#but secondly

Me, realizing I'm about to get to tell my story about managing a hotel when there was an emergency stopover for penguin transport and we were the only place in the area with bathrooms that would work for the night:

And not elaborate

I gotta say, it's really really dope.

I love the art style, Rudo's a really fun protagonist to watch, I love the world building and the power system.

Offer more sacrifices. Time, patience, the card, to the great being who has triumphed over multiple star systems.

P O M - P O M

Well, since the piece is available for public consumption now, even if you didn't preorder it, you can find me on pages 61-66 or on my ao3 page. It's called Castles Crumbling and explores what happens if you get the bad ending in Turnabout Succession. Gonna warn you up front, it deals with a lot of heavy topics, including an overdose that could be read as a suicide. If you're not in a place where you can handle all of that, that's perfectly fine and you can wait until you are. It's not going anywhere.

Arceus is a god, the God of the entire Pokémon world, and that is a very different thing than being the God of our world. We don’t get any indication of how omniscient Arceus is, for all we know, it isn’t. But more importantly, Arceus is a Pokémon, not a human, and it might not even think like we do. It may have an entirely different set of morals than we do that is just as valid, because, and I cannot stress this enough, morality is a subjective concept created by humans that has no actual bearing on reality. Like, we can argue all day on it, but morality is literally just not actually a thing that exists, not an objective measure of reality, but a human concept we apply to it. It just isn’t real.

Not to say that the “Unknowable God” trope isn’t overdone either, but I honestly think that it’s far more interesting than a God that has obvious and understandable motives like carelessness or cruelty. The idea that Arceus is intentionally sent Ingo to the past and then just abandoned him is… silly, to me, IMO. Like, the player quite obviously can die repeatedly in Legends Arceus, like, sure, you “black out” and get “rescued”, but like… let’s be real. Half of the things you get “rescued” for would have smashed you into paste. The fact that you are in a rescuable state is a Miracle with a capital M for Godly interference.

So you’re telling me that Arceus, who literally sends you to Hisui with a GodPhone in your pocket, who resurrects you from any of your stupid dumbass deaths, just gave up when Ingo got a concussion/met Uxie? Just said “oops, better luck next human”? Then why did it choose to help Rei/Akari? Why did it decide not to try again with Ingo? Why didn’t it just ditch Rei/Akari when they die and summon a new person and try again? It just raises too many questions.

Realistically, Ingo was just a fluke that Volo summoned with his little reality fuckups, and Arceus doesn’t really know or care about him being displaced. Because, well, it happens all the time. Fallers are just a natural phenomenon and part of the natural order of things. Sometimes shit happens. Just because we as the audience care about it doesn’t mean it’s somehow more special than any of the other times it happened. 

Yes, Rei/Akari is a child. But I think it’s way more interesting if that’s just… not a concept that occurred to Arceus as a problem. The concept of childhood is, again, an entirely human construct that does not concretely exist as a definable state, but rather a nebulous concept we apply to reality as a species to protect our young from trauma. Trauma, as well, is a subjective experience that Arceus, as a god, may not even posses! The concept of trauma might not even exist to Arceus! We get no indication it can read minds, that it knows everything you experience or think! The likely thing is that Rei/Akari was simply chosen because they were the correct choice in Arceus’s eyes with no consideration to human concepts like them being “too young”, because it has no knowledge or interest in them.

And like, that’s not good! I certainly wouldn’t argue any of it is a just or good thing to do, but the thing is that it’s fundamentally different than us and does not process either reality or morality like we do. I think it’s much more interesting is Arceus just… isn’t like us. Doesn’t think like us or know how we think, simply processing information in an entirely different way than we do.

And like, you can criticize that, but I think treating Arceus as a malevolent force undermines the incredible potential of engaging with an entirely different concept of a creator deity than traditional religion gives. One that doesn’t care in the same way we do, doesn’t think in the same way we do, but rather created the world and then created children to do the rest, who created their own children and so on. That watches us and doesn’t interfere, and the problem of evil just isn’t a question? Why does a good God let bad things happen? Because it’s neither good nor evil, and it “lets” the world play out because it doesn’t interfere in ways we expect.