What Cyberpunk DeadBoy Means and What it's Potentially Foreshadowing (aka very complicated analysis that makes a lot of sense and could happen depending on how colorpalet is feeling while writing the story)
Now I'm seeing so many people like running around wondering what this event could mean for the future for multiple reasons and like I've made like one post throwing my hat into the ring.
I've been frustrated with people's unwillingness to realise that this comm is prob foreshadowing because this is not the first time Colorpalet has hidden foreshadowing into comms weither subtely or not
Exemple's being :
-Akito's second comm foreshadowing his third event
-Lower's cover art literally foreshadowing what would happen to Mafuyu's phone in her event
-88 vocals being emurui and nenekasa foreshadowing the kind of dynamic the disbandement arc had with nenekasa wanting to move forward with emurui being scared of isolation
-Probably way better exemples that I forgot
I've seen people make Some assumptions which I don't agree with but there is one thing I think is true
There is 100 pourcent gonna be struggle between corporation/reality and WxS.
Purely because that's been WxS's entire theme since the beginning. They constantly bash you over the head with the theme of compromising with reality and the importance of dreams. In fact the pick of Maiki-P is not at all surprising as he basically has the same message WxS has just... well harsher.
The Big thing people have ignored however is by focusing on the lyrics, they've ignored something that's personally to me even more telling and that's the line distribution
We know for a fact colorpalet loves to mess around with line distribution, weither it's to make characters say lines that fit them or to kind of foreshadow their headspace.
Now something Big happens with the line distribution of Cyberpunk Deadboy that i've seen NO ONE notice and that's in the last chorus (that and also Tsukasa's lines which people have pointed out but it works less on it's own which is why I'm gonna analyse his lines afterwards).
This is the only time the chorus is like that, the others have a much more even distribution.
In fact the distribution choice makes it look like the rest of WxS is Talking to Rui.
It's even more evident considering the lines they chose to make WxS sing compared to only just Rui
Emu/Tsukasa/Nene saying kimi (you)
Rui saying boku (i)
Which honestly makes me think this is colorpalet foreshadowing some kind of issue reguarding specifically Rui. Remember Emu's second event ? The story of Rilley whose imagination was crippled by the industry to the point where he didn't really have any artistic vision until Emu's grandpa helped him.
In fact remember how the flashback that showcases that has Rilley working on a film
Now we get to Tsukasa's line which have been pointed out to be kind of sus but it's not just his lines.
Tsukasa refuses to sing with Rui (unless it's a line they all sing together but i consider those exceptions). In fact pretty much everyone has a duo line with each other except those two.
In fact in the section where Rui has duo lines with everybody, Tsukasa is the only one he doesnt sing with and the visuals make it clear that it's something that we're supposed to find strange
And then we of course have Tsukasa's solo lines
Tsukasa is the only one that say "fuzakeruna" outside of Rui (of course ignoring entire group WxS lines) and i've seen some people pointed out how it sounds like he's saying it in response to Rui's lines. Which I agree with.
Then we got his big boy solo lines
These lines will make more sense with my theory/analysis but right now if we go with the idea that WxS in the last chorus were speaking to Rui and Tsukasa in this comm refuses to sing with Rui then this implies those lines are Tsukasa speaking to Rui.
And this is where the insanity begins because people have pointed out a concerning trend with Ruikasa that I know some people use for shipping fuel but for me kinda feels more so like foreshadowing.
IGNORING all the ARG ass weirdness of the Fixer 2dmv, this choice to switch Ruikasa's colors have to mean something in my opinion outside of just wholesome shipping influence especially considering the two songs they do this are less than jovial.
What this kind of color switching signifies to me is that, Ruikasa somehow are/or will switch places.
And with that let me bring back Tsukasa's lines
These lines stand out because Tsukasa before remembering his dreams was extremely shallow only doing things for fame and probably the money that would come with it.
Now if you think about everything I've layed out I think you can gain a pretty clear picture.
