Actually, there is a relationship between Van's madness and what Vida did, I may be the one who is driving me crazy, but I think that when they met for the first time, she apologized, because it seems that the changes she made in his soul, they helped that even if Darcia did not happen, it is not entirely his fault because the shape of Vandeliu's soul also had to do with it, and in the end, madness suited him well, although it was because He went so deep in the well of madness, he came out on the other side of the planet sane
Reading this gave me the same kind of mental corruption that reading MTL does. Did you google translate from your main language?
The big thing that Vida did to Van was moving him out of Rodcortes reincarnation system and having him reincarnate as a Dhampir, which is why she apologized. In an indirect way she had a hand in a lot of his troubles. Though, if she didn't, Darcia still would've died and some random Dhampir baby would've starved or been hunted later. The other thing I don't understand was that she'd given him "the lingering memories from Zakkart's remains". He clearly doesn't have any episodic memory of the guy's life. Zakkart got creation powers, so maybe it helped the system give him creation themed jobs. I guess whatever the memories are could be a contributor to his soul changing shape, along with Rodcortes half-assed soul combination. I'm not convinced the soul changing shape would lead to madness as much as madness changing the shape, though.
I had interpreted the lingering memories of Zakkart to be why Van is so innovative when testing new skills and making things. Not like he had a chance to make much in in his past lives being imprisoned as a test animal for 20 years. And his uncle actively broke a pencil he was given as a gift because it was a fancy pencil that wasn't worn down to a nub claiming "luxury"
He gave them fragments of the soul and corpse of Zakkart that remained, but they are not complete memories, only residues that, as Mastine says, will have made his capacity for learning and research develop even more, although it seems that saving the distances, he has certain behaviors that champions had, which is a mystery even to the gods. Perhaps due to Robcorte's bad work (and I am going to commit a sin, and defend it with the fact that creating a frankestein of souls was unprecedented), some of the fragments that contained the personality will have stayed so deep, that all the Van reincarnations, even when they go through the cleansing process or are born into other species, these remain. It would be interesting for an eccentric cow with a mother complex to start a revolution on her farm due to the death of her mother. Do you know that, speaking of the matter, what tragic figure do you think Van could have been?
that actually makes some sense. it was an unprecendented thing to patchwork souls together, so it is certainly possible that his soul wasn't able to be cleansed properly by rodidiot's system. we know that his system is set up to be essentially perfect, when everything is working right. but as soon as something unexpected starts to happen he has to intervene in it to clean up. with an out of standard soul like Van's it could quite easily slip through without causing an error to actually show up.
Rodcorte made a basic programming mistake... he forgot to idiot-proof his system. Once you've made a program, you want to try and stress-test it to see under what circumstances it fails or gets buggy, fix those issues, then retest before releasing the program. Then again, that takes actual work, which is definitely not one of that idiot's priorities.
exactly. if you're program only works when you get exactly the expected inputs, it's gonna break when some idiot inputs null lol. I've started to think of his system as the most complex Rube Goldberg machine. is amazing when everything is set up right, but if one thing is wrong it fails.
Several people over the course of this chat have put forward basic things he could do to improve his so called "perfect" system. Adding an afterlife/soul pool to draw from in case of error, testing for nonstandard input. Basically all the things an actual engineer does to make sure a product/program actually works. Rodolt either stopped at the most basic of "OK it works", or someone else built it for him.
Sad thing is, I'm not. There's a bunch of other stuff he's done that I haven't mentioned yet, and we've got people on here who are cherry-picking and doing all other sorts logical fallacies to sell him as an unflinching "good guy" who would need to have 4th wall piercing knowledge to do better. Which is not true. And it doesn't matter that Van was "just buying time" when his arguments are sound, especially when we've seen in earlier chapters that Van is far, far more likely to be forgiving if people acknowledge their faults and how they've wronged him and his, which Heinz and crew seem to be pathologically incapable of doing. An earlier chapter, around the sending of Kanata to Lambda if memory serves, has narration indicating he wasn't always this lazy and oafish. He built the system when he used to be far more diligent and took his job seriously, but eventually the sheer magnitude of his job in ferrying souls around got to be too much for him, so he automated everything he could, and started doing the absolute minimum he need to in order to get by, and this obviously includes not checking his system's "software" or "hardware" for bugs or errors until the alarms are blaring, forcing him to rush to catch-up, which makes him sloppy and careless, which leads to more errors, and so on in a vicious cycle until he finally gets everything stable, which then makes him even less motivated to work, and more interested in passing the buck...
