crisesofsanity:

So. We left off affirming Hope’s connection to rationalizations, and how Hope players are able to use this to give themselves great power. My working theory right now is that Hope players find “evidence” to use as fuel for attacks and skills that I’ll call “claims” and “theories”– but they can also be confronted with “evidence” against their “claims”. This “debunks” their “claims”, perhaps permanently, and is also kind of demoralizing.

Like Kanaya being alive even after getting blasted through the stomach. That’s the kind of thing that makes you doubt your ability to Hope people to death, y’know?

I’m using this analogy of evidence and theories because there’s something about Eridan that a lot of people tend to gloss over when discussing Hope.

That thing is his obsession with SCIENCE.

At some point during his time in SGRUB, he decided that to really get ahead in life he needed to employ the most stringent magics of wwizardly science.

The fact that all of his scientific principles were objectively more shaky than a half-paralysed mountain goat about to get simultaneously devoured by a puma and crushed by an avalanche doesn’t matter. He decided that testable science was vastly preferable to arcane magic, and this has an interesting relationship to what I’ve already noticed– rationalizations and the quest for explanations.

Now we’ll take a brief interlude in order to discuss what I consider to be Hope’s antithesis.

I’m talking about Rage.

Zenosanalytic recently made an eloquent and highly sexy post that detailed his(her?) observations on Rage. In the interest of economy, I’ve decided that their points and views line up well enough with mine that you can read his post and come away with 70-75% of my understanding of Rage*.

One of the core points that zenosanalytic raised is that Rage deals with emotions and the animal part of people. I think it’s called the hindbrain or something, but my knowledge of neural anatomy might be a little dated/wildly incorrect. Point is, Rage is the opposite of logic and science. It is run by emotions and precious little else.

It also deals with fear and suffocation, so we can further say that it might act as anathema to the SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE!

You would love to travel around the world, toppling any SACRED URNS you encountered. You’d be tickled by the opportunity to defile HALLOWED TOMBS everywhere, raiding them of their treasures. And how you’d give your RIGHT LEG for a shot at desecrating THE SHIT out of some real life MYSTIC RUINS for their byzantine wares. Luckily for your limb, there is a dandy set of such ruins nearby, and you desecrate them quite frequently!

Anyway, that’s largely tangential. Hope as adventure is only ever really explored by Jake, although Eridan (as a Prince) did have adventures in destruction, and Cronus had his stupid “fantasy” about the evil wizard.

Back to Rage vs. Hope as Emotional Thinking vs. Rational Thinking: when you look at it, a lot of things that humans have done must look really dumb to animals. It’s like, “Let’s poke this mystery substance to see what happens!” Or, “Guys let’s go fight a vicious dragon so that we can have FUN ADVENTURES!”

Would an animal do that? Hell fucking no. Not for those reasons, anyway. I guess they could just be that stupid. But that’s a whole other aspect.

So we could further colour Rage vs. Hope as Animal vs. Human. Interestingly, here we can see their issues of belief reflected in real life, with animals believing in what happens on the surface but not trying to find explanations– much like Gamzee does!– while humans have managed to explain reality to the point that they can be very skeptical about things that do happen in front of their faces.

Rage sees objects as self-explanatory, but Hope sees explanations as the object. It’s not a cat, it’s a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other elements mixed in such a way that it meows and is adorable! It’s not a bright glowy thing in the sky, it’s a ball of hydrogen and helium that causes nuclear fusion to keep itself burning!

(Also: Cronus sees himself as “humankin”. This is pretty interesting against this interpretation of Hope, especially when we see that the Alternian trolls were largely ruled by Rage.)

But there’s something that divorces Hope from Science, or at least the Science that is practiced today. Put simply, Hope players are complacent. They make something up, and since it matches every single data point they believe it. They’re accommodating when the evidence shifts, disregarding previous theories and adopting new ones– much like scientists– but when evidence doesn’t seem to change, they stick to their guns. They might be driven to seek explanations, but they aren’t driven to seek evidence.

One could make a connection between this outlook and many religions, despite how triggering it could be. I think that, while the connection exists, it’s more because religion is a kind of science– in terms of “I seek a reason”. There are probably a couple of religions that don’t seek reasons for humanity’s existence, but the vast majority of them give explicit reasons for why humanity exists. To worship gods, to seek enlightenment, to protect Earth… the list goes on. But, unlike Science, most religions don’t actively look for ways to debunk their own theories– just like Hope players. I don’t mean to offend or insult, but religions are a very human thing. It makes sense that Hope deals with it, and that Rage finds it stupid.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Gamzee is one of the only explicitly religious characters in the story! And the other Heroes of Rage are both religious as well!”

Well. Yeah.

But have you actually looked at their religion?

You can sum up their views in two two-word phrases: “MoThErFuCkInG mIrAcLeS” and “mirthful MESSIAHS”.

They don’t try to explain anything beyond saying “miracles” and “jujus”, they worship the two most terrible gods ever, they are goddamn juggalos and the entire thing is just a parody of a stupid Internet cult that revolves around drinking Faygo and watching ICP videos.

When you look at it, this religion is actually viciously pragmatic in its own right. Its worshippers recognize that you don’t necessarily need any explanation beyond “it’s fucking magic”, and so they’ve based it on absolutely concrete tenets like “thou shalt not piss off Caliborn to the point that he obliterates you from the timeline”.

So while the veracity of calling Gamzee’s beliefs a “religion” may be a matter of contention between philososcholars, it’s sufficiently divorced from Hope’s concept of a religion that we can consider it another opposite between them.

(In fact, it could be said that the bullshit about miracles is basically how cats and dogs see our technology, with all our water taps and refrigerators and computers and buses and planes. They don’t exactly think to themselves “Oh I get it there must be some piping system that gets water from a remote reservoir”. They don’t even think to themselves “Humans must put their tears into bottles which they then hide inside the sink”. They just think “Miracles”. Compare that to a scientist or the Pope getting abducted by aliens for a while. The scientist would be all like “so this must be some kind of relativistic anti-speed drive with the ability to blah blah blah blah science words”, and the bishop would be like “ah this must be a challenge from God blah blah blah blah Biblical verses”. They could be exactly correct, or seven thousand miles from the truth, but the point is that people come up with explanations, while animals literally cannot give two shits.)

Anyway. Hope as logic and humanity’s quest for meaning, versus Rage as emotions and the animalistic urges to survive. Does that look absolutely awesome? Mildly cool? Structurally sound?

…

And thus concludes my musing. Heed these words well. Heed… them… well.

Or I guess you can just forget about my overthinking and laugh at the fact that I might have jumped to what might be an absurd conclusion in an ironically Hope-like manner. OH WELL.

* The other 25-30% of my understanding of Rage comes from this dude. He’s an outstanding candidate for Rage’s philosopher right now, so take from that what you will.

1) why have i never seen this in, what, four goddamn years?

2) thank u @arrghus for making me see this, you’re a hero