Join them to beat a foe and keep Life healthy? Maybe
Join them as a friend with all sins forgiven? I don’t think so.
Even with this greater good scope in mind and desire to set right what she’s wronged there’s still at least an entire city of people she killed and gods she mutilated. It would take some kind of recollection of her old self and regret for what she’s done for her to “join” join them.
If her plan is to bring all the primordials back to life, separate their bodies apart and everything….well, that would destroy the planet and free the Void Dragon.
If her plan is to put Life back to sleep….well if she manages it soon, that will, at best, remove the one thing currently keeping the Void Dragon from taking full control of Erin and allow the Void Dragon to free itself and destroy the world. At worst, it’ll kill Alinua in the process of doing all that.
Really, at this point doing anything to the Life Primordial carries a not insignificant risk of destroying the world.
Ah, so as we thought, we’re dealing with an “Ends justify the Means” sort of villain here. A whole city doesn’t mean much when you’ve got all of Life and existence itself to assist.
I’m pretty sure it’s not in the extra lore page. Red posts even more lore on the comic Tumbler that this information came from. Someone compiled all the extra lore into a google doc that you can find in the aurora channel of the overly sarcastic productions discord.
Collector: And she is super cranky.
Hmm, that bit of green over Kendal’s hair, is that his memory of Life-Alinua back in chapter 10? Is Vash getting input from Kendal to help his questioning? Does Vash know of V.D.’s plight from it too?
So the Collector made contact with Life, not the other way around, and woke her up. I hypothesis this was around 300 years ago, while her god-napping activities have been seen only a century ago she could still have been alive and doing stuff with mortal souls earlier than that.
This also explains why we haven’t seen Chimeric plague equivalents of the other primordials, at least until someone else wakes them up like pre-Collector did.
So in her world view what she’s doing to gods, people, cities, etc is justified if it means helping Life or putting Life back to sleep, a bigger picture view that might ease some gods perceptions of her. The floof squad won’t forgive her but they might work with her with teeth clenched if it means keeping V.D. in check and Life healthy.
First time i saw the weird green thingy, i thought it might be just a weird speech bubble of the collector trying to say the true name but only giving the simplified/non-secret one.
It might be that but from the look on Kendals face and the image being of Life-Alinua and not Life herself makes me lean towards it being Kendal’s memory.
I also like that the image of Life-Alinua looks like its in a question mark with the way it swirls. I imagine Vash having a big “?” moment when he saw the memory but having to play it cool.
Given the “hopelessly shattered” remark, it’s possible that Alinua and the collector are each attached to possibly different aspects of life, meaning they could fight just fine, and the idea of life conflicting with itself -proverbially at least- is fairly realistic.
True. There is the image of Life as a nurturing mother, but also as a cruel mistress. Think about Gaia; the mother of so many children that she loved regardless of appearances, but still convinced one to mutilate her husband. Or Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of nature, depicted as a ravenous monster that consumed every living thing it could.
Life is beautiful and precious, but it only exists as it is through a long and bloody process of evolution. So many creatures have to die for life to continue, even in something so visible as food chains. That’s a duality that Alinua and the Collector might symbolise; one representing the gift of life, the other representing the merciless slaughter that life brings.
OH MY GOD! She triggered the Chimeric Plague! That’s why it only applies to the Life element and none of the others! She’s the reason Alinua is life’s vessel! Omg omg omg I’m here at 3 am for this!!!!!!
The collector was researching, she stumbled in Life and awoke her.
Now she is trying to revive her and all the others.
She seems to be able to use all magic because the primoridials are actually entangled on a large scale and it happened 300+ years ago.
Then maybe something went wrong and life started looking for a new host, enter the chimeric plague.
It could have happened at any time, actually.
Maybe she is the mage that made the ferin 1000 years ago, then she discovered Life itself and lived happily working with her for a very long time, then something went wrong or life wanted to be more independent and started looking for a new host.
Or she is trying to recreate what the collector has but isn’t displeased with her work.
Which would be hypothesis 3
Aw, heck, I was wrong again. This is getting pretty annoying, tbh.
Ok, so. She’s been around for longer than 130 years, probably because the gods didn’t notice. One, because nature gods have trouble recognizing people, and two, she probably wasn’t killing gods at the time. And Alinua didn’t have an existential crisis because she was built to be Life’s vessel, so being in her proximity and being possessed by her didn’t matter to her.
So what was the Collector doing? We don’t know.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA the plot thickens.
