Kill Six Billion Demons Volume IV: King of Swords (Final Analysis)

This volume is apparently something of a base-breaker for Kill Six Billion Demons. It's a lot of people's favourite book in the series, and it's a lot of people's least favourite book in the series. Having finished it now, I'm not in either category...but only because of the first book's art and exposition issues that make me place it lower. Were it not for that, I would be solidly in camp 2.

I'm not saying that King of Swords is bad. In some specific ways (visually in particular) it might even be the best of the lot. Just, taking it as a whole, it falls significantly short of books 2-3. Part of this is down to there being weaker plotting and flatter worldbuilding than in the previous volumes, but the biggest issue for me was the lack of a coherent statement. "Wielder of Names" and "Seeker of Thrones" each had really clear character arcs for the protagonist, and also very focused and well-articulated themes. "Wielder" was all about the fear of power, and how it can corrupt just as insidiously as the love of power. "Seeker" was about self-loathing, and how power doesn't work as a salve for it. They each had a lot more going on in them than just that, of course, but those were the throughlines that tied each of them together and that all the other themes and subplots hung off from.

What was "King of Swords" about?

Parts of it were definitely about things. Cognitive dissonance and spectacle. Narcissism breaking against the reefs of reality. The nature of authoritarianism, and the politics of resentment. Some of these parts were really, really good at being about some of these things. But like. I look at Zoss' "King of Swords" speech that seems like it wants to be the book's central thesis statement, and then I look back at the first few chapters, and all I can say is "huh?"

Willingness to step back and let other people be the heroes of their own stories is not a lesson that Killy has ever needed to learn, except back in book 3 when she was mind-whammied by Incubus. Her putting herself into these critical situations has never seemed like a folly of ego so much as a pragmatic understanding that they only have one Masterkey and no way to pass it around. The rut she was stuck in before Gog-Agog's call to (a different kind of) adventure wasn't because of self-centeredness or a messiah complex on Killy's part. If anything, it was the exact opposite of that; it was because of her letting White Chain make all the rules. So then, at the end, when the supposed big personal growth for her is letting White Chain take the stage for herself and not taking independent action, it's just...no.

My Main Point of Criticism

It occurs to me that the comic may be struggling against its own premise and title. "Kill Six Billion Demons" is (hilariously) the name of the main character. When you have a story named after a protagonist, then the expectation is that the story will really revolve around that protagonist and their journey. So, the camera is stuck following Killy most of the time, and the other characters' arcs need to be intertwined with hers at every step along the way. If White Chain was the actual protagonist of this book though, then I think the entire thing would work much better.

Yeah. Yeah, I really do think that that's the biggest issue. This needed to be White Chain's story. She was the one who needed to learn to let other people find their own ways. She was the one who needed to confront her biases and self-deceptions. She was the one Solomon David served as a foil to. She was the one who had a literal transformation on account of her breakthroughs.

The reason why it bothers me so much that Zoss gave Killy that speech about needing to give White Chain room is because Killy wasn't the one denying White Chain that room in the first place: the author was.

I made a sort of similar observation in "Seeker of Thrones," about how Cio's iteration of the Prince Kassardis arc was more compelling than Killy's, but at least Killy *had* an arc in it. Additionally, Killy and Cio's mirrored journeys both enriched each others, albeit unequally. Their resolutions also tied together in a nice bow that changed the status quo; accepting and loving themselves allowed the two of them to accept and love each other as well, beginning a romantic relationship that continues into the next book and heavily informing their actions within it. There's nothing like that between Killy and White Chain in "King of Swords."

I don't think that this problem came out of nowhere in book 4, though. It's more like it existed in book 3, but the story did a better job of absorbing and working around it that time. An escalating structural problem with the comic as a whole is that this story wants to be about an ensemble cast. Frankly, this story needs to be about an ensemble cast. But, the title is Kill Six Billion Demons, and it's stubbornly committed to being a comic about Allison no matter what.

God, how's that for irony? All this stuff in "King of Swords" about the problems with hero worship, and yet it steps on that exact rake itself.

Well, hopefully the comic turns itself around on this issue. I'm not hopeful, but there's always the chance. To be clear, I don't think it's ever going to get BAD. Like, keep in mind, everything I've been complaining about is within the context of K6BD being a generally pretty great work. Just, at this rate its back half might end up being by far the less good half.

