#zerav meta

Drives me up the wall that the reason why Pochita did this was because he blames himself for Denji's current circumstances.

When Pochita talks about how Denji was unsatisfied with his life past the shed, it wasn't about how Denji secretly hated his life or Pochita saying Denji should just accept his circumstances, it's that he recognizes that Denji was never truly going to be able to live normal life so long as he was there. The circumstances were certainly better for Denji since he was no longer in a debt trap, but his life has continually been targeted and ruined because he was Chainsaw Man.

The entirety of Part 2 is literally about how the world will continue to target and define Denji solely by his status as Chainsaw Man. No one ever saw Denji, only Pochita, and no matter what Denji did, no matter how much Pochita helped him, it ultimately led to the end of the world. The tragedy is that while they were technically separate beings, you couldn't separate them as such, because their shared existence was never for Pochita, but for Denji. Chainsaw Man only ever existed for Denji, and he failed.

The Hero of Hell couldn't save Denji, the person who experiences heaven only within hell.

Yet, Denji has done nothing but save him.

It's a concept brought up with both Makima and Yoru, but a devil's love isn't truly 1-1 with that of a human. Pochita is a devil, and devils work on contracts. Denji helped Pochita achieve his dream, but Pochita still hadn't granted Denji the happy life he wanted, so to do that, he erased himself and freed Denji of the last true thing that held him back from a normal life. Not that I imagine Denji sees it that way, but Pochita has always put Denji first at the cost of himself multiple times over. Pochita very likely blames himself for Denji being in this situation at all.

As for what the reset might entail... Given that Chainsaw Man has placed a lot of emphasis on the symbology of motherhood, I stand by the idea that Pochita's true identity/title is the Birth Devil, and by eating himself, he not only erases himself, but *all devils* because the Birth Devil would be the one that created them.

but then you have things like dave having been told by his future self that he’s being trusted by his future selves to become someone worthy of being said future selves to the point that when he learns of his brothers death he flat out says that he wishes he could mourn him but the threat that bec noir presents is simply too great at the moment to take any kind of breather and that they Have to stay on track to fixing everything

and then you have jade who, for a good chunk of the story, was sleeping and having fun on prospit wanting to introduce her friends to it one day. she was dreaming for most of the story but when the chips fell down she sacrificed herself to save john and when she came back had a panic attack because dying was really fucking scary and she doesnt want to do this anymore. more than that, jade in the enter animatic ended up shooting bec and inadvertently made noir stronger. one of the markers of children growing up is literally the death of their pets and even more so when she says goodbye to it to revive her dream self

kind of fascinating that a linguist doesn't find meaning in a predetermined being choosing their own name and purpose entirely separate from what they were meant to be

I think part of what makes Priestess so effective as Arknights' ultimate antagonist is that there's nothing significant to her on Terra. She finds the actions of Theresa and Theresis and the countless people who oppose her as nothing more than a novelty, an interesting little bug to momentarily observe before squashing it. She's threatening but not as some kind of evil overlord that wishes everything to suffer, but more of a bored god looking down on Terra and annoyed that these primitive, tiny, stupid little beings don't just listen to her and do as she says, don't they realize that she knows what's best for them?

There's a detached feeling to all of Priestess' interactions on Terra, her opponents aren't threatening, they're just a child throwing a temper tantrum because they don't eat their (Originum) veggies. It's particularly frustrating for Priestess because she's done this same song and dance of humoring newborn civilizations an uncountable amount of time to where, in her own words, she lost the enjoyment in it.

The life on Terra, the Teekaz and the Ancients and the Elders, all of them were just a random accident, an experimental anomaly that isn't offensive on its own, just another one in a million random chance that sprung up.

And yet they did something that not a single member of Oracle and Priestess' cosmic, nigh-omniscient race could. Something that eventually befell every civilization they'd encountered prior, yet Terra has seemingly circumvented.

They evolved beyond what was fated for them.

I thought at the time it was a little weird for them to continuously bring up the flower field that Theresa made with Originum during the Babel event, but the new context we have for it makes it clear why Oracle was so enraptured by it: Theresa evolved Originum in a way that Oracle never realized was possible.

Despite Oracle's misgivings and the guilt they felt over how Originum was harming a newborn civilization, this same newborn civilization with the iota of time given to them compared to the countless eons of Oracle's own civilization and technology, managed to surpass them.

Terra took Originum, the literal fire and language of the gods, and made Arts with it.