Of Rui falling into the trap Rilley did, becoming jaded and losing the true motivation of his dream (or at least starting to have doubts). Becoming stuck with the struggle of managing dreams and reality.
Rui's costume even has a mask which can be a metaphor for his artistic voice and individuality being silenced .
Which now you get into the line distribution where WxS is implied to be talking to Rui.
And you get to Tsukasa, who is refusing to sing with Rui and in fact seems to be arguing with Rui if we really want to overthink it. In fact almost switching their roles from the main story.
Because Tsukasa has grown now and how else to show that growth than to switch Rui and Tsukasa's perspectives/roles.
Now how this would happen really depends since there are multiple ways they can go about it with the time they have.
There is obviously mystery dude dude (who i know now is sakaki) who still gives me bad vibes. However there is actually two way they can make mystery dude trigger this sort of plot :
-Mystery dude is malicious and actively manipulates/confronts Rui to make him rethink his worldview
-Mystery dude isn't malicious but instead is just jaded/has been through a lot of industry bullshit which ends up rubbing off on Rui accidentally
But you can even just not have mystery dude involved with this at all (which i doubt but still) because you know what loose plotpoint is still lingering over WxS, fucking Asahi
Rui still has not talked about Asahi to WxS, in fact Curtain Call ends on an explicit cliffhanger which is never really emotionally concluded (at least in Rui's own events, technically the arc ender did but there are still a lot of loose threads from that arc). Why would Colorpalet make Asahi come back after Rui graduates, they could've just had him disappear into the sunset but instead they hint at his potential comeback.
Unless Rui will be forced to again confront similar feelings he did during Curtain Call this time with possibly an added layer of whatever happens during WxS's freelance arc.
Anyways yeah this is overly complicated but then again colorpalet is not being easy with us so...yeah.
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The Collective Seraphic Writing System
This post is going to be the one dedicated to explaining how the Seraphic writing system works. This writing system is entirely digital, as physical writing is no longer in everyday use throughout the Collective, so it's a bit inconvenient to actually write out. It's also weird to read, because it's written in a way that makes the assumption that you know how to speak and understand Seraphic, but I'll try to explain what I can.
Seraphic has two written forms: longform and shortform. Longform is used primarily to teach young instars how to read and write, and as a way to show how a shortform word is meant to be read. Shortform is the main form of writing, and due to its complication it's usually put off for a year or two before being taught in pupariums. Shortform is the method I'll be teaching today. It's primarily morpho-phonetic, with elements of both an alphabet and grammatical logograms, and is written bottom-to-top and right-to-left in reverse boustrophedon (the path of writing goes up, flips 180°, and goes back down). Because of this, you're expected to be able to read both right-side-up and upside-down. For this post, I'll be using an example sentence to highlight specifics areas of the writing system, as shown below:
It reads: nJasāğn k'œ̄nan ālxōr e-fya.
"There are 16 dull knives on the floor."
There are seven elements you need to be aware of when writing in Seraphic: the alphabet, class cartouches, procedural and plural ligatures, preposition glyphs, tone diacritics, numerals, and punctuation. I'll be going through each one step-by-step.
Alphabet
The alphabet makes up the majority of Seraphic writing. There are 30 consonants and 6 vowels, and they all arrange into syllable blocks called "cells". Each consonant takes one of three forms depending on if it is at the start of the syllable, before a vowel, or at the end of a syllable. The alphabet is featural, meaning that the way each letter is written is meant to encode its pronunciation. Here is the alphabet in full:
Each consonant (excluding the ejectives) showcases the three variant forms it can take (similar to capital and lowercase letters in the latin alphabet). The largest, leftmost character is the form that hosts the interior vowels within it. The rightmost vertical form is used when preceeding another consonant, and the upmost horizontal form is used at the end of syllables. If a syllable contains a syllablic consonant, the main consonant will have no vowel within it and instead a syllable-final form of one of the syllabic consonants (r, l, m, n, or ŋ) placed on top of it.
