The Power to Begin | A Philosophical Analysis on Himeko Nova and Asat Pramad

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, welcome back to Existential XP. Today we have to start with a spoiler warning because the moment we get into topic, there is going to be heavy spoiler for version 4.4 of Star Rail. If you yet to finish the story, please evacuate immediately.

[00:00:15]>> We don't know exactly what's happening, but retreating is the safest choice right now.

[00:00:21]>> I trust everyone who wandered in by accident has now been escorted out by Dan Hong's very sensible advice. As for the rest of you, now we can celebrate together. Himiko lives. To be fair, the character trailer before the patch had already planted all the clues, but just like Wel, once the giant robot shows up, I just can't focus on anything else. So, for a good stretch of the 4.4 main story, I was completely lost. This Himiko we know, is she actually himo? I can relate to a subroad on this one.

[00:00:53]>> What's going on here?

[00:00:56]And then once it was confirmed that it was Moco who died in Himiko's place, my first reaction was that the whole maneuver felt a bit contrived. The twist feels engineered a bit too hard for the sake of subverting expectations and it creates some minor bugs in the story.

[00:01:16]Even now, I still think that purely in a narrative sense, this reversal isn't a clean move. The so-called exchange of destiny is a bit underspecified. The Himiko who boarded the Astro Express and left planadia. Did her character model I mean I mean her appearance good grief I think I've caught the fourth wall breaking syndrome from Assad PMAD. Did she come out looking like Monaco or not?

[00:01:43]If not, how could Assad PMAD possibly not know which one survived? Did he just not investigate for 15 years? Which okay. But if she did take on the appearance of Monaco, then this fate exchange comes bundled with a whole set of extra properties and then it drags in a ship of thesis problem. Exactly how much gets exchanged before Himiku simply becomes modical. Now, that's an interesting puzzle in its own right, but it is absolutely not the philosophical core of him or of this patch and it waters down the main discussion. But if we choose to overlook the narrative blemishes and read the whole arc philosophically, especially if we set it against the other narrative possibility where Himiko died and Mole boarded the express, then it becomes clear why this reversal had to happen and how the trailblazers final refusal to let Himiku sacrifice herself turns out to run much deeper than the power of friendship.

[00:02:45]More importantly, this story introduces us to a truly great philosopher, Hannah Arent, and her book, The Human Condition. So, without further ado, let's take a closer look at the story of Himikon Nova and Assad Permade.

[00:03:11]In the Firefly video a while back, we talked about the master of existential philosophy, Martin Haidiger, and his idea of being toward death. Arent was once his student and for a time his lover, but she was Jewish and he joined the Nazi. So you can imagine how tangled and complicated their relationship became. Still, judging from their relationship late in life, I suspect that at the end, neither of them regretted having met the other. And as someone who loves philosophy, I'm also grateful that they met. Without each other, neither might have achieved as much as they did. On Haidiger's side, at least according to biographies and some gossip, Arent was a major source of creative inspiration. On Arent's side, it's much more visible. A great deal of her thought begins by understanding Haidiger and then deliberately walking into the territory he never fully explored. The most classic collision between the two is over that very concept being toward death. Haidiger looks around and says look at how we are living. Each one of us is basically indistinguishable from everyone else. He calls this condition.

[00:04:21]Every day you say I do this, I think that. But if this I has just unreflectively borrowed the entire world view from other people, can it really be called a self? So, how do you break out from Dasmon? Haidiger says, "Well, you can't. At least not completely. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to do about it. There is exactly one thing no one else can ever do in your place.

[00:04:48]Dying. Hence, being toward death. Once you realize your death is completely your own, then it is possible for you to go backward from there and define your authentic existence." Arent hears this and finds it deeply compelling. But then she asks, "How exactly do you define your authentic existence?" Death does remind you to practice authenticity, but death itself cannot help you start practicing anything. To start, you need the other end of existence, birth. Now, just like Haidiger wasn't telling us all to hurry up and die, Arent is not saying that only newborn babies have existential worth. Her notion of birth isn't even limited to the physical event of a new individual coming out from their mother's womb. When an already existing subject takes action and forms a new connection with the ward, that moment carries the same significance as being born. She calls it a second birth.

