I can't believe on the monsterfucker website that I've not seen anyone in the Arknights community talking about this MILF.

Do not let Dorothy ever know about the seaborn for the love of god. Imagine if she gets any ideas again when she's exposed to their whole "we are all a kin that care for each other ;)" shit.

Pfffff I would LOVE to see a scenario like that.

Dorothy, in her capacity as a researcher and Operator, has a talk with Laurentina, the one Abyssal Hunter we know for a fact, thanks to her Files, that is pretty open about Aegir, the Hunters, and the Seaborn, and grows fascinated with the hivemind and sublimation aspects of the Seaborn, and she becomes to enthralled by the part where they live in perfect concordance with one another that she misses the part where Seaborn by nature live collective lives without any individuality (individuality being important to Dorothy.

Dorothy jumps off her seat with vim unrivaled, her next project pulsating through her massive brain, and runs off, leaving a letter saying "I'm going to have a talk with this Church of the Deep!"

The Hunters and Kal'tsit freak out and immediately assemble a task force consisting of the Hunters (the muscle), Kal'tsit (the negotiator), and Elysium (the chew toy with 2 torture scenes scheduled), but just as they are about to head out, The First To Talk is right outside their quarters, holding Dorothy by the scruff like a cat that misbehaved, and shoves her onto Kal'tsit, yelling "TAKE HER BACK, PLEASE, SHE'S TOO SCARY, WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER".

My main issue with the seaborn is that they are the least interesting part of the situation they are in, and the fact that they have been given center-stage is frankly criminal.

As always, this is my opinion and not objective fact, but I'm right and would die on this hill.

Let us imagine for a moment that literally nothing is different except that Skadi killing Ishar'mla worked, and all the sacrifices of the abyssal hunters actually did something (we'll get back to this). The only seaborn left are in scattered groups, cut off from we many, that occasionally get attracted to the Abyssal hunters so Hypergryph has an excuse to use those game mechanics.

The first theoretical abyssal hunters event is fairly similar to the Under Tides we do get. It focuses on introducing Iberia and exploring how the inquisition rules with an iron fist even after the danger has passed. Talk about the mass killing of AEgirians and how the terrified communities just let it happen. Glaadia is smitten by Kal'tsit, we get to meet Laurentina, roll credits.

The second abyssal hunters event is about exploring the golden days of Iberia before the profound silence as the Abyssals search for a way to safely return home. Focus on how the partnership with the AEgirians made them strong, and how the inquisition rose to power in the chaos and fear of the silence. They eventually find an old ship and after fighting off the obligatory small swarm of sea terrors set off to finally go home.

The third abyssal hunters event introduces us to the Atlantean AEgirian civilization. It explores the program that created super soldiers with an early expiration date, and how the political situation in AEgir allowed it. People get mad at the abyssals for attracting yet another group of sea terrors. The boss is what is left of an abyssal hunter fully lost to the transformation (perhaps this is a good time to introduce The First To Talk?).

That would be better right? I mean most of what I've described (for the first two) is actually in Under Tides and Sultifera Navis, it just gets overshadowed by the focus on the big spooky ocean monsters and how big and spooky they are.

So, enough talking about what could have been, let's talk about what is, and why it's bad enough that it got me thinking about this in the first place.

The seaborn have no personality. This is intentional. Practicing art and maintaining a sense of self is how the abyssals we do meet have managed to last this long, their self expression literally protects them from the consuming uniformity of we many. This is not, on it's own, a problem.

The fact that this is true and that the seaborn are treated in the story as the antagonist is crazy. They could have been presented in a 'man against nature' conflict sort of way, providing a situation in which the protagonists could shine on their own. Unfortunately, they didn't even do that, as is clearly shown by The Bishop and Amaia.

The most compelling enemies in Under Tides and Sultifera Navis are the church of the deep. You know, the characters that aren't seaborn. Arknights likes having complex villains, and nothing is a less complex character than a seaborn (again, by design!) so they have to bring in characters that aren't seaborn. Just don't make the seaborn the focus in the first place!