Concerning vowels, they are solely meant to be written within consonants, acting sort of like internal diacritics. They cannot exist on their own, nor can more than one be written within the same consonant (Seraphic doesn't allow diphthongs), and if a vowel must be written by itself it is written within the glottal stop letter ' (in this instance acting as an independant vowel holder).
These rules apply to individual syllables. In multi-syllabic words, each syllable cell is arranged together in a specific way based on the number of syllables in order to keep the line uniform and compact.
the flow of reading word-internally definitely follows the overall direction of writing (bottom-to-top, right-to-left) so broken down an entire word will usually look like this when written:
Seraphic written in longform will be written entirely using the alphabet. Spaces are put between words, punctuation and numeral symbols are still used, and tone diacritics may be included as well, but otherwise it's entirely spelled out in this way. Writing this way makes the text as a whole quite longer, and can come off as childish or imply you're a new learner of Seraphic, so shortform will usually be used in official contexts. In shortform, alphabetical letters are restricted to non-declined parts of nouns, adjectives, and proper nouns.
Class Cartouches
In Seraphic, there are seven noun classes: Solar (people), Astral (animals), Vital (plants), Terranean (places), Metallic (objects), Lunar (concepts), and Oceanic (everything else). Similarly, the writing system employs seven symbols called "class cartouches" to encode which noun class a word is in. This is drawn from this writing system's predecessor, the Aeonic Seraphic alphabet, that also used glyphs to notate class. These are the seven noun class cartouches:
The thing about the class cartouches is, not only is it morphological, but it's also phonetic. A noun is never spelled out in its entirety, usually only part of it is. When a class cartouche is used, it's supposed to stand in for the class prefix itself without having to additionally spell the class prefix in the rest of the word. For example, in the word zājlux (tail), the "-jlux" would be spelled out, and the solar class cartouche would be drawn around it to stand in for the "zā-". Even though you don't write it, you still know it's there because of the class cartouche. Because of the nature of the noun class prefixes, and how many different forms they can take, it can be daunting to have to guess if you're supposed to pronounce a word with a "za-" or a "zo-", but there are patterns to which prefix (and thus, declension patterns), is meant to be read depending on what the following sound is.
Solar class
read as zā before f, v, s, z, c, j, pf, ts, tc and any cluster of two consonants (e.g. zāsā, zāfr, zājlux)
read as zō before x, ğ, h, ', and kx (e.g. zōxō, zōxur, zōğœcl)
read as zē in stressed syllables, and occasionally before consonant clusters (e.g. zēzmp'ux, zēzt'e, zēvasax)
read as s before vocalics (vowels and syllabic consonants), r, l, w, y, n, t, d, p', or k' (e.g. srāc, sēr, sōğœc)
read as ts before t', the ts replacing the t' entirely in pronunciation, for example tsn would be written as (Solar)t'n (e.g. tsn, tsā, tsłzaf)
Astral class
read as ğr before f, v, s, z, c, j, x, ğ, h, pf, ts, tc, kx, p', t', k' and and cluster of two consonants (e.g. ğrzles, ğrxur)
read as x before vocalics, r, l, w, y, ŋ, k, g, p', or t' (e.g. xūc, xŋox)
read as kx before k', the kx replacing k' in pronunciation (e.g. kxa)
Vital class
read as wā before r, l, w, or y (e.g. wāya, wārāc, wāwax)
read as wō before k', k, g, x, ğ, ŋ, or kx (e.g. wōk'ł, wōxur, wō'ōf)
read as wē before consonant clusters (e.g. wēzles, wējlux, wējlozln)
read as ū before n, m, p', p, b t', t, d, f, v, s, z, c, j, pf, ts, or tc (e.g. ūt'u, ūp'n)
read as w before vocalics (e.g. wē, wīn, wājr)