[00:05:49]The whole point of talking about birth is this. Every new subject who enters the ward means the ward now contains a fresh possibility of beginning something new. A rent has a name for it. It's called natality. In our real lives, there's no wish power and there's no imaginary. Nobody can literally be born for you. Which is why natality sounds so abstract. And this is exactly where fantasy stories come in. With Mole and Himiko, Star shows us what natality actually looks like. Originally, Himiko created Mole for one purpose, to board the Astro Express in herstead, to live in Himiko's place. The young Himiko understood the imminence of death with perfect clarity. And yet, we cannot call that decision a practice of authenticity. There may be no imagining reality, but doesn't something very similar show up in certain parents? They see the finitude of their own lives and then they deposit the wish to overcome that finitude into their children.

[00:06:53]Transferring the burden of existence onto their kids in the name of love and hope. Being toward death gives you a diagnostic for authenticity versus inauthenticity. But in on itself, it doesn't explain how a person who has faced death with open eyes acquires the capacity to begin a new life. To be fair, Haidiger does have a rather complete theoretical framework of his own. It's just not contained in the phrase being toward death, but he's not today's protagonist. The metaphors and imagery of this patch clearly points to a rent. So that's who we'll talk about today. And if you want to see Star talk about Haidiger, you can go watch my video on Firefly. Anyway, Modok defies Himiko's intentions and makes a wish of her own. She exchanged their destinies.

[00:07:45]She goes to die in Himiko's place.

[00:07:48]Himiko's death gets delayed and through that she gains the chance to practice what Arent means by natality. On the surface, what Micole gives her is the continuation of life. But that's not the core of it. It's not as if Himiko became immortal. Her life is still finite. She is still a being toward death. What Moku really gives her is the capacity to begin a life that is her own. The capacity to set out on her own path. In the original Chinese text, the new form of himo is called, which literally means setting out. I have zero doubt that Aren's natality is where the intended meaning comes from. The English localization went with him nova, which lings on the concept of newness. It's slightly different. The Chinese version emphasizes the start of motion, that step from stillness into movement. I suppose a fair translation is himical goal, but I guess Nintendo's lawyers are watching. Jokes aside, this reversal of destiny carries three extra layers of philosophical meaning. First, for Modokco herself, she too practiced her own natality. As we just said, natality isn't about the event of birth itself, but about the new possibilities a new subject brings into the ward. If Module had simply lived on in Himiko's place, she would merely have been continuing an inheritance. Any possibility her existence introduced would still to a very real extent have belonged to Himiko. By making a wish that was hers alone, she created a future Himiko had never imagined. a possibility that exists only because she moto existed.

[00:09:38]The second layer is that now the story draws a cline between two questions.

[00:09:43]What am I and who am I? Arent explicitly distinguishes these two questions. What am I asks about origin, abilities, temperament, bodily condition and so on.

[00:09:55]Something close to what Satro calls facticity. Who am I? Can never be answered by any list of attributes. It can only be disclosed through action.

[00:10:06]For Modok, being a navigator answers the question, what am I? She was created already possessing the look and the qualities of Himiko's ideal navigator.

[00:10:17]Navigator is her facticity. But Himiko never natively had the navigator's appearance or qualities. She had to disclose that ideal self gradually across 15 years of trailblazing to give the word navigator a meaning that belongs only to her through her actions.

[00:10:35]So that navigator stops being the label of a given role and becomes an answer to the question who am I? And then there's the third layer, the one I find most interesting, which is why despite being thoroughly tricked by the plot, I walked away quite satisfied with the story. It changes how you understand a line that 4.4 repeats a few times. Each and every one of us nameless is making it to the next stop. On the surface, this is a hot-blooded declaration of protection.

[00:11:07]It's borderline cringe and cheesy even.

[00:11:09]But that's only if you stay at the narrative layer. Storytelling, frankly, is not Star's strongest muscle. The real power lives in the philosophical layer.

[00:11:20]And to reach that layer, you need another of Aren's concepts, plurality.

[00:11:26]Plurality is Aren's foundational framework for explaining how politics is possible at all. Roughly speaking, plurality has two faces. One face is similarity and equality. We have enough similarity and we are equal to one another to a sufficient extent.

