Raven's drafts

like so, this is gonna have spoilers for the first chunk of super supportive. i've already made a post about this before i think but this will be post #2 i guess.

right, the thing is that there have been a lot of mentions that the artonans are still very shady, going from the subtle to the extremely overt. what is up with u-type affixations? there's the implication that picking a bad first skill might permanently hamstring your authority development! we still don't really know what the deal is with chaos, and it's been implied that no human really knows what the deal is with chaos. who was really behind the matadero attack, b/c it seems like the guy on the submerged boat was swayed into committing the attack precisely when the boat went into the system's dead zone, which implies whoever swayed him knew exactly how to keep things out of sight of the system. so there's all these things that are rife for elaboration that could totally upend our understanding of the dynamics at play. but...

okay so like the narrative makes a big deal about that one object shaper whose name alden can't remember, right? ha ha they're just a background character. except there are also like ten other students in his class that have literally never been mentioned at all, except in team totals (grouped as sets of like, "+5 other As" in the gym class notes). likewise with alden's psychologist appointments: he has apparently been meeting with psychologists his whole life and especially now after returning to earth and the matadero attack, but these are all just kinda offhand mentions that we never see on-screen. now, with the mind healer, some of alden's ptsd stuff has come into narrative focus, but there are all these bits of worldbuilding like, "this is some worldbuilding that was never really fully elaborated on and is only there in the margins as vague gestures towards a more fleshed-out world that the author never got around to writing b/c it's not really critical for the story they're telling," and that makes me wonder how many of the things above that i see as looming conflicts were actually written more as miscellaneous worldbuilding and minor threads that have been dropped.

at this point i'm really hoping that the secondary and tertiary are huge dicks, b/c that's kind of the only thing that would really make the political position of the knights make sense? the primary and quaternary are so nice and sweet and honorable, and alis-art'h explicitly had a bit about how she's not involved in politics (getting the thegund mission specifically because it was long and remote and she hates dealing with the grand council). but like. these are the people who have the most effective power in the entire known universe. it doesn't seem like they take orders from anybody? that's the whole point of the english 'general' translation. but it's very unclear how they fit into the artonan political landscape.

stu-art'h was even like 'it would be very easy for me to unlock your system and give you better skill choice options', and it's like, okay so if that doesn't even rise to the level of a special knight-only privilege, are we supposed to read that statement as saying that the situation for avowed being what it is on earth is solely b/c no interested knight (or wizard!!) has decided to instruct humans on how the system and skills actually work? or that the knights don't really care about resource worlds as such? or that instruction of a single human about skill construction would be political, but it might be overlooked for the son of the primary? b/c that's sure how i read that bit.

like there's definitely a reading of the story where alden is this hugely traumatized kid who's only getting special information from the system b/c it knows he's now too terrified of system collapse to try telling anybody that the system is kind of shady -- e.g., jeffy's level-ups almost certainly being timed to reinforce that doing jobs and obeying orders gets him power-ups, even though he presumably had some amount of that authority growth already banked for a while prior to the disaster. like, why not tell somebody that you know what a level is? b/c it sure seems like that's something humans in general don't know. but! i don't actually think that's an angle the story is going to take.

or like, something else that has been weighing on me: max is explicitly mentioned as being from south africa. the artonans landed in 1960, prior to the dissolution of aparthied. presumably the fact that 1. max is black, 2. he's from south africa, and 3. he still ended up on anesidora is intended to signify that yes, south africa got rid of aparthied. there's some gesturing that maybe racism itself doesn't exist any more? alden mentions it when they're watching the old video about alien contact, and boe is immediately like "but there's still anti-avowed sentiment", but he notably doesn't say "sure but there is still racism". but we actually have very little knowledge of what the entire world's political and social organization is. there's a part where a superhero blithely mentions that most non-supervillian work people do on earth has to do with guarding things and quelling riots, and it's like, oh are you gonna elaborate on that?? no???

all that is to say, i've found super supportive to be compelling in part b/c it does keep gesturing at all these subjects in a way that's way more involved than the usual "there's a system and it gives people superpowers" setup you usually see in litrpg/progression fantasy stories. (like, i mentioned it in that other post, but the thing where wordchains interact differently with the system compared to all other kinds of magic being because... the special-interest group supporting the chainer class has ideosyncratic ideas about how magic ought to be used is great imo. like oh yeah this is all a constructed system, with limitations due to politics. stuff like that is how i want to see the 'the system was made by a series of compromises where everybody/nobody really got what they wanted' worldbuilding fleshed out) but i have absolutely no clue if it's actually gonna hit all the bits of the story that caught my attention. almost certainly some of the above is just misc. minor worldbuilding details my brain just latched on to that will never really be followed up on meaningfully in the text.

