You Think, Cruelly, Your Movement Will Corrupt Even A Deconstruction, And It Will, In Turn, Become A

you think, cruelly, your movement will corrupt even a deconstruction, and it will, in turn, become a pattern too.

made an illustration to accompany my fic.

@nopanamaman

dreamtonix transparents

so uh,, there's this teacher

THOUGHTS ON CONVERGENCE??????

YEAH SHITS CRAZY RIGHT

i've made some posts already but there remains a lot to talk about and i kind of want to holler about... the title. 'convergence.'

like with 'the mill', i think the simplicity of the word here kind of betrays how the deep the name really goes. so, starting with the dictionary: a convergence is A Coming Together, yes? it's a meeting place, it's a falling into line. when we talk about 'convergent evolution', we're talking about how living under the same pressures can cause very different creatures to take similar shapes. when we talk about 'convergence' in maths, we're talking about two sequences approaching the same infinity; we're talking about a curve flattening out into a forever approach to a line it won't ever reach.... !

i do too much fuckin calculus in my daily life to really romanticize it — but, you know, cmon: pafl's all about being stuck, it's about treading water, it's about the dreadful uniformity of the monsters being trapped like that eventually turns you into. so this all feels relevant. and on account of being a huge freak about etymology i will go ahead and mention that it's from the latin — convergere — and con means 'together' and vegere means 'to bend', or 'to turn towards':

circles in the sand, driving each other round the bend. or something.

SO. there are, i think, at least a couple convergences the title's referring to. the first one's kind of the most obvious one: this song's the convergence of anya-and-dima pafl, as begun in punch it, punk!, and yura-and-sanya-and-kt pafl, as begun in, well, pafl.

to elaborate: up until this point those two pafls have always kind of existed separately. they evolve out of a communal origin point — that's COMFORT ZONE, and dmitry's breakout — and they start to edge in on each other's narrative territory somewhere around olga getting arrested, but they're mostly happening in parallel. each half of the story gets one sibling, one mutant, and one stoic adult stalker who discovers the truth about said mutant (...only obviously olga and sergei reacted real differently to that discovery)

i've talked about it before um here but anya-and-dima and yura-kt-everyone-else really do feel like they exist in different genres. punch it, punk! has this brightness, a willingness to forgive, an adventure-story resilience to it, which none of the other songs remotely possess — kt's guide get's closest, but kt also gets fucking crushed for it. in punch it, punk! things to wrong, and then they go right again! dmitry gets beat up, so he gets bandaged and band-aided and fed breakfast; olga finds him out, but she doesn't call the police, and she doesn't get telekinetically dismembered either, because anna's there to help them deescalate. no other pafl song works like this, i think. in every other song, things go wrong, and then they get worse.

( ^ again i've said this already but SUPER META-AWARE LINE. eo ibis quo omnia eunt: 'you will go where everything else is going.' welcome, says yura, to what it's been like for the rest of us this whole fucking time! welcome to being completely fucking doomed, baby!)

this genre thing is why i think occam's razor doesn't qualify as the two storylines meeting, yet — because in occam's razor, anya and dima's luck is still holding. yura looks dmitry in the eye, but anna drags him away, and nothing happens. for the time being the adventure story keeps rolling. whereas in convergence their luck's run out, which to me means the narratives have come together for real. they're operating by the same tragic rules as everyone else now: for most of us that's how it goes!

so it's a convergence 'cause it's a collision, and it's a convergence because the narratives aren't gonna separate again, i don't think, no second chances on that kind of thing. from here on out anya-and-dima's fate is fully tied up with yura's, narratively first, and then also in the very literal sense that they're all going to go down into that facility together, probably. every player still on the board (except sergei) is now traveling out towards those got taken out already (kt, olga, nikita)* and those that have been down there the whole time (temnova). the paths have unified and there's only one line forward....

even our old friend The Cube's here, representing..... uhhh ......., Something. what the fuck does the cube represent? all we know is that it's a silent, perceptive little object; it's shaped an awful lot like a game dice (and we've had game-theory metaphors before, revolver roulette, cards on the table, we've talked about luck); yura found it, olga didn't want it, sanya was it. which means, idk, anyone's guess. the cube's so fuckin weird dude. although speaking of :

i am actually totally convinced that we have no idea yet what the real significance of The Cube is. the problem is that its only current known ability (recognizing zone influence in artifacts or people) is something stalkers can literally already just do. the cube didn't out dmitry or katya, it didn't have to! yura did that completely on his lonesome! which means the cube doesn't actually have something to do in this story, not enough to warrant the amount of attention it's gotten. yet. and pafl's way too tightly-constructed to hang up a gun like that on the wall and then not fire it. PRETTY SURE this thing's gonna come back to bite one way or another

but right anyway: storyline convergence. i also figure that's basically what the pronoun ambiguity in the first run of the chorus is about. we have yukari and kyo here, which is very straightforward — yukari sang both pafl-the-song and punch it, punk!, and kyo did occam's razor. this is the two siblings, two storylines, talking over each other, talking both sides of the conversation. the two sides follow each other very closely now, because they are sliding down into total convergence. everybody's on the same page now — that's not a good thing!