[00:11:44]Therefore, discussion and mutual understanding is possible and that makes politics feasible. The other phase is distinction. If similarity were taken to its limit and we were all perfectly identical, then sure would be equal, but then there would be nothing left to discuss. It's precisely because differences exist that politics is necessary. Plurality requires both faces at once. Now set the word politics aside for a second. Doesn't this structure look familiar? By Asat Prammar's own account, it's just like the Stellaron inside us. Two forces, assimulation and differentiation held in balance.

[00:12:27]>> I examined the Stellaron inside your body. It's not a seed of ruin in the usual sense.

[00:12:36]It was a seed bestowed on you by Sheep.

[00:12:40]Yet branded with the imprint of the trail plays.

[00:12:45]Chipe constantly tries to assimilate all things into one while Aki Villi constantly creates new variations.

[00:12:55]These two forces repel each other. But in your body they have achieved a dangerous equilibrium.

[00:13:04]Here the trailblaze manifests as the force of differentiation. In a world without difference, any individual can be replaced by any other. The moment difference arises, individuals start to display irreplaceability.

[00:13:19]And the exchange of destiny between Modok and Himiko is at its core a rejection of replaceability. Think about it. If the one who survived back then had been Modok, the story would have conceded that Himiko could be replaced by Mole. And that concession contradicts the navigator's ideal and the entire logic of the trailblaze.

[00:13:43]>> But if I left you behind to travel the stars alone, I wouldn't be the ideal navigator we talked about.

[00:13:53]>> Modok wished for their face to be exchanged. What this implies is Himiku cannot be replaced. Not by Modok, not by anyone. And Himiko's wish can only be pursued by Himiko herself. The Express Crew is indeed a community, but unlike the great chorus of Sheep Harmony, the Express Crew is not assembled out of functional positions. Its members are not interchangeable parts. You can't just simply sacrifice this one and slot in that one. And at the end of 4.4, the wish Himiku makes to the Stellaron is to sacrifice herself to save the crew. We usually count sacrifice as a noble act, but philosophy exists precisely to break you from common sense. Himiko's wish in fact amounts to a denial of Trailblaz's tenet of irreplaceability.

[00:14:45]I know you'll see all those sights in mystead and experience all those stories as wonderful and strange as imagining.

[00:14:58]walk this path without the eons's protection and become your own god and then you can grant my wish.

[00:15:12]Come back here and tell me all about your amazing stories.

[00:15:17]>> The trailblazer from the future says Himiko's wish leads only to failure because it is at its heart a compromise.

[00:15:26]Take a look at what she says. In mystead, grant my wish. She has fallen again into the same trap 15 years ago to stop her own trailblaze and have someone do it in her place. In fact, Morco said the same thing as the ideal self of young Himiko. Modok shared her blind spot. But due to her identity as imagin and the circumstances back then that similar action happened to practice her own mentality which doesn't apply to the current Himiko. In other words, the circumstances now point more accurately to Himiku's philosophical blind spot, forcing her to further refine her thoughts in order to embody the ideal of trailblaze. Both are sacrifices. And yet, Modok sacrifice back then and the sacrifice Himiko nearly made this time are different in kind. Not because there are two species of sacrifice, but because the core of what Modok did was never the surface act of sacrifice at all. She was practicing her own natality, materializing a possibility that only exists because she exists. And thus she proves her own irreplaceability.

[00:16:41]But she cannot prove Himiko's irreplaceability. That requires her to practice her own natality. And that is exactly where Himiko initially failed at the end of 4.4. That is how the trailblazer saves Himiko. Not by wishing for immense power to protect her, but by reaffirming Trailblaz's tenant of irreplaceability and reminding her to practice her own mentality.

[00:17:07]>> Each and every one of us nameless is making it to the next stop.

[00:17:16]>> And therefore, Himiko gains a new form because she has taken another step on the path of trailblaze. This is not a magical girl transformation by Del's ex Machina, but a manifestation of the power to begin. If the plot had not reversed the destinies of Mo and Himiko, if the one who died back then really had been Himiko all along, the story would collapse into a chain of passing torch.

[00:17:42]Himiko dies. Modok inherits her name and her will. Mole sacrificed herself in turn. The Trailblazer inherits her will.

