#seaborn

Second, they literally get taught how to sing and dance in one of the IS3 endings? Skadi was playing a harp for them and they sang along. It's kind of the point of them that they can't do something until they can. They couldn't talk until they decided they needed a way to communicate with humans, so they grew vocal cords and learned to talk. That's why there was one called The First To Talk. There must also therefore be a First To Sing and a First To Paint. A First To Feel Emotions. Like, they literally promised to learn to feel emotions; that was on their to-do list. They learn to coexist with humanity in another IS3 ending. There's one playing weiqi in IS6. Even Arturia in her latest module admits that she was wrong about the Seaborn, and hopes to go back and study their music.

Also, they do have individuality? Like, they literally do? Each one we've met (who could talk) has had its own thoughts and feelings. When one wants to share what they've learned with the many, they have to swim back and actually do that physically somehow. Like, stopping them from doing so has been a major goal in both Stultifera Navis and Path of Life. They do not "share a mind" in any sense at all. They just communicate with each other, whether that be chemically, psychically, genetically, or whatever. Maybe they dance like bees. At best you could describe them as hyper-altruistic, since they seem to prioritize the survival of others over themselves. Not even like, the survival of the hive overall: the survival of even a single other individual is enough for them to sacrifice themselves.

In [Path of Life], BP-1 After:

Specter: "My parents took me around the home territories when I was little. There are similar structures in many cities."

Doctor: "I thought Ægir children were raised collectively."

Skadi: "I was, but Shark has a special relationship with her biological parents."

Specter: "They're more like friends than parents.

Specter: "They reached a consensus with the Institute of Incubation to bring me along whenever they worked on a new dome project.

Specter: "I spent most my time in the Institute of Incubation, but I was able to see the cities, learn, and even work alongside them."

But two years ago (real-world and fictional), in [Under Tides] SV-ST-1:

Skadi: "You killed my family. It was you who killed my mother, my grandmother, my little sister."

Before I go any deeper into that scene in [Under Tides], I want to focus on "grandmother" first.

Because while the Aegir know what grandparents are... they don't seem to care. When even one's own parents are distant and estranged, then logically society places no value in personal lineage.

BP-3 After

Avitus: "Listen, Jordi. I cannot ascertain whether you are truly bound to him by blood, though such a connection holds little significance. What matters is that there can be no doubt that you are Ægir.

Jordi: "I know I am. But how do I prove I belong here, if I can't even trace my own heritage?"

Avitus: "A true Ægir needs no proof of that."

BP-ST-2

Speaking to Ulpianus for the first time since they met in [Stultifera Navis], Jordi brings up how Ulpianus called him Breogan's descendant, and informs the Abyssal Hunter he was mistaken.

Ulpianus: "True, I did miss the mark, but I never engage in baseless speculation. There is more of a bond between you than you think."

Jordi: "A bond?"

Ulpianus: "The Profound Silence ruined Iberia. The lighthouses fell dark along the coast, and doubt and suspicion grew in their shadow."

Ulpianus: "Breogan was forced to flee the splendor he himself had designed. Gran Faro was one place he sheltered while on the run. The research notes your parents left you are undoubtedly connected to him. They were people he knew he could entrust his life's work to."

Ulpianus: "Look at what you're doing now, young one. You may not be his descendant by blood, but you have most certainly inherited a portion of his wisdom."

And then Ulpianus draws parallels between the courage Breogan showed in leaving Aegir to save the world on dry land, how how Jordi showed similar courage in leaving dry land to save the world under the sea.

And he caps this lesson on Aegirian philosophy with the summation: "Conversely, if all you'd shared was just blood, then that would have been something to be ashamed of."

(Unrelatedly, Ulpianus then shows Jordi much respect by not merely calling the young man by his full name, but in doing so revealing that Ulpianus bothered to learn and remember it.)

Anyway, I hope that underscores just how strange it should be for Skadi to know who her own grandmother was, in addition to her own mother.

