Spoiler Latest Chapter Discussion Thread for Death Mage Raws

Yes, Zuruwarn only opened the way and let the other gods choose champions. And, yes, Solder is the champion of Peria,she was described as a shy girl who could not deal with 'macho' men. Which I am sure was only becaus she liked them, would love to read a scene of Preia doubting that Van is really her reincarnation only to immediately changing opinion after seeing him fangirling over Zod.

 

XD That's the kind of post I wish I could like twice.

 

Just ended up thinking of Van tiptoeing and squealing over Zod's muscles every time he sees them and goes into worship mode afterwards

 

Wait! So, does this mean Van's obsession with muscles comes from Soldier?

 

It's wrong Vida and alda always have different opinion and they clash often, Peria and others God will become mediator and make conclusion from all opinion.

I have feeling Shizarion is quite playboy, after all they say Elf tendency to play fire with Drawf it strem from him. Maybe Nineroad is his ideal woman or ideal art object.

 

I've always thought of shizarion as a goddess though?

 

Hehehe then Elf is born from yuri. Joke aside. Shizarion,Zantark and alda are God. Vida, Peria and Botin are Goddess. Zuruwarm and Ricklent are both. I don't know about Marduke,Zeno and Beast God.

 

Doesn't matter. Vida is a fertility goddess. And, as has been established, fertility goddesses can reproduce however the **** they want. (In other words, zero doubt what so ever it could have happened.)

 

It would explain why elves in most stories are very effeminate though.

 

Well, he does goes around calling him Zodcordio-sama, so I suppose is not that out there.

 

A word of advice: Do not debate philosophy with me on the internet. My brain is wired for this kind of stuff. With Google-sensei's search results and my own wordiness, I do my best to be as informative and insightful as possible. When I really want to argue, I give it my all. You will get bogged down in a wall of text.

Spoiler: WALL OF TEXT

When Nietzche said that, didn't he equate religion to morality (and by association, philosophy and metaphysics)? Basically, God defines morality, and is the one everyone looks up to as the prime source of their moral codes. That's why a godless world is hopeless and nihilistic.

This "godless world" principle doesn't really apply to Lambda, because most people there are usually worshiping some god or another. There are so many gods that most religions are just about right for somebody somewhere. When someone leaves a religious sect due to differences in personal belief, they just go to another religion that works better. When Van convinces people to not worship Alda, he also convinces them to worship Vida instead. Lambda will never truly be a godless world, seeing as that's a huge part of how Lambda works. In fact, since the gods of Lambda actively keep the world stable somehow, a complete lack of worship would doom everybody. Therefore, the people of Lambda will never be nihilistic or amoral any time soon, and the gods will not encourage them otherwise. Death Mage has shown that aside from the perks of being faithful to a particular god, morality is considered most important. The Vidal Empire has benefited tremendously from an industrial revolution that would never have occurred in a society with Alda's moral guidance.

Also, Nietzche was contrasting religion with scientific, rational thought, as if they are mutually exclusive. I can say with confidence that this is simply false, both in Death Mage and in real life. History has shown that religion does not make stupid sheeple out of everybody, and you do not have to be nontheist to be a great scientist or philosopher. A religion that declares a certain set of morals does not have to also make wild claims about the nature of the universe itself, and knowing how the gods run the cosmos is never really the main purpose of religion anyway.

Finally, you are also forgetting the solution Nietzche offered for his own problem: the Übermensch. The Übermensch, in absence of a higher moral authority, becomes the higher moral authority. Übermenschen are natural leaders. Van is obviously an Übermensch, and there is no doubt in my mind that Denske intended this to be one of Van's defining characteristics. And when the Übermensch card is drawn, your argument of Nietzche's "abandoning morality" notion is null and void.

While Rodcorte is screwing up his personal agenda, he's doing okay at his actual job, and the fact that Van is taking lots of souls away means that Rodcorte has that much of an easier time managing the souls that remain. Rodcorte's boss, if indeed there is one, will not show up just yet.

That... That makes too much sense to NOT be true!