[00:17:50]A moving story, no question. But it has one problem. It quietly assumes that sacrifice and replacement are simply how the word works. As I see it, the trailblazer from the future exists in this story precisely to remind us to look past the concept of sacrifice and find the natality hidden behind. The future trailblazer fixated on the surface act of sacrifice and drew the conclusion that you have to get used to loss before you can move on. It is an extremely powerful idea and an extremely dangerous one. It is capable of alienating the trailblaze into destruction. Think back to you see this is exactly the core belief by which Fon caught in endless cycles degenerated into the flame reaver. In fact, it is precisely this belief that Ligus exploited to forge him into the vessel of Iron Tomb.

[00:18:50]>> Losses are a constant on the flamechase journey among which even life itself holds little value, reduced to ashes, such a familiar end. It happens in every journey always the same.

[00:19:14]>> And now there is one more aminator of destruction who holds this very same line of thought. Our dear grandfather Assad PMD. Assad PMAD is a character with a lot of nuances. He did not become a Lord Ravager because he hates or refuses to see existence. Like Fäong in his endless loops, a subroad's problem is that he has seen too much. See enough and you start finding patterns. Find enough patterns and you come to endorse a certain statistical worldview. Even if there are infinite possibilities in the short term and at small scales, zoom out to the scale of the cosmos and everything falls under the rule of necessity and inevitability. In a boss fight against him, his three phases each have a unique name. Formation, existence, and decay. These are core concepts in Buddhist philosophy. Broadly speaking, Buddhism rejects the idea that things possess fixed immutable essences.

[00:20:20]It is first of all anti-essentialist.

[00:20:24]But then, how do we explain the fact that we ourselves and the world around us appear so stable? Buddhism's answer is the concept of causes and conditions.

[00:20:35]Causes and conditions are what sustain a thing's existence. When they converge, the thing arises. When they scatter, it perishes. And they never stay converged forever. Sooner or later, they will scatter. Thus, the universe passes through four phases. Formation, existence, decay, and annihilation. The standard English translation in Buddhist studies differ a bit. I'm using Star's translation here, but the underlying meaning is the same four stages. A motion of convergence, a state of persistence, then a motion of dissolution and a state of complete dispersal. Naming his three phases, formation, existence, and decay is a metaphor. It announces the inevitability that points toward annihilation. Now, a sapramad actually commits several philosophical errors here in the Buddhist framework. He clings to emptiness, treating emptiness as if it were a substantial existence. And he also ignores the cycle in which another formation follows annihilation, thereby chopping a cyclical cosmology down into a one-way arrow. But our reference point today is himo, so we won't dive deeper into the Buddhist side. What matters for today's theme and the key to how Himiko and the express crew finally defeated him is his desperate craving for certainty. He insists on finding a stable fixed point inside impermanent existence. His reasoning goes roughly like this. I have seen that all things are impermanent. I can't grab hold of any certainty in them as themselves. So, I'll retreat one step and grab for certainty in the laws behind them. And when I reach out, I actually catch something. Splendid. But when I take a look at what I caught, it simply reads, "Formation, existence, decay, annihilation. All things flow toward destruction." And thus, a Lord Ravager is born. Here's the thing, though.

[00:22:41]Merely seeing that inevitability doesn't automatically send you into the arms of destruction. If anything, I'd say it's more likely that you drift into nihility and become a self annihilator. The other half of the reason Asraad chose destruction is that sentence from before. You have to get used to loss before you can move on. Unlike the self annihilators, he wanted to keep moving on, to keep walking the path of salvation he had always walked. And so he closed off his feelings so that loss could never again stop him in his tracks. This is what getting used to loss looks like when taken to its extreme. Rationalized loss into code law and every loss becomes acceptable because every loss is inevitable. It is exactly by this logic that Fon who held the trailblazer as the hero within became the flame reaver and that I see once the navigator of trailblaze became a lord ravager. The moment you get used to loss, you're no longer walking the path of trailblaze. The trailblaz's creed is to explore, understand, establish, and connect. But once you close off your feelings and get used to loss, building connections is no longer possible. It reminds me of Bertrren Russell's critique of the Stoics that there is a coldness in them, that not only the bad passions are condemned, but all passions. Russell's reading of the Stoics is debatable, but it's quite accurate as a description of Assa Pra's condition. The problem is if you don't suffer deeply when your wife or your child dies, then neither will you smile at your wedding or at your child's birth. As per tragedy is PTSD on a cosmic scale. He has lost too much. So he forced himself to go numb to loss and in that process he lost something more the courage to take any constructive action at all. Now the word action in a rent is a term with very particular meaning in the human condition. She divides the active life of human beings into three categories labor work and action. The active life, the vida activa can be loosely understood as practical life in contrast with the contemplative life of thinking, willing, judging and so on. But that distinction isn't crucial for us today. What is crucial is that here labor and work don't mean what they conventionally mean in the modern vocabulary. And the difference deserves our attention. They may look odd at first glance, but I think they are actually quite easy to understand once you let go of modern stereotypes. The clearest distinction lie in their purpose and their shape in time. The purpose of labor is to sustain life, and it's cyclical in time, repeating without end. Cooking, for instance, making today's dinner doesn't exempt you from making tomorrow's. In modern society, we say every morning we go to work. But in Aren's terms, that is largely labor as well. Clocking in day after day, around and around to earn the wages that keep you alive. At the level of labor, human beings really aren't so different from the other animals. It's just our forms of labor are sometimes more elaborate.

