Timeline of the Prescience Wars

Its been a few months since, in a fit of reactionary anger, I decided I would write my own Horus Heresy, and it would have literally no satire! 

The Prescience Wars were intended to be the mythic foundational conflict of the Eclipse Knights Paracosm. Their Siege of Troy of Mahabharata. Something that existed deep in the borders between history and myth, and the ending of which set the scene for the more historical dramas, and fundamental nature of their ‘modern world’. 

Its proven more difficult than I expected and, largely, has had trouble reaching the promise of its pretty good first post ‘This Plague of Seers’. Still, some interesting things have come up. 

 

Chronology 

Since the last part of the Prescience Wars involved a total reality breakdown along with the use of memetic and ontological weapons, working out exactly when things happened is a bit difficult. 

There’s pretty clear synergy between very cubist epistolary storytelling and fictional worlds in which reality breakdown, madness and deliberate editing and obscuring of the record take place. Since these elements exist in the world being described, as well as they naturally would in the texts describing that world, you get the unreliable-narrator describing and equally unreliable reality. 

Interesting effects can be created, and in a more prosaic sense, you can fudge a lot of stuff while you are working things out. 

So, partly because its unfinished and partly for weird time reasons, the chronology if the early wars is arranged in-sequence rather than by date, with estimations of what happened in years-since-this etc. 

 

 

 

This Plague of Seers – Before the Wars 

This plague of Fairytale-like prognostication which seems to dissolve all social and moral bonds. How bad was it and how long did it go on? So far the only real description we have on it is from the unknown writer of ‘This Plague of Seers’. Can we assume they have a Pathist bent? 

It was certainly strong enough to trigger the massive and sustained backlash of the Iron Path. 

What on one level reads like a Fairytale fantasy world turning into a Low Fantasy world, its closest parallels are something like the Reformation or some equally huge mass-consciousness change that people can argue about for ever afterwards. 

The deep question of how and how much knowledge of the future should affect the present is built on an eternal human paradox, one that can never really be absolutely resolved in a general sense. Ends or means? What is free will? How much do we have and how do we use it?

 

 

The Early Prescience Wars 

 

The Canticle of the Iron Path 

 Scratched on a Temple Door in Albarneth, began the Iron Path and arguably, the Prescience Wars. 

Pretty obviously this is ripped off from Martin Luther. Even the technology level is similar. The world of the Prescience Wars might be a little ahead in this case, numerous printers in Albraneth are ready to roll and take the word of the Iron Path out before the initial Pogrom even begins. 

The ‘Iron Path’ develops a pretty logically-sound and practically probably impossible methodology of no-prescience-ever. Ignorance in this case, truly is freedom, or at least meaning. 

The flood of Prescient’s who leave Albraneth just before the Pogrom is a fun touch, but it immediately brought up a question which I am still exploring and have found no bottom to; if you are a Prescient, and you know a giant war against Prescience is about to begin, what do you do? 

The Amber Court is one answer to this question 

 

 

The Water-Horse Wars – beginning with the Canticle running to 10 or 20 years after 

Wars which got their name from later historians based on the three battles, which later proved to be decisive towards their end, all of which where strange situations in which cavalry forces assaulted naval forces. A rare event in history. 

These are almost completely unexplored so far. There must be quite a lot that could be done with them though, Reformation/Civil War armies marching about a post-Fairytale fantasyland? Cromwell vs Disney Sorceresses? 

While this is just the start of the modern-seeming Prescience Wars, it would also be the end of whatever culture or world-paradigm came before them. 

The three battles which end, or come close to the end, ofthe Water-Horse wars are all suitably bloody and horrible. They all have fragments stolen from real history too and the climax with the ‘Miracle of Hoogst’ – intended to be the rebirth of High Sorcery in the world. 

The theme of Magic vs Prescience emerges here for the first time. Fate vs Power, with each of them accelerating the other until reality itself breaks down. 

There are mythic references, or at least, references to myths in histories written directly upon these wars which infer a high likelihood of previous ‘Great Workings’, deep in the mythic past even for those writing at the time. The idea of historians of an ancient empire discovering an ancient museum, of time-squared if you will, discovering your legendary ancients also had their own legendary ancients, has always been tantalising to me, and its recursiveness and reference-within-reference seems to fit neatly into the pattern of the Prescience Wars.

 

 

The Time of Great Workings – begins 20 to 30 years after the Canticle 

A time of ‘High Magic’. The first being the ‘Miracle of Hoogst’ which ended the Water-Horse Wars. 

Actually the period immediately after Hoogst was meant to be pretty chill. After all there needs to be a reach of time stable enough for people to write history books so that my monk-scribe can find them in libraries in the far future after the Rise of the Black Sun and put them together in the ‘History of the Prescience Wars’. 

There also aren’t meant to actually be many, or maybe any, ‘Great Workings’, until the Amber Court kicks off in a few years time, opening a new phase of the wars and re-starting that arms race of magic and fate again. 

The ‘Early Period’ really dribbles to an end during this decade or so. 

 

 

 

The Middle Prescience Wars 

What happens when you ban prescients and start killing them off? They band together, secretly at first, then openly. Much worse for the Pathists; they organise and they have a philosophy, a unified direction and military forces to back it up. 

If the era of the ‘Plague of Seers’ was about the corrosive effect of unregulated prescience as a general disorganised cultural phenomena, directly randomly, or at least chaotically, differing each time depending on the combination of seeker and seer, the Amber Court is that force curdled into something new, a paradigm the Pathists feared from the beginning and which they adherently helped to create; a Prescient Empire dedicated to guiding the whole of humanity down a particular path. 

Who, or what, is influencing the creation of the Amber Court is considered in ‘Sumthing Lyk a Mowse’.