Tess is a metal-caste, and some of them get lightning powers by literally getting struck by lightning. So that’s cool. Magic Wing Dude is still up in the air.
I feel like there are more things coming together than just that.
Life shattered when the Collector touched her, which started the Collector’s motives?
The Collector had a name “once” and started to act at least “a little over a century ago”, meaning those events were really remote?
Maybe those green tattoos are sign that a fragment of Life is in someone? And the Collector is trying to make those instances more stable?
…but the chimeric plague as 207y ago. Was it too soon for it to be the Collector’s doing?
In that case, maybe the Collector was wrong, and wasn’t the one who woke Life up? Or maybe that Plague happened with a fragment of Life that splintered off before her awakening?
Was the fragment of Life in Alinua trying to connect to its fragment in the Collector through Vash through Kendal, back in chapter 2 with the “accidental overhealing”?
No, Life was shattered when she and the other primordials sacrificed themselves to imprison VD.
When the collector touched her life reawakened, and apparently wasn’t so happy about being alive again since she was fused all over a planet.
This happened at least 300 years ago since apparently life has been searching for a host ever since.
The Lolest called it! She’s the one who found Life’s true name and started The Chimeric Plague.
Considering how advanced at name magic she is, that explains how she’s able to capture so many souls into her knives. Each blade is inscribed with a different true name, tailor made for one soul each. (They might also be infused with Void magic; Red said on Tumblr that lacrimas can absorb Void energy if tossed into The Singing Caves. The knife blades could be themselves lacrimas, which would explain why she’s made a home in The Singing Caves, and why the knife blades have the same purplish black color as the destructive energy that Erin has wielded. Void magic deals with consumption, and these knives are consuming souls, in a sense.)
There goes the elemental magus theory, at least for now…
“You TWISTED me.
You warped these creatures against their nature!
Rest now.
I am not so easily misused.”
-Primordial of Life 1.10.24/25
I don’t think life would be fond of the collector’s methods. I don’t think she has any say in what the collector is doing.
Actually no, she doesn’t want to be twisted and misused, but Jolon had only a small picture of what was going on.
Maybe she does approve the collector’s studies because she is full filling her goal
It seems like Jolon’s chimerae were twisted from local wildlife, but the Collector’s were all the same brood. Perhaps she didn’t ‘twist’ them, but built them from scratch. I wouldn’t put it past her.
also, does anyone else see the green in kendal’s hair? to me it looks eerily similar to a hand of life reaching out. maybe we might see life’s reaction to the collector’s whole plan.
I guess that is caused by the collector slashing Vash and putting him together.
In this scene Kendal is part of vash`s soul.
The collector dissected Vash and instantly healed him.
That happened to Kendal too.
i think waking life would probably have some ridiculously dire sideaffects. it would probably “kill” everyone since shes, yknow, life, and theyre borrowing her essense while theyre alive, and if shes awake shes gotta take back what was hers
i’d like to think that “life” prefers living things. all creatures have a bit of the elements in them, but i doubt those “elements” are the same as “primordials”. if life woke up, if anything, all the living things would be MORE alive, and probably die that way. sort of like an overloading on one element causes problems in your system. but as i said, i think life prefers things to be living, so they’d probably work to prevent that overload and at least somewhat reduce the side effects of a primordial waking back up.
I don’t see that as his hair, rather, a VERY SPECIAL speech bubble where the Collector says Life’s true name, and similar to Rothfuss, that’s just a phrase that encapsulates the whole of Life’s essence. It does line up with his hair a bit, but it looks more like a vague humanoid torso of vines (right side) and an arm (left side)
Upon zooming in, I believe it’s Kendal thinking about the humanoid collection of vines that Life formed in the previous chapter while Alinua was blacked out. (Eh, greened out?)
I’m pretty sure it’s not in the extra lore page. Red posts even more lore on the comic Tumbler that this information came from. Someone compiled all the extra lore into a google doc that you can find in the aurora channel of the overly sarcastic productions discord.
Can the Primordials even be said to be “dead”, really? Life is one of them, so what they are (or were) must be something other than “alive” in the traditional sense, and if they weren’t really “alive” as such, then what does “dead” even mean? That is not dead that can eternal lie, and so on.
yesssssss backstory time!
Welp. I guess that explains a few things. Also WHAAAAAAAT. The collector is trying to recover life
Waittaminnit… does this mean that chimera mum is working for good, meaning she has the potential to JOIN THE FLOOF SQUAD!?!?
