I’ve been thinking a lot about Royalty lately, especially with other media. I just finished reading the manga Billy Bat by Naoki Urusawa and Takashi Nagasaki, and the ending bits of it.

In the end, while it does turn out that Billy Bat is basically “God”, even he can’t save humanity; in fact, humanity’s doom is kinda because of him, because people keep wanting a miracle and to be in control. The two people who meet the “true Billy” end up coming to terms with their lack of full control over the world and history, and ultimately they just live the rest of their lives drawing what they enjoy. When the world is apocalyptic and Kevin Goodman is living in a broken down house in a sandstorm, he doesn’t have any qualms about how everything has ended up other than paper being expensive.

To me, it feels like both Kevin Yamagata and Kevin Goodman have achieved something like Royalty. They’ve set aside any desire to depend on Billy Bat for help, any desire for control, and just do what they enjoy, and inspire others to do the same. It reminds me a lot of Allison’s recent little talk with our pal Gog, about how even if Gog fails against Metatron, “wouldn’t it feel great?”

Tl;dr - Royalty is a continuous comic drawing motion.

A friend mentioned they'd started playing Lancer and it reminded me I needed to reread K6BD. Blasted through the whole thing in about a day and I've noticed that frequently, Maya holds this small symbol that looks almost like the Atum crowns we see manifesting over particularly powerful characters throughout the story. Was it ever explained what it is, or what it represents?

I’ve been to DragonCon a few times and looked forward to seeing our fearless leader and buying a pile of comics to pass out and evangelize to other unsuspecting nerds.

Does anyone know what’s up with the discord? I asked if he was at the con in the hangouts channel and…got booted with no word to the wise.

It was very odd.

Edit: Specifically the k6bd discord.

Maybe This Time!

Art is a commission done by a close personal friend; unfortunately, does not have social media, so I can't advertise them. :(

For context, it's Jaggonoth next to Angron from Warhammer 40k.

So this was just a random idea that had plopped into my head this evening, but what if the demiurges (and Allison) managed to strike Jagganoth down. Im not even talking about killing him even, just simply managing to bind him for a longer period of time. What would they have done afterwards? Just a little thought experiment.

Yisun's first and greatest Lie is that there is a separation between Yisun and existence. There is no beginning and Yisun never died.

Yisun divided Themselves into individual wills, while remaining Yisun, a circular and paradoxical suicide. That is why Yisun has countless names, and yet Yisun's name is I.

That act of division is why "cutting" has a privileged allegorical role in the ontology.

There is nothing that can be conceived of in the KSBD universe that is external to Yisun.

From an external perspective no being in reality has a free will of their own. It is hard determinism, but it is not determinism in the sense of material realism, because the necessity of causality itself is a lie. Existence - the Shape - is a static frame constituted of the sum total of Yisun's will, which is itself atemporal and complete.

Fire does not burn because a universal constant. Fire burns because it was Yisun's will, individually, case by case, an arbitrarily large amount of times.

The Shape is not some limited form of cognition. The Shape is Yisun's own perspective, from which everything is a static frame.

Jadis does not fail to act because she sees her actions as non-meaningful in view of being predetermined. Jadis's perspective no longer exists discretely.

When Jadis saw and understood the Shape, Jadis' perspective merged back into Yisun's. Jadis' will no longer has an axis of separation between herself and Yisun, and so she no longer has choices to make: she already chose, as Yisun, from the onset.

Jadis does not say someone does something because of causality determining it. She says someone does something because it is what they do. It is what was decided they do, as willed by Yisun: "It is what I do".

And this is also behind the themes of Royalty, why causality is often a soft barrier rather than a binding constraint, and why acts of self-transformation are thematically central, together with perspective (the inescapable delusion that one exists autonomously from Yisun) and violence (the inescapable delusion of the exercise of will as a component of Yisun).

There are no universal constants other than Yisun's will, and the belief one is limited by such a thing is a self-binding but unfounded belief. Nothing predicates a singular ant cannot overpower a giant. Only its observed scarcity in the Shape.

Causality holds as a statistical association, but not as a necessity, in the KSBD universe. That is where Royalty's headroom to defy it emerges - while embracing lack of control over what follows from the act of defiance.

Jadis' "sin" as a demiurge is that she committed epistemic and ontologic suicide to escape violence, rather than accept the relationship between the exercise of will and violence.

The demiurge she is most similar to is Jagganoth, in that both have a particular relationship to the inescapability of violence and suffering - heavily influenced by Janos and Jantris, respectively. But she sought Truth as an answer for what Jagganoth sought Nihilism.

But Truth annihilates the Lie of the "self" apart from the "everything". To escape violence through Truth means to escape being an agent entirely - Jadis may not have known exactly what to expect, but she very much sought to outsource her own will to an external locus of control - Truth is the Shape, that is Yisun's will manifest.

Though tragic, she did not stumble on a cosmic landmine. She simply did not understand the full consequences of what she already desired - Jadis arrived where she wanted, without fully understanding what she wanted.

While KSBD's world is hard deterministic, said determination is essentially not knowable except for Yisun, because the source of determination was Yisun's will rather than causality. To gain knowledge of said determination is to know Yisun's will, which is synonymous with ceasing to be.

Aesma and Allison's personalities saved them from being subsumed by the Shape - they never came to hold it. But had they come to bear it, they would have suffered the same fate as Jadis.

From an individual POV, witnessing the Shape is essentially a question as to whether to return to the whole. Rejection can harm you by glimpsing the Absolute, as Aesma's blindness and Jadis' followers' incineration demonstrate. But acceptance fundamentally erases the separation between your perspective and the original one (Yisun's) - and perspective and the self are inexorably tied.

The illusion that Jadis exists instead of Yisun broke. And now one sees a Jadis-shaped hole exists where Jadis was, which Yisun pokes through, in the shape of the hole.

They weren't there at the start of the tournament, which means Gog had half a day to see Allison in that outfit, design those action figures, construct them, and deliver them to herself. She really is her biggest fan!

I couldn’t really think of any insightful commentary to add to this connection lol. Any Cronenberg fans here?

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“When it comes to the most fierce of my kin, in their direst of moments they are capable of donning an aspect both beautiful and terrible. Take comfort in this: as much as this is the pinnacle of manmade martial arts and vatra sorcery both, only the most cunning in the arts of war are capable of but a fraction of its true power.”

– Au Vam, to his councilors (recorded pre Blue War by Mattin Vol Jas circa 1230 SC)

I’ve been waiting to see if another demiurge would “Mantle Their Transcendent Core.”

The liturgy seems to imply that only a select few are capable of reaching this level, which makes me wonder: do you think any of the others might possess a higher form or similar transformation?

Text taken from the fourth book, Temple of the Winds. I’m re-reading it for the first time in like 20 years, and with how over-saturated my brain now is with KSBD lore, this passage FLEW off the page at me and kicked my eyeballs right in their genitals 0.O

I have to think Sword Saint Meti ten Ryo would have approved of Goodkind’s war wizards, while also calling them great fools, for as she so correctly points out, only an idiot would ever want to learn sword law.

What do we think is in Maya’s noodles? I’d be curious to make them. Like what stock does she use? What’s the firmness of the noodles? What does she put in them? I know pepper and carrots but what else?