the other convergence i think a lot about is.... character arcs.

this is where "convergent evolution" is relevant, i figure. you will come running back like a dog. i will come running back like a dog. earlier i was saying the two halves of the story in pafl are yura-and-sanya-and-kt and anya-and-dima, and that's true, in a straight-up parallel plotlines sort of way, but also arguably the two halves of the story in pafl are just yura and dima: the protagonist and, probably, deuteragonist. two boys trying to be heartless!

i've talked about them before (uhhhh for instance) and how they are basically doing each other's arcs backwards; that's been true since at least kt's guide, where they're explicitly placed at opposite poles of her narrative, "being used is really uncool" vs "giving up is really uncool." in kt's guide they're two boys who don't believe in a future. this is a fucking lot in itself: how they each get a verse-chorus cycle dedicated to them, how yura's "he" but dima's "you." how dima says, "this life's not fit for the likes of you and i", ironically a perfect echo of sergei's "the world is a cruel place to people like you", and yura says "pathetic ones like me lose before we join the game."

the interesting thing is kt tells both of them they're wrong, but when she says goodbye to yura, she's hoping he'll keep believing in a future from now on — whereas when she says goodbye to dima she's admitting that he was right not to. there's a really deliberate juxtaposition happening there! and what's crazy ironic about it is that, yet again, she's right but she's wrong: she's kind of got them the wrong way around. she's associating yura with freedom, and dima with the cage, but not to put too fine a point on it, it's yura's fault she got locked up! it's dima who set her free!

when i say they're "doing each other's arcs backwards".... they're two boys trying to be heartless. "i've weaponized my helpless spite" vs "i've an objection not one you can overrule." "fair play is overrated" vs "men like me have the right to be cruel." that much is true...

... but also, like, the thing is, dmitry started heartless. he has no fucking reason to believe in a future; he does not even know how to imagine one. we make a lot of hay about yura having Killed A Man (big deal, it was a cop) but honestly: dmitry has absolutely killed people, right? dmitry has, at the very least, canonically tortured children. he has been the weapon with which war crimes were committed. what is yura talking about, "bark all you want?" who is he fucking kidding? what does he fucking know? dt-001-319's quiet, he was obedient for years, but he most certainly bites!

(^ BY THE WAY this shot's fascinating because it's almost a kind of flashback. this can't be dmitry in the present, because in the present he's wearing his black sweater and his stolen jacket; in this shot he's in his uniform. these are his facility clothes. weird, right?)

but yeah: yura's attitude here is almost as ironic as kt's infamous "are you afraid of pain." dt-001-319 is unspeakably well familiar with pain, and familiar with violence, and he has zero moral compass to speak of; even the highly skewed one the facility gave him got screwed when they betrayed him. i'm not sure if yura understands this, at this point, but the remarkable thing is not that dmitry attacked him. the remarkable thing is that dmitry did not follow through.

i actually don't know if i've seen anyone talk about this yet, but i think it kind of might be the single most important thing that happens in this song, and also maybe the reason it's named like it is. yura makes his threat, he puts olga up as the sacrificial lamb, and dima stops.

like, alright, let's back up: pafl, so far, has been the story of yura getting ever more ruthless. he is ever more willing to burn anything, everything, if it will get him power, if it will get him control, if it'll get him an inch of what he has always been willing to die for, which is freedom, any freedom at all. any room to breathe: that's his arc.

& at this point i think it doesn't even have to be to his personal advantage to hurt you — i'm pretty sure, now that he's made that excuse for himself, he'll take any opportunity he can get. it's a really miserable fact of human nature that you will sometimes hurt other people just to prove to yourself that you have enough control over them to do it. i'm going to talk about this some more, if i ever make my post about "poor little boy can't solve all his problems with force", but there's so much hatred in how he treats dima and anya in this song, there's so much totally vindictive joy in having that power to cause pain. he sees it as turning the tables and he's going to keep chasing it until he's turned into something awful.

to put it together: dima has been learning to care about people. yura has been learning to treat them like gears in the machine. i think the other reason this song's called convergence is 'cause this is where the intersection is, this is where they cross each other's paths. this is where they officially swap places on the roster of the ruthless. this is where it starts coming down to dust !

and my argument for that is basically: that dima stops. he doesn't stop for katya — he isn't willing to go back down into his own personal hell to save her — and that's not exactly a heroic decision but it's also, honestly, understandable, in some level. he knew her for like, two hours, and she said things to him that felt very cruel at the time, when he had just saved her life and was in the middle of having the worst headache ever conceived of. and then she went off on her own, and did the exact thing he said not to do, and got caught: you can see how, from dmitry's perspective, it's not really his problem. not enough to be worth breaking back into a death-trap for.

and to be clear: he probably has done kt a lot of wrong, in his time! again, under temnova's rule, dmitry was definitely complicit; he's a kid, and he can't be blamed, but katya's a kid too, and he's most definitely hurt her before. but i don't think his brand-new education in having a heart is really far enough along to process that yet, and i can't hold it against him, all things considered.