(i have kinda been thinking about the story from a perspective 20 years in the future, where alden is some superhero-knight on multiversal adventures, and boe is probably an infamous supervillian involved with superhumans at large, and also jeremy is just some guy with a job who was childhood friends with both of them. but who knows if the story will ever really get there.)

re: gayness, i'm pretty sure alden is canonically asexual, on account of everything with natalie. him completely not understanding why the super-secret privacy booths all come with a giant bed was pretty funny. but wow that does not stop him from having a lot of intense emotionally-fraught interactions with other guys. boe, lute, stu-art'h... actually i kinda suspect this might be the kind of story when alden and stu end up as queerplatonic lifepartners. i'm not even sure what that would mean, but their friendship is so emotionally charged and is clearly being built up towards something. in the original draft of the sleepover chapter alden interrupts stu-art'h by saying 'hush' and it's like, wowwww okay i see why you changed that b/c that makes the entire scene read way more romantically

(there's also a lot of speculation about boe maybe having a one-sided crush on alden? i could see it. there's, again, like one mention of boe going 'natalie is hot' and then nothing else, & it's hard to say if that's just the author not wanting to dip into relationship and romance stuff or what.)

It’s kinda difficult to have an objective view on what exactly is going on as Alden and Stu’arth and practically every character in the novel (apart from maybe Gorgon but he has literal chains preventing him from speaking) are all unreliable narrators, which is why the criticism of Anton and the power dynamic shifts often when new information is presented.

The contract originally is said by Joe to have been intended as good but with the original wizards not being powerful enough, it brought in all of Anton which is where it devolved into political bullshit. That is obviously unreliable because we Know Joe isn’t particularly trustworthy, but it is the version that I think makes the most sense. Knights and the other “good and just and true” Antonians in the book are implied to be under their own contracts and rules that prevent them from outright Telling earthlings all there is to know about the system and chaos, and this contract only makes sense if we go with Joe’s teaching about the intentions being good. The Earth Contract being so new that the influx of information could disrupt it, is only a deterrent to people who are said and implied to have good intentions if the disruption would be a bad thing. If the Knights and the Primary are working on a much grander scale that ultimately points towards good, the lack of information available to earth starts to become clearer.

This isn’t to say that what they’re doing isn’t ultimately shitty or horrible. Aulia Velra appears to believe that what she is doing is ultimately right and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that how she manipulated Lute was completely wrong. Earthlings are tying their authority too quickly, with little to no information about what they’re doing or Why they’re doing it or even the wider chaos-driven effects. Under such complete and total ignorance, the contract is manipulative and unfair, but Alden as the narrator has Never known a world without the contract and the only time the contract failed or blipped out was extremely traumatic to him. So even as he becomes aware of the way he and the other avowed are being screwed over and manipulated, he can’t go further from his own core and central belief that the System and the Contract is still a Good thing.

In that way, he is more similar to Antonians, especially Knights, than even he may realize. Though they might occassionally think that things might be unfair or that certain avowed deserve more knowledge, they won’t act on those thoughts for fear of causing mass rejection and thus the contract failing. Because they, like Alden, think that ultimately the System is a good thing. Ironically, more morally dubious characters like Joe are more willing to take risks -as it pertains to the system breaking by an abundance of knowledge- than the upright Knights. (Except the Primary but tbh idrk his deal)

I don’t think the Antonians have as much knowledge and sway over the system as you might think (personal theory), as what usually happens in a group project where everyone pushes their own agenda, some stuff slips by that only the person who has the agenda fully knows about or understands. The system itself is semi-sentient, continuously growing and changing so the Antonians control over it is limited. Knowledge on specific Earth Contract things is likely to be limited much like how Earth governments don’t really tell Everyone everything about their dealings with foreign nations, so what the average Antonia believes their relationship with Earth is might not be based on truth, and most likely differs depending on who you ask. Ultimately, it’s a shitshow that is most likely going to come to a head at some point.

