Kill Six Billion Demons Volume III: Seeker of Thrones (Final Analysis)

I said that the previous volume had a lot going on in it, but holy hell does it not have anything on this one. "Seeker of Thrones" is completely jampacked, both narratively and thematically, and also significantly longer than its predecessor by page count.

Aside from that disparity, "Seeker of Thrones" and "Wielder of Names" are in many ways mirrors of one another. I commented earlier that "Wielder" was angel-centric, with White Chain as the deuteragonist, while "Seeker" is more devil focused with Cio as deuteragonist (arguably protagonist). "Wielder" involves a journey into the sky and bringing down a flying fortress, while "Seeker" delves underground and ends with a bunker getting cracked open. Most importantly, "Wielder" was about the poison of inaction and learned helplessness, while "Seeker" is about the hazards of action and power.

"Seeker of Thrones" does pay for all that quality content, though. It has some really rough spots. Unusually, a book gets either better or worse the more you think about it. "Seeker" is one of those rare cases of a book whose good parts keep getting better and whose bad parts keep getting worse the more I muse on them. Fortunately, the former outnumber the latter many times over. Not to the point where I can confidently call this volume better than the one before it, but it's definitely close.

Well, aside from the art of course; so far, each volume of K6BD has been significantly better drawn than the one before it, no contest.


Speaking Of Mirror Images...

Basically, the better part of "Seeker of Thrones" comes down to Killy and Cio each having an arc about trying to escape from their perceived worst selves and almost falling right into them in the process. There were other parallels going on with this too (White Chain briefly had a similar thing going on, though it only took up a couple of pages), but it was mostly about those two characters facing that personal challenge.

I'd probably have enjoyed Killy's side of the tale a bit more if it hadn't been paired with Cio's. Cio's arc did almost exactly all the same things as Killy's, but better.

To begin with, as I've said before, Killy's self-loathing always seemed to me like an informed attribute until this volume. You can interpret her being about to sleep with someone she's not attracted to as an expression of self-loathing, or at least lack of self-respect. In retrospect, the subtext seems to be that she was a closeted lesbian forcing herself to perform heterosexuality, which does land closer to self-denial and self-hate. But, that subtext is hard to pick up on until the very end of book 3, which is an awfully long time to spend telling but not showing. I guess that if you squint you can also see her decision to risk her life to save Zaid's despite her not really caring about him as a kind of deathwish, but considering how effective and determined an effort she's been making at both rescuing him AND keeping herself alive since then I still see it as heroic more than anything else. By the end of "Seeker" I was beginning to see what the text was talking about regarding her self loathing, but the arc would have been way better if I had a grasp of it beforehand. If nothing else, it would make Incubus' initial temptation in her dream (and her actually falling for it) land much more strongly.

The biggest issue I have with Killy's arc in this book isn't with what she's trying to escape, but what she's hurtling toward. I just cannot see how Succubus is a part of Killy's own personality or an embodiment of some of her own ideals. I don't think she NEEDED to be that, either. "Killy needs to rally the self-confidence and self-awareness to shake herself free of a villain's mind control spell" would have been fine. Not as thematically ambitious, sure, but it would do the job. As it is, when Incubus tells Killy that Succubus is actually cultured from her own personality I not only don't believe him, but am also not sure why the heck Killy would believe him either...and yet, the story itself seems to want me to take this at face value going by how it resolves that conflict. There's nothing about her that suggests it could be warped into anything like Succubus. At best, Succubus is similar to the character Killy briefly tried and failed to play in the first scene before the dream sequence. Which might have been the point, but if so it's not a point that I find all that interesting or satisfying.

Compare that to Cio's arc. When we learn about Yabalchoath at the beginning of the volume, it immediately answers a bunch of questions that Cio's backstory has raised since she debuted in book one. We see her confront her past really clearly in the Heretics' Court sequence, with the ebons still hating her guts and Himself warning her that she can't run or hide from who she is over her insistence to the contrary. We don't actually meet Yabalchoath as she was in that old incarnation, but she's a very well realized posthumous character from the beginning of the volume, so we go into Cio's arc knowing what the stakes are. Yabalchoath isn't a corruption of Cio's usual personality; Cio is a reaction against Yabalchoath's personality.