... so he won't go back for her. and yura has the audacity to stone cold condemn him for this. "i see your decency has long degraded." (another dreadfully ironic line! degraded from what??? he's been locked up underground since he was a literal baby!) but — and this is the important bit — then yura puts olya on the line. cards on the table, everybody place your bets....

... and for olga he agrees. for anya he agrees — because the other, easy solution is to kill yura where he stands, dead men don't report mutants, but anya wouldn't want that to happen. dmitry who was raised to believe that sympathy is a weakness and mercy is a failure and the only holy purpose is to be used, and used up, he stands down, and he gives his freedom away, and he agrees to go back to hell for someone else's sake ... !

occam's razor sparked a lot of discussion about how yura is quickly starting to resemble the doctor temnova, which, oh boy is he ever: "some ventures require a sacrificial lamb" and "sacrifices are something that we have to make" are the same song set to different tunes. i think convergence marks the point where he starts to follow through. i mean, olya's in prison for his crime! she sacrificed herself for him! as recently as the beginning of occam's razor, the guilt about this was still killing him, as it would kill anyone; now he's bartering her life as if he doesn't care at all. sympathy has no place in a righteous heart... and as far as he's concerned saving kt is the most righteous cause there is.

so that's hence the title, hence convergence, because this is where yura and dima meet in the middle (and cross over, and start fully swapping places). i am actually relatively hopeful for dima's chances right now, in a nailbitey sort of way, i am hope hope hoping that this whole mess is .... awright, not a good thing for him, obviously, but also not as bad as it appears?

the thing is: sure, he's back on the leash. he's back under someone's command. he's going to be a weapon again. but also this time, he's there because he decided to be, in order to save someone he loves. there is a difference, isn't there? that means something! yura has the leash, but unlike temnova he does not have dima's heart. dima's heart belongs to dima, more than it ever has before. his loss of agency here is also kind of a demonstration of agency! that's hopeful.

and yura on the other hand... i mean, christ alive, yura.

yura's going to keep getting worse, but we've known that for a while now. they're all going down into hell anyway. what convergence actually gets me thinking about is the question of, what is going to happen when they meet temnova again?

i worry about dima, in that situation — in particular i worry about the fact that his faith in the facility was broken, but i'm not sure his faith in temnova specifically was. after all she warned him. she set him free. she's the only one who didn't betray him! and like a dog sure seems convinced that he'll come back to following her — one way or another — waiting / like a dog with a bird at your door, and so on

but also all things considered: sure, he might, but also, he's grown a lot in the time he's spent with anya. the decision to stand down for olga's sake means he's at least figured out some concept of agency. and he's got the advantage that he knows what actual love looks like now, he's got a better model to fall back upon than temnova's "noble to serve / as means to an end." it may or may not save him — but at this point i figure he's got a chance. whereas yura....

... yura already believes everything that she believes. and yura figured it out on his own. yura didn't have to be taught. mercy is the sign of a talentless actor — and dima does mercy now, so is he really her perfect little monster anymore, her golden boy? he's kind of... gone rotten, in his time away, hasn't he? he's gotten all sorts of human. (and as we know: the only use for a motor not meant to start... )

and despite the worst of circumstances yura has been doing the precise opposite: he is, by temnova's standards, a talented actor. by god, he's a prodigy; he's a natural. he didn't even need to be a mutant, to end up a monster — he got there his own way, the old way, for hunger ... and temnova's always struck me as hungry.

i don't know! it depends what temnova's motives are — and despite like a dog we frankly still don't understand her motives at all. she works at the facility, she believes in science, but also it only makes a limited amount of sense that she'd really be there to study the mutants. after all she's some kind of zone-creature herself, if not exactly a mutant, and i'd guess that she already has the answers to a lot of the questions the rest of the scientists down there are cracking their heads over. so what does she actually want to learn? why would she go to the humans to find it? what was she trying to make happen, in raising dmitry like she did? what are her plans for him, anyway?

the only thing we know for sure is that she was trying to build a boy without a heart .

and okay, yura's not a mutant, but despite what she says in comfort zone (we still don't really know how much of comfort zone was what temnova really believes, anyway, and how much is what she's feeding dmitry to make him into what she wants) — temnova strikes me as generally too pragmatic to actually be a stickler for the distinction. there's more than one way to be inhuman, i'm sure. and anyway the implication in like a dog ("a gear in the machine grew immune to corrosion") is that temnova started out human too. it's just that she got better. she got hungry. she learned devotion.

i used to worry that temnova would take dima back, and that yura would probably get killed, because he's out of his depth and too deep in self-destruction. right now i am honestly mostly worried that they actually might get along way too fucking well

footnote:

*yes I am conflating "being in the facility" and "being in jail" and "being dead" here. this is because 1. in narrative terms all three of those are kind of the same amount of "taken out of the story" 2. because let's be perfectly honest some of Our Heroes (irony, yura is not a hero anymore) are probably going to end up biting it 3. i am totally convinced at this point that dima and yura's journey to rescue kt is going to fully qualify as a katabasis, e.g. A Descent Into The Underworld, orpheus style. which raises the question of, oh you know, who's going to look back?

Gentle Judgment - Submitted by SeesawSiya

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