Re: the politics on earth. I do think most of the -isms and -phobias have taken a step back or more likely translated into Avowed vs non avowed, and then into Rank bs. It does seem a lot more heterosexual than I would expect for a post-homophobia world with a lot of the explicit canon relationships amongst humans being f/m, but that could be more about what Alden through the Author notices, than an actual indicator of the relationship preferences of Earth at large. Frankly, it would be weird for homophobia to still be a thing considering just how…. strange the relationship and family dynamics of avowed in Anesidora are. The riots are implied to be Anti- Antonian sentiments from non avowed , unregistered avowed or low ranked avoweds. Especially in the latest chapters. It would be nice to have a Boe or Jeremy focused arc to expand the world a little, as Alden is a lot more Antonian and Anesidora-centric (for understandable plot reasons).

we know that some information is not being given to earth, and we even know (via stuart) what kind of information that is: it's information that would make earth less interested in maintaining the contract as it currently exists. what kind of information could that be? well, it could be anything. but imo some of that information is almost certainly knowledge that they got a bad deal. like, alden knows this but i don't think he's necessarily put it all together and actually told anybody: if earth rejects the contract, just from a planetary politics perspective, every single earth avowed will die horribly and painfully. without the contract around to affix them regularly, their authority growth will eventually destable the affixations and rip them apart. it'll take a few years, maybe even a few decades, but every earth avowed would need to either leave the planet or die. that's not a great bargaining perspective to be in!

but from a wider perspective, also, i would be shocked if there wasn't some explicit chaos/magic connection. maybe magic causes chaos. we already know wizards make worse demons, so maybe magic or authority presence in general intensifies chaos. maybe chaos is solely a byproduct of magic! if some of that information is stuff like "actually each time a wizard casts a spell it produces chaos, so by allowing wizards on your planet you're making it a chaos magnet, and 'the chaos problem' is like 90% b/c it's not politically practical to tell wizards to stop destroying the universe by casting spells for everything, so your job is just to existentially subsidize our ruling class so they can continue to do whatever they want", then that's a very different perspective on the chaos problem than the view we've had so far.

joe said that some of the advocates for the system & the contract consider avowed to be a gift from the universe who will be the artonan's saviors, but he very notably did not really explain what that actually means. saviors from what, exactly? there's absolutely room for that saviorship to still be something fundamentally selfish -- have knights and avowed mutilate their authority so they can cast without producing chaos, and then use that bound authority to squash the chaos produced by wizards casting with unbound authority.

the main roadblock alden has in the story is just not having information: "how will the artonas generally or the knights specifically respond to knowing he's effectively a knight-in-hiding"? the artona i kernel even says, hey, there have been non-artonan knights in the past, and it's like, oh yeah? who were they? how were they considered among artonan society? among other knights? how about you take me to a library where i can read the minutes of the knight meetings that covered that and get literally any information about that at all?

the artona i kernel also says: well, if you tell him stuart will know your secret for a long time. who knows what he might think about it in a decade or two. and it's like, well, what pressures are on him? what's the knight's oath that they swear, and what are some ways those oaths have been enforced in complicated situations in the past? she doesn't have to tell him all his deep inner thoughts and feelings when she could give him, like, a history book.

that all seems to be treated more like top secret CIA briefs than, like, historical documents. alden can't just go to the library and check out a book on the knights over the centuries and give himself some perspective that way. the maps of artona given to earth don't even include the existence of the knight rapports!

i read this one comment that was like, 'the chainer', lute's little novella about his backstory, is basically the entire story in a microcosm. nobody lied to lute. hazel said his mom wasn't on the list of family members to get healing, and she was telling the truth. lute confronted his mom about that, and she didn't say anything false. when he demanded his mom get healing as his half of the oath he swore with aulia, she did in fact swear to get healing for his mom, and meant it. none of that was a lie! but because he didn't have relevant information, he couldn't understand what was actually happening until it was too late. like the system told alden: a lie is expensive. a simple refusal to answer is cheap. when stuart is saying, well, the artonans are keeping certain information from earth that would make them less likely to agree to the contract terms, i can't imagine that being anything other than some really bad news that would make them aware of how profoundly they've been screwed over.

