Technically speaking Gudaris isn't a death mage. He's an evil god just like his followers except he had the power to destroy souls which made the other evil gods obey him. In fact it's never stated Gundaris had any association with death at all. While it was his power that became Van's death attribute it seems that the death attribute resulted as a mutation of Gundaris's power. Remember he couldn't eat souls as far as we know he only broke them. But Van can. This isn't too relevent to the overall discussion but I just felt it needed clarifying that Guduranis isn't a death mage. Rather he's a god and like you said they can make familiar spirits and lesser gods. I haven't had a chance to look back but from what I remember at least the implication SOUNDED like he ADDED something to the system to create ranks. Was it a full on god of ranks or just some sort of familiar? Or was it like corrupting the system and forcing ranks to be part of it? I think adding an extra god makes more sense. As for the divine protection thing ... not exactly? Divine protections are more like bestowing the god's power itself onto them. That's why god's can't just give absolutely everyone divine protection unless they have enough power to manage that. I think the system works more on simply displaying the target's personal power and creating the means to cultivate it further beyond it's normal limits. Like normally you could swing a sword for decades and not get better. But because of the system it reinforces that training into quantifiable progress that will at least get you to rank 10. But then you need personal progress to evolve that rank 10 skill into a better one. If it was purely divine protection they'd simply be granted power by the system without as much personal progress needed. At least that's how I see it.
I don't think so. Take Rodcorte as example. Most of the time Rodcorte do Nose Picker job and fish out boogers, but don't involve himself into reincarnation, don't make decisions and don't give anyone anything. All reincarnations and all decisions are done by his system automatically. And I think Ricklents system works the same. His gods only look at system if it stops working or produce errors, but all job/title giving is done by system. And I think Lambda works the same. Here are many gods who manages deferent attributes. I think they manage Lambda system part for attribute. It's like human working with computer. If here are complex system with many different parts, but if everything works right, one worker can look and manage all system, but if system starts to produce errors and in many different parts, one human can't manage it. Human only have two hands (god too have only two hands). So, if here are possibility for system to produce errors, here needs to be more workers. Gods are the same. They are just workers who manages the system. Because world are made from many different things and all of them can produce errors, every part needs god to look after it.
Unless the gods deliberately mess with the part they have control over. Like Alda deliberately shutting the lights off. Which was yet another dumb move on his part since it gave Van a power boost.
Familiar Spirits are the extra hands of a god, so technically gods do have more than two. I think Rod has familiar spirits other than the reincarnators that have decided to work there, he just keeps them in the mindless machine stage for longer than other gods would (they are probably the computer screens that project the info about the souls), so we haven't seen them much. It's probably the familiar spirits that sound the alarms when there is an error, but couldn't tell when a giant lion was peeking in through the windows.
You know that for certain do you? When he got his two new ones to shut up, he mentions that he makes sure that his familiars can't second guess him, or annoy with opinions.
Like you, I find it hilarious that the only time the Gods seem to do their jobs well is when they deliberately do nothing, like the majority of modern corporate executive officers, who seem to exist solely to be disgustingly overpaid mouthpieces for their companies. I mentioned it before (like, thirty pages back or something) but the only job that Alda has which he doesn't objectively suck at is being the God of Light, a feat I attribute to his ignoring this authority for millennia at a time; and look at what happened when he finally chose to use his powers! His abilities as the God of Life are functionally nonexistent, and he could pass that authority on to a totally random person in Lambda and if anyone noticed any differences for him having done so it would be because the situation in Lambda would've improved suddenly; there's also his inborn ability as the God of Law that has been wasted on him ever since he unilaterally decided to not only enforce rules--selectively, of course, so as to not inconvenience himself--but make them up as he goes as well. Rodecorte is exactly the same in this regard. He had a thing going, and it worked quite well until he tried to casually involve himself in a process he had set up to be totally automated; that never turns out well for people, and it certainly didn't for him. Ricklent directly dabbled in Lambda to create Jobs for the people as a means of growing strong enough to oppose the Demon King, and that left a vulnerability that Guduranis promptly noticed and exploited almost immediately to create Ranks for his minions. So, that kinda backfired a lot in the short term. Even Vida caused a few problems when she decided to create a ton of new Races on her own, though she was basically caught between the two tough choices of either allowing Humanity to slowly go extinct or creating new hardier lifeforms to take the place of what had been lost. She opted to not go against her nature as a Goddess of Life, and hopefully picked the better of the two options in the long run, but it certainly wasn't without its own set of issues.