The fact that the Cio we know is a new identity rather than the old one also, I think, better supports the central thesis. There is no "true self." The grand enemy called I must be defeated, over and over again. Get too used to an identity, and it becomes a prison. Break out of it whenever you have to, but don't forget that it was still you. After you tear the grand enemy apart, eat the pieces, or they'll keep making a mess all around you. She really was Yabalchoath. She really is Ciocie Cioelle. In the future, she might be someone else. All of them are the "real" her.

Thinking about Cio's development makes me appreciate that interaction she had with Himself much more. Was he really doubting her ability to evolve, there, or was he challenging her in the hopes of spurring her progress? When he said that she will inevitably return to his pit, was he doubting her, or predicting that she will someday return and help make things better? Is he a controlling, manipulative patriarch, or a wise grandfather telling his descendants exactly what they need to hear to encourage them? He's like Cio's own version of Zoss, in this way.

He's also a literal visualization of the point. "Himself" is a cage. Maybe he's hoping that if other devils can truly evolve as people, then that might mean that he can free himself too. Much like Zoss, he probably has a lot of things he thinks he should have done better. Regardless of whether or not his current intentions are good.

Meanwhile, with Killy, we have her opening up and telling the others about her civilian life in LA at the end instead of trying to force herself into the role of brave adventurer and buying Incubus' self-help product line to try and become it. Which, I mean...it's nice and all, but there just isn't as much substance there.

...one nice detail about Killy's arc that occurs to me now, thinking about it in retrospect, is that she kind of does do her own version of Prince Kassardis bringing his old life with him in his determination to deny it. It's much more oblique than Cio's iteration of the tale, but if you think less about who and what Succubus is and more about Killy's relationship with her, well...her old life seems to have been defined heavily by repression. Sexual repression. Creative repression. Economic repression. Being trapped inside your own head, watching helplessly through the windows of your eyes, while your body does things you really don't want to do. Succubus' control kind of works as an illustration of that. The fact that her dream-image of Incubus swaps out his stupid cosplay outfits for a boring corporate look - like the dean of a university, or the owner of a coffee shop chain, insincerely promising advancement to a fresh-faced eighteen year old - after the screw over makes more sense in light of that.

Heh, I might actually be warming up to Killy's arc a little more as I write this. Still, I think Cio did it better, mostly because of my initial point about Succubus' identity not really convincing me while Yabalchoath's did. Cio's story also benefitted from not sinking to the painfully cliche "multicolored copies of yourself to represent parts of your personality" device, or taking place in the wasteland of cringey forced memes that Killy's mindscape often was.

The angle of personal identities being cultivated or molded by antagonistic actors connects back to what Mottom tried to use Killy for in the previous volume. Killy isn't the only one having this kind of social engineering used against her, though.


The Potential for Positive Devilution

For all their fluidity and mercuriality, devils really don't have much freedom.

Their individuality is defined by masks made by other people and placed onto them by other people. According to every historical account we've been shown, the demiurgi created the devils to be their slaves, not their children. In this way, they committed the same sin that Un-Koss did when he created the angels and servants, and they resorted to similarly insidious means of social control. Why does every devil want to ascend through the color spectrum, when being a higher color doesn't necessarily make you any more powerful or capable than members of your current caste? Does every curious, playful blue devil really look forward to becoming more brutish and belligerent as a red? Does every introverted, contemplative green devil honestly want to be an officious, domineering gold? Why would they even think that they wanted this? Well, maybe it has something to do with how - in at least most cases - ascension through the spectrum requires codependency with humans. And that, in turn, encourages devils to think of everything as a selfish push and pull; it's always best to try to get as much as possible for as little as possible, and to compete with other devils for opportunities. Which also, it just so happens, makes devils unlikely to ever unionize.

The fact that this codependency and competitiveness also opened up the unintended side effect of letting some powerful devils just eat people to get the soul flame might have bothered the demiurgi at the time, if they'd been able to predict it. Or maybe they wouldn't have cared any more than their last seven remnants of today do, as long as they were confident they could keep themselves off the dinner plate and just let nameless human peasants suffer the consequences.