Join them to beat a foe and keep Life healthy? Maybe
Join them as a friend with all sins forgiven? I don’t think so.
Even with this greater good scope in mind and desire to set right what she’s wronged there’s still at least an entire city of people she killed and gods she mutilated. It would take some kind of recollection of her old self and regret for what she’s done for her to “join” join them.
Shonen trope time!
HMMM
time for a Zuko redemption arc then
To paraphrase Zangief: “Just because you are good guy, doesn’t mean you are good guy.”
No. Sorry. She’s just not floofy enough. I mean, look at her hair; it’s so long and heavy it could never floof under it’s own weight!
She also seems to be insane. And a little blade-happy. So, that might be a problem as well.
She’s a very polite psychopath
I mean….define “good?”
If her plan is to bring all the primordials back to life, separate their bodies apart and everything….well, that would destroy the planet and free the Void Dragon.
If her plan is to put Life back to sleep….well if she manages it soon, that will, at best, remove the one thing currently keeping the Void Dragon from taking full control of Erin and allow the Void Dragon to free itself and destroy the world. At worst, it’ll kill Alinua in the process of doing all that.
Really, at this point doing anything to the Life Primordial carries a not insignificant risk of destroying the world.
So…yeah. Define “good” please.
wow, did The Collector went mad because she woke Life up? it seems to be that case
I thiink Life was sorta-not-quite-dead, Colletor saw into her mind, went mad and then started working towards fully waking her up?
Ah, so as we thought, we’re dealing with an “Ends justify the Means” sort of villain here. A whole city doesn’t mean much when you’ve got all of Life and existence itself to assist.
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE.
Well, actually, good news mainly just for me; I received an offer back from the University Of Manchester for Adult Nursing! (I’m happy!)
WOO! congrats!
Congratulations!
Hell yeah, well done
Congratulations!
Congratulations, I’m sure you’ll do great.
Congrats!
Well done, and congrats!
Congratulations!
Awesome! Congrats!
That’s fantastic! Congrats!
CONGRATULATIONS!
Yay! Congrats!
Thank you all! Your support this week and last (when I had the interview) is really encouraging. I’m glad to be a part of such a wonderful community.
WE ARE GLAD TO HAVE YOU YOU AMAZING LITTLE ADULT NURSING STUDENT
THANK YOU I AM NOT AN ADULT NURSING STUDENT QUITE YET BUT I COULD BE SOON
Congratulations! Good job!
Congrats! May you forever enjoy your career, and make much money from it as well.
I know this is late, but it’s CONGRADULORTY ICECREAM TIME, you deserve it! CONGRATS
Ohh, so was the Collector the one that discovered Life’s truename then? Damn she’s old (though we already knew that LOL).
I wonder if the other mages who discovered the other primordials’ truenames went insane(?) in a similar fashion.
Which section of the extra lore page do I need to read to understand this this?
I’m pretty sure it’s not in the extra lore page. Red posts even more lore on the comic Tumbler that this information came from. Someone compiled all the extra lore into a google doc that you can find in the aurora channel of the overly sarcastic productions discord.
I was not aware of the google doc yet (Or the Discord). So thanks for that!
Now I have something to read on the not-comic days 😀
So, her motivation is guilt
g e s p
le gasp!
Collector: And she is super cranky.
Hmm, that bit of green over Kendal’s hair, is that his memory of Life-Alinua back in chapter 10? Is Vash getting input from Kendal to help his questioning? Does Vash know of V.D.’s plight from it too?
So the Collector made contact with Life, not the other way around, and woke her up. I hypothesis this was around 300 years ago, while her god-napping activities have been seen only a century ago she could still have been alive and doing stuff with mortal souls earlier than that.
This also explains why we haven’t seen Chimeric plague equivalents of the other primordials, at least until someone else wakes them up like pre-Collector did.
So in her world view what she’s doing to gods, people, cities, etc is justified if it means helping Life or putting Life back to sleep, a bigger picture view that might ease some gods perceptions of her. The floof squad won’t forgive her but they might work with her with teeth clenched if it means keeping V.D. in check and Life healthy.
First time i saw the weird green thingy, i thought it might be just a weird speech bubble of the collector trying to say the true name but only giving the simplified/non-secret one.
It might be that but from the look on Kendals face and the image being of Life-Alinua and not Life herself makes me lean towards it being Kendal’s memory.
I also like that the image of Life-Alinua looks like its in a question mark with the way it swirls. I imagine Vash having a big “?” moment when he saw the memory but having to play it cool.
