#light: i’m not like a regular god i’m a cool god i have catholic guilt.

[bestworstcase]

Do you think the Ever After could act as a parallel to the Garden of Eden?

you know what. asking me this when my latest post leads with me identifying myself as an evangelical apostate and after i’ve been caterwauling again about how rwby isn’t a christian narrative is kind of a power move, ngl. all biblical quotations to follow are from the NASB 1995.

one sidebar i want to make before getting properly into the actual topic of the garden, because it’s something i’ve been mulling over, is the absence from rwby’s cosmological mythos of a primordial ocean. that’s an interesting omission because of how common a motif it is in real-world mythology, christianity included. (In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. […] Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. Gen. 1:1-2,6-7)

i’ve mentioned a handful of times before that rwby takes some noticeable cues from hellenistic philosophy and in particular heraclitus is pretty visible in the ever after—which is salient to the absence of a primordial ocean because the interior of the tree strikes me as a cosmic river flowing both from and around the everliving fire of the forge. see fragments B12, B30, B31, B36, B91, here is a general summary.

this has very little to do with the garden of eden question beyond the, like, broad comment that if analytical comparison between rwby and real world mythological and philosophical traditions is something that interests you generally, peruse what very little remains of heraclitus and also read plato’s timaeus and critias, because the influence is pretty strong.

anyway. back to genesis. the biblical story of creation goes like this:

on the first day, the deity speaks light into being, illuminating the formless waters of the void, and separates the night from the day.

on the second day, he creates a separation between the waters, above and below, and names the waters above the heavens.

on the third day, he parts the waters below and gathers them all into one place, drawing up the earth, which he calls the land and the sea. then he bids the land to become lush with vegetation.

on the fourth day, he creates the sun and the moon and all the stars to govern the passage of time, to mark the days and the seasons and the years, bringing order to the separation between night and day.

on the fifth day, he speaks into being all the creatures of the sea and the sky, the fish and the birds. (and this is no more arbitrary than the creation of the land together with vegetation; the air, remember, is the separation between the waters above and the waters below.)

on the sixth day, he creates all the animals that roam the land, and then he creates humankind in his own image, to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (1:26)

and on the seventh day, he rests, and sanctifies the day.

ok. so, i’m not going to get into the weeds of christian theology (<- apostate) so our engagement with genesis here is strictly as a literary text. with that in mind, there are two things i want to make note of:

first, that the biblical creation story is fundamentally about categorization: the deity creates things by naming them and the work of creation is made possible by the separation and definition of what had been a nameless and formless void. the deity first differentiates between day and night, water below and water above (separated by air), land from sea, and then systematically creates things to fill each new category. each day ends with the deity examining what he has made in order to determine that it’s good, and all the living creatures are instructed to “be fruitful and multiply,” in accordance with “their kind,” which is to say that all things are supposed to remain in their categories.

second, that the deity creates the celestial bodies to govern the heavens; he creates plants first, then animals, and to the animals he gives the plants; and lastly he creates man and woman in his own image to govern the whole of creation. the creation of the world itself is indistinguishable from the creation of a natural hierarchy: each new creation is given authority over what came before.

while there are some loose similarities here with how the ever after as it exists now came to be (in that one could make an argument for the separations of the primordial ocean as being akin to the clearing of the wilderness), the fundamental ideas articulated in genesis 1 and in rwby regarding the ever after are diametrically opposed: the notion of an inviolate natural order is, in rwby, textually rejected. balance “cannot be restored by force or calculation” because it “finds its own equilibrium”—and of course the whole point of ascension is that things do not need to remain as they are if they would rather be something else. a girl could become a cat, if she wanted to. the ever after is preoccupied not with designated purpose but chosen purpose, whereas the biblical creation myth is about the designation of purpose.

nevertheless there IS a clear parallel to draw here—between the biblical deity and the god of light. (this is where i stress, again, that i am not making a theological argument but a literary one.) consider the creation story of ‘the two brothers’ as it is told in the fairytale anthology:

first, the primordial dragon separates himself into light and dark.

second, the brothers create the heavens (celestial bodies) and the land.

third, they create animals (and grimm). it is at this point they begin to quarrel, because they cannot agree on whether dark’s contributions are good or bad.

fourth, they decide—to settle the argument—to create a new kind of being in their own image, capable of reason and will, which they agree will be given the freedom to “rule or ruin this world we have made for them.”

fifth, they fail catastrophically to leave well enough alone, fight about it, and go to sleep with the intention of judging humanity’s worth when they awake.

the similarity between this creation story and genesis 1 is much more pronounced, with the crucial difference being that the brothers, unlike the singular deity of the biblical story, cannot come to an agreement on what the natural order should be: every time one of them looks at what they’ve created and deems it good, the other disagrees and changes it.