The spawn of Un's white flames - the servants and angels - need constant reinforcement to stay in their intended roles. Servants need angels to beat them up and throw them in jail when they won't do their jobs. Angels need other angels to bar them from physical manifestation and stick them in group therapy for a few millennia when they won't do theirs. Angels didn't have the Old Law metaphorically beaten into them at their race's creation; they have it literally beaten into them every day of their cold, miserable lives. And it still doesn't always work. There are still fallen angels who run around joining street gangs. There are still servants saying no to their traditional roles and saving up money to buy their way out of the angels' paygrade.

If Un-Koss, a literal god, couldn't get the life he created to act the way he intended them to, what chance did a bunch of podunk human wizards ever have?

The "diabolical" way of life was crafted to keep the devils subservient to demiurgi, above common humans, and in constant competition with one another. It's not theirs, any more than the angels' old laws are really their own. And, just like the angels and servants, the devils' cage is starting to show its cracks (once again, Himself's appearance literalizes the metaphor). Individuals like Cio are discovering the ability to say no to traditional diabolical advancement. Devil songs and stories are starting to show undercurrents of class consciousness that defy the intended atomisation (though ironically the devil who sings "Bring Me a Bottle" for us, Oscar, seems to completely miss that undercurrent himself).

More and more, I'm leaning toward Himself being a sympathetic figure. I think that he wants things to be better. He wants to be better. For now though, all he can do is ask the up-and-coming new regime to please spare a thought for the poor devil when it comes into power. I could be giving him too much credit, but that's my current read.


Acting On What?

Getting back to this post's introduction, the biggest running theme in K6BD so far is agency. The stand-out sidestories for book 2 were "Het and the Rakshasa" and "Aesma and the Red-Eyed King." Both stories about passive, acquiescent protagonists who let other people use what should be their own power and agency for evil purposes. For book 3, the big sidestory was from "Tales of the Silver Prince," where the protagonist acts in what he thinks is his own interest, but due to his lack of self-awareness it ends up leading him nowhere.

Worse than just not getting what he wants, Kassardis ends up replicating the thing he hates. Not because he gave up or gave in. Not because he let someone else run roughshod over him. To use an Orwellism, he didn't realize that he'd already been conquered by himself.

Everybody has biases and blind spots. The absolute worst thing you can do about them is pretend they don't exist. Making empty performative gestures to make up for them or distract people from them is not the same thing as acknowledging them. Cio was able to come back from the brink because she saw what she was doing and recognized the cost. Mammon, meanwhile, was able to distract himself from what he was doing by reminding himself how rich he was becoming. He never confronted his regrettable actions; just kept comforting and reassuring himself with his success. Counting his money over and over again until he forgot how to do anything else.

Killy's interaction with this theme is kind of muddled because of her actually having an antagonist trying to string her along. I guess in her case, the self-perception of weakness and passivity was the thing she was running from, so her failure state was basically just being set back to the previous book's challenge. Like I said, I feel like her part of this volume was strained all around.


Speaking Of Muddled

At this point, I feel like I have a sense for what K6BD is good at, and also what it's bad at. "Seeker of Thrones" did a very good job of highlighting both.

The central philosophical stuff, about existentialism and democracy and so forth? That's all gold. Probably better than gold. Platinum. This is the kind of fiction that changes lives. It's also, I think, very astute social commentary and political critique, told through fantasy trappings that do a perfect job of making it clear what they're talking about without ever naming names or creating lazy one-to-one analogues.

For instance, while the Black Seven's regime is pretty obviously a satire of late capitalism, it isn't literally late capitalism. Something that's increasingly bothered me about left-leaning fiction is that by casting literal capitalism (or its knock-on effects; literal neoliberalism, literal 20th century style fascism, etc) as the antagonist of every story no matter where or when it's set, it ironically falls into a weird kind of capitalist realism. It starts sending the message that capitalism, an economic system that's only really existed for a few centuries of real world history, is an inescapable eternal boogeyman that haunts every possible or even impossible world. A thousand years from now, space wage-workers are exploited by space corporations. In fanciful worlds of magic, heroes face down orc Hitler or fight off the wizard Dutch East India company. Sometimes, I just want to be able to imagine a world that ISN'T stuck in the same rut that ours is. Its evils can still be commentaries on our own world's evils without directly transposing them. K6BD nails this perfectly, in a way that I only wish was more common.

...