even like... humans like to think of system-mandated vacation time and refusals as ways to schedule around superhero work, actually, those are the only things keeping every avowed from being summoned 24/7. it's been said several times that humans (for as-of-yet unspecified reasons) have very tightly-restricted summoning limits, which is part of why most superheroes get summoned like, 4 times in 40 years, or w/e. but the artonans are the one that control the summon restrictions; earth has nothing to do with it. if they wanted to, artonans could be summoning all of earth's avowed nearly perpetually; the artonans have just not been doing that so much. yet.

i don't think artonans are going to end up being, you know, mustache-twirling villains, but i do think eventually the story will get back to the setup established at the very beginning: earth is a colonized world that's having its resources extracted and sent back to the artonan empire as desired by artonans. how badly that goes for earth has a lot more to do with the triplanets' needs & specific political maneuvering between artonan senators, than anything earth has to say about it.

like, notably, we still know almost nothing about the actual political framework of artonan society. we know it's an aparthied state where non-wizards can't hold political office; we know there's a grand senate of wizards that decides most policy; we know that there's a very strong cultural expectation to not spead information down to ones lessers. that's nearly all we know!

(or, like, another thing i think is probably going to be touched on -- the average artonan wizard is probably in favor of SAL, rather than anesidora. anesidora is convenient to them, sure, but given what we know about the expectation for wizards culturally, it's that avowed should be out there among their lessers, using their powers for the good of the common people. all the avowed recusing themselves from the world's problems to live on an isolated island & hoarding all the artonan gifts for themselves is probably very weird and a little repulsive to a lot of wizards. a lot of wizards are on the side of the supervillains here! which i think has some interesting implications w.r.t. the growing anesidoran nationalist movement after the matadero attack.)

What I did find interesting re: chaos, is that the novel kind of says that most Avowed have really high chaos potential and the system is a stabilizing influence (much like how Gorgon was a stabilizing influence), that in itself paints a more dire picture of earth’s chances if even a crumb of chaos happens in it’s near vicinity.

It would be interesting I think, if the chaos threat is like this vicious cycle where they send people out to defeat chaos and those people become chaos monsters who need to be defeated by more people etc etc. But maybe it’s naive, but I just can’t see a way for the author to backtrack into making the chaos threat Anton-only. Like I don’t think the Earth is a chaos magnet because of wizards being on the planet, I think the mention of chaos potential being present in Alden Before he became avowed means it already was.

I’m also really interested in what you think the resources Artonians are exploiting from earth would be. Honestly, from my perspective it seems like the avowed are wayyy underused. Lind and Esh even think of the chaos fighting they do on earth as a vacation because of the comparison of danger, most avowed get summoned to do petty, useless stuff that the artonians just can’t be arsed to do and which occasionally goes very wrong (Alden being a very good example).

I do agree in there being a lot of selfish reasons being re-packaged in a machiavellian “it’s for the good of the universe at large” way, I guess I just have more faith in the “it’s for the good of the universe” aspect especially since we know so little about the chaos threat. I do agree that a lot of Antonians have the capacity and maybe even the intent to abuse Earthlings, with very little in the way to stop them. I also think blatant abuse would destroy or hurt the contract in some way which is why the limitations being what they are. It’s still unfair but with a lot less wiggle room.

Also, re: anton 1’s hoarding of knowledge. I find Mother incredibly suspicious, especially with how fond Alden is of her. Lis’arth (idk if i spelled her name right) hesitated to ask a favor from Mother For a reason. I find it weird and manipulative how much Alden relaxes in the weird system limbo, and it reminds me a lot of Aulia playing games with her grandkids so they all think they’re special and thus less likely to rebel. All that said, the history books might be even more expensive than the lie was. Magic books are available to even children, but information about Knights was restricted even in the huge ass library Alden went to when visiting Stu’Arth. I do think she might have given him more hints as to where to find that knowledge himself, but I guess the story will tell us eventually (i’m crossing my fingers for a griveck knight).