read as wī occasionally before consonant clusters (e.g. wīzya)
Terranean class
read as va before f, v, s, z, c, j, pf, ts, tc and any cluster of two consonants (e.g. vafl, vasērn, vasa)
read as vo before x, ğ, h, ', kx, and consonant clusters (e.g. voxāl, vodsā, vojrayux)
read as vu in stressed syllables and occasionally before consonant clusters (e.g. vujlux, vulvren, vuzajni)
read as f before vocalics, r, l, y, w, m, n, ŋ, p, b, t', or k' (e.g. fe, fruvn, fmağo)
read as pf before p', pf replacing p' in pronunciation (e.g. pfan)
Metallic class
read as ja before f, v, s, z, c, j, pf, ts, tc and any cluster of two consonants (e.g. jafa, javlni, jawaya)
read as jo before x, ğ, h, ', and kx (e.g. joxl)
read as c before vocalics, r, l, w, y, n, t, d, p', or t' (e.g. can, cya, cenaŋx)
read as tc before t', the tc replacing the t' entirely in pronunciation (e.g. tcłvr, tcāŋğl, tcū)
Lunar class
read as la before r, l, w, or y (e.g. lara, layeğr, lalel)
read as lo before k', k, g, x, ğ, ŋ, or kx (e.g. loxir, loğn̄, loxel)
read as le before consonant clusters (e.g. levp'ā, levren, lejt'ān)
read as li in stressed syllables and occasionally before consonant clusters (e.g. liwayi, lit'n̄, livasāx)
read as y before vocalics (e.g. yar, yu, yawu)
read as l/ł before n, m, p', p, b t', t, d, f, v, s, z, c, j, pf, ts, or tc (e.g. lce, łzēwok'u, lvulvren)
Oceanic class
read as a/ā before m, n, p', p, b, t', t, d, s, z, f, v, c, j, pf, ts, tc, w, r, y, l, and all consonant clusters (e.g. ap'i, āt'ē, ācèya)
read as o/ō before ŋ, k', k, g, ', x, ğ, h, and kx (e.g. ōxūr, ōxān)
read as aw/āw before vocalics (e.g. awun, awaf, awaman)
Of course these rules are not hard set, and there are several instances where a written word contradicts these rules or even when two words end up spelled the same, but for the most part these rules will generally be consistent for most written words. It seems like a lot to remember, but usually it's a thing that you eventually develop a sort of "ear" for.
Procedural and Plural Ligatures
The procedural and plural ligatures are additional glyphs used to mark, respectively, the procedurals and the plurals of a noun. The procedural are written at the bottom of the noun (since Seraph is written bottom-to-top and these are prefixes of course), and there are 12 separate procedural symbols in use. Similarly, the plurals, being suffixes, are written at the top of the noun and contain only three symbols (the singular is usually unmarked). They are as follows:
The plural ligatures attach to both nouns and adjectives freely, but in order for a procedural ligature to attach to an adjective, the adjective needs to be put in the oceanic class and subsequently written with the oceanic class cartouche. Additionally, if you want to write remote past/future forms for each procedural, you would need to attach the resultative present ligature underneath the preexisting past or future ligature (these conjugations haven't developed their own separate ligature forms, so they follow the tradition of using the resultative in addition as semantically that is where the remote forms originated). I don't really have a way to show you how to pronounce the plural forms, as even though the different pronunciations are pretty few they're actually pretty inconsistent on which one goes where. It's just one of those things you kinda have to already know. You can check the introduction to Seraphic post to see what forms the plurals can take, but otherwise it's basically, like, memorization. The procedurals on the other hand DO have a predictable pattern of pronunciation, but each tense has a different form based on what class and declension the noun is in, and with six tenses and seven classes each with at least three different declension forms, it's definitely something I can't summarize here. Again I HAVE to make a separate post for that because the declension forms are vital to knowing how to decline properly in Seraphic.
