One theme in DCC that I've been rolling around in my brain for weeks now is "If you were always doomed, does the love matter?"
Li Jun is one of the most obvious examples, he is saved by (and saves) Carl multiple times, and it doesn't matter because he dies on the ninth floor, right before the chance for freedom. What did it mean for Li Jun to struggle so much, only to die? Does the extra time with his sister and best friend outweigh all the pain and suffering he went through? Would it have been kinder to let him and his family die?
Annie's the other obvious one, the tragedy wasn't that Annie was sick and dying it's that she was denied the comfort of dying with someone who loved her! She was never going to live but the love that Katia gave her was real! Does it matter if it couldn't change anything? If Annie was only ever going to break Katia's heart should she have loved her in the first place?
The crawlers on the fifth floor as well, especially Langley and company, was it worth it to fight so hard to get off the fifth floor only to die early on the sixth? What does it mean if the second they gain confidence and purpose they just die? Was it worth it? Was it worth the struggle and pain?
If all of Signet's memories of her family are fake, if her whole family is fake, does her love still matter? Does her pain? Her hatred? Should she still fight for them?
Was Donut's love for Bea wasted? Do the moments of love and companionship between them mean nothing now because of Bea's betrayal? Were the moments between them fake even? If Bea had never taken Donut, Dount would never have met Carl, but is that they only thing she would lose?
What of Yvette? A girl born into a shitty family, who struggled and suffered to grow up only to die horribly and painfully and young. Would it have been kinder if she just died in the collapse?
Would it be better if Carl's mom never took him to the circus? Is it tarnished by the heartbreak that came after? Was suicide really the only way?
And the series over and over and over just goes: No! This is the only thing that matters! There will always, always, always be suffering and tragedy and heartbreak and death and you have to wrench joy and love and community from a world that wants to deny them to you! If you're doomed matter how hard you fight to survive then fight like hell anyway! Love even if it only leads to heartbreak! We can see these tragedies and call them unjust and fight for a better future but even if we never reach better the fight alone is worth it!
And don't forget the Tomb Raiders. God, the Tomb Raiders
I can't tell if their memory has fallen by the wayside because there's just too much going on or because Matt Dinniman is a genius and there are deep implications to their memory falling through the cracks.
Historians, when they talk about Carl's life, won't remember the Tomb Raiders. They made some stupid mistakes that made Carl's life a lot harder and got a lot of people killed. In Carl's quadrant, we have Carl, Donut, and Katya; Louis and Firas; and Langley's team of 6. Each bubble had about 150 people, which means Carl's quadrant started with 30-40, and we only know 11 of them because the Tomb Raiders got the rest of them killed before Carl could ever meet them. Not to mention any land quadrant crawlers that could have been saved if Carl got there sooner, and all the NPCs Carl had to kill because the Tomb Raiders made peace impossible.
But goddamn they tried. They tried. The only one whose name I can remember is Bobby, the rogue whose spirit was broken by the tomb. That tower was ten kilometers tall and it took everything they had to survive exploring the top floor, but they kept trying anyway. They suffered, and they were crumbling and they were lost, but they never gave up. Bobby was shaking and dissociating and broken by the end, but even he never stopped trying.
And despite it all, it mattered. They got that panel hooked up, which allowed the Royal Court to kill Quetzalcoatl. Maybe the Royal Court would have found another way to pop the bubble, but that would have taken time. Time that they used to save Srendelgor, to save Floren, to save countless other crawlers and all the changelings, which snowballed into so many more lives saved.
Most of the Tomb Raider guys died thinking their deaths would mean nothing. But it meant everything. I haven't finished book 8 yet, but I'm thinking that it's not just the crawlers. Carl is going to save every human left on the surface, he's going to be there to help with the Lucia issue, because the Tomb Raiders never quit fighting.
The point is that it matters.