 

 

The Wars of the Amber Court 

Begin perhaps 15 to 20 years after the Miracle of Hoogst, so 30 to 40 years after the Canticle of the Iron Path at Albraneth,  and continuing all through the Time of Great Workings into the Red-Shift Wars and the Last Settlement of Xap. 

(Depending on which chronology we accept this may mean a conflict, or series of conflicts of anything between 60 to 2,000 years.) 

I actually know relatively little about these wars. I know they start with the Amber Court surrounded and outnumbered. It then wins successively, through some chancy battles, and eventually comes close to forming global empire, before the counter-reaction against that in turn leads to world revolution and the unleashing of utterly destructive magics. 

Its WWI, WWII and WWIII all rolled into one, with ontological and reality-effecting weapons taking the place of technology. 

The Five-Hundred Son of the Moon from “All They Murderare Forgotten” operate towards the middle to end of this period. Elements from the same pseudo South-American kingdoms as the Battle of the Metero Falls’, now very much changed and making some kind of deal with spirits for possession or joining in order to create a cadre of soldiers who, when they kill, kill even the memory of their targets. 

The record, always somewhat unreliable, becomes utterly deranged, (from the point of view of our Scholar, the Monk in the Eclipsed Kingdom in the One-Thousand, Six Hundreth Year of the Sleep), mind-plague, the ‘Vermin Tales’ and general ‘Cursethought’ hover round every element. 

Its easy to see how, in battling an enemy who can literally see the future, the Neo-Pathists reached for weapons that would make that self-same power irrelevant, or at least hard to use. Weapons which alter memory, reality, cause and effect, etc.. 

Even the name of the King of the Amber Court cannot be spoken or recalled. 

As we can gather from ‘A Glossary of the Amber Court’, the Court itself becomes more and more decadent over time, developing factions and weird philosophies. 

 

 

The Fall of the Amber Court 

Unknown date. The writer of the letter in ‘In theMemories of Stars’ claims to have had a vision of this. 

Whatever happened to finally bring about the last collapse of the Amber Court, it must have been intense and strange enough to effectively break reality and causality. 

Beyond this point and for an unknown, and perhaps unknowable reach of time, there can be no true recorded history as time itself is warped and altered. 

 

The Later Prescience Wars -  the ‘Red Shift’ 

The Red Shift was a period, or area, or modality, in which not only can no date even be estimated for events of the Prescience Wars, but even the sequence of the events cannot be discerned, causality itself having broken down.

Little can be known in full but according to the writer of ‘In the Memories of Stars’ this period contained; “horror, vague and terrible as if from scripture or nightmare. I read of shapeless legions, of lands I knew yet "turned from any Path and Broken", of rains of corpses, of generations cursed by dark foreknowledge, of lands where the babes were born dead, yet sentient and grieving themselves, of cities tipped into the "Fabric" and make alike unto curses, or worms or dragons of myth;” 

Within the “Red Shift”, the skies are said to have turned red and peoples, persons and places are claimed to have been encountered before, during and after it was possible for each agent to have done so as our understanding of causality would claim.

“Reality Dreamed” of, more prosaically, “Reality was drunk” 

(Imagine a Beksynski-paraverse come to live and flooding across reality).

Whatever records or indications exist of this era, they must be both deeply sought but obsessively feared and controlled by the Monks of the Eclipsed Kingdom. Since they relate to Unreality itself, and describe a period, or place, or era in which mindplague and vermin tales, and who knows what else, roamed freely and likely bread with and interacted with each other, dream and reality blurring into one in a timeless eternity, even the relation of the period ‘later’ might be both incredibly dangerous, but also powerful…

  

 

The Restoration 

During or towards the ‘end’ of the Red Shift, He who would become the Sleeping King of the Eclipsed Kingdom is born. 

Now we enter what the Eclipsed Kingdom would consider to be ‘History’, as opposed to myth. 

The King rises and rides through Reality, knitting together what was broken, restoring order, causality and meaning, separating dream from real. 

Many heroic events too numerous to mention; the Binding of Setebos, Conquest of the Otherworld, the Defeat of Summer etc etc 

How exactly this relates to the Coming of Azathoth, I suspect the religious thinkers of the Eclipsed Kingdom have doctrine on. By their telling, the Sleeping King was always the Prophet of Azathoth and all his power flowed from service to that Black God. 

 

Rise of the Black Sun 

God him, her and itself arrives. This is Year Zero for the Eclipsed Kingdom. 

The Sleeping King takes the thirteen poisoned daggers in his back and enters the eternal waiting sleep in which he still remains. 

God stays in His heaven. The Black Church of the Eclipsed Kingdom says that God is waiting for its Prophet, the Sleeping King, to complete his dream. Which to God, is little more than a moments wait, before it enfolds the world and reduces it to pure chaos.

  

 

Years of the Sleep 

672 YS – alleged recovery of ‘In The Memories of Stars’

Said to have been uncovered from the ruins of lost Samaris in the lands once called ‘Frost’ 

 

 

732 YS – First Block-Printing of ‘In the Memories of Stars’ 

 

 

1600 YS - The ‘Present Day’ 

One-thousand and sixth-hundredth Year of the Sleep 

Date of the writing of the article titled ‘Who Shall Rid Us of These Seers’, presumably 1600 years after the coming of Azathoth and the Sleep of the King. 

Somewhere in a tower of the Eclipsed Kingdom, a monk begins to set down ‘A History of the Prescience Wars’, the mythic pre-apocalyptic era which forms the deep history of the Eclipsed Kingdom. 

Whether, in gathering records and resources of such an infectious and in a way, still pulsating era, is a wise thing to do, we shall see. The Order of St Korbin no doubt would do hard work with their iron staves if they knew someone was writing such a thing. 