11/10 Would like intriguing ideas again.

This looks like a job for @kari-no-sugata!

This demands a fanfic, if it doesn't become canon first. This is a brand of comedy the author has used in Death Mage.

Yes. I think Schneider's party touched on it while expositing about the 4 creation champions. It happened in some early side chapter that was translated a long time ago.

*evil cackling* SPREAD, MY MEMES. SPREAD!

Edit: When I wrote this, I imagined saying it in the voice of Heimskr. His hammy "LET ME SHOW YOU THE POWER OF TALOS!" speech is the sum of my knowledge about Skyrim. "RISE UP! RISE!"

 

I do not always comment but I read everything that is posted here, and I have the impression that often someone wants to attribute great villainy to Alda, Rodcorde, Bellwood or even the DK but at least to me it is very obvious that the problem with all of them is the "narrow view", they are extremely powerful and influential but have much less control over the situation than you think, following this otica Van can control much more the situation not because it is more powerful but because it sees much more than these characters , all the attitudes he has taken so far have a long-term goal.
And because I put the DK too, there is a recent chapter that is the first time we see the DK's point of view, his world was purely the survival of the strongest and he does not see in it malicious actions, he is just following the logic of the environment where he was born

 

Well, intentions make a difference, but they don't change the characters' roles in the story. And that's because they can't change the way they think. Alda might be convinced to look at the bigger picture, but the other villains are likely beyond saving.

• Alda is trying to be a good guy but forgot all the important things that set heroes apart from villains. He ended up being a bad guy.
• Bellwood is a bad guy through and through. He's either a malicious schemer or an ignoramus, but he's a bigoted jerk either way, and he has done more harm than good.
• Guduranis is a bad guy. Invading Lambda was his idea. You can't even really sympathize with him because he's a flat character.
• Rodcorte is an idiot. That's just the best way to describe him. He's Death Mage's version of Team Rocket, no more, no less. He's technically a bad guy, and it's easy to forget that he's a god because he is hilariously inept. Rodcorte is a flat character, a fact that pains his familiar spirits when they try to give him the character development he so desperately needs.

 

What I want too see happen (even if I know it won't) is Driftwood to wake up a decade or 2 after the 2nd Vida-Alda war to find Van running the continent and all the 'evil' races that Drifty hates living with all the 'People' and that Lamda has gone through an industrial revolution, and have him flip out and start murdering/destroying things. This would allow Van to give him the same treatment that Alda gave Vida and say that he has gone insane, also allowing Alda (assuming that he is alive) to see how wrong he was about Woody and admit that what he did as wrong.

 

Alda trys to keep the system running as it is because he doesn't want the negatives of a change following the saying “never touch a running system“

He is just your average idiot who believes he is right, does not want to face his mistake and has too much charisma. That is about all there is to him

That is the same problem as the one with heinz. They both grew up not knowing anything else. Heinz: that dhampir, and vidas races, can be nice. DK: that there are other ways then survival of the strongest.

Rods one flaw is that he doesn't think about the personality of the people he deals with, so yes he is an idiot

 

He have what I like to call "Kouki Syndrome" (even if there were characters that had the same personality before), which when a someone is accustomed to be in the 'right' and have people agree with them, but not being able to change when their enviroment do, in other words, they can't adapt to anything else beside their 'ideal enviroment'. Or conceited, that works too. Alda is too in a way, but not the same. He genuinelly thinks that what he is doing is for the better and not for personal gain besides the continual current existence of the world. The thing is that his way of doing things is not working and he is surrounded with 'yes people' that only know Alda's way, so no constructive discussion is ever started.

I think that his major flaw is that he is hyper conpetent in his actual job (managing the reincarnation system) and harmfuly inept in everything else. As Alda said, he is an expert when it comes to soul management, but be it making Van's soul 100k years ago or his 'Bravers plan' all ended in almost complete failure, and when his plan actually work somehow (advancing technology in Lambda via a reincanator) he did it by complete accident and the more he tries to interfere the more it actually works. Somehow. Just think how much Vidal tehnology would have advaced had Roddy not became a treat to Van? Not at the ridicuous speed that it does now at least.