[00:26:13]The purpose of work is to fabricate things that endure. And it's linear in time, having a definitive beginning and a definitive end. A carpenter builds a table. An architect designs a house. An author writes a book. These products aren't consumed on the spot the way food is. They have a certain permanence and they go on existing after their maker walks away. Work exceeds in form anything other animals can achieve. But like labor, it is defined by explicit purpose. And for that reason, it tends to treat everything as a means. The lumber and the tools are means to the table. The table becomes a means to dinner or to paperwork. Follow that road far enough and one day you'll find yourself agonizing like lias over the so-called prime mover of life, the ultimate purpose of existence. And then you throw yourself into destruction. The antidote to all this is the third category of active life, action.

[00:27:23]Action can no longer be reduced to its purpose. It is grounded in plurality and natality. It is the opening of new possibilities together with others. And a note here from this point on whenever I say the word action I mean it strictly in a ren sense. Please keep it separate from the broad everyday sense of the word. Now unlike work which is linear and runs from a beginning to an end action has no fixed end point in time.

[00:27:55]For Arent, action is the true embodiment of human freedom because action transcends necessity. But let's pause on that word necessity. When Aren says action transcends necessity, she does not mean that action is exempt from the laws of nature. That by sheer willpower, I can violate logic and overcome physics. It's easier to see if we distinguish the meaning of has to in these two sentences.

[00:28:25]Socrates is a man therefore he has to die. Socrates infuriated the Athenians therefore he has to die. What Assad Permat saw was the first kind of necessity. Formation, existence, decay, annihilation. It is governed by nature and logic and it still holds. Everyone dies. However Socrates dies, die he will. But hidden inside the second kind of has to is a whole web of individual and collective actions. The Athenians collective action of deciding to execute Socrates, Socrates own action of refusing to flee and so on. It becomes an inevitable outcome only on the basis of those actions having happened. The two types of necessity are different.

[00:29:14]It's just sometimes our language smears the two together.

[00:29:18]Aren's word is action. So the one who takes the action is an actor. And this is one of those moments where I am so happy for doing the analysis in English because there is a perfect and interesting double meaning here. A sapperad also considers himself an actor in the other sense of the word playing a role.

[00:29:40]>> Life is like this. One chance journey after another. One whim after another, playing someone's father, becoming someone's friend, and at times someone's lover.

[00:29:58]>> Ara describes the human way of existing as performance, stepping into identities that were never yours to begin with.

[00:30:06]Factually speaking, he is a fake Ryusuki, just like Moto is a fake Himiko. And yet the two of them take completely opposite ethical stances toward the act of performing. Modok knows full well that she is an imaginated ideal navigator, but she willingly accepts the moral obligations that come with the role. She never hides behind the perfectly available excuse of I'm just an imaginary to escape responsibility. Instead, she considers since I am the ideal Himiko, I cannot abandon the real Himiko and claim for myself the future she longs for. She turns a fictional identity into a real moral subject. And together with Himiko, she takes action in Aren's full sense of the word. Assad PMD, by contrast, keeps insisting that he's merely playing roles. He hides behind the mask and refuses every moral constraint. You could read this as him evading responsibility. But I think the absence of responsibility is the consequence, not the aim. What he is truly evading is action itself. There is a detail in the story that I love. 15 years ago when Himiko restarted the Astro Express, Asapromod could easily have dragged her back down, but he didn't. He admits he doesn't understand why he let her go, but then he rationalizes that decision and tries to repackage it as a more sophisticated form of destruction. A few weeks ago, Heimo returned to her hometown and brought you back with her.