 

 

 

Some Questions of the Prescience Wars 

How would a prescience-guided army actually fight? Would its enemies just give up in despair, no matter how superior they were? Can numbers overwhelm Prescience? Is there some calculation or equation that gives you a rough estimate of the “combat power” of Prescient guidance in terms of troops and materiel? So to attack a fortified position I think the traditional guide is you need at least three, and hopefully five times as many as the defenders. Can you even calculate the effectiveness of Prescience? Presumably its somewhat logarithmic base on depth and accuracy. 

 

Have I thrown in too much jargon and lore for even me to keep straight? Honestly I can’t remember all of the technical terms from the Glossary of the Amber Court 

 

Why can’t I do character? My ability to create personality is basically zero. 

 

Deeper questions – is the argument over prescience and its relationship to moral action, which has been a big theme in a lot of mainstream genre stuff in the last decade, feeding into or off some particular strand of something in the cultural gestalt? 

 

Can I actually say anything sane and useful, or at least interesting, about the possible interactions between the Iron and Amber paths?

A Review of 'The Strange Death of Alex Raymond'

This is a bit of a mad one but there is s fragment of info here for those who paint with sable brushes, see below; 'The Useful Part'.

INTRODUCTION

Dave Sim is Schizophrenic, and really good at comics.

He got big in the 70s for creating one of the first self-published comics, 'Cerebus', about an Aardvark in a fantasy land.

It was good, then got very good, then got weird then insane. Sim either _went_ insane or revealed his madness. It was a hell of a ride to be honest.

I read almost the entirety of the then-available Cerebus in the early 00's. Liverpool Library had the whole set, Sim published them in hugh hardback 'phone book' volumes. They were there, (old even then), ranked up on a bottom shelf, looking weird and mysterious, being wierd and mysterious, because when you open them you find this intensely realised, visually intensely precise, quasi-medieval world, and this cartoon Aardvark hanging out in it, and then what is the Aardvark doing? Running for office, becoming pope, being a religious figure, dying in a bar? Huge books they were, densely realised complex politics, fictionalised visitations and analysis of literary and cultural figures, a weird matriarchal religious cult.

It's difficult to describe to people, when the craft of comics, not just the images or the writing, but the synthesis, is not deeply attended to, just how really intensely fucking *good* at comics Dave Sim was and is. I'm talking here about something that if it were broken down would be difficult to recombine in the minds as anything but a combination of minor and greater talents, lettering, conversational dialogue, portrait art, expressive art, the flow of time through panels, panel arrangement, composition, world building, but if you see it go as-one, it’s simply a different order of thing. People who knew about comics, the obsessives, all knew about him and as time went by they all knew he was nuts but still a genius.

Ok there's no way to tldr this but; Aardvark, acid trip, religious visitations, personal breakdown, misandrist feminist cult, alienation of former friends and lovers, self written into comic, protagonist encounters Sim as godhead, Sim encounters actual ("actual") godhead, structure of comic breaks down or changes hugely, turns out Dave Sim may be prophet of new (old) religion and also if I recall correctly modern culture is an act of vampirism where the female void preys upon the divinely inspires male light, Sim essentially forms his own religion from some combination of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I suppose he is a one-man pure son of Abraham, and still carries out his devout observances today.

I don't know if Sim has ever come out directly and said he has been visited by the Godhead but I am pretty sure he believes he has.

Anyway, old story BUT, I happen to be visiting family down south and happen to wander through the nerd section of town and happen to see this strange book 'The Strange Death of Alex Raymond', by Dave Sim, and behold its only a single book, not an infinite series, and I, possessed by the spirit of Capitalism, take it home.

THE USEFUL PART

The boon of a ferocious mind. Alex Raymond, master of brushwork and the hyper-realistic style; in particular he performs what Sim calls 'Nightingale Lines', with a sable brush (Raymond uses nothing else), he creates these flows of ultra-ultra-ultra fine and precise brushwork, so fine in some cases they don't even show up in reproduction. All his contemporaries are amazed. Not just amazed but intimidated. Some decide to ignore brushwork themselves as they feel they can never match up. How does/did Raymond do it?

*simply by looking at the comics* Sim has worked it out

(or almost certainly worked it out, I judge his analysis here as more accurate than any of his "wilder assertations" in the book)

This is the most useful thing in 'The Strange Death of Alex Raymond' and, since Sim is Sim, and even its description is an act of beauty, I present the images below)

Ok that was the useful part.

WHAT IS THIS BOOK

"The Strange Death of Alex Raymond" is, or starts out as, a deep, deep, deep investigation of the photorealistic comics style of, primarily its three titans, Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Alex Raymond, (Flash Gordon) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), who ruled in a great age of newspaper strips from the 30s to the 50s.

These guys were popular in ways that only 20th Century creators could be popular. The early age of mass production, but before communications tech advanced enough to splinter the market. We're talking millions and millions of readers. 

The book is centred on what Sim calls 'The Strange Death of Alex Raymond', (he died in a car crash), which Sim makes the central mystery of his investigation.

He never actually gets there. The book remains uncompleted, at least by him, due to either, or both, a wrist injury which cripples his drawing hand and Sim himself becoming utterly lost in his own web of connections.

But its also about something Sim calls 'Comic Book Metaphysics', which, to boil down that which cannot be boiled down, because Sim describes it in fragments and staring inferences, is what he thinks is the interrelating patterns of people, persona dramas, crises, imagined entities etc which weave between the work of the photorealistic school and their actual lives.

And not just them but everyone connected to them, and not just those connected to them personally but everyone who may be connected to their ideas, anyone whose ideas fed into theirs, anyone their ideas fed into.