Arts, of course, has a huge double meaning here both in-context and thematically, Arts of course refer to the literal arts that people can devote themselves to and it's why so many instruments/wands/etc have a huge variety among the weapons in Terra, people cast Arts through a variety of creative means like music, writing, painting, you name it. Arknights places a heavy emphasis on the importance of self-expression to the point where it's a literal hard counter to things like Daemon infection or Seaborn assimilation, but I think looking at this in-context is also important.

Originum is fundamentally a language. While the Assimilated Universe and the actual rocks themselves serve as a storage system for the information of everything that has ever existed, that's mostly a lot of bells and whistles for what Originum really serves to do: Universal translation and understanding.

Languages are born from a primary need for communication, which is so broad that it makes sense why Originum also needs to store an absurdly broad amount of information. We even see in the beginning of Ch15 that Raydistorter has a few sequences of calibrating itself to then properly communicate with Hierda because it's combing through all the accumulated knowledge of Originum to approximate the language and means of communication that Hierda uses. This makes sense because languages are also a form of culture (civilization), they can evolve on the spot from seemingly anything like slang and memes (hell just consider Tumblr itself, phrases like blorbo and oh worm and the like, these are all memes, units of culture that become part of Tumblr's 'language' that we understand but other websites might not), so Originum stores a functionally infinite amount of information to cross reference and approximate any new culture and language it comes across.

Originum thus has a by-design need to be stagnant as opposed to ever evolving, a Rosetta Stone for any form of language it can come across.

And yet, Terra evolved it still, because the arts are still a form of communication. By nature of Originum being a language, it is still capable of the evolution any language can undergo: Cross-culture idea mixing and remixing, songs, paintings, theater, puns, memes, these are all things that can emerge from any sort of language, forms of self-expression that, in a lot of ways, go beyond language.

To Terra, the Arts derived from Originum are a form of self expression, a way to evolve beyond the static nature of a singular universal, unchanging language. A way to continually evolve language and communication. Theresa in severing the thread of fate that bound Terra's fate to Originum is also what lets them evolve beyond a set meaning.

its amazing how utterly fucking awful the sankta actually are at communication because the law was basically handholding them the entire time and relied on the empathy superpower equivalent of basic cue cards or like internet tone indicators to vaguely parse out what other people are saying and the actual horror of this comes in the form of how vannini can suddenly speak in the dream world because the law deemed the 'language' she shared with paganini completely worthless

to the other sankta, vannini was mostly regarded as defective, she doesn't have her halo yet so she might as well not exist, and yet for all of his complaining paganini managed to communicate with her. paganini only considered that something might be wrong with her solely because it's what all the other sankta told him, but functionally she's just a mute child. where all the other sankta gave up though, paganini bridged the gap with her through bullet casings with engravings on them. I think of importance to note is that paganini said that he found himself becoming quieter with her, that the silence she has was also spreading to him but he doesn't hate it, if anything he decided to come up with a way to talk to her that wasn't so reliant on talking because she couldnt. they communicated more effectively with warm silence and bullet casings instead of a literal hivemind network. it became their way of communicating, their personal language for their little family.

For all that Narnia talks about the order of the Netherworld being dependent on the Ranking system and "people knowing their place", he also seems to resent the fact that the Naberius Clan is that of the Netherworlds watchdogs.

what I absolutely adore about kalego's 'habit' of making notebooks about people is that it's so clearly intertwined with his role as a guard dog and very much a parallel to his brother in demon border patrol, they're both dogs born and bred to serve as weapons but where narnia sees only value in a static status quo, kalego values individual growth and change. for all that narnia talks about demonkind being a noble and powerful race that should rule all, hes indifferent to the suffering that he causes to other demons and outright cruel to them. The rank system is fundamentally flawed, but narnia still upholds it because it was made by demonkind and thus has value as something made by demons. If demons cannot adapt, that's their problem. meanwhile kalego whines and complains about how much his students dont listen to him and how annoying other people are, yet there is no one more committed to being an educator than him whose constantly pushing for others to improve.

seeing henri's past and kalego's father in the current arc, I have a feeling that kalego (and his uncle) actually seem to be anomalies among the naberius clan, who are the literal dogs of the demon world. We don't have much information on kalego's uncle, but he was also similarly someone who was committed to his duties as a protector of education despite his appearance, and kalego similarly feels that something is amiss with narnia solely because he couldn't feel appreciation for the brother he's looked up to for his whole life.