My blog Lmao

Okay so, one of the things I really hate about the "traditional" view of the 4 horsemen is that the white rider is Conquest because really that doesn't make too much sense, to me at least. Now I'm not super religious or anything like that, I know a bit about Greek Mythology but that's about it, so I probably got SOME(or a lot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) things wrong, so just bear with me. Also I think this is my longest post lmao, so I probably messed up something formatting wise.

Pestilence makes more thematic sense than conquest because:

For starters, while War's whole thing IS mostly about bloodlust and war(No duh!), the best way to convince humanity to go to war and by extension generate blood is by convincing them to conquer other nations. And while the whole schtick of War(The Red rider) is bloodlust, murder, and war, what's to say he isn't ALSO deceptive? Using lies and deceit to instate people to fight, to riot, to go to war in attempts to conquer. The Red Rider doesn't HAVE to be built like Kratos(God of War games) or Ares(Actual Greek Myth One), he could ALSO be cunning using lies to force people into war whilst ALSO being a brute in the process.

Then there's the fact that some odd thousand years ago, when the Book of Revelations and it's translations were at their peak(From being forced upon everyone by the church), Plagues and disease were BIG killers with things like Chickenpox and the Bubonic Plague, so naturally it makes sense for one of the riders to be named after a representation of that stuff.

And think about it, the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse all represent some downfall of humanity at the time:

Death comes for all, no matter the source

Famine brings death from starvation, a serious risk back then

Wars in the name of expansion such as the Roman Empire killed thousands

And Plague was largely a silent killer then(and now too sometimes), and for many diseases you might not even know you have it, even now with some versions of COVID, meaning you could look relatively healthy, much like a healthy WHITE horse? And a case could be made that Disease goes out and CONQUERS lives silently, the white horse could be Ironic, not militaristic

To me, the idea of the 4 is that they play off of each other: Plague causes Famine when crops die out, Famine causes War and bloodshed, War causes the finality of Death, and Death spreads disease and Plague with rotting corpses.

The way people think of the 4 now doesn't make sense for me, they're really like 4 cogs in the same machine that is slowly grinding down humanity, not 4 isolated disasters that are similar enough.

And really a good-ish metaphor for them, and one that is kinda relevant in modern day, is:

Pestilence = A nurse/doctor, able to silently kill by spreading disease wherever he goes with surgical precision

War = A politician/world leader, with a silver tongue, slippery words, and a slithering body, capable of causing mass panic and inciting violence and conquest, with the tools necessary to go nuclear(pun intended) should war break out

Famine = Restaurant chef/owner, able to make people THINK that they're eating, when really it's empty calories, feeding their hunger even more in an endless loop(I mayyy have taken this idea from Good Omens, but I still like the concept lmao)

Okay so, I have some gripes with Anime/Manga MC's and how they always seem to know the language of the world they've been sent to. 1. The MC knowing the language of the fantasy world "Just because~" is kinda lazy and cheap, because it either means; exactly that, he suddenly learns it for no reason, OR the fantasy world just HAPPENS to speak English or Japanese or whatever language the MC is from, which makes no sense, why would the fantasy world speak anything at all similar to a modern language? This is even worse because if it has multiple languages, like one for humans, one for demons, one for beastfolk, etc. Because if the magic doesn't auto translate those other languages into English/Japanese like what it does with the common human speak, well then it's even cheaper because it implies that the special "Auto translating skill/spell"™ only works on the common tongue and not the others.

2. The MC being reborn into the fantasy world as a baby, and needing to learn the language like any other child is far more realistic(Well, as "real" as fantasy can be), but this has some other oddites. For example, if the MC is born as a baby, and he retains all his memories and stuff of his past life, then he'd be a very smart and capable baby, already knowing how some things work without being taught. And if he still acts like a baby, then the only logical explaination is that he literally doesn't have control of his body, which'd make the MC more like a narrator than the y'know, the main character.

But personally, I think the funniest potential option that I wish would happen, is that the MC is transported to the fantasy world, just as he was in his world, except he has no clue what anyone is saying or what any sign or document says because he doesn't know the language. This could easily work in a story where the MC can't read nor speak the language, so he learns forms some kind of sign language to communicate, and for the whole series everyone thinks he's deaf and illiterate. And in the finale, after the entire series of listening to others speak, he finally turns to the obligatory love interest and says "I love you", throughout the whole series, VERY slowly the text/voices shift to be closer and closer to English, where we finally hear the obligatory love interest say "I love you too". And then it just cuts to black/the page ends.

DOWN WITH THE SLIM!

IT'S TIME TO START PRAYING FOR THE RENAISSANCE OF THE CHONKY BOIS™!

I DON'T NEED SLIM I NEED BIG

I NEED TO BE ABLE TO BREAK WALLS

*1 hour later*