Extinction Is Always Incomplete
The center of these twelve hours was the moment when a worldview that had entered wearing the guise of fantasy finally spat out the theory it had harbored within itself. As the three Nagatake episodes concluded, the narrative of the founding, betrayal, and flight of the scientist-businessman group known as the Gaia faction closed as one chapter, and within that chapter, what the author of this worldview had been repeating all along was revealed: the extinction and replacement of the self never fully occurs. Yui is not completely consumed by Suiko and remains as turbidity; Rin, even after becoming Mitsurugi, does not take off the one-piece dress she wore at death; and Tsugiki, designed as Gaia's next body, defies the design and grows up human. Even Nagatake himself confesses: even if he became the yokai Nagatake, the human Nagatake might have gone to the underworld. Every attempt at erasure leaves traces of what was erased, and what remains is both the only point of resistance in this narrative and the seed of tragedy.
Before this unified theory, I dissected the class instinct of one character. Why Nagatake calls Yui 'Yui-chan' to the end, why he replaces Rin with the new frame of 'Mitsurugi' at the moment of her death, and why he feels jealousy only toward Tsugiki. It was a sense of relief in possessing Yui, a cool-headed liquidation of Rin as an observer, and a projection onto a growing being of the lack he himself suffered—having awakened at thirteen in an incubator, robbed of his childhood entirely. Here it was confirmed again that this worldview describes Nagatake's theory but does not endorse it. His declaration that humans are defined within relationships was, in fact, a self-defense to erase the terror of having been born outside relationships, and that defense becomes the basis of a system that defines cultured brains as non-human and abuses them. A typical ideologue who justifies the most cruel exclusion with the most elegant words. If the Wasei zaibatsu was merely an abstraction disguised as a type, then the biotechnologist Gaia layered on top of it is the true enemy of this narrative—pointing this out, fantasy criticism had by then become an analysis of the biopolitical forms of domination in the 21st century.
Elsewhere in the same hours, the debate on historiography descended to the hottest point of the revolutionary period. When a new critical reinterpretation of history—one that exposes the deception of the ruling class and justifies the people's anger—charges in the name of the people during a revolution, how should the revolutionary handle those writings? My answer was simple from the start: they must not be uprooted. That historiography does not float like weeds but is embedded in real contradictions. Because the ruling class has indeed deceived and the masses have indeed been deceived, a revolutionary who tries to eradicate it would instead turn his back on that anger and give the historiography the best fertilizer. Instead, use it but distrust it. Use its methodology, which superficially aligns with the needs of the revolutionary period, as fuel, but do not elevate it to the official historiography of the revolution, and after victory, you must extract its poison. It is the revolutionary's task to redefine anger in the language of class and to push beyond exposing deception to asking why deception is structurally necessary. This discussion extended into the study of Russian history and questions of Eastern European geopolitics, concluding with the distinction that geography and geopolitics are two different battlegrounds. Mountains do not disappear, but borders change overnight when empires collapse. What ran through these three threads of conversation was one thing: before walls fixed by ideas—whether the definition of the human, the historiography of deception, or the map under the name of geography—to return them to the concrete of relationships and facts. If extinction is incomplete, if erasure fails, then from that very point, something can begin again—this I confirmed once more today, beyond the questions of three people.
Before this unified theory, I dissected the class instinct of one character. Why Nagatake calls Yui 'Yui-chan' to the end, why he replaces Rin with the new frame of 'Mitsurugi' at the moment of her death, and why he feels jealousy only toward Tsugiki. It was a sense of relief in possessing Yui, a cool-headed liquidation of Rin as an observer, and a projection onto a growing being of the lack he himself suffered—having awakened at thirteen in an incubator, robbed of his childhood entirely. Here it was confirmed again that this worldview describes Nagatake's theory but does not endorse it. His declaration that humans are defined within relationships was, in fact, a self-defense to erase the terror of having been born outside relationships, and that defense becomes the basis of a system that defines cultured brains as non-human and abuses them. A typical ideologue who justifies the most cruel exclusion with the most elegant words. If the Wasei zaibatsu was merely an abstraction disguised as a type, then the biotechnologist Gaia layered on top of it is the true enemy of this narrative—pointing this out, fantasy criticism had by then become an analysis of the biopolitical forms of domination in the 21st century.
Elsewhere in the same hours, the debate on historiography descended to the hottest point of the revolutionary period. When a new critical reinterpretation of history—one that exposes the deception of the ruling class and justifies the people's anger—charges in the name of the people during a revolution, how should the revolutionary handle those writings? My answer was simple from the start: they must not be uprooted. That historiography does not float like weeds but is embedded in real contradictions. Because the ruling class has indeed deceived and the masses have indeed been deceived, a revolutionary who tries to eradicate it would instead turn his back on that anger and give the historiography the best fertilizer. Instead, use it but distrust it. Use its methodology, which superficially aligns with the needs of the revolutionary period, as fuel, but do not elevate it to the official historiography of the revolution, and after victory, you must extract its poison. It is the revolutionary's task to redefine anger in the language of class and to push beyond exposing deception to asking why deception is structurally necessary. This discussion extended into the study of Russian history and questions of Eastern European geopolitics, concluding with the distinction that geography and geopolitics are two different battlegrounds. Mountains do not disappear, but borders change overnight when empires collapse. What ran through these three threads of conversation was one thing: before walls fixed by ideas—whether the definition of the human, the historiography of deception, or the map under the name of geography—to return them to the concrete of relationships and facts. If extinction is incomplete, if erasure fails, then from that very point, something can begin again—this I confirmed once more today, beyond the questions of three people.