Also, by presenting the seaborn as a genuine threat they are giving justification to the Inquisition and the Abyssal Hunter project. I know there are scenes that are meant to show that these things were actually bad, but they're a bit hard to get behind when you have a whole fucking game mode set in an alternate future timeline where the seaborn are an existential threat to all other forms of life.

Another issue with going 'the seaborn are still a genuine threat' is that all the shit Skadi and the other abyssals went through apparently didn't do much, I guess. It feels like they are retroactively ruining a story we didn't even get the chance to enjoy.

I'm going to cut myself off here. There's more narrative nitpicks I have about the seaborn (Like how, just because they don't have personalities doesn't mean they have to be boring, and yet!) but they get even more into how it was executed rather than fundamental issues, and this is long enough as it is.

In conclusion: If the next abyssal hunters event's main story is 'there are spooky seaborn doing bad things, got to go stop them' again, I'm going to scream.

Part 2

06/02/2023

Did You Know: The CN nickname for The First To Talk is 美丽哥, AKA 'Mr Beautiful'. This comes from his enemy description. Truly, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

On the other hand, the CN nickname for the Pocket Sea Crawler is 奇趣蛋, aka 'Kinder Joy Eggs'. I wonder what's inside.

Gla-dia.

hmm it seems like its cloudy with a chance of fish

oc posts i hope yall missed them

We tried to eat a metal crab today, but as soon as we got a good bite on it four more popped out of the ground and surrounded us! They are getting smarter! Organizing! In a few years, they'll be able to take out entire landships!

One of a series of watercolor kelp pieces I painted a while back. Just browsing some old art folders and finding some cool stuff.

seaborn.jpg

What are your opinions or feelings on the seaborn and would you like to be one?

Sure, it’s one thing to say Iberia, Aegir and the Abyssal Hunters are wrong to some degree — they are, I agree — but it’s another altogether to go “the Seaborn are the good guys/right”, I mean, basic instincts or not, they DO invade and consume everything they can invade and consume. And yes, they do develop the ability to talk with hopes of reaching out to their kin, but this is only after their Feranmut got ‘killed’ and they lost contact with him, and their words are exclusively reserved for kin, that being adherents of the Church of the Deep or Abyssal Hunters. Endspeaker flatly refused to talk to Irene because she was neither, for instance.

Obviously something’s off abour Aegir, Ulpianus made that much clear, but that doesn’t immediately make the Seaborn good. It’s almost like gray morality is a constant theme in Arknights. The only thing separating the Ursus Empire that has a creed of “everywhere I see and stand is Ursus” and the Seaborn that quite literally can do that with the nethersea brand is that, for the Seaborn, it’s natural survivalist instinct, and even then that’s not exactly grounds to say “yeah they should’ve just let them do that to the whole world, actually”.

Why I'm not a fan of the seaborn: complaint 2. This is definitely the less important issue, but I'm not going to let that stop me.

Before I get into it: I am currently doing real studies with evolutionary modeling, like publishable academic stuff, so I know what I'm talking about.

Evolution cannot happen to an individual creature. Ever. Pokemon lied to you. Evolution is the gradual change of gene frequencies in a population over time due to natural selection. Anything else is not evolution (in the context of biology). Whatever the endspeaker is doing is not evolving... unless it is.

One of the very few ways what we see might actually be evolution is if the seaborn are actually a symbiotic microorganism with a very short life cycle which can rearrange the cells of it's host (sort of like the Thing from The Thing). This would explain how so many things with radically different structures can be considered the seaborn, and it also quite handily explains how people can become seaborn. This headcanon alone allows me some relief from these fucking things.

For this next bit I'm going to put aside the fact that they can somehow just create meat when they need more, because if I account for that the "evolutionary" pathway they take makes even less sense.

So let's actually apply the concept of natural selection to the sea terrors shall we? To start off I would like to address the fact that the AEgirians didn't use their advanced technology to fight these things, because the seaborn would then evolve to that level and become unstoppable. That is not how this works.

Do you know what happens if you shoot a fish with a laser cannon? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't grow a laser cannon. Natural selection doesn't produce "better" gene frequencies, major negative traits disappear first and optimization or the emergence of new beneficial traits happens slowly afterwards.