Sim knows these things two ways, by study and my inference.

His study is that he has read every goddamn one of these comics, memorised every element, researched every life-line, looked up interviews, checked histories, examined timelines. 

His inference, which he would not separate from study, remember the level of attention and analysis it would have taken to first perceive the problem of Raymond’s 'Nightingale Lines' then to have, *within the pages of the comics themselves* devised and understood the solution, but to Sim, he can "read" the lives of these men from their work.

Which, because Sim is Sim, are largely about sexual jealousy and malfeasance, invisible power struggles, manipulation, cultural decay and, ultimately, as we go waaaaaay past the event horizon, actual witchcraft, the attempt to resurrect the Klu Klux Klan via sympathetic magic and the direct presence of the devil in the affairs of man, the devil here, operating though the sexual desires of women and the weakness of men.

He has no evidence for these things.

Lets take a look at one, very early, very mild example of Sim being Sim

These are from page 81 and 82, Sim argues that for a few years Raymond had been copying or adopting the style of Caniff, as an act of domination of course, because for Sim, everything is domination and submission, then Raymond wins becomes the president of the National Cartoonists Society, he is photographed shaking hands with Caniff.

Sim takes this moment and over several pages goes, well, this...

Obviously (OBVIOUSLY) this is an act of mental and moral warfare between the two men and obviously Raymond has been defeated, destroyed, revealed for the weak man he is by the superior and more purely manly power of Caniffs handshake...

Try to avoid laughing at this. Like with anything Sim-related, elements of high skill, deep perception and subtle analysis segue seamlessly into foolishness and into madness.

Remember how clever he was with the brush thing. Could anyone else have done that? Well this is just the other side of that.

Having a high IQ doesn't really help much with Schizophrenia. 

Imagine the pattern recognition of the mind firing and firing and firing, as it does in your mind, but more so. But with the Schizophrenic there is no, or only a weak, opposing synthesis. No voice or silent bar to so "no, this connection is bad, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't match with how reality works".

And under all that is fear, and an overwhelming sense of drive, of purpose, of importance, not just importance but of sacredness. To be in the grip of such power..... Well, if you've read the old testament you get my drift.

Think Sim hyper-analysing an awkward photo isn't really "nutso" enough? By around page 200 he's proved that Margret Mitchell, writer of 'Gone With the Wind' was either a witch or a direct servant of Satan and a descendant of witches, and was part of a plot, or a dark conspiracy to.. 

I'll just show you;

Think about the level of clarity, of talent, think of the carefully acquired skill. When he began drawing Sim was considered pretty bad, by the end of Cerberus he was thought of as excellent, by this point he's reproducing, warping, remaking, some of the greatest pages, the greatest illustrations from the high point of Photorealistc Comics, riding with the masters.

This is high art in many ways. What a beautiful, incredible capacity to perceive and create, and what an absolutely awful, really a nightmarishly pathetic man.

Think in real terms about what Sim has done through the whole of this book. Pried, or imagined he has pried into the personal lives of these figures light-years away from him. Secretly opened the secret boxes of their hearts, these real people who really lived, and tipped them over to show the foulness and shit within.

But none of it is real. He made it up.

He will never really understand that he made it up. To him it was revealed. 

In fact he was just trying to save the world from the conspiracies of the Devil. When he prays he may even pray for your forgiveness for, in thinking him mad, you know not what you do.

Its inspiring and wounding and wearying and ultimately like taking a beating, or listening to a man rant you can't get away from. (Yet he is ranting in visual music). It’s pretty much the same feeling I got reading Cerebus all those years ago. Its nasty and viscerally unpleasant. The mans heart is a sewer. Yet he is an innocent. He doesn't know, after all, and never will.

Those They Murder are Forgotten

 "There is a gap in our pattern, rooms and duties to which no names attain, yet prepared for some unknown, or as if a ghost had left them. In my memory I have sat at tables with shades, given dictates to spaces in the air - and yet the deed was done, been instructed by no voices, yet performed the act. What is this silence that spreads around us?"

From - A Glossary of the Amber Court; Apocrypha and Miscellanea, Chapter; 'Those They Murder are Forgotten', Unattributed note, Amber Court, late Period.

"Aya we marry the sky!

And make the stars our wives!

Ladies of hunger!

We give to you five hundred sons on whom the sun has never shone!

Un-touched by a woman’s hand!

They are the children of the moon! 

Bathed in starlight!

Pure sons, pale as pearl!

Flesh of great wonder!

Ladies of constellations, eat with our Sons!"

From - A Glossary of the Amber Court; Apocrypha and Miscellanea, Chapter; 'Those They Murder are Forgotten', quote from translated text; 'The Legacy of Reeve'."

"I know not with what army I went forth. 

My Lords, amend me I beg you; how many were my numbers? We have fought a battle and we have the field and no men were lost though we fought a great multitude.

All worked as the Patron stated. Yet, amongst the enemy was a strange company, I remember silver men with black shadows. I know of no harm they did, or how they fought and yet as my mind turns to them a great fear wells up within me. My hand shakes, as it has never done, and I in your service for good years and well-fought as you know well.

Yet I do not understand for we are over-supplied. Tents and material for a great many though we are but few. Something is wrong. Aur surgeon says none have died, none at all, though he has worked all the night. The ground is wet here and this place stinks and yet we cannot find the smell.

It shames me to write so of things which have no mention in your Patron. I fear a Working. I fear as a child fears lost, though the place be small. There is a wrongness here.

I beg you to write clearly to me and with dispatch, to tell me; what number we are and why sent forth with so few, and with such great supply, and why with no General amongst us? For though I am a Major in good standing I would not think myself to command for some years such an expedition, such a diversity of men, for so far, though their numbers do be few."