It's a little ironic that I'm using this example when "Seeker of Thrones" literally involved an evil banking cartel. I think that "Seeker" avoided falling into this trap by not going into any detail about how the Grand Bank actually works and the legalities of how it fleeces the multiverse. We all know how that shit works already, we're tired of looking at it. By instead focusing on systems of social control, atomisation, and greed more generally, it makes a statement that applies to modern society, but would ALSO apply to a very long list of premodern ones.

...

The main characters are great, at least when they're able to really be themselves. Hell, even most of the side characters are great. For instance, I'm still surprised by what a memorable one-scene-wonder the Reverend Mother turned out to be, both as a foil to Killy and just as a charismatic baddy. Mammon was pretty compelling in his short appearance, but the Reverand Mother did at least as much work for the story as he did, and she did it with even less screentime and dialogue than he got.

The art started out meh, but it's gotten better fast and isn't showing any sign of slowing down. The big, high-rez spectacle pages are getting more frequent as well as better quality, to the point where I'm downright impatient to see what the next book's scene-setting pages look like.

One place where K6BD is really starting to show its cracks, though, is with the realization of the worldbuilding. In the first book and a half or so, I was blown away by how big and detailed and intricate the setting was, but I'm starting to feel like that was a Potemkin village. We were told that the main purpose of the Keys of Kings is to allow dimensional travel, and that the personal magical power of the Black Kings comes down to a whole intricate magic system (or systems). But...then it turns out that the Keys are just pieces of magic power that make you stronger the more you have of them, and that their main role in the story is just to raise people's power levels. There was a system of pacts and contracts that devils use to advance themselves...but now we're being shown "exceptions" before ever seeing the rule, in a way that makes me fear that that whole concept is going to be quietly dropped. We're told that the Black Kings can create and destroy entire worlds with their magic, but when we see Mottom actually fight for real in the Battle of Yre she just uses a higher level version of the animu attacks that half the other characters use. Characters forget their most interesting and flavorful powers when the plot requires it (ie, why no paper pterodactyls from Cio?).

The most disappointing thing for me, though, is the homogeneity that's starting to show beneath the skin of a diverse, multicultural setting. I get that being conquered by Throne and assimilated into its cultural milieu will have a homogenizing effect, but the story hasn't been using its opportunities to go beyond that. The freshly conquered world whose king Mottom turned into a tree in book 2 had a monarchical one world government with superpowered martial artist soldiers guarding the king...just like all the other ones we've seen, both in the comic itself and in all the side stories. Every story and subculture - with very few exceptions - paints a picture of this pseudo Age of Sail technostasis, with swords, flintlock guns, and (flying) wooden sailing ships. All the myths and legends have the same kind of Wuxia-esque bombast, hyperviolence, and melodrama to them, if not always to the same degree. I don't mind at all if a story has a style it wants to commit to, but early K6BD really seemed like it was promising more than that, so I'm left disappointed.

There are also some things that just...how do I put this...okay, for example: "Seeker of Thrones" has an undercurrent theme about found family and the importance of human connections in general. Mammon is suffering forever because he gave his family up without realizing how much he would miss them. Cio's existence is defined by a struggle between antisocial conditioning, and a desire for love and companionship, with her feelings for Killy being what saved her at the end. White Chain's own little redemptive moment had her accepting a gift from Nyave, not only coming into her own femininity by wearing the dress but also showing appreciation for a human gesture.

So why the hell hasn't Killy gone back home for a visit yet? I was sure she was about to do that, at the end, when she started telling the others about LA. There's nothing to suggest she did it, though, and apparently book 4 starts out after a timeskip of some length. Whatever happened to that sorority sister of hers who was a friend since childhood? You know, the one that comforted her and gave her that vital pep talk back in the first book? What about Killy's family? Do Killy's family just think she's dead at this point? Does she care? I wouldn't be bothered by this if it weren't for "Seeker of Thrones'" emphasis on family, friends, and loved ones. I feel like K6BD forgets these sorts of things by the wayside a lot, and sometimes it really does hurt the story and undermine what I think it wants its message to be.

Like I said before, I think this volume really showcases the best and the worst things about the comic as a whole. As such, I'm not sure where to rank it next to the previous two, at least as far as writing (rather than visuals) is concerned.


Anyway, that was "Seeker of Thrones." And, I suppose, a review of K6BD as a whole up to this point. Sometime before the end of December, I'll be starting book 4, "King of Swords."