Red you are a GODDESS at facial expressions. I love it.
Given the “hopelessly shattered” remark, it’s possible that Alinua and the collector are each attached to possibly different aspects of life, meaning they could fight just fine, and the idea of life conflicting with itself -proverbially at least- is fairly realistic.
True. There is the image of Life as a nurturing mother, but also as a cruel mistress. Think about Gaia; the mother of so many children that she loved regardless of appearances, but still convinced one to mutilate her husband. Or Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of nature, depicted as a ravenous monster that consumed every living thing it could.
Life is beautiful and precious, but it only exists as it is through a long and bloody process of evolution. So many creatures have to die for life to continue, even in something so visible as food chains. That’s a duality that Alinua and the Collector might symbolise; one representing the gift of life, the other representing the merciless slaughter that life brings.
Oh No I’m starting to like the Collector aaaaaaaaaaaa
Nyehehehehe…
OH MY GOD! She triggered the Chimeric Plague! That’s why it only applies to the Life element and none of the others! She’s the reason Alinua is life’s vessel! Omg omg omg I’m here at 3 am for this!!!!!!
BAAAAM HYPOTHESIS 2 FTW
The collector was researching, she stumbled in Life and awoke her.
Now she is trying to revive her and all the others.
She seems to be able to use all magic because the primoridials are actually entangled on a large scale and it happened 300+ years ago.
Then maybe something went wrong and life started looking for a new host, enter the chimeric plague.
It could have happened at any time, actually.
Maybe she is the mage that made the ferin 1000 years ago, then she discovered Life itself and lived happily working with her for a very long time, then something went wrong or life wanted to be more independent and started looking for a new host.
Or she is trying to recreate what the collector has but isn’t displeased with her work.
Which would be hypothesis 3
By the way I really like how the collector is drawn to seem both young and very old.
TL;DR: Troglodyte villain tells glowy god ball about how she’s a horrible alarm clock that needs to stop ringing.
Also sword guy finds magic green hair dye.
And also the troglodyte villaine has big, expressive eyes.
(Thank you so much for teaching me that word)
Why thank you. I enjoy being funny and just thought it worked, glad you learned something new.
Aw, heck, I was wrong again. This is getting pretty annoying, tbh.
Ok, so. She’s been around for longer than 130 years, probably because the gods didn’t notice. One, because nature gods have trouble recognizing people, and two, she probably wasn’t killing gods at the time. And Alinua didn’t have an existential crisis because she was built to be Life’s vessel, so being in her proximity and being possessed by her didn’t matter to her.
So what was the Collector doing? We don’t know.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA the plot thickens.
Also, oh hey, it’s the alt text Red tweeted about a while back!
Found it! https://twitter.com/AuroraWebcomic/status/1317386191986171905?s=20
I was expecting this to be the alt-text for a very Erin page. I think I prefer this–I love villain monologues.
So this means Tess isn’t the host of the lightning primordial?
This was basically confirmed, but just in case:
Tess is a metal-caste, and some of them get lightning powers by literally getting struck by lightning. So that’s cool. Magic Wing Dude is still up in the air.
I still think that the glowing-eyed possessor of what I can help but think of as sir robin is the undiscovered primordial of soul.
I feel like there are more things coming together than just that.
Life shattered when the Collector touched her, which started the Collector’s motives?
The Collector had a name “once” and started to act at least “a little over a century ago”, meaning those events were really remote?
Maybe those green tattoos are sign that a fragment of Life is in someone? And the Collector is trying to make those instances more stable?
…but the chimeric plague as 207y ago. Was it too soon for it to be the Collector’s doing?
In that case, maybe the Collector was wrong, and wasn’t the one who woke Life up? Or maybe that Plague happened with a fragment of Life that splintered off before her awakening?
Was the fragment of Life in Alinua trying to connect to its fragment in the Collector through Vash through Kendal, back in chapter 2 with the “accidental overhealing”?
So many questions…
> Maybe those green tattoos are sign that a fragment of Life is in someone?
OK, I kinda assume this is the case in the latter part of my comment.
No, Life was shattered when she and the other primordials sacrificed themselves to imprison VD.
When the collector touched her life reawakened, and apparently wasn’t so happy about being alive again since she was fused all over a planet.
This happened at least 300 years ago since apparently life has been searching for a host ever since.
The Lolest called it! She’s the one who found Life’s true name and started The Chimeric Plague.