EDIT: Since it read weird let me correct something, the failure with Van's soul was not creating a new one, but creating one to do less harm to the system. Which he does. A lot.

 

I wouldn't call guduranis a bad guy, I would call him a tyrant who saw his world ending and jumped through the nearest exit, also if there are gods above rodcord who's to say that the entire story isn't a test? One that is ment to raise a soul up too join them.

The Godly gods could have opened a portal from the DK's world to lambda to spark a war they can't win on there own, so with a space God they gather champions (unknown to them prechosen by the godly gods) and the story goes on, it would explain why vans soul would be among the 101 reincarnated people and also why only allies of van noticed him fall into the world of lambda.

Take it how you will, i would enjoy any feedback.

EDIT

I changed "Alda" to "rodcord" in the first paragragh

 

Ok, well, you might want to spend less time making a wall of text and more time understanding the original point, because I was able to read around 1 and 1/2 paragraphs and that was all I needed to see that you had misinterpreted my original point to such an extent that I can easily counter that entire wall of text with a single short paragraph consisting of a few sentences.

My point was that Nietzche's "god is dead" quote was accusitory in nature and pushed it as a highly negative thing. The last part of the quote was "and there will never be enough water to wash the blood from our hands." So, if you are going to apply this quote to Van's god-killing ability, then you have to interpret Van as intensely evil, or at least short-sighted, because that's the essential context in which Nietzche meant it.

You DID however effectively address my point none the less with your final paragraph about the Übermensch solution. (Which, BTW, was a line the Nazis took in order to justify their eugenics program. The Nazi philosophy was largely fueled by a misinterpretation of Nietzchean philosophy.) So, I suppose that instead it would be possible to criticize you less on missing the point and more on saying that everything except that last paragraph was completely necessary, and the argument before that final point really did not do much to build to it as the point that did 100% of the heavy lifting was apparently an aside in your mind as you were writing that. However, BECAUSE of everything that came before that point you actually defeated your own point. As you pointed out, Lamba is full of gods, and Van is only killing a few gods. He is, in fact, amplifying worship of Vida. Therefore, the Übermensch argument for living in a godless world doesn't necessarily apply either.

Bottom line, we have one Nietzche quote that is confirmed to be a part of the story in the form of the description of one of Van's skills that strongly refferences this quote. This doesn't necessarily mean the entire body of Nietzche's work is part of this.

At any rate, now it is time for me to practice irony (or maybe hypocricy,) and do exactly what I just accused you of doing. Undoing my own point with my final paragraph. I think there IS a proper application of the Nietzche "god is dead" quote that applies perfectly to this story, and that's in Alda sealing Vida. In that case, the "there will never be enough water to wash the blood from our hands" part of the quote completely applies, and a HUGE part of that reason also heavily involves Bellwood.

(and now time for me to show you MY walls of text in which every word is actually necessary and actually builds to the final points, and can't be accurately assessed by the first few sentences super easily.)

Spoiler: wall of text

The alda/bellwood dynamic of the story is a reference to the evils of communism. Alda is a vision of pure 100% distilled conservatism and outlines the often missed most crucial feature and biggest problem with conservatism when people inaccurately criticize it. Conservatism does not actually have any political perspective, value, or issue that is innately a part of it. The one and only thing that makes someone conservative is wanting to "conserve" the way things already are and being opposed to change or progress. In this world that practices the very worst forms of communism, which is considered progressive/left-wing in most of our IRL politics, these things that become the representation of communism in Lamba become hyper-conservative because they are currently the status-quo. This makes Alda a very accurate jab at the REAL issues of conservatism, as well as pointing people in the proper direction of where to look when criticizing it.

