ne0dym

neo's obsession with religious characters AND bootstrap paradoxes

18/01/2025

the inaugural post of this blog section was an overview of some of my favourite tropes in media related to religious imagery and symbolism, which were at the forefront of my mind thanks to dune part 2. i haven't had much interest in engaging with fandom and media talk in a good while, but with the release of arcane season 2, my brain cells started firing synapses about characters and ships again. so i wanted to talk more in depth about those tropes that i like plus some others, and a little bit about my latest interest, arcane.

the power dynamics to religious tropes pipeline

while the first article listed many elements of a narrative and character traits that i've come to find really appealing, i neglected to explain how such a fascination came about in the first place. it was a gradual shift in my tastes that, although novel, wasn't entirely out of character for me; it was like the culmination of tropes i had always been drawn to since ancient times, all the themes, all the dynamics i had always enjoyed since i was a child, synthesised into a single AO3 tag. as far as i can tell, 2019 was when i first became aware of my new interest, catalysed by two characters in particular: Harrow from warframe, and Horobi from kamen rider zero-one.

i fell in love with the warframe Harrow immediately upon completing his questline. his highly self-synergising kit revolves around sacrificing resources to boost his power, and punishing enemies to replenish those resources, making him a self-sustaining monster who can also buff allies. his abilities are named after Catholic concepts ("condemn" and "penance" to name two) and even the name "harrow" itself evokes christian symbolism. and without going too much into the story, harrow and the human who used to control him were worshipped by one of the game's factions, Red Veil, who are initially presented as a zealous, bloodthirsty cult seeking to purge corruption.

harrow's been my main warframe since i first came across him (he's also famously the eponym of my Warrior of Light), but the real trigger for my obsession was one of the initial antagonists in kamen rider zero-one, the android Horobi who leads the cyber-terrorist cult metsuboujinrai.net that aims to bring about humanity's extinction. originally created for a benign purpose, he was corrupted by the AI Ark and served as its spokesperson; justifying his actions as "the Ark's Will" was his whole shtick. although my history suggested a different chara would be my fave, horobi claimed that spot for the first half of the series's run, indicating an ongoing shift in my preferences. my fascination with cults was beginning to set in, specifically of the doomsday type at first but gradually growing to encompass religious symbolism (usually catholic) in general.

awakening to a new fancy was nothing strange: i'd been known to be super into selfcest (pairings involving characters who are either literally different versions of the same person, or by my looser definition, characters who have at any point been the same person or coexisted in the same vessel) — it's still one of my favourite tropes, even if it's taken a backseat in recent times —, but vampires had eventually become another important element of neocore tastes. what made this new craze surprising was that religion and me are two things that don't mix.

at the same time however, i began to realise that my new interest was not without precedent, that it could be seen as a recontextualisation of tropes i've loved ever since i was a kid unaware that such things even existed, the most notable of which being "master/servant" and similar power dynamicky relationships. when a character swears loyalty to another, vowing to fight, kill and die for them, the way a devoted knight pledges his sword to the king. when a hero is tempted by the dark side and becomes the villain's servant, or when they're corrupted and forced to do the big bad's every bidding. when a lost child or a teenager seeking thrills is taken in by a villain and groomed to become one themself, or when they're born or created or trained to become a weapon for their master's grand design. when a messianic character preaches the word of a twisted higher power, carrying out divine intervention with death and destruction in a holy war. when a character submits to another's authority, surrendering their fate to their new god's mercy, worshipping their name and figure and the ground they walk on, when they kneel and kiss their feet and receive their grace with ecstasy and adoration, when they beg for not just forgiveness but also punishment, craving the pain that brings them closer to the divine.

if i put it like that, the lines between power dynamics, cults, religious symbolism, masochism, even the chaste and the erotic, become very blurry indeed.

with this worm taking up residence in my head, my brain chemistry was altered to a degree that cult/religious tropes became extremely appealing not only in media i consumed going forward (for example, dune and far cry 5), but also retroactively in those where i previously ignored or didn't care much for their presence (such as bioshock infinite and nier automata).

