Of Want and Will (K6BD book 2 analysis)

This volume has a lot going on in it, both in terms of worldbuilding and story progression, and in themes and subtext. With the intricacy of the story and cast both sharply increasing after the end of book one, it's also tricky to organize into a single thesis.

Which, honestly, may be part of the point, because Kill Six Billion Demons is a postmodernist work in both the literary and the political sense. A core premise of postmodernist philosophy is that reality is never as neat and tidy as our systematizations for it make it look. Not everything fits together perfectly for a unified purpose. Every "rule" or "law" of nature is a simplification of the reality. The map and the territory will never truly be one and the same, and thinking otherwise leads to capital t Trouble.

So, I'll just go topic by topic and cover what I found interesting or discussion-worthy about Wielder of Names. Starting with what I now think will be one of the comic's core axioms.

Postmodernist Enlightenment: the Terrible Power of Want

There's a paradox inherent in most theistic belief systems. In the Abrahamic and Dharmic religions alike, people are supposed to aspire to godliness. Whether that means being in God's presence in heaven, or reintegration into the oneness of the Brahma. The question that raises, though, is: if that state of being is so desirable, why would a being in that state have created others, divided itself, or imposed the illusion of division on itself in the first place? If heaven is the end of want, then why would a heavenly being have ever wanted to do anything?

There are entire libraries written in multiple languages trying to answer this question. This comic's take on it is that division is a lie, but is Yisun not a splendid liar?

Life is conflict. Death is peace. K6BD doesn't seem to take a moral stance on this. It never says that this is a good way for reality to be, or that this is the way that it should be. Just that that's how it is. Granted, this statement itself is a sweeping, prescriptivist narrative that should be questioned and attacked. But, the person making it would then be able to lean back, smile smugly in Yisun's indisputably John De Lancy-ish way, and say "good." Because just accepting that premise as fact and not challenging it would be a failure to put it into practice.

Enlightenment, or "royalty," then, is overcoming the temptation to accept one's self, surroundings, and understanding as they are, and instead continually striving to improve them. It's the concept of "the journey is more important than the destination" taken to its reductio ad absurdim conclusion, and then promoted without irony. I guess that focus on material concerns and self-actualization are why "royalty" is the word for enlightenment in this story. In the word's usual definition, "royalty" are people who have and use power. And, if you were ever to have too much of it, the thing to do would be to get rid of it and divide it up, so that you still have something to live for. Like Yisun did when creating Yis and Un, Yis and Un did when creating the Multitude, and the Multitude did when creating the cosmos. A fire that doesn't burn stops being fire. Stagnation is death. Royalty is acceptance of unacceptance.

Personally, I don't know how seriously I take this school of thought. One problem with "always question everything" is that it can lead you to doing even less than you would normally. Any problem you think you have can be muddled by someone like Mottom saying "are you suuuuuure that's really a problem?" and you'd have to entertain that possibility seriously. The potential for abuse by bad actors here is almost infinite, especially if you let the question of "how inaccurate is the map to the territory" turn into "does the territory exist at all, or is reality an illusion?" God only knows how many real world authoritarians have pulled rhetorical defenses like that. It does help to combine it with the more general postmodernist axiom of "authority must constantly prove its legitimacy" that places the greater burden of proof on the status quo, but even so, it's a philosophy I have serious reservations about.

Nonetheless, I can appreciate an artfully presented and explored idea even if I disagree with it. So, if absolutely nothing else, I enjoyed this aspect of "Wielder of Names" on that level.

The title "wielder of names" itself is a little ironic, in light of the story's general attitudes. Naming something is giving yourself a sort of power over it, but it's also - necessarily - building an unreliable map of the territory of reality. A map that, once you feel too confident in after having filled it out, will leave you in the situation of the three Masters who Aesma blundered her way into ruining. For that reason, I half-suspect that the power of Zoss' key will end up proving insufficient or unreliable in the end. It works by using the "true names" of each world in the multiverse, but is there actually such a thing as a true name?

Lavishing names and putting masks on something might make it more controllable, but breaking its actual substance down leads you to the chaotic black fire that cannot be named. Every narrative has gaps, and sometimes the black flames surge through those gaps. That's why devils have the language association. Their existence, distinct from the black flame, is as narrative and understanding are distinct from the true reality.

So, I guess use names, but never put too much trust in them, and never be too certain that you know what they actually mean.

Including your own name, for that matter.

Agency: Exercised or Deferred

The theme of struggle is also explored through the story's examination of passivity. I'm not one hundred percent on this, but I *feel* like what's being said in this volume is that there's not really any such thing as voluntary passivity. Choosing to do nothing is an action. It's just most often a bad action that leads you away from godliness rather than toward it.

I'm not sure how accurate that trajectory is to Mottom's true self, given her final scene and its unmasking of her personality and motives. It seems to me like she was much more of a cunning manipulator and proactive agent than she wanted Killy to think. After all, she was the one who captured Zaid from Jagganath and/or Metatron's agents, and who called the other demiurgi for the council on how to react (though, on further consideration, she also chose to let someone else take Zaid off her hands. Hmmm...). In any case though, the allure of inaction was important to the story she was trying to sell to Killy regardless of its veracity. An allure that she knowingly designed to play on traditional feminine conditioning and insecurities, which are themselves wrapped up in learned helplessness.