---

Draft letter, un-signed and un-sent, recovered from the goods of a beggar at our gates. He wove strange tales and was wrapped in the tatters of a flag which seemed to be of our design though of no army we have ever formed. The mans feet were callused and his hands branded with rope-burn and salt, like a sailor, a pilgrim or a slave, his hair grown wild and matted as if he had journeyed a great distance. He came as if bearing a great message and this fevour (sic) and intensity attracted the attention of our guards. Yet when questioned he made little sense, but wept and spoke in fragments

From - A Glossary of the Amber Court; Apocrypha and Miscellanea, Chapter; 'Those They Murder are Forgotten', Unattributed note, Amber Court, late Period."

Dark Rivers Without End - Berserk and The Path to Power

 Two dark, unfinished rivers occupy me currently, Kentaro Miuras 'Berserk' and Robert Caro's 'The Path to Power'.

One, 'The Path to Power' is incomplete but may reach its end, the other, 'Berserk' never will. Miura died recently, his opus will never be completed, Caro is still kicking (!) but is currently "pulling a Martin". From Wikipedia;

"In November 2011, Caro announced that the full project had expanded to five volumes with the fifth requiring another two to three years to write.[15][16][17] It will cover Johnson and Vietnam, the Great Society and civil rights era, his decision not to run in 1968, and eventual retirement. As of January 2020, Caro had completed 600 typed manuscript pages and was working on a section relating to the passage of Medicare in 1965.[18] In a 2017 interview, Caro expressed his intent to embark shortly on a research trip to Vietnam.[19] In an interview with The New York Review of Books in January 2018, Caro indicated he did not know when the book would be finished, mentioning anywhere from two to ten years.[20]"

-----

Very different works. One is about a man who fights monsters and the other is about the monster.

What unifies them is the depth and darkness of the subject matter and the almost ridiculously classically-heroic scale of their relative achievements. Both creators combine skill and craft with an incredible, almost stupidly titanic amount of WORK.

"Fuck you, I spent thirty years on this. Seriously, just fuck off. Do *you* have thirty years to spend on one thing? No you do not, so fuck right off. Don't even look at me son I will kill you by blinking."

Caro's first _book_ on LBJ came out in 1982, but the research likely started god knows how long before then. It’s possible that by the time he is done Caro may have spent more time investigating, writing and thinking about Lyndon Baines Johnson than Lyndon Bains Johnson spent being Lyndon Baines Johnson. His book(s) are a simultaneous exultation and destruction of a mans reputation in a way that will *never* be amended; there is literally nothing anyone can say about LBJ after this - no-one can do this much work on him, the only meaningful history the could do is reading Caro’s notes and taking a different point of view.

Miura began in 1988/89 and, on and off, barring illness, has been going for 30 years. Many things are good about Berserk but to pick out one of the more obvious; the simple and staggering attention to beauty, intensity, terror and detail that goes into Miura’s images, which cascade through the story like impossible memories. Think I remember reading that Miura was producing linework so fine and so detailed that his publishers were worried because the printing process wouldn't be able to capture it. 

Miura has his unfinished masterpiece  bourne along by the sheer tumbling weight and black size of the story as a whole - for with a story that long, that coherent and that INTENSE, every single moment holds as a mirror a thousand referents of deep familiarly and meaning. 

Caro has done what few could do, and what perhaps could only BE done at this moment in history, and simply interviewed everyone that Lyndon Johnson ever spoke to or dealt with (who would talk and was alive), often multiple times - at the only historical point at which these people would be both, alive, and also long enough after the power structure of LBJ, and the terror of the man, has weakened enough that they might be willing to talk. 

There is more to art than skill and work but not necessarily a lot more.

Caro's telescope can't help but tell a history of America, of power and tragedy, at the same time. Such is the depth and detail with which he examines every particular moment that, like a great painting, every scene has it own cast, set and history, all of which are illuminated and described. One feels one could take any character who walks onto the scene and follow them off it, all the way home. What starts as an environmental history of the Texas hill country and a dynastic history of his family before his birth, turns into a social history and, as LBJ gains power and influence, becomes a political or 'Great Man' history. 

Because Caro has interviewed literally EVERYONE LBJ ever spoke to or dealt with who was willing, looked into every document, checked every box, he has uncovered every, or maybe many, individual lie and manipulation Lyndon Baines Johnson every engaged in. Of which there were not many, or a myriad, but lies beyond passing, beyond comprehension, almost a galaxy of lies, a shifting, nebulous stormy counterverse to which LBJ was the psychopomp and within which those who dealt too long with him were trapped.

To seize a brief fragment of these horrors for explanation and display; LBJ at college.

Being a mediocre student LBJ first glues himself to the faculty with almost palpably disgusting and visceral levels of dickriding obsequious brownosing. He whores his tongue out to whomever wields institutional power to an extent that we who read can hardly believe people fell for it. (It wounds the soul  to think too deeply on how utterly weak and morally worthless almost every institution proved itself to be before this mans vacant burning ambition.) Add lies. Constant, shifting, endlessly protean lies about this, about that, so much that LBJ gains the name 'Bull', because everyone (every Student, the faculty still love him), knows that most of what comes out of this mans mouth is bullshit.

Add secrecy, manipulation, domination. With campus politics ruled by a clique of star football types and their female antipodes, LBJ challenges them for control of the microscopic power wielded by these institutions. Not openly  of course, and no directly. He knows full well that everyone hates him. Instead he forms, or encourages the formation of a secret society, (the actual 'leaders' of this society either don't realise that they inevitably end up following his lead on all things or don't care), and with the aid of this invisible group, effectively steals the elections to every major college student institution. With the power of patronage control of these, along with his brown-nosing, get him, he builds a hidden network of obedient, subservient, fearful and craven scum who will obey his will.