revelations about their origin in V9 provided a great deal of context to their disagreement and vindicated me on the matter of dark not being the one who’s ultimately causing the problem; the details do not matter particularly to this discussion. the salient point is that light approaches the act of creation in the same manner as the biblical deity, but he exists in a cosmos to which that notion of inviolate, deliberate order is anathema. he is in the wrong story in a very literal sense.

now, insofar as the ever after might be intended as a kind of eden it would have to be for the brothers, yes? because they are the first emanations of the tree and the ever after is theirs to cultivate until their departure. and bearing in mind that at the heart of the narrative conflict is light being, in essence, the biblical deity transposed into a cosmos whose fundamental reality is diametrically opposed to the fundamental reality of biblical myth, there is an interesting angle to tease out here because:

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Gen 2:15-17)

and

The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (3:2-7a)

and

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life. (3:22-24)

again, there are loose parallels one could draw here with the blacksmith’s tale of the brothers, but the ever after simply does not function the way eden does: no part of the ever after is forbidden to the brothers and their departure from the garden is a gift, rather than a punishment. but consider the beats of the fall of man in the context of how light sees himself.

the temptation of the forbidden fruit is the temptation of divine knowledge—of becoming knowledgeable, and thus becoming godlike. the deity curses adam and eve to punish their disobedience, but that is not why they are cast out: they are made to leave because they have become like gods, and the deity does not want them to eat of the fruit of the tree of life. the expulsion from eden is a precautionary measure to ensure that humans continue to be mortal now that they have the capacity to understand (and thus fear) death.

now lay that against light’s perspective of the events leading up to his and his brother’s departure from the garden: they grew curious. they wanted to do more. they made the cat in deepest secrecy, and learned that they could make things to do their jobs for them. they make the jabberwalker—but he turns out wrong. they have introduced death into this world. their eyes are opened—they become gods. jabber is their fruit of knowledge. light (like adam, like eve) reacts to his newfound understanding with fear and shame, and tries to erase jabber for the same reason adam and eve scramble to hide their nakedness.

but creating jabber was not a sin. that is the critical difference: the tree does not judge or condemn; jabber and the cat find their places in the ever after and the tree gives the brothers a door to other realms where they can blossom into their divinity. the fear and shame light feels is his own creation—a self-inflicted curse—one he passes down to all his creations in the form of death as ending instead of change. his exile from the garden demands that the permanence of death be codified as a natural law, for the same reason that adam and eve are sent away from eden clothed. who told you that you are naked? who told you that things can die?

nothing guards the ever after’s door. light could return whenever he wished; but he cannot return because his own shame and his fear of what he created forbid it. how this is carried to its conclusion remains to be seen—although it seems inevitable that light will ascend, because he desperately needs to for his own and for remnant’s sake—but i do think rwby is doing something really interesting here with light in relation to biblical creation and the fall of man.

to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is to become like god; the last act of creation is human defiance and apotheosis, and the experience of apotheosis is the creation of shame. for light both the defiance and the shame are illusory but, to him, deeply and painfully real, and this shame is at the center of him. he is eve who became god and exiled himself from his own garden.

#light: i’m not like a regular god i’m a cool god i have catholic guilt. #dark: what is wrong with you

[prairiesongserial]

10.7

The chapel was pretty, though the observation barely registered against the fact that John wasn’t there. Cody didn’t feel great about being proven right on that point. The pit of dread in his stomach was starting to give way to numb acceptance, a fog that not even the brilliant colors of the chapel’s stained-glass windows that made shapes of dancing light across the floor could shine through.

“Hey, over here,” Valentine said from near the front of the chapel, gesturing for Cody to join them by what he guessed was the confessional. It was intimidating - a big, partitioned booth made out of dark, polished wood, with the sort of craftsmanship that tended to baffle Cody. How long had it taken someone to make this, and where had they gotten all of the wood from? Had someone from the convent made it, or had it always been here? It had the impression of a structure that had simply grown out of the ground one day, and allowed the convent to be built around it, rather than vice versa.

There was a figure of an angel carved into the confessional, in the space between the two doors, and as Cody made his way across the room to join Valentine, he saw that the details of the angel’s face had been completely worn away over time. Rubbed smooth, even, like someone had deliberately sanded it down to render it featureless.

“Novitiates like to touch it for luck,” Valentine said, reaching out to pass their thumb over the angel’s face demonstratively. “We should really get it fixed, but angels are supposed to be a little scary, right?”

“I guess,” Cody said. He didn’t know much about angels, but the carving made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Rather than look at it any longer, he stepped into one side of the confessional booth, and let the wooden door click softly shut behind him.

