Annotated 49-38
The pace of Carol’s side of the battle slows to a crawl about here, time enough for everyone in the cheap seats to figure out how this looked likely to go. All that trouble Shanna and Xan went through to disarm Carol, and look what happens anyway, just because gravity’s suffering a local outage.
Some readers expressed that they’d be disappointed if a simple shot through the glass would kill HR and invented alternative scenarios. What if the glass were bulletproof? (I mean…it seems pretty unlikely that HR would make that preparation and less likely that he could do it without Carol knowing about it.) What if HR’s power deflected the bullet and made it so Carol shot herself to death instead? (Like, anything’s possible with this kind of magick, but…it doesn’t seem like the most satisfying way to resolve her arc.) What if Carol, realizing whom she’s served, shot herself because she’d lost the will to live? (See previous parens.)
I’m going to assume most of the disgruntlement was because it looked like Carol was about to take our heroes’ victory out of their hands, which I would consider a last-minute reversion to the “Sepia World is the real world, Arkerra doesn’t really matter” concept that we’d done our best to avoid. What’s going to happen instead will be a little more like us.
FB:
“The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.”
― Anton Chekhov
Well, my first comment was yeeted by my celphone’s internet, I suppose, so here comes my second attempt.
I always LIKED Carol taking the shot, actually, and just now realizing it wasn’t a popular decision.
This works for me for several reasons. First of, I felt like this was a great “last action” on Carol’s side, especially considering how remorseful she’s been throughout her journey (even if she kept it mostly to herself). I’m not sure I liked her taking all the blame for the Five (I seem to recall that’s the version they decide upon at the end) but it fits perfectly with the situation we are left with at the Sepia world.
Secondly, this makes perfect sense considering the world they inhabit. Sepia world is the world of bullets, permanent death, and corporations, not of magic. If they had pulled a sudden magical thing out of nowhere to stop HR, it would have been really weird to me. Sure, both worlds are connected, but each has its own set of rules and, as far as we know, each is independent from the other. So to me it is quite fitting that HR is finished with a simple shot here (doesn’t deserve more) while he is ended with hyper-magic on Arkerra. Each world is dealing with the “anomaly” (if one were to believe he was actually becoming a god) according to its rules, and that’s somehow beautiful.
…Besides I don’t believe in gods and HR always struck me more like a Mage of Oz smoke-and-mirrors guy. Of course he has power in Arkerra, we can all enter “creative mode”, we can all have “admin priviledges” somewhere; That doesn’t make you god, contrary to popular belief xD. And regarding the gravity thing… I’m not that impressed, really. Is that all it takes to make a god? Clearly not, considering how he ends. (I know, I’m a party pooper.)
TBC, I think the decision became more popular once people realized it was going to be a simultaneous thing with his defeat in Arkerra. I think most of those who complained early wanted the Arkerra Five not to get written out of their own climax…a reasonable request!
I’d like to understand how and what the antigravity thing actually means for Sepia World.
The Five had no way to affect Sepia World, after entering Arkerra (apart from of course their bodies being stored there, but they could not act there at all), whereas HR seems to exist (and live!) in both worlds simultaneously, and his words are heard in both worlds, too. So what are his powers, what can he do, and was is actual actual (actual) plan to rule both Arkerra and Sepia world? Or did he just want to rule Arkerra, but then, under the influence of all the things he’d absorbed, decided to destroy Arkerra to make something else and maybe do the same with Sepia World, too?
It’s all definitely scary and mysterious, but some hints beforehand, or some resolution afterward would be appreciated.
Since T mentioned a few pages back being unhappy with some of the story: I think the Five are done really well, and most of the other characters too (probably haven’t mentioned Rachel for a while, so I’ll just do that now), but HR is still kind of opaque to me. What does he want, what drives him, what are his abilities, weaknesses, why does he think that what he does make sense (or does he even think that?) These questions keep coming up for me, throughout the story, and maybe I overlooked a lot of relevant information (it happens…) or it’s just not there. His abilities, as well as his weaknesses are revealed no sooner than they appear in the story, and not explained afterward. This means that I can’t really reason about what he would or might do in any given situation, the way I can with most other characters.