With these he completes the destruction of the college elite, their political destruction, if they hold patronage posts he wants then their economic destruction and if he can get the details on them, their personal destruction.

One class star, the only person who can keep up with, and even beat LBJ in debates, is shocked to find out that due to a last minute rule change, an important newspaper post won't be going to him after all. He realises that someone is doing something to him, but doesn't realise that it’s a secret organisation, doesn't realise LBJ is in charge of it and doesn't realise that this man he had debated constantly, and who he thought respected him, that they respected each other, for isn't the strong cut and thrust of debate what college is all about, and they had always been friendly, that this man in fact absolutely and totally despised him, because he had beaten him, and had connived and plotted relentlessly for a year for goals which, though manifold, included his personal destruction.

The invisibility of the manipulations, the total surrender of the 'authorities' to simple flattery, the sheer and horrible malevolence, the sustainment of such hatred, quietly, imperceptibly, the ease with which groups are manipulated to goals they do not understand, the, almost eager terror and subservience of so many people, the craven manner in which people hide even their fear, for even decades later they won't spill it immediately, Caro has to go back and interview the same people multiple times till they will open up, so great and secret is their fear of the long-dead LBJ, his organisation and their own shame at what they had done and not done, all of this was something like a living nightmare for me. TRIGGERED BY THE DARK TRIAD PATRICK HAD TO LIE DOWN.

A dark, damned and frightening man.

(I have, at no point since adolescence, entertained seriously the idea that Kennedy might have been assassinated by elements inside the U.S. government. This has been very very slightly modified, not by any actual evidence, but simply by an increasing awareness of LBJ's character. I don't know if he did do such a thing, but I am certain that if someone made him the offer, and he thought he could get away with it, that he *would* do it. The man simply had no moral core whatsoever.)

What is Berserk "about?" A huge dude with a sword who fights monsters. A struggle to shape some kind of moral life in a reality in which absolutely no moral core exists. A search for meaning. The possibility for growth from one of the most damaged and wounded people imaginable.

Curious thing about Berserk is that Guts entire arc is also totally shaped by the effects of an insane, persuasive and ultimately empty narcissist who commands and unifies the lives of those around him, gives them purpose, meaning and a future and who ultimately betrays them all for power. The drive for revenge, justice, or simply to protect and heal what remains, makes up the 'motivation' of the rest of the story. Can you ever get justice against a narcissist? Against someone who simply cannot comprehend what they have done wrong?

That part of Guts' story will remain ever-open, the series incomplete and the final confrontation and resolution hanging in the air.

The moral part of the story is settled though, simply by the struggle for humanity. Its almost laughable how similar and different the two heroes are. What links them is overwhelming, almost insane, drive and will, far beyond that of ordinary men. In both cases the response to trauma and defining between them the arcs of on one hand, a shattered and impoverished soul, and on the other a complete personality.

What is this magnificent foolishness of great men? It kind of fits with Miura because the piece itself is so tragic, and because of its central themes of resistance and perseverance. In a way it’s a mercy because if it had gone on any more I doubt I would have had the space to collect the whole thing, certainly not in these deluxe volumes. It’s like a deep dark dream that you wake up from before it is resolved, or where particularly, the dream itself is deep, and the waking is both jarring and unexpected - woken in the early hours by a rattling on a door - a sudden jolt into wakefulness.

What the hell was he thinking, dying like that?

sumþyng lyk a mowse

dreem u and a telling came upon I

Nd of ay it was

a ryder am ay þru rivers of ur dreems

þo ay no not mi wey nor urs

informayson can not ryde þru tyme

þer r tayls too many Nd soles too few

þe sonderpayn of tyme the wal of cloks

in mi fison þe sunne had noe fase

nor the moone

nor wos þe urth krakd nor rithed þe ded but slept

Nd ay saw þer gryt amys binyth a blu ski

sux blu it was aye hav seen onli in ayebals Nd jems

Nd in mi memris of ur dreems

the hole wurlds ski a jem, or maybi an aye

but under it blud and red urþ

Nd men hakyng men in forms few

won blakke won yelo as pus but bryt as son

yu wer þer ho reeds this

yet saw not ay nor nefer wud till tymes turn

wen ay becum yu and yu remember ay

yt is al a grayt remembering

or ay þynk u dyd ther

Nd n ur dying dreem saw mi

a fison ov mi as ay a fison of u saw

a telling in mi telling and a telling þerof

feer me not þo ay seem teribil

aye am onli as aye must bi to ryd mi rod

as u wer as al ar

hu am aye hu ryts þis

wer in the weel was aye mad

aye no not

yet as u di beniþ þys gem ski as u reed mi lethers on þi pot as u reed the ink þay wil be

i wil tel to u a sekrit

ay am sumþyng lyk a mowse

sleep ay in mi palis of bryt ston

a frosen þyng

kurled Nd waytyng

slept ay long whyl mi serf ants kut the ston

wakanyng to voyses of jyants Nd to lyt

ay am þer king Nd they serf mi wel þo no mi not

lissen u ar þer aye heer u wel þo u heer mi not

sush plans u weev mi kynning

tyme ys r pryd Nd r kurs boþ

-

Pottery Shard, Red-Shift Period

Fons ignotus

Redacta in dolorem annihilationis

Vermin Cogitatio, non referri vel transcribi.

would a depressed man be watching this much Anime?

