The Last Enemy—Thoughts on Starscribe's Knight of Wands · 2:47am Jul 29th, 2019
Trigger warnings:
1. Spoilers. Many, many spoilers. Read Starscribe's Last Pony on Earth series for the rest of the context.
2. Religion, and my opinions about it.
I haven't been to this site in a long time. I went back to read some good stories I remembered. Then I saw this, and a few others. This one ... hit me. Knight of Wands has a happy ending, but I feel depressed. I want to lie down and have a good cry. I did cry. And at first, I didn't know why.
There's a pretentious saying about how all great writing is a reflection of the reader. For me, for this story, it's true. Because after thinking about it, the reason for my reaction to what should be a happy ending is rooted in that ending also being a death. In this universe, souls exist, the dead don't really die, they're in paradise, yeah, I get it, and the clues were there all along. Archive brought her undead army back to life, and they all wanted to go back again. Pretty big piece of evidence there. And I can see the story's intent, too. If she would do anything to find Ezri again, Jackie would take the chance to dive into an unknown portal.
But Archive is now Death. If she can't visit directly, she can revive others. She did before. Yes, necromancy feels horrible, but that too shall pass. A few minutes of interrogation about what it's like on the other side; shown explicitly, it would be a better method of persuasion than a leap of faith. The leap is all well and good, but not when it's unnecessary. Let Jackie talk to Ezri, yeah?
However, there's probably a reason why Archive, why Death, can't or won't do that anymore. Maybe necromancy is beyond her after Charybdis weakened her. Maybe she's become a terrible, cruel person who won't sacrifice a few minutes of someone's comfort in paradise for the ability to assure everyone that what waits beyond isn't nothingness. Maybe she has her own system of morality now, her existence as an alicorn leading her to thoughts too warped and strange to allow her to be both immortal and human at the same time.
Whatever the reasons, as long as the barrier between life and death is an unknowable, one way street for most, I can't be comfortable with this ending. I tried, and it gives me cognitive dissonance. The way death is set up, as a gate with no real way out, where no information can flow backward, is too similar to the real world for comfort. And in the real world, death is the endless void. It's the nothingness before birth, the sight from your elbow, the unawareness of a brick. Death is the proof that when humanity reaches an impassable obstacle, we won't dig around it or climb under it or bull through it, but instead bow down and worship it as natural—maybe not good, but necessary. We convince ourself that the last enemy is instead a gentleman pulling us along for the next great adventure.
(Perhaps we could end that idea if we really tried.)
I used to be religious. Faith was important to me. I still associate it with goodness, if I'm being honest. My brain's already wired it with the feeling of being among hundreds of others within a vast hall where songs resonate, and there seems to almost be a presence reaching out. Proof of God, if you will. Yet with all that, I was sad when someone I knew died. Not a close friend, but an acquaintance. Someone I knew, whose company I enjoyed. He'd be happy up there, I thought, and that brought me comfort. If he wasn't burning forever, but I shoved that thought away.
All that scripture I once followed. Hollow words and broken ideas, in the end. A system that's uniquely human, with good intentions, but terrible results. It was useful once, the mother of inventions. Similar to war in that way. Now it's the source of that autocomplete in the back of the mind: death ... brings meaning to life.
Death doesn't bring meaning to life, it's not good, it's not even a necessary evil. It's the ending of a person, a history, forever. I knew this, but what I didn't know was how much I've woven the idea into my identity. Now, I wince at any positive portrayal of death in a story where it's treated like it is in our world. An end.
If what I said seems wrong, at least take away one thing from what I've said: It's possible to change your mind about something so utterly, so completely, and so viscerally that you can flip an idea that brings comfort to one of chilling horror. And vice versa, I assume. The little ideas I hold are malleable. Opinions I can move around like chess pieces, applauding when one falls. Of the bigger ideas, the gods of thought that rule my mind, I've only ever overthrown two. Both were comforting beacons of hope and strength. Now they lie cold and dead, replaced with others.