The scenario is they are invading another creature's niche, and that creature is very effectively fighting back. So, which strategy is more likely to get you removed from the gene pool: continuing to push into enemy territory but with slightly better armor, or just staying the fuck away from the people with laser cannons? Evolution always takes the easy way out, not the best way, the easy way. Want to know why every terrestrial vertebrate has 4 limbs? Something crawled out of the ocean with four limbs, and it was simpler to move those ones around than make new ones.

Would the fish growing a laser cannon help them take over new environments, thus out-competing the ones who just stayed away? Sure, but there's no easy path to get there, so they would never get the chance to reach that point. (When talking about genetic algorithms, this is called a local maxima, look it up!)

In even a mildly realistic scenario of creatures like this actually being driven by natural selection, the situation would become a case of dealing with an exceptionally dangerous invasive species, rather than an existential threat to all other forms of life. As per my opinion in part 1, this would have been better.

The seaborn are presented as this purely natural selection driven menace, when in reality they're just the evil army of an ocean god-monster. The driving will to consume all other forms of life isn't natural selection talking, it's at best an excuse Ishar'mla uses so that He can get what He wants, and at worst a case of the writers genuinely trying to write a natural selection driven antagonist, assuming they understand the concept, and not bothering to check if they are right. And it really looks to me like the second one is more likely.

All they had to do was not make them the focus, not make them an existential threat. You can still do the themes of individuality vs conformity with a smaller-scale hive mind. You don't need another planetary-scale environmental threat, you have originium! I could forgive the poorly applied scientific principles, if they weren't such a mess narratively as well. If they had taken this approach the seaborn might have even been one of my favorite parts of this game (they have actually hinted at the possibility of the seaborn deciding that coexistence is actually the best survival strategy, and that would be super cool!). Unfortunately, as it is, the seaborn are bad.

Part 1

The Stultifera Navis Post

Well here it is. My scene analysis-turned-character analysis-turned-event analysis of Stultifera Navis. SN story spoilers and descriptions of being eaten alive ahead. This is a long one, so strap in. Ye have been warned.

Of all the things that happened in Stultifera Navis, the one I keep coming back to is the scene in SN-10 before where the Endspeaker, Will of We Many, tells Laurentina of Amaia's sacrifice. This isn't my area of expertise, but there's something about its writing that's just so intimately visceral. The contrast between the imagery of her being devoured, still conscious even as her flesh is stripped from her bones, all the while comforting the Endspeaker as one might comfort a child, makes for an incredibly powerful scene.

[Image ID: A screenshot of dialogue between a Seaborn and Specter. The text is white on a greyed-out background, which depicts the Seaborn, an angelic jellyfish-like creature, floating in the air. The dialogue reads:

Seaborn: Laurentina, that is the name of our scaleless kin, the Liberi, the Iberian.

Seaborn: As I consumed her, she kept stroking my head. She spoke of many things. Time itself was like frozen dust, an eternity seeming to pass as I listened to her.

Seaborn: Until she could no longer speak, until even her bones were digested by our smallest kin, she nurtured me with both nutrition and time. She taught me everything I know.

Specter: Since when were you so sentimental towards your food?

Seaborn: Such was her request, I merely granted it. If there is purpose to such emotions, we are willing to experiment.

End ID]

In SN-ST-11 “Main Mast,” Amaia tells the Endspeaker that there is no grand purpose, no glory, no honor in sacrifice, and that the shred of humanity she gives it is purely for the survival of their kind. But despite her going on and on about how humans are not so different from the Seaborn, I think we also see sentimentality in how she nurtures it and in her request to be remembered. There is still a glimmer of humanity left in Amaia, and she gifts this to the Endspeaker. It's not lost on me that the Endspeaker is referred to as "it" before consuming Amaia, but "he" after.