As for Bellwood, he is a representation of the methods and spirit of Communism without the economics of it. So, again, Denske has removed the typically associated form of the thing that a lot of people get hung up on and presented only the very worst and most agreeably bad aspects of it. Bellwood is an almost perfect representation of the methods practiced by Che Guevara. A rich sheltered kid who got some extreme views on politics and wanted to change the world with his ivory-tower view on the world that disregarded the human life aspect of it. Then, someone started a war, he joined it, and he became a glamorous leader in the war.

The bigger Che Guevara parallel in Bellwood though is what he did AFTER the war was won. After the philosophy he preeched was implemented by the authority of Alda (who would be an equivalent of Fidel Castro in this scenario) he began to take great pleasure it seemed in killing anyone who he saw as opposed to his ideas. His ideas became paramount, and human life and wellbeing was an insignificant bother that he could completely disregard. Che Guevara actually RAN the death camps in Cuba during the Castro regeim. The Cuban death camps were somewhere between the political persecution of the Russian Ghoulags and the industrialized killing machines of Nazi Germany. Pure evil to an absurd level, because Che Guevara actually rellished pulling the trigger on his political enemies himself, he LOVED killing, but Che Guevara's death camps were just not as coldly efficient as the Nazis. So, he's up at the exact same level as Heinmel Himler (Hitler's trigger-man for implementing the death camps,) in terms of evil, just not the same level of effectiveness.

Bellwood's disregard for human life and willingness to see other common citizens suffer and die for the sake of his ideals, and even preach the killing of anyone who disagrees with him, are all things that place him on the same level of pure evil no matter what his intentions were. Your intentions can be anything, when those are your methods you are nothing but evil.

It can be seen that since Bellwood went down for his power-nap, the Alda side has been becoming gradually less evil. This is seen as the ones who go around burning entire towns to the ground for cultivating rice are the Bellwood fundamentalists, the ones trying to carry out Bellwood's will. The Alda extremists are also quite evil in trying to go after the Vida races, but Heinz demonstrates that the evils of the Alda extremists are more along the lines of the issues of religion rather than the evils of the communist's methods. Religion is something that can evolve with the enlightenment and, despite the conservative air, it can change and become less anti-life and more supportive to a functioning society. The godless communist ideology is different. (Ironically though, the worst thing about the communism of Lamba is that it actually is not godless. There is a patron god dedicated to it in this world.)

And then, another point where the Neitzche quote fits the Alda side is the communism in and of itself. Neitzche predicted the Soviet style communism when he made his god is dead quote, so I think sealing Vida fits in far more accurately to Neitzche's idea of killing god than anything that Van is doing in literally killing gods.

Spoiler: wall of text

Rodcorte is arguably the greatest force of harm and suffering in this entire world, and every single problem in the Death Mage multiverse can in some way be traced back to him. Rodcorte is also a distillation of a political point. What Rodcorte represents is that incompetence in a position of power is several times more harmful than any intentional ideology like Communism or Fascism could ever possibly be.

You don't have to have a conspiracy to commit evil acts on the world. Epic levels of incompetence an unleash far more destruction on the world far more effectively than an evil conspiracy ever could. We see this time and again with Rodcorte. One thing after another, Rodcorte keeps doing things that would make one suspect he is intentionally trying to bring about the worst case scenario on both Lamba and Origin. Since he is a god of reincarnation, you can even argue this that maybe he is trying to sew chaos because chaos leads to death and death leads to more souls circulating through his reincarnation cycle.

These conclusions are rather easy to reach if you don't have the whole picture, but the reality is that he is causing all this destruction and chaos for the simple reason that he's an idiot. He's trying to do something helpful and constructive, but winds up getting a result that is so much worse than anyone could have EVER gotten if they were actually trying to bring evil on the world.

So, bottom line lesson we can learn from Rodcorte, incompetence is the greatest facilitator of evil, death, and chaos in the world. I can't help but think Rodcorte is some kind of refference to George Bush starting the war in Iraq, which in turn lead to Isis and some of the worst humanitarian crises that are still tearing Europe to pieces with the migrant crisis. Bush is also responsible for Nafta, which resulted in the lowering of trade barriers. Lowering of trade barriers when the US has a policy of subsidizing farm goods means the US sells produce to Mexico at a far lower price than Mexican farmers can ever hope to sell at. This in turn puts the Mexican farmers out of business and results in a rising crime rate in Mexico since poverty always leads to rising crime rates.