The thing is, in my view, HR gets simpler and simpler after injecting himself straight into Arkerra, then Cyberia, then Arkerra again. He can dress himself up with flowery speeches either in this god-form or in a half-remembered approximation of his old self, but underneath it all is just hunger for absolute control. And the memory of these five who always stood in the way of his control. He sacrificed so much of himself to get where he is, that I don’t think there’s much else to his personality any more. He said different, of course, and some intelligent part of him still believes that he hasn’t lost anything in exchange for all the power he’s gained. But his intelligence isn’t really driving the bus at this point. His hunger is.
And that hunger is focused, fixated, on what he can’t have. He could’ve consumed the Arkerran capital at this point, via the Tarozerker or otherwise, if he were more rational about acquiring power at this point. But he is not.
“Rational” was a few Cyberian monsters ago. Even the version of HR who palled around with Ulak pre-Cyberia was capable of recognizing that he could accomplish his goals without worrying about the Peacemakers (“Fuck ’em”). HR-as-he-is-now simply cannot abide the continued existence of these…creatures who defy him. Sometimes he tries to kill them, sometimes he tries to trick them into giving up, and sometimes he seems to be trying to neg them to death. His obsession is his true weakness, and no matter what he told himself, it always was.
Thanks! That matches the vibe of “power-drunk idiot” I was already getting from him.
The thing is, though: When he said “Fuck ’em” about the Peacemakers — I can’t tell if he was just being dismissive about a serious issue he still needs to overcome, or if he was actually correct that he could just have ignored them safely. His power in Arkerra must be limited in some way, otherwise he could have winked the Five out of existence long ago, and would not have tried to kill them in conventional ways first. He also would not have needed the support of the cultists — he could have just got in there, make everyone recognize him as the sole superior being, and reshape the world to his liking. … but now he feels a bit more like a permanent deus ex machina (in some ways, he is the god in the machine, not out of it… haha), in that his abilities/limitations are never defined, and there’s never a point where he does something and I think “makes sense he would do that”, because I don’t know what his options are. I don’t know what the plan is that he has forsaken after entering Arkerra, I don’t know what he thought his abilities were, why he chose to go to Cyberia, when he decided that …
I think to some extent, all that vagueness is indeed helping transport the feeling the the Five must be having, because they are likely even more clueless than I am, but since he’s a major character in the story, I think he’d deserve some more detail.
There are a number of reasons we kept HR a bit vague: the disordered nature of his mind and self, our own occasional disagreements on whether he was once a good-ish man or always really just a scoundrel, the way he channeled our own creative frustrations.
I’d say, though, that Occam’s razor is pretty useful in figuring him out. What he does is what he thinks will satisfy that hunger. He went to Cyberia because doing an end run around the Five seemed more likely to get him power on a level that’d satisfy him. He was correct that the end run was a better path to his stated goal of godhood, incorrect in thinking that becoming a god (of sorts) would mean that the Five would no longer be his problem.
My reading was (and is):
* The five resists HR in Arkerra
* HR goes into megalomaniac rant mode
* HR’s megalomaniac rant destroys the last faith Carol has in HR
* Carol shoots HR
I think this fits great into the various arcs:
* The fives resistance against all odds has a consequence they couldn’t know or plan for. It was the right move, but more importantly it was the moral right in stading up to oppression even when it looks fruitless. I am reminded of the bleak saying attributed to William the Silent: “One need not hope to undertake, nor succeed to persevere.”
* Carols arc is concluded by HR kicking away the last foundation of her faith, loyalty and trust in him.
* HR’s bare megalomania ends HR’s megalomaniac spree.
This is how I read it too. Also: HR being “unstoppable” and stopped (in part) by a bullet mirrors the end of JJ’s arc, which I assumed was a deliberate narrative parallel.
Stockdales Paradox comes to mind here…he was a pow in ‘Nam.
“ You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
-Admiral James Stockdale
I wonder if HR is aware that his microphone is still on. I suppose he isn’t. And I suppose that Carol might have react differently if she wasn’t hearing those words, which don’t really sound as if they were directed at the other people currently in the room.