It's not that the Aegirian institutions would normally bother to hide that information, but that Aegirian citizens seem to not care at all. It seems that they would respond to news of a grandparent's violent demise no more passionately than that of a completely unrelated stranger.

Yet the death of Skadi's mother and grandmother were explicitly, canonically her motivation for revenge. For leaving her job as an engineer to risk her life in the Abyssal Hunter transformation process, and as a hunter at war with the Sea Monsters. (And apparently, her little sister agreed and joined her for the same purpose.)

Skadi: "You killed my family. It was you who killed my mother, my grandmother, my little sister."

Skadi wishes to know.

Seaborn (The First To Speak): "No. We wouldn't. ... Those in your territory die, by those in your territory's doing."

Skadi: "Lies!"

Seaborn: "Lies? I wish to know what lies means. 'Liar,' too, you said earlier. I wish to know."

Skadi knows. From every part of the sum of all of it, Skadi knows—The Seaborn would not lie.

...All killed by the Ægir.

My sister, my mother, my grandmother...

All my years of revenge were mistaken, from the very beginning.

I never knew. All of this, everyone, killed by the Ægir. The Church of the Deep. The Ægir.

The Seaborn does not lie.

Could Ægir be ignorant of who it was that murdered all of her family?

If there truly are Seaborn that enter cities... could it really have been only her family who were hurt?

In [Path of Life], it was certainly a 'Cultist of the Deep', rather than the Sea Monsters, who murdered the missing the data scientist.

But the investigating officer who discovered the 'cultist' culprit made no attempt to pin the crime on the Sea Monsters. Nor did the officer face any suggestion from her superiors that the Sea Monsters should serve as the scapegoat for the crimes of the murderous saboteur.

Yet apparently, Skadi was lead to believe that Sea Monsters had invaded her home city and killed her mother and grandmother. ONLY her mother and grandmother. No one else.

I'll remind you that Horatia planned from the beginning for Blandus to open the doors for the Sea Monsters to invade Millarium and consume the launch tower. Horatia gambled with the lives of an entire city and two of her nation's legions, with giving the Sea Monsters a whole new set of information to use for evolution... for the sake of advancing her own plan to extend Aegir's control over the sea and the land.

Compared to an entire city, what would be a mother and grandmother?

Ulpianus didn't want his hunters returning to Aegir for a reason.

Addressing The Whale In The Room

Ulpianus isn't without his own responsibility in Skadi's loss.

After all, he is the one who killed Skadi's little sister.

And, she sees... she has seen... That sister of hers ate Ægir, chewing the bones, corners of her mouth torn, up until the Captain had her killed.

And he lied to Skadi's face, blaming her sister's loss of identity not on the Abyssal Hunter transformation he pioneered, but on a Sea Monster's mind-breaking infection.

It's not that he hated or despised Skadi, or that he wanted to lie. But the truth about the Abyssal Hunter transformation was still a classified secret at the time.

More importantly, the revelation of the truth was a known, dangerous risk for a Hunter's grip on their self-identity as humans. Telling Skadi the truth about what happened to her little sister would have been the surest way for Skadi to end up just like her.

But this episode just reinforces what The First To Speak told Skadi. The Sea Monsters do not infiltrate Aegirian cities for precise murders, either random or targeted.

It is the Aegir who do that to themselves.

It was an Aegir 'cultist' who flushed the data scientist out of the city, and it was an Aegir patriot who mercy-killed the Sea Monster the poor scientist had become.

Now, The Leviathan In The Room

Skadi does accuse The First To Speak of lying on the grounds that the Sea Monsters are very much at war with Aegir. Any Aegirian cities the Sea Monsters found within their territory, they would attack and seek to destroy and consume. And the Sea Monsters constantly expand their territory.

As far as Skadi is concerned, the deaths of her mother and grandmother make perfect sense against the context of that war.

I feel the translation in [Under Tides] might have missed something, because the Speaker and Skadi clumsily trip over the distinction between direct, obvious, warlike aggression (which The First To Speak casually admits) and infiltration for the purposes of limited murder (which The First to speak categorically denies).