Neat. I didn't realize I'd been wanting to see more stuff like Arachne being introduced to normal human society. I've read this series a couple times and I honestly don't remember reading this at all. I like that the flaw of the biggest villain in the story isn't wrath, pride, ambition or anything like that. No, it's goddamn sloth. He's such a lazy bastard that everyone wants him dead.
Well, I’m sure there won’t be as big a fuss over here as when we fought against Fitun and the others,” said Vandalieu. NO, don't jinx it!!!
No, no we have not seen Van to be forgiving. If what you said or did offends him, and you apologize, you are forgiven, in some cases you don't even need that much, just do better, and he'll overlook it, but if you harmed any of his family, you burn, especially if it was his mother. Don't oversell Heinz' heinousness, and don't try to hold Van as some paragon of virtue, he admits himself that he's insane, and bereft of any forgiveness for his mother's enemies, or anyone that looks at her in any way he doesn't like.
I think he WOULD if not forgive Heinz then at least overlook him if he made the effort to improve, apologized immediately etc but the situation didn't exactly allow for that because Van frankly wasn't there for that type of talk. Alda's peaceful faction does hold some value and would be better if Heinz would compromise more, but Van himself made that impossible by cutting short the discussion because he doesn't WANT to forgive Heinz. I mean, the takeaway from that conversation isn't just "Heinz is worse than he seems" but also "Van doesn't want to give Heinz a chance and will accentuate the negatives." Because Van is explicitly wrong: Heinz absolutely does do things like stop slavers, campaign for the rights of Vida's races and so on. Honestly, the story could use a bit more focus on what Heinz actually does because you can only pick up these details around the edges. We have no idea who he's campaigning for except not undead (and Van hasn't told him why this is bad) and up until this point not ghouls or majin. Probably not vampires either but even Van doesn't blame him for that. And definitely not anything like noble orcs but, again, can't blame him for that. And I get the feeling that he isn't really doing much for Arachne either so... just the ones who are already mostly considered people? That would probably be a better point to focus on as not being enough.
They both declare their intentions, and resolves, starting in chapter 200. Van makes it very clear during the exchange, that there is no way to save them from his rage, he is not calm enough to think rationally, and when they say things that piss him off more, like saying he seems calm, he loses even more of his reason.
The conversation Selen and her guards had shows that there are actually decent people in the moderate faction. Sad to say their efforts are wasted when their god has no intention to compromise. His only stated plan so far is to use the Vida races that surrender as cannon fodder against Vida herself. As Country Mage referenced. Heinz is in too deep now. He's backing the human races against Vida's children whether he likes it or not because that is what ALDA wants. Van has to kill him even if he did feel honest remorse and was begging for forgiveness.
I'm gonna assume you're talking to me 'cause there's no quotes. There is a point where Van weighs his grudge against what Heinz is offering Vida's races right now and decides it's not worth it. This implies if his grudge were weakened by, say, an apology and Alda's peaceful faction offered more, his decision may have been different. If he had entered the conversation with a less hostile tone, compromise or at least honest discussion may have occurred. I mean, I think we can all pretty much accept that Heinz's position on ghouls was probably open to consideration and if he was actually working with Van, Van would stop Heinz's attempts to save the pious and kind rapist adventurers from those dastardly ghouls by invading their homes and murdering their children. Heinz walked over a bunch of landmines in that conversation, but I don't think conflict was inevitable there. I mean, not without making Van look pretty unsympathetic for reasons we probably don't need to get into because it's too meta.
I had been pretty certain that Van was judging whether or not the peaceful faction could be worked with at all, but if you take this at face value: There may have been a sliver of a chance for them to "get along". I think it would have required Heinz and thus the faction to have already been radically advocating for Vida's races, though. I don't think Van wanted to find reasons to let Heinz live, but showing that he was willing to kill humans in defense of Vida's races would go a long way. To my memory, even when dealing with folks hunting Selen, Heinz was more likely to catch them and guide them to the new faction. The sort of things he would want as proof for whether the peaceful faction is trustworthy probably couldn't be gotten out of a conversation. Maybe if it really made Heinz look like a meathead who had never even considered Van's perspective, like if he came around to Van's way of thinking after having his views challenged. People don't often respond to having their political views challenged by changing their mind on the spot, though, so it feels impossible that they would ever avoid that fight. If him judging whether or not it was worth sparing Heinz is sincere, I think it would be possible for them to not kill each other after the fight was over. It'd take something like Heinz backing off, championing some monster-like race of Vida that hasn't already aligned with Van, becoming a political power with them like Van has, and bringing Van to the negotiation table I think. I dunno where you would find one when most are behind the barrier or hunted by him in the past. I don't think he's met Merfolk yet, so I guess that's it? They don't have ranks, but short of inventing a never before seen race, he's burned his bridges everywhere else already. The Scylla would have been ideal.