practically inevitable. Brant creates a character, the Saint Grobian, whom Brant made into the patron saint of vulgar and crass people, so not only was he making a whole book with over 100 little stories about how much a dumbass collective the Church was, he also got spicy and threw in his own OC, Grobian the Hedgehog, the worst and shittiest of them all, and the one that codified the Church most closely.

Now, you may be thinking, "Hey, did Brant get fucking burned at the cross for this or something? Wasn't criticism of the Church the leading cause of death back in those days right after being invaded by Church for no reason?". Well, there was a SPECIAL JUTSU you could use back in the day, one that rendered you naught but a little birthday guy that couldn't be killed for criticism: Employing the voice of the fool. Y'see, Court Fools were allowed to say whatever they wanted, because they were court fools, and this little loophole allowed certain figures of the time, like Desiderius Erasmus, to criticize the Church openly, as he did in "The Praise of Folly", and when the Churchboyz came to his house with pikes and broadswords, demanding he step right out to they could eviscerate him for the SIN of speaking ill against Our Most Righteous, Loving, And Considerate Of Institutions, The Holy Church Itself, Erasmus threw his arms up in mock surrender and yelled "I'm just a little fool! The work was written from the voice and perspective of but a fool! I'm just a birthday fool! Come on, man, don't get so mad!" and then the Churchboyz, smoldering in white blistering ire, sheathed their arsenal and walked away FUMING because he was now impervious to Christblasts.

Well, Brant used the same jutsu, as the book is Entirely about Fools, he claimed it was just the fools talking, ergo, it's not what he REALLY thought, ok? Just some food for thought, a little what if, no need to get so spicy over a WORK OF FICTION. So the Church harrumphed and hmppphroomed their way home, stomping their feet all the way through because AGAIN they couldn't execute someone for their (alleged) opinion.

Now, moving to the Arknights' Stultifera Navis, given how much the event shows the longing for the Iberian Golden Age, and very much states how impossible it is to go back to those days, simply because, one, the world has changed to something that would never again sustain this Iberian Golden Age, and two, the 'Golden Age' in itself was built upon the systematic oppression and suffering of others, ranging from the Aegir persecuted within the Iberian lands to the Victorians and Bolivars raided and pillaged outside the Iberian borders, and it was the selfsame greed, close-mindedness and ignorance of Iberia that led to its natural end. The Inquisition is very much a Ship of Fools: Guided by old relics, fueled by archaic and obsolete beliefs, it's bound to collapse under its own weight. Saint Carmen himself is the perfect representation of the Inquisition: Tired, old, full of regrets, putting a strong front, yet completely ravaged and exhausted, his life artificially prolonged well past the natural lifespan of a Liberi, guided by ostensibly good intentions and yet adhering to principles that necessarily involve the oppression of certain people in order to exist. I wouldn't say Saint Carmen and Saint Grobian are one and the same, but you can't help but see some similarity. Patron saint of the vulgar and crass indeed.

The allegory also extends to Aegir to some degree as well, but we don't have the full picture just yet. Stultifera Navis does suggest that Aegir Beefed It to some degree as well, and not a minor beef, either.

Notably, Laurentina defies the trope: Her recovery stems in part to having let go of her "Golden Age": The times when she could have pursued her passions as a sculptor, the times when she happily hunted away with her fellow Hunters in the 2nd Company, the times when she didn't have a country's worth of Super Death Rock Cancer Juice in her spine, the entire swath of time she lost due to having been replaced by 'Specter', the time when she was blissfully unaware of her Seaborn blood, she makes it clear to Amaia: She's fully aware that all of these things are irrevocably lost, and that that's fine, she's got the present and the future still. She misses that Golden Age of her life, but doesn't agonize over it, she simply has to make a new Golden Age, comprised of other, unknown, exciting things, in the future.

Sometimes, you don't need to think too hard about it. Just tear apart what's in front of you, and move forward. She is not a crewmember of the Ship of Fools.

There's a few more comparisons and connections you can draw between the Allegory of the Ship of Fools and Arknights' Stultifera Navis, but I think the point has been made!