i think FFXIV illustrates well how my tastes changed. when i first played it in early 2017, i was vaguely invested in the story but had no concept of a WoL with their own lore and personality. there's a questline in the latter half of ARR where we meet Ishgardians who are portrayed as wacky religious fanatics and zealots who witch-hunt those they believe to be heretics. at the time i had no love for this type of character, so i found those NPCs irritating. but when i got back into the game in 2020, the worm in my brain had already reconditioned me to enjoy those archetypes, and combined with my personal mission to discover the Dark Knight story (which is intimately linked to Ishgard), this led to the creation of my WoL Harrow. in short, i went from strongly disliking religious tropes in media, to making them a fundamental part of my beloved OC. i've always felt that the fact i'm so different from my OC in regards to spirituality is what makes him interesting to me, it's like a little self-imposed challenge to imagine things in such a foreign perspective.

well, my WoL isn't really the best example of my obsession in the spicy way i described it earlier. because i'm afraid of portraying his religiousness in poor taste, he has a pretty wholesome character development. i just wanted to illustrate how my opinion on those tropes changed and i got a bit sidetracked. let's recap the original topic: religious symbolism and imagery is HOT and SEXY and has the power to instantly make me go from indifferent to insane about something.

so far i emphasised the importance of power dynamics between characters, which usually takes the form of a "master-servant" relationship or devotion to an unseen patron god. when a character develops a god-complex themself, that can be hit or miss for me, especially if it's played for laughs. for example, i can appreciate Light's growing megalomania throughout death note a lot more now (i'll finish rewatching it some day) because it's accompanied by other elements that give it a religious undertone: visual references, music, and the fervent support from other characters. but Dan Kuroto in kamen rider ex-aid never sparked much interest in me, as his god-complex increasingly became a gimmicky comedy relief, not a threatening character trait; it was simply narcissism taken to the extreme, with no references to actual religious cliches.

to conclude this section, i will add that character relationships with religious motifs don't have to be rooted in toxicity, villainy or sado-masochism in order to appeal to me. going back to my WoL Harrow, while his faith in Halone (Ishgard's patron goddess) originates in indoctrination, i'd say his devotion to Hydaelyn (the Mothercrystal, a real deity-like figure who shaped the world as we know it and granted the WoL formidable power) is organic and pure. i will return to this point in the next section.

tragedy and spirituality of predestination

the whole journey i described of me slowly realising i fucked with religious tropes was reprised, more recently, with cliches like bootstrap paradoxes and stable time loops. there might be some subtle differences between them, but i'll use those terms interchangeably to mean narrative devices where "any event, such as an action, information, an object, or a person, ultimately causes itself", to quote from wikipedia (too lazy to summarise it myself).

the gateway drug this time was the 2nd season of loki, which had bootstrap paradoxes at its heart. i'd never been a big fan of the character until watching the show, and the end of his arc made me go nuts. just like how my enjoyment of cult tropes was generalised into religious ones, the fascination with bootstrap paradoxes was generalised into any kind of predestination, whether as a time loop or as a self-fulfilling prophecy without time travel. and just like with religious symbolism, i started to really appreciate these tropes in subsequently and previously enjoyed media, especially when paired with a degree of tragedy in a character arc's resolution.

there is something deeply romantic and spiritual, in my view, about a character's destiny being sealed due to a prophecy they cannot fight, or the meeting of two characters written in the fabric of time, setting off an entire chain of events that ensures their meeting in the first place. the inevitability of such a situation connects the chara to a greater purpose, and even more appealing to me than when they resist their fate, is when they realise what must be done and fully embrace it. the notion of submission comes back into play: giving oneself over to the universe is a bit like finding god.