On a More Positive Note...

For all that they didn't come together very well, the themes of K6BD were all individually really, really strong in book 4. Partly by following Nietzche's philosophy to its logical conclusions, and partly by rejecting Nietzche's dumber and more misanthropic brainbugs. Which is almost a teach-by-example act in and of itself, in context. As I commented in at least a couple of places during my readthrough, this volume has a major recurring motif of students needing to surpass their teachers, and - even more strongly - of teachers forcing their blind spots and flaws onto students along with their actually useful knowledge. In particular, the character whose philosophy has the most in common with Nietzche's real life writings, Meti, is given the absolute mother of all takedowns in the backstory chapters. Her egotistical blind spots and misanthropic bitterness causing Incubus to end up walking away with what she taught him and turning it into perverse ends, just as Heidegger and his fellow fascists did with existentialism.

I think this is where it ties back in with Nietzche's refusal to align his work with any actually practicable political force, and how anarchists have ignored his own feelings on the subject when appropriating him (in an ironically close parallel to how the fascists also appropriated him over his own objections, heh). If there was any ambiguity before as to whether K6BD is a didactic anarchist work, it's gone at this point. Like, the author pretty much told us directly, in Zoss' words, that this comic is an anarchist tract.

That's neither a compliment nor a condemnation, by the way. Being propaganda doesn't necessarily make something bad. It also doesn't necessarily make it good (and I'd say that even in the case of propaganda for causes I agree with).

So, where I think this volume is at its best is where it interrogates the usefulness of much of the social technology that people tend to take for granted. People being tempted after imaginary prizes, playing roles for non-existent audiences instead of living their own lives, all culminating in the deference of agency to a cruel, mad system where even the tyrants are slaves and even the deceivers are deluded.

Moreso than most anarchist works, K6BD does a decent job of pointing at what an alternative to all this might look like. Not a great job, but a decent one. Showing the principles of free association in action at the end with Killy and White Chain's unspoken arrangement, the rejection of hierarchical thinking in favor of trusting other people to do their part and letting you do your own to make everything work, etc. That said...when it comes time to actually show what the results are supposed to look like, it still sort of falls back on fairy tale logic. Which might seem like an unfair criticism, given that the rest of K6BD has plenty of fairy tale logic already baked into it, but it's not evenly distributed, and really, the way that the grit and details of K6BD's worldbuilding and metaphysics have been increasingly taking a back seat to big ideas is a second criticism I'd make of it.

But anyway. The thing it all comes down to is that social technology - any social technology - can only work with the consent of its participating individuals. No one can actually make anyone do anything. At most, they can just threaten to kill you if you don't do it. If enough people say no, then the machine stops, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The way to beat authoritarianism is by inspiring others to stop complying with it. Without them, it is nothing. Without her hosts, Gog-Agog is just a pile of helpless invertebrates. Without his audience, Solomon David is just some guy who's good at fighting.

It's the antithesis of Incubus' twisted advice about power in the previous volume. A few powerful individuals can enforce their will on other people, sure, but that's not because there's anything inherently special about them. It's because they both a) develop the will to power, and b) are lucky. No one can make luck happen, sure, but anyone can develop the will to power. It's not a divine endowment. It's a cognitive skill you can learn. A society in which every individual realizes their will to power is one fundamentally immune to tyranny.

On one hand, this is a place where I feel like the story might be tripping over its own messages just a little bit. In the world of Kill Six Billion Demons, having a Key of Kings necessarily gives you more independent personal power than any real life person could ever have. No social technology required at all in order for an individual to accumulate immense power. But then, on the other hand, the comic has been introducing more and more ways that you can potentially amass that kind of autonomous power without needing a Key. Ki-Rata. Meti's thing. Whatever the hell happened with White Chain's transformation. These techniques aren't easy to find or learn, in the world created by the Seven, but they still exist. And, unlike the Keys, there's no ceiling on how many people can use them at a time.

So, bringing the metaphor back to reality, with magical power in the comic standing in for social power, it still works. Discovering how to be one's own master is hard, in a world ruled by hierarchies and a culture stewing in authoritarian memes, but anyone can theoretically do it. And, unlike the personal power conferred on select individuals by the hierarchies under them, there's no limit to how many people can do it at once. With each individual denying the resource of their own personhood to the enemy's war machine.