It was dark inside. A little like what Cody might have expected the inside of a coffin to feel like, if the cushioned bench he was sitting on hadn’t been so comfortable. Valentine hadn’t lied about that.

There was a sudden, sharp sound, and a beam of light filtered through a tiny, screened window set into the wall to Cody’s left. Through it, he could just barely see Valentine’s profile.

“I’m supposed to say something first, right?” Cody asked. He had never been particularly religious, but some of Miriam’s regulars at the bar had been, and he had a general sense of how this was supposed to go.

“Well, that sort of depends,” Valentine said. “You can just sit there and spill everything that’s on your mind, without being formal about it. But if you want me to absolve you afterwards, then yeah, you have to say a specific thing first.”

Cody frowned. “Absolve?”

“It’s like...forgiving you on God’s behalf,” Valentine elaborated. “Which I have the authority to do, as a reverend.”

That made a certain amount of sense. Cody nodded, only belatedly realizing that Valentine couldn’t see him.

“Does that work even if I’m not Catholic?” he asked. “The absolving thing.”

Valentine made a noncommittal noise. “Technically no, unless you’re dying, but I like to think I could at least put in a good word with Him for you. I still take confession from people who left the Church, but have nowhere else to go.”

Cody weighed his options. It would be a relief to have someone take his guilt off his hands, and to be forgiven for what he’d done, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be forgiven by God, exactly. It wouldn’t feel as satisfying as it would to be forgiven by the Dead-Eyes. Or by John - though Cody still wasn’t quite sure what he’d done to make John close up so abruptly the way he had by the river. Maybe it was nothing that needed forgiving. He could hope, anyway.

“I think I just want to talk,” he said, bringing his feet up onto the bench of the confessional and hugging his knees to his chest. “If that’s okay.”

“It’s less work for me,” Valentine said, easily. Through the small window, even in the dim light, Cody could just barely see them smiling their funny little half-smile. “So, Cody. Let’s talk. How do you know Valerie?”

“I don’t actually know him that well,” Cody admitted. “I was half-dead the first time we met. I owed a lot of money to my - to a gang leader, who chopped off two of my fingers when I couldn’t pay him back in time. I almost died, except John rescued me on the road. I don’t remember a lot of the first couple weeks we were together, but I guess he dragged me to Vegas to find a doctor, and Val and Friday helped him out.”

“Friday’s the short one?” Valentine asked. “And John is the one with the bad knee.”

“Yeah,” Cody said. “After we left Vegas, Ethan - the gang leader - showed up and threatened Val, to find out where John and me were headed. And then he burnt down Val’s church. Val was just telling me about that - that he’s sorry he gave us up.”

Valentine let out a low whistle. “No kidding.”

“I told him it wasn’t his fault,” Cody said. He still couldn’t bring himself to be angry at Val, not when he knew firsthand the way Ethan manipulated people and used the things they loved against them. “Ethan would’ve found out one way or another. But I think Val still feels guilty about it.”

“No wonder nobody can get him to talk about what happened,” Valentine muttered, mostly to themself. Cody heard them shifting around in the other confessional booth, like they were getting comfortable. “Okay, keep going. What happened next?”

Cody paused, trying to get back on track. This was the part of the story he actually remembered.

“Well, John and I ran across half the States trying to get away from Ethan,” he said. “And then we met up with this other crime boss who we did a job for, so he was going to help us get rid of Ethan. But it didn’t work. Not the way it was supposed to, anyway.” Cody frowned, remembering the standoff in Old Problem. It was hazy in his mind’s eye, like he had been somewhere outside of himself. “The Dead-Eyes decided they were done trying to chase me, and they made Ethan leave with them.”

“Even though he was their leader?” Valentine asked, sounding fascinated.

“Yeah,” Cody said. He wondered how the rest of the Dead-Eyes were doing, and if they were already back in Oregon. No doubt they were, by now. Had they dissolved the gang, or decided on a new leader? Did they even know that Ethan was dead?

“So then what?” Valentine prompted.

“Uh, we thought it was over,” Cody said. Remembering what had happened next made a flush rise to his face. “John and I kept going, to the Mississippi. And I realized that I, uh…”

He trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to put the realization into words. He hadn’t known what to call it then, when he’d first felt it. Still didn’t. All he could think to do was ask to kiss John, and hope that John, somehow, had known what he’d been trying to say.

“You’re in love with him,” Valentine supplied, as easily as if they were talking about the weather.

“I - yeah,” Cody said. It was easier than trying to deny it - and why try to deny something that was true, anyway? Especially in front of a reverend. He hadn’t thought about his feelings for John as love, not until this very moment, but Valentine saying it felt like a puzzle piece sliding into a spot that had been waiting for it all along. Like the satisfying click of a key in a lock. He loved John. He was in love with John.

