#im too tired right now to figure out how phyrexia clicks into this

[dwaginfodder]

I have just finished the Ikoria ebook and I have Thoughts

I am rotating Lukka in my mind like some kind of microwaveable food item.

I'm a sucker for Ikoria and everything about it but I just hadn't gotten around to reading the book yet. Very good. Many notes.

Lukka is a very special kind of asshole. He starts as a well-meaning but ultimately ignorant man and, through a combination of arrogance, access to power, and self-feeding isolation and radicalism, becomes a very hateful piece of shit. He's a very interesting take on a red-centered planeswalker to me because he comes from the same slice of red's philosophical color pie as Act of Treason effects. His main flaw isn't that he's stupid (though he's not like. book-smart or anything), it's that he lacks empathy.

Above all else, I take Lukka as a warning.

Lukka starts the novel as like, this prodigal foot soldier at the head of the first squad of Specials. If you're anything like me calling a bunch of people "Specials :)" because they're good at killing things is like, a giant red fuckoff fascism banner, and you aren't too far off because Drannith is a military aristocracy from hell. But Lukka likes it here because everything makes sense and doesn't challenge his values until a giant cat kills most of his friends and then challenges his values.

Particularly, the giant cat challenges his values by bonding with him and forcing him to empathize with it. This scares the shit out of Lukka, who is used to treating these things as existential threats to his life and the life of everyone he loves (i.e. his fiancee). He telepathically panics and tells the flying cat to fuck off so it does, and then he passes out and wakes up in the hospital with some military aide writing down every word he says. His fiancee, Jirina Kudro, helps him out of the city and he fucks off into the woods with Vivien to go find the cat.

Once he does, he runs into some other people with mental connections to Ikoria's monsters. And this is the kicker: he has no care or sympathy for the others in his position or curiosity at how they live away from the cities. He just wants, by his own words, to go home. This will proceed to be his defining trait. And this makes the other bonders accept him! Because, much like many real minority communities, they understand being displaced, they understand being hunted for what they are, they understand the desire to make oneself a found family.

Instead of empathizing with people who might welcome him, and looking past differences, he instead goes off on his selfish quest to redeem himself with the status quo he comes from. This gets him manipulated and pushed into alienating himself from both groups, isolated in a mentality where rejecting his plan means rejecting him, reinforcing his ideas and driving them to even more extreme ends. Even if at the heart of his issue he is on some level correct (General Kudro and the military aristocracy of Drannith is corrupt and fascist and unchanging), his methods and rhetoric harm both (what if we used our allies, a subset of our minority group, as thoughtless weapons, objectifying them and stripping their own rights to empower our own? doesn't that sound great?).

This repeats itself on Arcavios in the Strixhaven story. He gets to the plane, find civilization, and is immediately persecuted for being weird and suspicious and out of place. He gets in a fight with a dragon cop and then runs off with the Oriq, the gang of criminal mages who rebel against the dragons who founded Strixhaven and, from all we've heard, effectively rule the plane.

And again, the Oriq aren't wrong about the dragon founders being vaguely tyrannical (with some of the lore mentioning a banning of ally-colored magic on the... continent? plane?). But Lukka is still driven by selfishness and power, and instead of informing people of possibilities, he helps the Oriq unleash a murderous war avatar inside of a school. (This will not be the first nor last time a red 'walker helps or actively commits a war crime and it gets pretty passed over.)

Lukka is fundamentally a warning against the thought process of (and rhetoric used by) people like TERFs, splinters of a minority who fall into hate trying to appease the majority and ultimately fail.

#im too tired right now to figure out how phyrexia clicks into this #but ill probably go feral about it tomorrow #fox yips #magic the gathering #lukka #ikoria: lair of behemoths