Reading back over that, I do feel the need to clarify something. I am not an anarchist. At least, I don't *think* I am. It's an ideology I'm very sympathetic to, but it's got enough weak spots and "not quite sure about that one chief"s that it leans on that I don't feel comfortable labelling myself with it. So, to elucidate my own personal views on the subject at hand, three basic points of clarification:

1) I'd definitely be interested to see anarchistic societies exist alongside a more collectivist neighbor that isn't hostile to them, to give them a chance to prove they can work for modern populations with modern infrastructural needs. That's probably a total pie-in-the-sky dream, looking at the world we currently live in, but my point is that it's an experiment I think would be worth trying.

2) Much like existentialism, anarchism isn't a totalizing philosophy. Anarchist principles can still inform a non-anarchist organization. Thus, even if I wouldn't call myself an anarchist, I think anarchist theory is very much worth mining for ideas. Again, much like existentialism.

3) Even if it's pushing an ideology that I don't entirely agree with, Kill Six Billion Demons is good at what it does. I can appreciate the quality of a messenger even for works whose messages are quite a bit worse than K6BD's.

Going Forward

For the most part, I stand by my earlier statement that I think this story needs to slow down and do some world and character development for a while. King of Swords was always going either too fast or too slow, timeskipping over important stuff and also dwelling for multiple pages on flourishes and filler. Additionally, if the takeaway of this volume is supposed to be that Killy needs to bring the peoples of the multiverse into their own Royalty, then I think this would build and deliver on those themes. Let's get to know some of those people in need of empowerment. Let's see Killy, White Chain, and Cio interact with varied cultures full of beings with different assets to bring to the table, both as gurus spreading egoist enlightenment to the masses and as explorers navigating a bunch of creative science-fantasy societies.

I think Zaid is a good figurehead for this. We spent multiple volumes trying to rescue him without ever getting to learn anything about him. Now we ARE getting to know him a little, and he's much more interesting and has more useful insights into his surroundings than Killy's descriptions of him primed me to expect. Her reunion with him comes right on the heels of Zoss' speech, giving her a chance to put his advice into practice with the story's hitherto most disempowered character. Or to reject Zoss' advice and think of something better; that would also be on-point for this story.

If the story goes this route, then another character I really hope to see more of is Himself. I mean, I've been wanting to see more of Himself ever since the end of the Heretics Court scene, but now it feels like we're at the point where reintroducing him would make the most sense. A powerful being inside of a cage, perhaps one who IS a cage at least in part. A king who is also a prisoner, whose subjects are also his wardens. On top of that, if Killy is going to be spreading the word of self-actualized Royalty, devils have a heavyhanded language motif associated with them. Who better to help spread a message, then, but the king of the devils? It would also fit the emerging symmetry of these volumes. Books 2 and 4 both feature a lot of open spaces, bright lights, and angels. It feels right for book 5 to pick up on the opposites of those things from book 3, and get back to messes, dark confined spaces, and devils. Book 3 ended with White Chain introducing Killy to a new plot thread, with the Krayu-Mat training. Book 4 doesn't end on Cio introducing Killy to the new plot thread of Steven Universe Fusing, but that happens NEAR the end and hasn't yet gotten a chance to explore itself in depth.

On the other hand, the short-term plot and setting ramifications of Jagannath's attack might hijack all of those plot threads. If so, I hope it at least replaces them with something good.

When it comes to predictions as opposed to hopes, I...should probably stop hoping that the comic will get into the details of alien cultures besides "explaining character X's backstory." Or to pick up the dangling plot thread of Killy returning to her homeworld with nonhuman friends and dire warnings. The comic never really wanted to be about these things, even if it seemed like it was promising them back in book one. Like, I read White Chain's exposition about there being 777,777 universes worth of possibilities for the story to explore, and all the emphasis on the Keys' function in enabling travel between worlds, and there's a part of me that never stopped wanting the comic to be about these things even long after it was clear it isn't. I like K6BD for what it is, but...I feel like it could have been both of these things at the same time, and potentially be a better story for it. Ah well.

Anyway, that was King of Swords. On the weak side for this comic, but still a fine read with plenty of meaty ideas to chew on.