[00:31:50]That was the moment I finally understood why I didn't shoot down the express 15 years ago. It had nothing to do with acting as a father or trailblazing, but but for a destruction that spanned 15 years to set her on a journey to gain what was most precious only to shatter it all in the crulest way.

[00:32:21]>> If you think about it, it's quite ridiculous. 15 years ago, he had no way of knowing the trailblazer would ever follow Himiko to planadia. If you ask me, Asapromat simply couldn't bring himself to do it. In some real sense, he does love Himiko because he was her father. Yes, he impersonated Ryuzuki, but for Himiko, the father in her memory simply is the Ryusuki that Assad Permad played.

[00:32:51]That year, He-Mo was six. At her mother's funeral, she met her father for the first time.

[00:33:04]>> You are lying.

[00:33:06]>> I have told you only one lie in all these years, my dear daughter.

[00:33:15]Nice to meet you. I'm your father, Ria Suk.

[00:33:22]>> Now that I think about it, you always intentionally left little openings during my childhood.

[00:33:30]Was this also part of your scheme?

[00:33:34]>> As I said, my only lie to Himiko is the lie that I am Ryu.

[00:33:44]Why did Assad PMAD keep leaving little openings letting his mask slip in front of her to test his daughter's IQ? I don't think so. It's because he knew that for Himiko this relationship was real. All the more reason that he had to keep reminding himself that this is only a role. Plurality, natality, none of it is real. All existence is empty. In the face of necessity and inevitability, action is impossible. And so the only thing left for us is performance to become actor in another sense. But as Sparkle and Sparksy reminded us, a mask does not only conceal what is real. To a certain extent, it creates what is real.

[00:34:32]on a road that has already rejected essentialism to paraphrase Kimu to a large degree appearing creates being in this sense as simply is Himiko's father just like he is the most elated of fools on route and is the navigator I see he insists those were only roles he played because the Assad pad of today has lost the courage for constructive action that those roles stand for so much So that even when he has in actual fact taken such an action once again, all he can do is denial. Himiku calling him a deserter could not be more fitting.

[00:35:13]>> You're just a deserter.

[00:35:15]>> Denying the very path you walked.

[00:35:23]See how the trailblazers who came after you will walk the fact you were too afraid to finish.

[00:35:33]>> So why did he lose the courage to take actions? This brings us back to those two kinds of necessity that language loves to confuse. One is the law no human action can transcend. Another is the future defined by action. A sopraad mistook one for the other because the first kind of necessity cannot be transcended. He flatly denied the meaning of action itself and as a result he found himself staring at a phenomenon he could not explain.

[00:36:06]>> I have never understood why the seeds I planted by chance would always take root in unexpected ways.

[00:36:15]I never expected them to bear fruit such as Graphia or Himiko.

[00:36:22]It feels like a curse, like fate's crulest mockery of me. Why doesn't he understand? Because with his eyes locked on necessity, he keeps telling himself that action is impossible. And yet, in fact, he has taken action. He has fostered plurality and nutality and so he cannot account for where the effects of those actions came from. For Arent, one of the actions essential properties is precisely its unpredictability.

[00:36:56]Once an action enters the dense web of human relationships, no single person can fully control its outcome. Exactly as Assad Parmad puts it, seeds that take root in unexpected ways and bear fruit he never expected. Action is therefore both free and dangerous. Its consequences can far outrun the actor's intent. And Aren points out in the face of that unpredictability, human beings possess one crucial capacity as a saving grace to make promises. A promise cannot close off the openness of the future, but it can plant a few stable anchors within the chaotic and unpredictable future. Aren sees promising as the remedy for the unpredictability of action. By binding ourselves to one another through promises, we keep our shared life from drifting entirely loose. A promise can take two individuals who cannot walk into the future together and place them inside a shared future anyway. Modok cannot travel with Himiko, but through a promise, she became part of Himiko's future actions.

[00:38:08]>> Multicole, when the fantasies full again, I will be there as I have promised.

[00:38:25]I will come back with so many stories to tell you.