The "Aesma and the Red Eyed King" story illustrated the contradiction in Mottom's story very well. In the story, Aesma learned to take on the submissive role, but that didn't actually remove the threat she posed to the world around her. That power and destructiveness remained. It just became available for someone else to use rather than her. She freed the Red Eyed King from his prison. She made the armor, shield, and sword for him. She only did as she was told, but she still DID as she was told. She put her power in someone else's hands, but it never stopped being her power. It wasn't taken from her. She chose to give it. And to keep giving it. She also only regretted it once it came back to hurt her personally.

It reminds me a lot of the themes of "Revolutionary Girl Utena," actually. Anthy has a sword inside of her, and she chooses to let people use it, claiming to be powerless to do otherwise, when really there's no reason she couldn't just use the damned sword herself.

Aesma's arc in that story mirrored both Mottom's in her questionable autobiographical account, and Killy's in the onscreen events of the comic. Mottom in how she lent her power to Hastet's undying hunger and his court's rapacious demands after taking over as queen, and then claimed to not be responsible for any of it, like Aesma did for most of the middle of the tale. Killy in how she didn't give in to the part of herself that wanted to give up, back out, and let someone else take the lead, as Aesma did at the end.

Granted, here's where a weakness in the story's structure shows itself. A minor, but growing, irritation I have with Killy's arc is that the prophecy seems to be largely self fulfilling. It was BECAUSE of the prophecy, after all, that Mottom gave her the time of day. Not to mention putting her within striking range of her immortality-tree. It kind of feels like the plot giving Killy too many freebies, thus letting her get the credit for fulfilling the prophecy when it doesn't quite seem like she's earned it. This definitely works against the themes. Maybe it'll get better in the future volumes.

The motif of "doing something is better than doing nothing" is much more explicit in White Chain's sequence at the beginning. She even says it in almost those exact words when she abandons the lethargic sorority angels and decides to take the Primes up on their mission request. Of course, whether she ends up letting the Primes wield her power with herself being complicit in what they do with it or defies them in the end remains to be seen. She doesn't exactly have much reason to like them, at this point, but millennia of worshipful respect and obedience is a hard pattern to break.

Speaking of patterns and breaking them, let's talk about the angels some more. Because woo boy...

K6BD Angels Are Pretty Fucked Up

I'll leave the question of how true that devil creation myth is open for now. The angels may have been created by a petty, insecure tyrant god out of frigid death-fire for the express purpose of enslaving and oppressing, or they may not have been. Just going by their onscreen behavior in the comic though, man.

Imagine being patriarchal and transphobic when you're not even a gendered species.

The angels seem to represent the extremes of uncritical acceptance. Their whole culture is stubbornly defined and confined by the boundaries given to them by their creator. And, despite the Multitude being portrayed as very flawed and imperfect beings in every single story about them from every single culture that's been featured thus far, the angels seem determined to not question Un-Koss' designs. Even as the "Old Law" becomes less and less relevant, and their attempts to reconcile it with their modern situation become increasingly unhinged.

I was pretty sympathetic to them at first, even when faced with White Chains' initial coldness, Michael's bigotry, and Juggernaut Star's...um...whatever the hell that guy's damage is. The way White Chain and Michael told it, they basically got invaded, conquered, tempted into submission with their conqueror with promises of future respect and good treatment, and then had those promises horribly, hideously broken and everything they loved ruined by those they had grudgingly trusted. The thing is, seeing them interact with each other for a while now, they don't seem like a downtrodden minority embittered by historic mistreatment. The vibe they give off, the attitude and type of biases they display, well...even were it not for the devil creation myth, the first thing my mind goes to would be "revanchist former plantation owners." Except weirder and (even) more self-destructive in their commitment to an ideology that evidently doesn't even work for themselves on a personal level, let alone a societal one.

At this point, I wonder what innate psychological differences actually exist between humans and angels. The impression I had at first was that, to put it in Dungeons and Dragons terms, angels were Always Lawful and devils were Always Chaotic, with the good/evil alignments varying among individuals. But no, that's not actually how it seems to work at all. The law that was allegedly beat into the angels by Koss isn't just instinct to them. It's something they have to strive to live up to. And, despite Michael and Juggernaut Star's insistence to the contrary, I don't get the impression that angels like White Chain are being corrupted by their exposure to outsiders so much as they're reverting to a more natural, liberated state of being. The humans just make a handy scapegoat for it.

It sounded like the Primes' goal is to destroy the multiverse so that everything can be merged back into Yisun, who then may or may not choose to divide themselves again and begin a new creation (or illusion of creation, if you want to be like that). If their narrative doesn't work, they'd rather rewrite reality than revise their way of understanding and interacting with it.

I guess that's one interpretation of "seek heaven through violence." But it's a more twisted one for sure.

Kill Six Billion Demons remains, as I said after reading volume one, extremely a product of its times and their preceding fantasy media. But, coming into its own thematically and also artistically in this volume really makes it stronger than the sum of its parts, and even the sum of its parts alone wouldn't have been half bad. It does seem a little tryhard at times, with the character names that sound like they came from someone's extra edgy Exalted campaign, the relentless grandiosity, and the overemphasis on dramatic reveal shots and meme fodder. But still. I think I can probably call this my favorite webcomic at this point.