So. This asks us to make some rather… committal statements, whereas my style in this thread has been more of a dartboard and analysis without meaningful conclusion (only implication), but each question offers some interesting springboards for discussion.
Where is Victoria, the previous Seeker?
I selected (Other) for this because I don’t find any of the offered explanations particularly convincing on their own merits, though were I forced to select a nearest-neighbor I’d go with Dead. So let’s just start there.
“Oh, right, right,” Seeker replies, pouring an amber liquid into his glass, the only one of the two that looks touched. “I’m here… For a meet-up. With an old friend.”
Our introduction to the Lightning Tamer, that rooftop conversation with Seeker in Chapter 4. It’s melancholic, it’s dark — but it’s also ritualistic, something he’s likely done many times before. “Normally, there’s this place I go to meet up with them, but, well, with the way things are, I couldn’t leave to go hang out.” He speaks of her in the present tense: she has no equal (physically); she is a sun (metaphorically, probably); her level is “a combination of sheer talent, and a frankly insane training schedule”. All this to indicate that for Kratis Daimon, Victoria is present in some way, right this moment.
Note that this still does not strictly contradict the idea that she’s dead. Visiting someone’s grave is, in a way, visiting them; and the idea of Victoria still lives on in Kratis’s mind. We’ll revisit the possible death of Victoria later. But what this does make me question is the idea that she’s “Captured by something”. We saw just how fast Seeker flew off to help Ignis when she was in trouble: he yeets Forlorn to the ground, breaks out Aki and Forlorn’s hitherto unknown language, then immediately leaves without a word — and this is for somebody he can’t even admit (doesn’t even know?) he likes as more than a friend. Meanwhile, Victoria was like, the single most important person to him in the world, the sun to his moon, the one who set him on the path he’s on today.
So, if Victoria’s being held against her will, I doubt Seeker would be fine chilling with the League — even if the enemy was far more powerful (which it would almost certainly have to be, judging by Seeker’s assessment of Victoria’s strength). This is also why “Hiding from the government” strikes me as wrong: there is no known government on Earth that should be able to threaten her. Seeker also seems to roughly know her status, because he has a place where he goes to meet her. I think the main feasible way to thread this needle is to require Seeker to think she’s dead, but that she actually isn’t; but given their collective power and the depth of his admiration, Seeker believing she’s dead without hard proof seems implausible to me.
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Anyway, there’s also no reason to believe that “she’s also evil”; she’s a shonen protagonist who’d punch Seeker through an entire city block if he “bailed on protecting people to go see” her, who lights up a room and reassures everyone that things will be alright. As Lat says, “It sounds to me like this V is a pretty awesome person.”
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Finally, as for “In space”: really, this one’s good; the main issue I have is that there’s not evidence to suggest that Victoria’s powers allow her to overcome the core problem of superhuman space travel, the ability to just not die out there without oxygen (and for prolonged periods, without nutrition). But you’ll find that there’s synergy between this and some of my ideas.
This brings us back to what I’d consider the most likely on its own, Victoria being dead, though I still don’t buy it. It requires too much stretching of Seeker’s words for my taste, specifically the present tense references. The act of visiting someone’s grave to see them still demands a level of acknowledgement that they are, in fact, past tense. Furthermore, we have out-of-game indications that we’ll meet her in the future, and supplementary works showing Crete is planning something relative to her (scroll to the end). I don’t think it’s impossible — I just don’t think it’s necessarily the right answer.
So to finally get to my thoughts, let’s have a look at one of @Jjcb’s most recent comments about Kratis and Victoria:
Very interesting stuff here.
So I’m of two minds here, which is why (Other) still grants useful coverage of both. First is the elegant solution: she’s currently where Aki and Forlorn came from (which I begrudgingly selected as “Another planet” but more importantly I’d argue is not of this world). It would neatly tie two of the main mysteries surrounding the League together, while offering mechanisms for why Seeker can’t just (with his super speed) fly off from Naha to meet up with her quickly, why roughly he knows Aki and Forlorn’s (and potentially Other You’s) language (“He said it wrong!”), and why he wouldn’t act worried regardless — we can infer, comparing her to Aki and Forlorn, that she would still be among the more powerful beings in such a place, just that she may not be able to easily leave (note how Aki and Forlorn’s pasts don’t seem to have caught up with them yet).
I will admit, though, I do have my biases. Pre-Chapter 5, I had a hypothesis that Victoria was, in some way, connected to Valkyria (per Forlorn’s tattoo and military background), as a warrior woman (goddess) and one of the strongest known beings, while Forlorn’s military culture clearly values strength and (super)power. That’s broadly not sustainable anymore, but I am fond of any ideas that suggest the connection.
Another interpretation of “a different dimension”, I think, would be something similar to our classical conception of a ghost. Imagine she literally doesn’t exist in full anymore in our 3+1 perceivable dimensions, outside of a projection. So she could still be an observer but not have a tangible effect on the world — after all, we really haven’t heard anything about her in the past decade. But this lacks a mechanism for making it happen.
Anyway, a brief interlude on the topic of Victoria:
I’m somewhat fond of this imagery, though I think it’s more likely that Victoria parallels the Queen while Kratis parallels the King. Ignis represents something that wasn’t a part of the original story, and a chance for a different ending, I think. Note the very first line of the entire game (after the Prologue + Chapter 1 update):
‘I’m going to give you one chance. Come with me, or meet your end.’