Preposition Glyphs
This section will probably be the easiest to explain really. The preposition glyphs are pretty easy to recognize. They're written in between words, attaching to both of them instead of floating freely like regular words are. There are 19 glyphs for the 19 prepositions, and they don't really change form. Sometimes, if occurring at the beginning of a sentence, they'll have one end sorta lopped off, but not everyone follows through with this convention. Here are the glyphs listed below:
Two or more prepositions can't occur sequentially, it's a very one-at-a-time situation, although in colloquial speech you'll see two prepositions being used in certain instances.
Tone Diacritics
Seraphic is a tonal language, and luckily it has diacritics to indicate the tones. They frame the words on each size, being used on both nouns and adjectives where applicable. You'll usually see them in formal contexts like government documents and letters of address, on signs and boards and menus and any kind of display especially in highly populated areas, in use by those whom are just learning Seraphic and don't have a hang on remembering all of the tones yet, and just in any context where clarity of literacy would be important. In everyday colloquial text conversations and things the tone diacritics will be usually dropped as context is sufficient enough to know, although tone diacritics may be reintroduced to differentiate homonyms that are distinguished only in tone (e.g. lxal "power" vs. łxāl "day"). There are eight individually recognized tone diacritics:
The low tone is the base tone and is usually left unmarked, so there's no sign for just the low tone. When a low tone transitions to a rising or falling though, the low transition diacritic will be used to connect the two. Many of these diacritics are usually connected consecutively when a word requires it, flowing as if they're one larger tone diacritic. This can give a whole host of unique tone symbols, but for the most part, all of the tone symbols can be broken down officially into the 8 diacritics. There isn't a 1-1 correspondence between individual tone diacritics and syllables within a word, usually you can know from context and just knowing how the word is pronounced. For example, the word łxāl would be written with one high tone marker even though the word is two syllables, but it's meant to infer that the entire word is pronounced with an even high tone. Here are some additional examples:
The top example is the word jalzègxa "chronicle". You can see that it uses the two low tone transitions to connect to the central falling tone, representing a low-falling-low relationship. The word below that is māzefādnu "hourglass". It employs a high-low-high, and then a high-low, with the last high-low meant to merge with the high-low-high. So truthfully it's meant to be interpreted as high-low-high-low. There's a lot of possibilities, but breaking it down will simplify what tones are being used specifically.
Numerals and Punctuation
This final section will discuss Seraphic numerals and punctuation. Now, unlike in most human languages which uses base-10, having 10 unique symbols to represent the values of 0-9, Seraphic uses base-16 and represents the values 1-16 with 16 individual symbols. In base 16, we would write 16 as 10, standing for one set of 16 and zero sets of 1. It's written in positional notation like arabic numerals, where each position represents a power of 16 (instead of a power of ten like in base-10). Here are the numerals:
If you were to write a number like 299,792,458; you'd convert it into base-16 which would be 11,DE7,84A; and since Seraphic numerals are grouped in 4 instead of 3 it would actually be 11DE,784A. This is how you'd write that:
Both Arabic numerals and Seraphic numerals describe the same amount of things, they just group things differently. We group in sets of 10, they group in sets of 16.
As for punctuation, there are only 5 marks that's in standard use, and these are them:
Single bar - separates individual sentences.
Single dot - separates clauses for clarity, separates numerals into groups of four.
Double dot - separates individual words such as in lists or replaces a single dot when separating clause groups.
Triple dot - Distinguishes quotes and dialogue, as well as highlighting names, terms, and titles.
Double bar - used to end full paragraphs/passages instead of a single bar.
Overall, that's pretty much everything I can detail about how the Seraphic writing system works! It's complicated but it was very fun to develop and boy was it satisfying to get it to work. Hopefully you'll now be able to decode a little better Seraphic writing, and maybe even write something of your own!
ŋKowīci cu-stux 'ōf tsa-levp'ā cu-zāsláf pi-lizt'n ğōdjasa! (Thank you all so much for reading!)
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