Seaborn: "We would not do that. Those who die in the cities are unable to provide for the many."

Translation: "Aegirians don't toss their dead out into the ocean to nourish it, and any 'assassins' we sent in would be killed and unable to return with any nutrients. We see random murders as a waste of resources. We haven't begun to understand the idea of assassinating key humans as a part of a deliberate strategy."

As more proof that something is lost in translation, at one point the Seaborn responds to Skadi's freak out by asking "Sin?"

While Skadi is indeed having a mental breakdown over her perceived sins, she never actually says or even thinks the word. Though she might have done so in a previous draft of translations.

And yet, while it is possible there was some mistranslation about "mother and grandmother"... it seems fairly inescapable that the original Chinese MUST have referred to two people who were murdered in Skadi's hometown, whose deaths were blamed on the Sea Monsters, which drove Skadi and her little sister to become Abyssal Hunters and seek revenge.

The broad shape of her narrative background reinforces the likelihood of that part of the translation being correct, inversely to how the dialogue inconsistencies in this scene cast doubt on the accuracy of word-choice for Skadi's broad accusations and the First To Speak's specific denials.

Though another, valid reason for Skadi and the First To Speak struggling to not talk past each other is that the Seaborn isn't remotely human and is trying its best to communicate via a foreign language loaded with concepts it finds completely alien.

One Last Thing

The Tumblr-user, Cerastes, believed that Skadi's grandmother and mother must have both become and died as Abyssal Hunters. Yet Ulpianus became the first Abyssal Hunter only 20 or so years ago, as of [Path of Life], and I don't think he would have accepted a woman older than him as a candidate to risk the procedure.

Even if we assume otherwise, it still runs into the problem of Skadi identifying so strongly with them, despite Aegirian child-raising culture. And it should have been very difficult for Skadi's grandmother and mother to have been significant presences in her life if they were both Abyssal Hunters after Skadi was born.

(As I imagine Hunters were not allowed to conceive children.)

But even if we assume that mother and grandmother were both Abyssal Hunters, Skadi and the Seaborn's lurching, wobbling conversation still makes it clear that the two of them died in an Aegirian city, at Aegirian hands, as surely as Skadi saw happen to her little sister.

And yet, at no point in her break-down at Sal Viento, does Skadi place any blame on Ulpianus.

Not for killing her sister, which she saw with her own eyes. Not for suspecting him of being the one to execute her mother or grandmother. Not for pioneering the technology that would have transformed Skadi and her whole family into beasts that would need to be put down.

Nor does Skadi seem to hold any resentment for Ulpianus afterwards, during their brief reunion, or any time after that.

Which, personally, would make a lot more sense if Skadi believed her mother and grandmother were just civilians who were killed by Aegirians for any other reason than being fallen Abyssal Hunters.

In Conclusion

This:

Doctor: "I thought Ægir children were raised collectively."

Skadi: "I was

Can't be anything other than a retcon.

And that's a problem because it's both blatant and unnecessary.

Okay, so they decided that Specter and Gladiia would both be exceptions to Aegir's child-raising culture. So if Skadi still had a connection to her mother and grandmother, Specter and Gladiia would seem less exceptional.

Would that really have been a problem big enough to necessitate a retcon?

Come on, Hypergryph. Haven't you done Skadi dirty enough already?

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[T]he Endspeaker's parents were killed and eaten by the Captain whilst it watches from afar... The Endspeaker has an uncanny trait of inheriting the evolutionary properties of any organisms (which so far includes other Seaborn and Terran races) it consumes, allowing it to adapt to ever-changing situations, and rapid regenerative capabilities... The Endspeaker is initially similar to an oversized tadpole but with limbs and transparent skin showing some of its innards as well as thick white carapaces around its head. After it consumes Amaia, it evolves into a humanoid Seaborn resembling a jellyfish but with avian legs and wings on its "head," a reptilian tail, and some parts of Amaia's clothes strewn into its luminescent medusa-like main body in addition to the ability to fly.

Idk i just wanted to draw them in my space dnd universe bc the brain rot came back