Yes, he said it himself when he decided to offer them the job. Something like "Well, I don't have any familiar spirits and I've been thinking it might be good to fix that."
so, what in your opinion, do you consider to be the worst thing Van/Banda has done so far? Most of the things he has done have been driven by the circumstances at hand. For example, slaughtering all the employees of the lab in his second life, or killing the 3 who sold out info on his mother and tried to capture him for profit.
Well clearly, he should have looked for potatoes and made fries. It's absolutely unacceptable that he didn't create fries yet. And he doesn't even have mustard. How can be live with that?!
This is actually kind of difficult to answer because the story always justifies his actions. I suppose a few things that bug me are some of his particular choices in soul breaking like Rickert and that it doesn't feel like he gave Heinz a proper chance by constantly hiding critical information during their conversation and then suddenly attacking him. I mean, we the reader know that further ahead in the story Heinz will almost certainly make it clear that he would have just ruined everything anyway, but I don't think Van could have known, and it would have also been more convenient for Van's long term goals to work with him at least for awhile. As for some soul breakings like Rickert, it didn't really feel they had done enough to justify it. If Van's choices to soul break were consistent it wouldn't bother me too much, but as I've said before I don't see the logic in breaking Rickert but not Sleygar or sparing Isla but not, I dunno, Ternecia/Gubamon. Honestly, it's just difficult to really have an emotional reaction to Van's evil actions because somehow there just aren't any negative consequences for them and the arguments against doing so at the time seem really flimsy. "Whaaaaat? He chose not to spare the serial killer just because it would make it a bit harder for him to achieve anything in Sauron? This man is clearly insane!" Shut up, Aran and, uh, other one. That wasn't a weird thing to do.
Hmmm, It's the human experiment of cause =_= about Heinz, it's just that Van hates him, even though I understand Heinz and think it would be good if they reconciled and join hands, for me Van's hate and action again Heinz is reasonable, I just think it's a shame that they will never look the same direction.
That's a loaded question. The metrics of "worst" can easily spark heated debate. Is it in terms of kills? The counter offensive in response to the attack on Talosheim would probably qualify here as Van killed an entire invading army (albeit a genocidal one) reanimated them as undead and sent them to attack the people who sent them, including their fellows while they were alive, while Bormack Gordan was specifically showing off just what a fanatical loon he really is. Not to mention trashing several cultivation villages, poisoning the earth, and leaving poison zombies behind as a "warning." Is it in terms of sheer damage? When he got sucked into Bellwood's dungeon and had his first real confrontation with Heinz, he wrecked the place, but good, and made Alda BLEED. Though he doesn't know it, he also came very, very close to wiping out a sleeping and helpless Bellwood. It's kind of hard to argue that the tree-hugging man-child didn't deserve it for Guiding Alda into being a racist hoarder in the first place, and setting up a cult that sets people on fire for growing rice. Is it for the sheer squick factor? Crawling into Raymond Paris and using his corpse as a disguise to sneak attack Gubamon would probably fit the bill. It's not for a lack of trying. The Bellwoods did a pretty damn good job of keeping the locals from expanding their food culture. Van had to use MAGIC to get rice to grow in the Scylla territory, and set up an undead generator to keep the Sauron Duchy from trashing the place. For that to happen, Heinz has to admit his actions were wrong, and he is fundamentally incapable of doing that. Even though Edgar, of all people, condemns the party's actions in Evebejia as undeniably and inexcusably evil, Heinz still insists on trying to deny and excuse them anyway, saying that while the act of turning over Darcia for torture and immolation is bad, because he feels bad, the process by which he came to do it is either beyond reproach, beyond his control, or both, and as such, he bears no responsibility for it. He does, briefly, realize that this line of thinking is wrong when Van calls him out on it and puts him on the receiving end of a beat-down, and his soul is nearly blasted to atoms, surviving only because the innocent Familiar Spirit Joshua took his place, but then he lets Mills talk him out of it and going right back to thinking he's not liable for the obvious consequences of his actions. He wants to see himself as a flawless "ideal hero" and pointedly ignores anything and everything that says otherwise. He never, ever learns from or addresses his flaws. He instead does his darnedest to try and convince himself that he has no flaws. It's only a matter of time before he destroys himself and everyone around him, and he never misses an opportunity to sabotage any chance he might have to actually reconcile in any way. Spoiler By the time chapter 360 rolls around, Van doesn't even have to try to condemn Heinz. When Guduranis shows up, Heinz, in front of a large city full of witnesses, is far, far more concerned with attacking and arguing with Van than with dealing with the demon king, or protecting the citizens, ignores the collateral damage, and flees through an Alda gate while Van sticks around to help clean-up the aftermath. Even Alda's "heroes" begin looking at Heinz with contempt. As for Alda, if you're of the opinion that his actions are "unrealistic", well HTML: https://notalwaysright.com/sounds-like-dad-is-the-thing-that-needs-the-most-fixing/203020/ reality would disagree. Hard as it is too believe, there are people who will physically rip out and destroy new things and re-install old and broken ones, sometimes even making the breaks worse, and then turn around and say that there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.
