#arklance

i think the major thing that sticks out to me about the sankta is, not just That they're incredibly racist, but the particular way in which they are racist. there's a lot of racist characters in arknights, with most of that racism being directed at the sarkaz, so it's not like the sankta are particularly unusual on that front... but there's a difference between how anti-sarkaz racism singles out the sarkaz as exceptional (exceptionally reviled), and how sankta style racism singles out the sankta as exceptional (exceptionally blessed) instead. the sankta don't hate other races, of course not, but the other races will never be The Chosen People like the sankta are. of no fault of their own, naturally, they can't help being inferior, we should pity them. rather than outright hateful it's this very condescending style of bigotry. anyone who doesn't have our "empathy", anyone who doesn't immediately catch the vibe, anyone we need any effort at all to understand can never be one of "us", can never be on the same footing as "us".

it's something I kinda stubbed my toe on with insider and spuria in hortus de escapismo already, and now again with patrizion in the masses travels. these characters are "fun and nice people", they certainly seem to think of themselves as such, but they're also incredibly fucking condescending towards anyone who's not a sankta. and other characters say out loud that that's a load of shit, I don't think the game is actually trying to present these characters as remotely justified for this line of thinking. but it's striking that the sankta, these people who define themselves by their "empathy", are repeatedly portrayed as deeply callous to anyone not like them, and so lacking in self awareness that they don't even realize they're being callous. why would they question if maybe the way they look at other races is wrong when the saint's travels clearly says that the liberi were drooling cavemen before the sankta shared their superior culture with them? it's just the natural order.

this condescension with a veneer of goodwill is the core conceit of the first saint's argument. she explains how things happened in the past and thinks that alone is enough reason to listen to her idea of how the future should be. the first saint felt that she was saved when she received a halo, so obviously the only way to save everyone is to give them halos. isn't it natural? even andoain was taken in by the concept at first, the idea that the halo is not unique to the sankta, the idea that even beasts can be welcomed among the chosen with enough faith - an idea that requires the base assumption that there is such a thing as "the chosen people", and that it is the halo that marks them as chosen.

the first saint's revelation that the sankta were originally sarkaz feels like a complete disruption of established doctrine, but this appeal to authority, this conviction that she knows what's best for everyone because obviously the halo means she was singled out as more special than anyone else, is completely in line with the lateran church we know. the sankta are self-evidently special, and this gives them the right to decide the fate of the world. this is, of course, functionally no different from the end of path of life, when aegir announced to the world that everything will be fine and dandy if all the nations just submit to aegir's self-evident superiority. laterano isn't even unique in its condescension.

it's made very clear time and time again that this sankta "empathy" is something they cannot extend to other races, not just because of the fantasy logistics of their halos transferring emotions between them, but because they do not make any effort whatsoever to try understanding people who don't have halos to facilitate this understanding, to try understanding people who are not like them. paganini as a liberi raised a sankta girl and none of the resources on sankta childrearing were of any use to him because they all assumed the sankta would only be communicating with other sankta. patrizion as a sankta raised a liberi girl and thought that immanentizing the eschaton would be an easier and better way to come to understand her than like, taking time off work to hang out with her and actually talk with her. and paganini is the one who eventually succeeded at bonding with his daughter, because he adapted his way of communicating with vannini until they found something that worked for the two of them.

speaking of, the scene where paganini points a gun at patrizion and patrizion is like "just give it a few hours until you get your halo and then you can actually shoot me" was insane. guns and halos are connected culturally if not materially, gunsmithing is how paganini communicated with vannini when she couldn't talk. paganini directly spells out his frustrations with patrizion, he points a gun (this bit of language that he as a liberi shares with the sankta) at him, and patrizion essentially says "sorry, even though I can see what you're getting at, I still won't understand until you're exactly like me". paganini is hailed as the greatest gunsmith of laterano, mastering a 'language' that wasn't even really meant for him, but still the sankta won't do the bare minimum of reaching out in turn to actually achieve understanding. patrizion as the longest-serving gun-knight in the force is so deeply entrenched in the lateran status quo and this assumption that the sankta are fundamentally different from (that is, superior to) other people that he's destroyed every single one of his personal relationships and attributed it all to the other party's tragic failure to be one of the chosen. you dense motherfucker.

contrary to how the sankta present themselves, the halo does not make them more emotionally capable. if anything it makes them exceptionally emotionally immature, because none of the lateran sankta ever had the need to learn how to use their big boy words to say what they feel. that's definitely what the baby and rebirth theming of the event is getting at too, what with andoain's metaphor for how killing the Law will be like a child biting through its umbilical cord. a sankta gets their halo when they utter their first word, when they first attempt to bridge the insurmountable gap between people, and it spares them the effort of ever having to get significantly better at it as long as they stay in laterano. mostima said it took her two years since falling before she could bear to even look her friends in the eye while speaking, she continues to avoid any conversation that would have her put her feelings into words to this day. the average lateran sankta's level of emotional regulation skills is having the restraint to file an application to blow something up before doing it, and if you have a problem you should tell it to a confessional instead of bothering others with it.

federico meanwhile is basically the only sankta still living in laterano who knows how to use his big boy words to convey concepts and ideas to other people. other sankta act like something's wrong with his empathy, because they don't understand him, but he's hooked up to the halo network same as the rest, he can interface with the Law just fine. getting other people's emotions beamed directly into his brain just doesn't change that he has no instinctive understanding of emotion and has to use context clues and logical reasoning to extrapolate what any of that information actually means, the same as he would have to for non-sankta. fede is treated like he's an aberrant freak for not just catching the vibe the way the other sankta do, but it means he's one of the few lateran sankta who can actually fucking talk with non-sankta without being condescendingly racist. he's the one saying word for word "your prejudice is illogical" in hortus de escapismo, because there is in fact no actual basis for acting like other people are incomprehensible just because you never put in the effort to understand them. grow up.

i actually burst out laughing when the epilogue to the masses travels had patrizion mention that after everyone's halos got rebooted, it seems that the degree to which sankta empathy lets them understand how others feel now depends on how well those sankta know each other. that's how it's worked for everyone else the whole time! at last, the sankta of laterano are forced to grow up and build an actual understanding with those around them.

i think it's very interesting how exia talked about prayer while fighting the first saint. the laterano of today already proved that prayer doesn't work as communication with god, the actual function of prayer is social and emotional, it is to express that you're thinking about others and wishing them well... the institution of religion that would profess itself the one true way to live is heavily criticised, but the emotional need that religion can fulfil is respected. exia being "the new covenant" makes sense when she's the one who verbalised that. the sankta halo is proof of their connection to god, and the sankta themselves proved that this connection with god has no bearing on real life, even if they didn't extrapolate that conclusion to other parts of life yet. prayers are ostensibly meant to seek connection with god, but their actual function is to connect with the people around you. and so the god and the world and the wishes expressed in prayer don't have to match reality at all, because these are simply the lateran way of expressing how you feel to one another and seeking connection with one another, with or without halo. exia likewise redefines laterano's relationship to the machine that housed the Law, spraying it with graffiti to turn it into another vector of expression and communication separate from halo empathy.

and with that in mind i'm also fascinated by the little aside with priestess in which she says language development can be fettered by human emotion and reason. priestess clearly sees language as purely a method of conveying information, rather than a method of connecting with those external to you through the conveying of information. a language changing to adapt to the minds of its speakers is a flaw to priestess, rather than the whole point of the construct... and if her reminiscing is to be believed, oracle never disagreed with her that language being influenced by emotion was a flaw, they just believed that such flaws are not necessarily a bad thing.