the FFXIV expansion Endwalker also played a major role in shaping my obsession: the WoL travels back in time to an era before the sundering of the world and ends up meeting Venat, who immediately deduces we came from the future by sensing her own protective magic on us. after witnessing the events that led to the very threat we were facing in the present, the WoL and venat part ways with a promise to save the universe. in the past, venat went on to become Hydaelyn and sunder the star into its many shards; in the present, our character finally meets Hydaelyn in person, proving their strength and gaining one last boon from the deity to chase after the villain. for the WoL, the gap between meeting venat in the past and hydaelyn in the present wasn't very long at all, but to her, eons of watching the suffering caused by her actions passed before she could meet her champion and fulfill her promise.

right at the start of the expansion, the WoL sees a vision of hydaelyn in her original form who hints that a "conjunction" is forming between the ancients' time and ours, and that only by understanding the monumental conflict that approaches will we have the power to stop it. lots of things happen between this moment and the time travel part. this is what i mean by a character "realising one's great purpose and embracing it". with predestination being added to an already spiritual dynamic, i think there is great potential for a spark of romance between my WoL Harrow and Venat, in a knight/lady devotion kind of way, initially strongly "agape" (the love between god and humans) but potentially with some "eros" (passionate, physical love) sprinkled in as the relationship develops.

there is one more instance of predestination in endwalker that i wanna talk about. it was elidibus, a former enemy, who opened the portal to the past, expending the last of his life-force to do it; at first reluctant, he finally agrees to help us after seemingly remembering a meeting with the WoL in that time. this meeting comes to pass in the post-MSQ raid questline, where we return to Elpis to investigate another issue that has been echoing in the present, and encounter elidibus as his original self, Themis. having the WoL realise this new friend is destined to become one of his greatest foes, and in fact to be slain by their hand, and still develop tender caring feelings for him, is the kind of pain i like to put my character through.

viktor arcane made me write this article

when i started writing this post, i was still heavily under the spell of arcane season 2, but it's taken me so long to finish it that my interest has dwindled. nevertheless, to wrap up this long overdue article, i still want to briefly talk about this character and how he reactivated my fandomy synapses after a long time with no blorbos.

the first person that recommended arcane to me was a friend who shares a lot of my preferences, so i naturally assumed viktor, her fave, would be my favourite character too. however, contrary to my expectations that he'd turn antagonistic, he remained on the "good scientist guys" team (or so i gleaned on my first watch, missing some of the nuance in his arc), and thus he didn't catch my attention that much, and nor did the very popular jayce/viktor ship. despite my bf's insistence i didn't rewatch season 1 prior to beginning season 2, such that i barely remembered anything about viktor or jayce for that matter.

so as we were watching the first episode of the second season, i went on reddit to see people's reactions and got spoiled for the next episodes in that batch: that viktor would "become jesus". this fact alone was enough to make me pay attention to his scenes and i was not disappointed; he went from a scientist with a secret obsession with "fixing his imperfections", to a stoic cult leader who used his new powers to cure people's ailments. as we learned in the previous sections, a character exhibiting messianic traits is a straight shot to my heart.

at the end of act 2, jayce appears in viktor's commune, in very rough shape from having travelled to some alternate timeline with the arcane's power, and blasts a hole through viktor's chest, basically killing the last few remnants of his humanity. intent on eliminating human individuality and thus conflict, viktor allows himself to be transformed into a bio-mechanical evolved being in order to save himself and obtain the power needed for his goal. he also has a trippy eldritch god-like cosmic aetherial form, and it's in this metaphysical plane that his final confrontation with jayce takes place, where they both realise they've always been meant to meet each other, develop hextech, have a fallout, and finally fix everything by destroying their own creation, by destroying themselves.

viktor inspired me to make this post because he synthesised both types of tropes i am insane about: religious motifs, with his cult leader persona and later an omnipotent god-like form, and predestination, with how it was an alternate time-travelling viktor who, in all possible timelines, gave young jayce the rune that led him to later develop hextech with viktor. their relationship is what implicitly drove most events of the series, and it concluded in a beautiful way, with stunning animation and music: in the aetherial mind-plane, they merged their beings in order to seal and destroy the out-of-control magic, their physical bodies vanishing too in the process, but their consciousnesses joined together for eternity (and what's gayer than that).