I feel sorry for Heinz. I think if it wasn't for Edgar and all these pricks around him telling him he's never done anything wrong he probably could have been a real hero.
I get where you're coming from, and if the story was written in his perspective and only his perspective then he'd be the guy we're rooting for, but it's not. Unless someone can point out where Heinz was forced to pal around with the likes of Edgar and Riley, then he's responsible for the company he keeps too. The character sheets at the end of Volume 9 even point out that Heinz hand-picked Edgar out of the slums, for whatever reason, which would go a long, long way to explain why Edgar does his best to keep Heinz from feeling guilty about his actions. To his credit Heinz does actively resist some of Mills's more ridiculous excuses like "if you didn't hunt down Darcia, someone else would have" but he does ultimately bear the responsibility for letting himself be led to believe that he has done nothing wrong when he clearly has. He also bears the responsibility for repeating his mistakes over and over again and actively resisting having those mistakes pointed out, like taking kill quests without verifying if the quests are legit, and then walking away satisfied with himself when the quests are completed and he's been paid for turning in body-parts. Yes, Heinz has the potential to be a genuine hero, but he just can't resist undermining himself every chance he gets.
That's how you know he was well-written. You really want to like him... but he just makes it so damn hard sometimes! Similarly, you really want to hate Vandalieu for the sketchy things he does on a routine basis, but you just can't because--apart from simply being our All-Talented Death-God Messiah--he's absolutely adorable. A character that doesn't spark debate is a character unworthy of being debated in the first place.
Do we even know if the locals had potatoes before or after the hero transfer? Until now we know rice is inspired by Japanese, pasta by I dunno who and it got forgotten and locals had bread and porridge. But who knows if they had potatoes, corn or buckwheat pancakes.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, that doesn't appear to have been addressed yet. Even if there were potatoes (or something similar) in Lambda, there may well be a pre-existing cultural taboo in regards to them. Fun fact: On Earth, potatoes used to be known as "the devil's food" and even the Scotts, who eat Haggas, couldn't stand them. It wasn't until Ireland and Scotland had an unprecedented famine, where there was nothing else they could eat, before people actually tried them, and found them good food. Potato eyes are mildly poisonous and potato plants themselves are tenacious weeds with three ways of propagating themselves, runners, flowers, and having herbivorous or omnivorous animals dig up the tubers and spit out the eye, burying it, that causes it to sprout right then and there. So there may well be potatoes on Lambda, but Van just simply hasn't found them yet.
Well, it's Heinz's fault for not getting rid of bad influences on him and only hearing what he wants to hear, sure. I was just kind of of thinking 'Imagine if Edgar was actually as good of a person as Heinz thinks he is.' Someone that doesn't literally murder children and then tell himself he's such a kind person for doing so. One that doesn't support his best friend no matter what he does because his own morals are so flawed that he sees nothing wrong with what Heinz does. If Heinz had actually had friends who didn't just tell him he was always right he could have been a proper hero. Dude is practically brainwashed at this point by people who genuinely think they're trying to help. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with seeking validation from people you care for. Even Van has done that much, skewed as his own morality has become. The problem is just that Heinz respects the wrong people, which gets in the way of his fundamental morality.