George Bush seriously spread Rodcorte levels of destruction throughout the world during his presidency with policies that, at the time, looked like very well intentioned programs. His "No Child Left Behind" act has caused huge problems in schools as well as it leads to a vicious cycle of rising requirements for what needs to be covered in class for the kids, then that means you need to give the kids less recess. For elementary school age kids, denying them an opportunity to get up and move actually reduces the amount they can learn because their ability to pay attention in class lowers. Thus the rising standards of the "No Child Left Behind" act actually reduces the amount that kids learn in school, and causes a great deal of chaos in the school system. This is all because the act was drafted by a stupid politician who had not even consulted a child psychologist.

Every single George Bush policy backfired in the long run in the same way as most of Rodcorte's ideas. I don't think he was the actual inspiration for Rodcorte because that would mean Denske, a Japanese writer, would need to know a lot more about North American politics than I think is reasonable to assume. However, he very well could have based it on a trend he saw among politicians and it just so happens that Bush fit that trend and anyone in any country can think of a similar politician. (Bush's actions just so happened to include the war in Iraq, which had a global level impact. Which ultimately makes him the best Rodcorte analogy IRL by coincidence)

 

To be percise: not recognizing ones own incompetence and therefore not giving the task to someone more competent

 

No he is not doing an OK job.

He has known flaws that could destroy his system and has had 100,000 years to fix them but did nothing. There is 0 excuses for that because only an idiot like Roddy could think that the DK was a isolated incident which could never re-occur. Roddy does not control all worlds cycles, he tries but does not which means there is always a chance of something just as bad or worse happening again.

Rod nearly destroyed 3 worlds due to a temper tantrum, remember when he tried to cut out earth, Origin and Lambda from his system, but had to stop due to Van accidentally making him a god of Lambda.

Look at how much damage the existence of the bravers has done to Origin, the death attribute Rod accidentally unleashed on the world did not help, but they were a source of problems even without that.

When the Origin Gods handed over the souls of the Eighth Guidance, Rod immediately thought that they might have made a deal for Vida to teach them how to replace his system. that is not something someone doing a good job would think, because if he was doing a good job in the first place they would be satisfied with his work, and not want to replace him. There are other references in the series that no one likes him, or wants his services, but he has forced the worlds to be dependent on him. Handling clients is an important part of service industry jobs, and Rod is horrible at it. That he is worried about gods wanting to change supplier is prof enough that he is not doing a good job.

Heck, even his reactions to things going wrong with his system have been wrong from the start. When he sent Van to origin with nothing he messed up badly as he should have either sent Van back to earth like the guy who opted out, or held on to Van's soul long enough to craft replacement gifts. Sending Van like that was Rod F-ing up at his job. He cursed Van rather then make up for his mistake or calm Van to the point he would not seek revenge because he was more concerned with his idiotic Lambda development plan which had a 0% chance of success and would likely have just made the world worse without Van being there. When Van created issues with his sstem he could have easily negotiated with Van and reduced the risk of a system crash to near 0, but instead he sent a assassin who left a trail of bodies and made sure the chance of future negotiation was 0. Now some might say that there are not related to his job performance, but unfortunately every single one of them is Rod as the God of Reincarnation acting within his position and making things worse, he is constantly mixing his personal agenda in with his job and F-ing up his job because he wants things to line up with his agenda.

Rod does his job well when everything is working completely as expected, but time and again we see that as soon as something goes wrong or there is an exception to deal with Rod makes mistake after mistake and messes everything up. He is only capable of doing a good job with the mindless repetitive tasks he has done so many times they are ingrained in him, but fails every time the situation deviates from that, which is not an acceptable fault at his level of authority. it works for a labor drone who only needs to do that one task, but not for the supervisor or even worse management who are responsible for making sure everything works smoothly.