#willow cries and weeps about dr ratio yet again more at 11

[everlastiingiimmortals]

I was thinking again about Ratio's speech to Screwllum and how incensed he became, the sheer emotion in his voice when he speaks of the tumbles and triumphs of human life, and something about that clicked to me. And I think it's something I mentioned before, but it just never hit me so hard.

Ratio finds the human existence so beautiful.

He is so passionate about life, about the belief that it is because the human life is so small and fleeting that people should push and push and strive to their absolute limit, because that is what it means to be human, to be alive.

"Even a life marked by failure is a life worth living."

These are his words directly from the 1.6 ending cutscene. Would someone who only hated stupid, ignorant, factually incorrect people say that? I don't think so. And it is here that I realized: what Ratio hates isn't ignorance in the sense of not knowing something. Ignorance isn't the root cause of his dread.

It's a symptom.

It is a symptom of an attitude of complacency, of stagnation. Because it is as Screwllum says: everyone is ignorant of one thing or another; nobody knows everything, not even Nous. What Ratio is trying to pinpoint and change is that attitude, that quality of being ignorant as a trait, not a state. He's trying to kindle the drive for self-improvement, because to embrace oneself, complete with one's flaws and acknowledging them but striving to improve on them, that is so fucking beautiful. That is the meaning of life.

And I wonder if, really, he uses the word "ignorance" on purpose because it's just... an easier goal to communicate to others, especially with his methods of sparking change. I wonder if he sets himself up to be this "boss" to be challenged, and his classes the battle, because he takes such an antagonistic approach to every aspect of a person that can be criticized that people are compelled to challenge him. In this sense, he's similar to a certain Otto Apocalypse (and possibly his alts as well).

We even see in the space station that he's not specifically attacking ignorance with the phase flame incident, but rather the researchers' complacency and dependence on Herta. What he does is label it under "ignorance" because it is a more inflammatory word, and for those who walk the Path of Erudition, it is an insult. Ignorance is the antonym to erudition. And I guess that his decision to use this approach is because all his life he's been the scholarly type, been surrounded by scholarly types, and it is because of professors that challenged him and wanted to see him push his limits that got him this far. How much of his life might have been wasted if Professor Rond hadn't advocated for him in his youth? If he were to say he wanted to challenge complacency and preach self-sufficiency directly, he'd be a therapist. He would rather die; he could not stand being a therapist, his own sanity would not be able to handle it. What better way to spark change than through the profession he is most familiar with, the one that encouraged him, the one that he knows best? What better way than to use his passion for philosophy and the sciences to spark others'?

Call him a narcissist all you want, it's true, but also nobody would work this hard if they did not believe that their end goal wasn't absolutely worth it. No one would care so much if they didn't find the object of their care precious enough to cultivate. Nobody would make so many fucking statues if they didn't love and celebrate the human body because sculpting requires so much goddamn effort, especially with masonry.

What Ratio pursues is not necessarily the eradication of ignorance, but rather the advocacy of self-improvement, because the human existence is only its most beautiful when passion has a direction and the momentum to propel itself to its limit regardless of whatever stands in its way. That is his self-evident, unchanging truth.