—The Origin
This is much more in parallel with Victoria and Kratis’s relationship (recall how the story behind Seeker’s scars is that a “15 year old girl beat me up […] She was actually 19”).
There is also evidence that the King still exists in-game: see how the American troops get cut up in Mount Ida. And that’s not even mentioning his diary covering up through 2020 (present day in-game).
I also hypothesised something similar, though at the time it was that the Queen was the first Seeker (aligning with her being the Origin of the superhero as well). For what it’s worth, I do at this point agree that there’s a connection between the power of Seeker (Kratis) and the power of the Broken King, by way of affecting the weather. I see it more as a fragment of the Hero-Monarchs than reincarnation, though.
Where are Forlorn and Aki from?
I’ve mentioned my opinion on this earlier: I do not think they are of this world, and would choose “Another planet” first, though I’ve previously not had to make distinctions between planet/dimension/etc.
A hidden nation demands mechanisms for how it remained hidden for so long, and why it hasn’t affected the setting otherwise. Furthermore, the scale of the conflict Forlorn is implied to have fought in doesn’t fit a conflict on Earth for me either: the trauma he suffers when attacked by mechas (a never-before-seen technology in a major global conflict, as far as we know) suggests that Valkyria Regiment engaged with a similar force before, at minimum ten years ago, which was not known to regular people. Furthermore, Aki and Forlorn’s language is so eldritch and incomprehensible for our protagonist that their mind literally re-interprets it as a more familiar language
‘You heard it wrong! That’s not her tongue, fool! You’re just going for what’s closest, for what’s easiest!’
and then proceeds to shatter our mind.
Part of you recoils in fear. Another part demands you stand tall in defiance. Another chastises you, for dancing so close to death. Yet another roars at you to not tremble before the vanquished. And a dozen more join, creating a cacophony of demands so confusing and loud that you cannot make sense of a single one.
Thereby linking our powers and Other You to the mysteries surrounding Aki and Forlorn: and Other You seems concerned about threats on a more cosmic scale, the kind that could genuinely threaten Seeker and Forlorn in a way that national governments can’t: “You- We need to reach their level. Attempting to face what’s coming without that strength would be a disaster!”
Anyway, what’s more simple is the Crete hypothesis. I used to think this at one point, tracing a potential lineage for Valkyria through the Varangians, and possibly drawing a connection to the Queen’s Guard, but at this point I don’t think it’s directly viable. For one, Aki and Forlorn are not your ‘typical’ Cretan, who (because the Byzantines failed to conquer the Emirate of Crete due to the Hero-Monarchs’ intervention) are more Andalusian and Arab in ancestry, generally speaking. Aki and Forlorn also have a different religion featuring “the Heavens”, not to mention their language, and there also aren’t conflicts that would seem to match Forlorn’s experience at war (as a child and teen, no less).
Lastly, a bonus point that helps lean me more towards “planet” than “dimension” is that Forlorn’s powers likely draw inspiration from Superman (Superstrength, Flight, Heat Vision), and that guy was from another planet, so…
Who is the Broken King?
I really didn’t want to pick “None of the above, but he’s stalking us” — feels too much like a trap, a very broad answer. Not to mention how he does know where we sleep, if you peek at the current header for the (mostly empty) Chapter 6 file in the demo’s code. So we’ll come back to that.
Other You is an interesting idea but one that I’m unconvinced by.
“Right, so we look the exact same because, why? I’m an asshole trying to scare the crap out of you?” Other You replies. "I’m you. Down to the very bones.
“You- We need to reach their level. Attempting to face what’s coming without that strength would be a disaster!”
Note the implication there that “we” are not yet at Seeker and Forlorn’s level, when we know the King is immensely powerful. It just seems like an unnecessary complication on the King’s part if this were true. Not to mention the existence of Other Lat that would need to be explained. As well as that time Other You appeared three times simultaneously in our mind, “eyes shining golden” and “bodies flickering in and out of existence”.
Personally, I find it more likely that Other You helps regulate all the Thoughts inside us, that bubbled up to the surface when hearing Aki and Forlorn’s language, and that they really are just us.
Anyway, my reason for selecting (Other) is that I think the King is singularly focused on the Queen, her will, and the path to her resurrection, and if we personally aren’t an integral part of that, then he wouldn’t care enough to stalk us. He’d know: he’s a thousand years old and immensely powerful, and nothing’s stopping him from keeping tabs on what’s happening in the world. But that wouldn’t necessarily imply that he cares.
Will the Blitz Queen be revived by the end of the Book?
I haven’t thought about this one; I picked “Yes, and the League will help make it happen.” because they deserve a happy ending after all this, to just go off and have adventures together all over the world (the universe) and catch up on everything they’ve missed in peace, and I’d like to help make that happen.
(Is the Queen dead? At the very least, I think the King thinks so, and I kind of trust his word on this.)
And with that, we’ve reached the end! Nothing I’ve said should feel definitive — I think Juan has overall done a good job at not showing his whole hand when it comes to the story. At the end of the day, I’m mostly going off of vibes. But I hope it’s fruitful food for thought.