(Or "Weebery Four: I Went back for More) One, Two and Three here

People say I'm depressed, but would a depressed man be watching this much Anime? I think not. After mainlining even more of this stuff

Themes

Still Upset About WWII

'Dororo', which was basically a psychogeography of living with/under a Fascist power structure

FullMetal Alchemist - oops we did a genocide

Attack On Titan, especially last season - heroes are arguably the baddies, oops we did a genocide, generational shame

Slime had an affecting and strange one with a child transported from Japan during the WWII bombings meeting someone from modern Japan who tells her the country is doing well and they re-built which makes her happy, (he does not go into specifics about the US bases and half of SEA still hating their guts)

Now Prussia Is My Best Friend

There is one nation in occidentalist nihon imagination and unlike the anglo-influenced occidentalist blur that I may have been expecting; friendship broken with anglos, now Deutschland ist mine best friend

Nihon simps hard for Prussia, so smart, so disciplined, so PURE. is the feeling reciprocated? hard to tell.

Tragic Bad-Guy Point-Of-Death Backstory Flashbaacks

A technique which according to my amygdala, can simply never be overused. I just never seem to get tired of these. That orc you just killed - they had an abusive orc family they rebelled against but ended up as a mercenary with a drinking problem, they were looking for a way out before you CUT THEIR FUCKING HEAD OFF.

THERE'S A VIRTUAL WOOOOORLD

I'm thinking more of 'summer wars' and 'Belle', in which the Virtual world is .. basically the same thing?

In the better fictions this is like the dreamy forest bits in Midsummer Nights Dream, or the Maze bits in whatever play, or Masqued Ball stuff - all the characters we know can meet and interact in different identities across a different reality.

Anime Mans Burden

How many Isekai shows are there with some nerd colonising a fantasy world, based on computer game logic, and 'improving' everything with the power of their enlighting civilisation. It’s interesting, in its entirely unconscious belief in the power of reason and a decent person from a particular cutlure 'uplifting' a band of simple foreigners. It’s a hell of a lot like Victorian fiction. THANK YOU FOR IMPROVING US SEMPAI!

Boner For Tha Pehhpe

Aye, they do have the best costumes and architecture and won't directly kill you for criticising their beliefs - it feels like there is a LOT of fantasy/sci-fi dark Catholicism in Anime or is that just me?

Seriously the Vatican needs to contact the Japanese government and start charging copyright on this stuff, there are more cathedrals, conspiracies and weird priests in Anime than in Italy.

Breath Fetishism

Not as a sex thing, but Demon Slayer, and MHA (which are almost the same show some of the time), and I think a few others, this deal where you do ritually controlled breathing and learn to super-breathe, and then learn to super-breathe ALL OF THE TIME to become super-charged, AND it’s in the first bit of Jojo as well

is this a Japanese body-awareness thing? big history of breath control? lots of concentration on breathing, I mean more than equivalent martial traditions?

The Word for "Hero" in Anime is "Hero"

Not a surprise to see a lot of boys fiction with a focus on heroism, BUT - lot of these make a point of the word 'Hero' being the western word, so, is there not an exact equivalent in Japanese? Is that precise Western construction a slightly novel thing in Japanese culture?

Pure Boys and Decency Porn

Ranking of Kings - seriously disabled but VERY PURE boy takes on all and warms and changes their hearts with the power of his kindness and purity

MHA - VERY Pure and only slightly Berserk boy warms hearts and cares for others

Slime - Extremely decent, no EXTREMELY Decent and in fact virginal, and now a-gender reincarnated pure boy Kiplings the fuck out of a society of Fantasy monsters and impresses all with his capability, decency and purity

Demon Slayer - Literally the purest of very pure boys, so pure that if you INVADE HIS MIND his subconscious is literally a blue peaceful ocean, SO FUCKING PURE, absolutely murders the fuck out of a bunch of evil demons who, in their sad-boy flashbacks, turn out to not be so bad after all

Mob Psycho - bowl-cut Pure Boy just wants to do the right thing and be a normal teenager while happening to be the most insanely powerful psyker ever

MHA & JoJo have this too, even Odd Taxi a bit

It’s not that they do this, it’s the intensity and prevalence of the theme, or is that just my viewing habits and the algorithm shaping my experience? Am I secretly a pure boy fetishist? 

Speaking of which;

Exciting levels of Pederasty

From mild but continual hebephilia to "I look twelve and dress like a stripper but I'm 1,000 years old oops I've FALLEN ON YOUR FACE". Nihon rarely fails to live up, or down, to expectation.

Tha Shows

Ranking of Kings

I am a MASSIVE simp for this show. If you often find you share my taste then watch it.

Quasi-Disney aesthetic. Deaf-mute weak boy-prince heir to the throne in fairytale-paracosm faces the 'Ranking of Kings', basically a league table of kings, except that is barely the subject of the first series, instead it’s a mythopoeic deep-dive into the conflicting characters and paradigms of a range of characters rooted in Fairytale archetypes but which grow far beyond their simplest incarnation without losing that essential rootedness.

The first interview I googled about this had the interviewer banging on about "how you subverted the Fairytale elements" FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING DRONE, DOING THE GOOD VERSION OF A LOW-STATUS FORM IS NOT FUCKING 'SUBVERTING' ANYTHING.

(ZERO Pederasty so far, GET EXCITED BOYS LETS GOOOOOOOO)

Purity of the Boy - 10000000000% FUCKING PER CENT BABYYYYYYYY

Odd Taxi

Good. Basically a Tarantino film made into a series, or more an Elmore Leanoard novel made into a series. The people are animals.