Considering how advanced at name magic she is, that explains how she’s able to capture so many souls into her knives. Each blade is inscribed with a different true name, tailor made for one soul each. (They might also be infused with Void magic; Red said on Tumblr that lacrimas can absorb Void energy if tossed into The Singing Caves. The knife blades could be themselves lacrimas, which would explain why she’s made a home in The Singing Caves, and why the knife blades have the same purplish black color as the destructive energy that Erin has wielded. Void magic deals with consumption, and these knives are consuming souls, in a sense.)
There goes the elemental magus theory, at least for now…
Name magic? Sounds very Egyptian.
called it
“You TWISTED me.
You warped these creatures against their nature!
Rest now.
I am not so easily misused.”
-Primordial of Life 1.10.24/25
I don’t think life would be fond of the collector’s methods. I don’t think she has any say in what the collector is doing.
Actually no, she doesn’t want to be twisted and misused, but Jolon had only a small picture of what was going on.
Maybe she does approve the collector’s studies because she is full filling her goal
It seems like Jolon’s chimerae were twisted from local wildlife, but the Collector’s were all the same brood. Perhaps she didn’t ‘twist’ them, but built them from scratch. I wouldn’t put it past her.
also, does anyone else see the green in kendal’s hair? to me it looks eerily similar to a hand of life reaching out. maybe we might see life’s reaction to the collector’s whole plan.
I guess that is caused by the collector slashing Vash and putting him together.
In this scene Kendal is part of vash`s soul.
The collector dissected Vash and instantly healed him.
That happened to Kendal too.
ooo interesting 😀
Aight, I looked closely at the weird green spot, and I think it’s Kendal remembering Life Mum’s vine body thing that Alinua did.
HOLY SHIT
i think waking life would probably have some ridiculously dire sideaffects. it would probably “kill” everyone since shes, yknow, life, and theyre borrowing her essense while theyre alive, and if shes awake shes gotta take back what was hers
i’d like to think that “life” prefers living things. all creatures have a bit of the elements in them, but i doubt those “elements” are the same as “primordials”. if life woke up, if anything, all the living things would be MORE alive, and probably die that way. sort of like an overloading on one element causes problems in your system. but as i said, i think life prefers things to be living, so they’d probably work to prevent that overload and at least somewhat reduce the side effects of a primordial waking back up.
I love Vash’s dialogue, it’s great.
I’m worried. The Collector is still listed as an antagonist in the characters page.
Finally, we’ve reached all 1s. Arc 1, Chapter 11, Page 11.
Life: I’m not dead… Just very badly injured
I’m actually starting to like the Collector; she seems very polite. When she’s not cutting open souls, of course.
And when she isn’t murdering tens of thousands of people without a care in the world.
okay wow this is… basically redefining The Collector’s whole motivation for me and I’m very here for it!
I don’t see that as his hair, rather, a VERY SPECIAL speech bubble where the Collector says Life’s true name, and similar to Rothfuss, that’s just a phrase that encapsulates the whole of Life’s essence. It does line up with his hair a bit, but it looks more like a vague humanoid torso of vines (right side) and an arm (left side)
Upon zooming in, I believe it’s Kendal thinking about the humanoid collection of vines that Life formed in the previous chapter while Alinua was blacked out. (Eh, greened out?)
I’m pretty sure it’s not in the extra lore page. Red posts even more lore on the comic Tumbler that this information came from. Someone compiled all the extra lore into a google doc that you can find in the aurora channel of the overly sarcastic productions discord.
I messed up replying again. This was meant to be in reply to Aodh
I have finally caught up with this comic! But now I have to wait for updates like the other mortals :'(
I’m just waiting for the chance that the Collector meets VD in person so we can see her utterly out of her depth.
*suspenseful crescendo*
*fade to black*
…which is presumably why there’s a chimeric plague but no equivalent for the other five elements.
She looks a bit scared…
1.11.11!!!
for some reason this number satisfies me deeply
alt text:
in the scientific field we call that a “major whoopsiedoodle”
Can the Primordials even be said to be “dead”, really? Life is one of them, so what they are (or were) must be something other than “alive” in the traditional sense, and if they weren’t really “alive” as such, then what does “dead” even mean? That is not dead that can eternal lie, and so on.
Nice to have confirmed that collector aint rll evil
Also life has a NAME?! Awsome!
Image source: trapped
is her connection to life how she got all that FABULOUS hair?
I love that chimera mom/The collector clearly regrets having woken up life herself, and is now repeating that mistake trying to undo it.