[00:38:32]>> And in the confrontation with Assad Permade, the power of promise finds its final expression in the trailblazers declaration and all the promises, oaths, dreams, and pacts.

[00:38:50]I'm not leaving a single one behind.

[00:38:54]>> We said earlier that the philosophical error of Assad PMAD is that he was obsessed with grasping permanence inside impermanent existence. But apart from code law, he could not find any anchor.

[00:39:07]Boss fights in Star are always collisions of philosophies. The Astro Express defeats Assar PMAD because they see something he couldn't see. They point at his blind spot and refute his philosophical error in practice. Within impermanent existence, law is not the only thing that we can hold on to. There are also promises. A promise is not a leftover of the past. It is a force that gives the future its direction.

[00:39:36]>> Venturing to uncharted worlds isn't all that motivates us to move forward. We also have promises of the past.

[00:39:45]By the way, in Chinese, uncharted warts is a direct pawn on the name onroot. The god of localization give and taketh away. With that, the trailblaze once again draws its line against destruction. But Assaar Prammard leaves behind a bigger problem. Orus, the verocity. His own philosophical path has been falsified, but his diagnosis of existence has not. The disease of modern society that planadia represents has not been cured. Don't forget a supper was always in his own way committed to salvation. He forced himself to become used to loss so that he could keep moving forward. In a twisted way, destruction was his prescription for saving humanity. His datab bank entry says, "For it is only when faced with his most vicious gests and trials that they can break free from the beastly nature he so uphors and reveal for one fleeting moment a distinctly human brilliance, dying with dignity." Earlier when we went through Arent's distinction between labor, work, and action, I mentioned that purely at the level of labor, human beings really aren't so different from other animals. If we content ourselves with labor alone, then human brilliance and beastly nature really become indistinguishable. Aren devotes a huge portion of the human condition to modernity. And what she sees in modern society is the rise of labor. She loves using ancient Greek and Roman society as her point of contrast, which incidentally is very likely why Himiko's character design carries so many Greor Roman elements in Staro, which is nowhere to be found in Hong Kong Impact 3. After all, her name comes from Japanese. I know there are people say that Hoyver retracted all the Japanese cultural influences due to political concerns, but in this specific case, I don't think that's the reason because Himiko's base form is already taking inspirations from ancient Greece.

[00:41:52]I mean, just look at her, it looks like her wardrobe is curated by Aglia. Now, now that I think about it, Agllaya is the track of romance, which simulates the path of beauty. So yeah, Himiko is an aminator of beauty and you can't convince me otherwise. Jokes aside, in antiquity, labor generally held the lowest status. It was the layer humans shared with the other animals. But in modern society, the occupation you hold to make a living has gradually become the primary source of personal identity.

[00:42:26]to the point where people without jobs feel stripped of social worth and society itself passes negative judgment on the unemployed. The whole society has become a laboring society locked in a cycle of production, consumption and reproduction. Note that Arent is not saying labor is lowly or that laborers are like animals. The problem here is that laboring society holds labor in such a high esteem that it overshadows work and action. Remember, labor's purpose is subsistence, and what labor produces is meant to be consumed quickly. Work, by contrast, is supposed to create relatively lasting things, furniture, books, painting, etc. But in modernity to accelerate the rhythm of consumption everything must become disposable. The products of work degrade into products of labor and work itself which ought to be a linear process with a beginning and an end degrades into a day after day loop of nominal creation.

[00:43:38]work has been demoted. And worse still, the laboring society takes increased production and increased consumption as its explicit purpose and bends everything towards serving it. But purposiveness was supposed to be the signature of labor and work, not of action. Once everything is boxed in by a clearly defined purpose, action loses its very meaning. Action has been demoted too. Aren saw more than people gradually losing the capacity for action altogether reduced to statistics and herded around like sheep by algorithms of sociology, economics and statistical science. Run the analysis through Iran's framework and the conclusion is clear.

[00:44:25]Action is the one thing that fully and truly distinguishes human beings from every other animal. And modern society is suppressing it. Which means Assad PMA's diagnosis was never wrong. Modern society really does to a degree suppress the human brilliance and flatten it toward beastly nature. We have rejected destruction as the prescription. But next we will have to face or the beastly nature incarnate and find a real way out for humanity. If my guess is right, that's exactly where the story goes next. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video and that it helped you enjoy this wonderful game even more. Until next time.