Method of Victory;

Decency - 90%

Specific Brain Damage Perceptual Superpower - 9%

Breath Control - 1%

Boy Purity - subtly conveyed but hitting 80 or 90% purity

Fire Force

Absolute banger first few episodes. Fairly good follow up. Semi-sci-fi near-future cathspolitation. Everything is on fire apart from Japan and even that is on fire a bit. Pyrokinteics are being born and the better ones are trained to stop the victims of a plague of apparently-random auto-combustive zombie demon outbreaks. Could the giant powerful catholic new religion that controls everything somehow be behind things yes probably. Can the creator keep coming up with new ways to use Pyrokiniesis. Yes again.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 60%

Breath Control - 20%

Power of Friendship - 20%

Pureness of the Boy - mid-range purity

My Hero Academia

The old X-Men cartoon but its anime. Feel like this is a normie take. Maybe I should be ashamed that I am still this into capeshit but I am who I am I guess. Fatherless neurotic gets SUPERMAN AS HIS DAD!! AND HE TRAINS HIM TO BE THE NEXT SUPERMAN!!!! Combined with the X-Men danger-room sections but that’s the main story, plus tacit analysis of 'heroism' and how a collectivist society deals with Burgerland levels of freedom and individualism because now everyone effectively has a gun all of the time. Answer - everyone is banned from using their superpowers except a cadre of Heroes who are basically celebrity cops taking down anyone who breaks the rules.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 95%

Breathing/Energy Control 2%

Power of Friendship - 3%

Purity of the Boy - High level. 99%

One Piece

There are a thousand or something episodes of this, I have seen five, it was ok

No stats on this so far. But also no Pederasty. 

Boy Purity - highish, say 75%

Jojo

This is very popular with the yoof about two years ago? I have seen some of the first season, it was ok, people say that’s not the best one? Just go and re-read Sontag on "Camp" and "Kitsch"

No Pederasty so far but very, very very gay. Acceptable.

Method of Victory

"Going Beyond" - 50%

Breathing Control - 50%

Purity of the Boy - 90% at least

Check the stats, he's far from the goodest boy

Attack on Titan

Hans are we the baddies? Yes and so is everyone else. basically Fullmetal Alchemist with Giants. I am loving it and waiting for the second part of the last series to be done so I can watch it on one go. NO SPOILERS!

Purity of the Boy - oh no

Mob Psycho 100

"Indy" feel, (whatever that means in anime), Psychic boy deals with school and psychic warfare with the help of his conman-with-a-heart-of-gold boss who pretends to, but has no, psychic powers. I like this one.

I have only seen the first series so NO SPOILERS

method of victory;

"Going Beyond" - 95%

PURE HEART - 3%

Power of Friendship/mentorship - 2%

Boy Purity - 85 to 95 per cent

Slime

I became a Rudyard Kipling Poem In Another World. 

Decent but virginal semi-failure becomes low-level monster in a fantasy world BUT HE IS SECRETLY THE MOST SUPER-POWERFUL CREATURE EVAARRRR HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT TO ANY OTHER ISEKAI POWER FANTASY? Its basically decency porn. What if a good person tried to do the right thing in everyone’s best interest and somehow it worked. If the FullMetal Alchemist/Attack ON Titan and somewhat MHA are the historical-moral-maze, generational-guilt, no-sane-escape themed animes this is basically Little House on the Prairie, or early Superman. "Ha ha I like you slime, at first I thought you were just a slime but you have impressed me with your courage and decency, I will reconsider my evil ways". You fucking bet you will buddy. Increasingly besieged by anime titties, and also a Lolli. Thanks Nihon.

method of victory;

Decency - 90%

"Going Beyond" - 5%

Metagaming - 5%

Boy Purity - a straight 90% if you are willing to ignore the elf tits

Pederasty - high

Demon Slayer

The purest possible boy with a tragic past and insane weapons and sucide fetish FIGHTS DEMONS. But WAIT, did this particular Demon ALSO have a sad and tragic past which lead them to be easily redpilled on becoming a demon and will we get a flashback as they die in which they recognise and come to terms with their past and perhaps also thank the CHILD who just SLAUGHTERED them? Yes, yes we will.

Method of victory; 

"Going beyond" 60%

Breathing    25%

Magic Sword  15%

Purity of the Boy - an absolute clear 100%

(Pederasty levels - he carries around his sister gagged in a box)

Belle

If I hadn't seen 'Summer Wars' and 'Your Name', and/or was a teenage girl, I would think this was the most amazing animation of the last ten years but I have and am not so I just think it was very good. Beauty and the Beast, Virtual World, Young Girl, Tragic Backstory, Coming of Age. Good anime. No complaints.

Method of victory; 

Decency 20%

Hyperintelligent best friend    30%

Singing  50%

Friendship ended with....

 whoever my previous favourite sculptor was. No idea really, Hepworth? Some un-named Medieval gargoyle-former?

Because now Akishi Ueda is my best sculptor

Twitter isn't completely awful, I actually knew nothing about this artist, not even their name, but was drawn in through the algorithm showing images, links and suggestions presumably based on people I was following. 

(This guy in particular reminds me of myself.)

From the links and images I saw an art book was being made and that it was not horribly expensive, and so a purchase was made and thence utterly forgotten about while the book slowly germinated and then slipped across the seas.

Ueda (Akishis?, I can never get Japanese names the right way round), work runs from the beautiful nightmare to the somewhat sugary, probably you can guess which arc of that I prefer more, but all of it is dreamlike, somnolent, the halls of Morpheous open up and processions come forth, all quietly intent upon their own journeys and purposes.

Children dreaming of kings or kings dreaming of children, comfortable terrors.

Many such snouted creatures, they remind me of Baku the dream snaffling monster.

Many Fairytail Riders, creatures like men riding wonders sprung from the impossible paradoxes of a peasant grandmothers descriptions of an impossible beast, yet made real.

Or common figures and characters from parallel-world Fairytails, or visions of us in the dreams of the impossible creatures that might exist obverse to us across the wall of sleep.

There is an instagram here

And you can get the book..

here