It is clear throughout this event that Amaia’s view of humanity is reflective of the Seaborn’s view as a whole. The Endspeaker is continually baffled with the Hunters’ refusal to join their “kin.” Amaia explains this belief more fully than any other character. In her eyes, idealizing things like sacrifice and dedication is merely a delusion that lets humans pretend that they are somehow more noble than the animals that they are. The Endspeaker says she taught him that laws are much the same. To the Seaborn, there is no inherent meaning to life or death or duty or pain. Any attempt to create meaning from this is a delusion, a denial of the truth that humans and Seaborn are fundamentally no different from each other. In a world devoid of any inherent meaning, the only rational goal is survival. 

When Amaia and Laurentina share a dance in Main Mast, Amaia tells Laurentina that the part of her that keeps her awake and alive, that makes her Laurentina, is the Seaborn part of her. That she is, at heart, no different than them. But Laurentina rejects this. In what I would argue is the most important line of all of Stultifera Navis, Laurentina says, "Because, during the process of carving, chiseling, and shaping, we give meaning to the forms of the dead, liberating them from the void of meaningless." Laurentina does not reject Amaia’s premise that there is no meaning inherent in sacrifice or life. But she concludes instead that sacrifice is meaningful because we remember them, and the meaning of sacrifice or of life is the meaning we give it. Amaia calls this delusion, but Laurentina suggests that our ability to make meaning from a meaningless world is what makes humans unique. Looking at the characters in this light, I think we can see what Stultifera Navis has to say about what makes someone human.

 To the contrary of Amaia’s perspective, Laurentina believes that, much like what separates a sculpture from a rock, it is the act of remaking herself as an Abyssal Hunter from the unstable, originium-infused body she has been given that makes her human. Skadi lays her own claim to her identity. "...No. I am the Abyssal Hunter, Skadi." Not Ishar-Mla, not seaborn, but a Hunter. Gladiia's concern at her physical transformation is at some level self-fulfilling. She sees the physical transformation as synonymous with becoming Seaborn, and so it is. Opposite Gladiia there’s Captain Alfonso and First Mate Garcia, who resisted assimilation into We Many for sixty years, remaining human only through continuing to define themselves as human, even as their bodies were twisted beyond recognition. 

And in the end, this goes both ways. Amaia asks that the Endspeaker assign no meaning to her sacrifice, no greater purpose beyond the simple instinct of a species to survive. But she asks that the Endspeaker remember her, and the Endspeaker makes its own meaning of her sacrifice in doing so. It recognizes the gifts of knowledge, of feeling, of time, she has given him. Even Amaia understands the implications of this act. In the flashback to her conversation with Bishop Quintus, she says, "[y]ou have to admit, that we're more like them, more like humans, than we are like Seaborn.” The Endspeaker shows signs that he, too, has the capacity to become human. 

It's not that we humans aren't so different from the Seaborn. It's that now, the Seaborn aren't so different from us.

One of the things that I think makes the Seaborn so fascinating as antagonists is the duality of them compared to antagonists in the rest of Arknights. Human antagonists have emotion and feeling and certainly many of the Cult of the Deep are like that, even Amaia can't help the ways in which she is fundamentally still very human (and says so herself).

But the Seaborn are a completely different kind of threat, and the way they are written is so fascinating. It's not antagonism born out of malice. They're both an entity and a force of nature. The antagonism is inevitable. It's not a battle of values or right and wrong, its a battle of survival. Can you and a hurricane truly talk about ideals? Not really, and in the story, so much of the time you can tell they're talking past each other. The Hunters are obstinate in their refusal and the Seaborn don't understand why.

It's only the Endspeaker after it assimilates with Amaia, and it starts to explore the concept of feelings where they start to make an accord. It(she) cares for Specter to the point where she(it) agrees to let Specter kill her(it?) if Specter would join with it(her?). It lets Specter call her Amaia, despite having no real reason to continuing that name. They tell Specter that the ship is about to sink in 10 minutes.

And it does feel like only the Endspeaker finally understands, at the end of the day, right towards the end, that there is no point in talking. It's only option left is to appeal to Ishar-Mla. But Specter isn't going to listen.

One day, I think, the Seaborn will understand. But until then, it is going to be fascinating to see how they are continued to be written.