So why couldn’t he fucking say so out loud?

“It was pretty obvious,” Valentine said, answering a question Cody hadn’t thought to ask.

“Cool,” he replied, embarrassed, feeling the flush creeping steadily up the back of his neck. He closed his eyes, just breathing for a moment, reminding himself that there was no one else to hear what he was saying except himself, Valentine, and the angel carving on the door. “So. I asked if I could kiss him. And then we kissed. And then he got...weird about it. And I thought - maybe I did something wrong, or he didn’t want it after all. Because John’s so quiet...it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. I never know if he’s sad, or angry…” Cody trailed off. “I don’t think this was anything like that, but I...I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to him about it?” Valentine asked. Their voice was a little gentler now, like this was about more than a good story.

“Not really,” Cody admitted. He’d spoken to John since they’d gotten to the convent, of course, but the kiss had hung between them undiscussed, like a hot piece of metal neither of them wanted to try to pick up and handle.

“It’s frustrating,” he said, filling the silence when Valentine didn’t. “I feel like I fucked things up with him. Like I ruined my chance. But I don’t know how to tell him that, or ask him how he’s feeling, because he might just not say anything. And I don’t know what to do with that. And now I can’t find him anywhere, and I’m - I’m scared.” He swallowed. He hadn’t known that was what he was feeling, exactly, until he’d said it aloud. “I’m scared that something else happened to him, and I wasn’t there to stop it.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to him at the convent,” Valentine said, sternly. “We’re the safest place in this whole city. You’ll find him. And when you do, you should tell him how you feel.”

“Okay,” Cody said, because he didn’t feel like he could disagree without starting an argument.

“Why are you scared about something happening to him?” Valentine asked. “Because he got shot when you were on the road together?”

“Right,” Cody said, realizing that he hadn’t finished his story, and had stopped just before the hard part. He swallowed again, harder. “I guess Ethan followed us to the river, because when we were there...well, he showed up with a rifle, and he shot John. He was trying to kill him. So he could take me back to Oregon with him. Alone.”

He paused, waiting for Valentine to ask something, anything; or to cut in with some sort of witty comment. But they were quiet. If he hadn’t been able to see their profile through the window, Cody might have thought he was alone.

“But I...I got mad,” he said. This was the first time he’d spoken about what had happened by the river in so many words, to anyone. Val and Friday had gotten the barest bones of the story, and hadn’t asked to be told twice. John...John hadn’t asked anything at all about what had happened.

“Ethan grabbed me. And I fought him,” Cody went on. Again, his memories felt like he was seeing what had happened from somewhere outside of himself, a bird’s eye view. “I wanted to tell him all the stuff I’d been holding back, about how much I hated him. About how I don’t think he was ever really my friend. But I knew - I knew whatever I said, he wouldn’t listen. And that John was hurt.” He took a breath, ignoring the hitch in his chest that promised tears. He hadn’t cried since before he’d fled Oregon. “So I didn’t say anything, and I got the pistol out of my bag, and I shot him.”

Valentine was still quiet. Then, after what felt like minutes, they spoke.

“How did you feel about killing him?”

“Bad,” Cody said, instantly. “Well - sort of. I feel bad that I had to kill him, but not bad that I did it. I think the only way he was gonna stop coming after me was if someone killed him. And I think he was gonna keep hurting people ‘til that happened. Like a rabid dog.”

A rabid dog had come through Levering once, and had bit one of the older Dead-Eyes, back when Ethan’s aunt Edie had run the gang. Cody remembered that Edie had put a bullet in the dog, then a bullet in the Dead-Eye who’d been bitten, and had said it was so neither of them needed to suffer long. Plenty of people had suffered because of Ethan.

“Do you think I did the right thing?” he asked. He hadn’t wanted to ask anyone else, because he knew that John, Val, and Friday would all tell him he had done the right thing, even if they privately thought he hadn’t. But Valentine was a stranger, and a reverend, which meant they had not only their own opinion, but a general idea of God’s.

“Well, murder is a mortal sin,” Valentine began, slowly. “There’s really no way around that. It’s in the Ten Commandments. But if you’re asking me, personally, I think it sounds like you took it upon yourself to take some wickedness out of the world. I can’t really say what you did was right, but I think...well, I think it sounds like you stopped a lot more people from being hurt, and a lot more churches from being burned.”

Cody nodded to himself. Valentine’s answer was complicated, but it felt more like what he’d wanted than a simple “yes” or “no”. A complicated answer for a complicated problem. He liked the thought that killing Ethan had stopped more people from being hurt, which was something no one else had told him.

“Thanks,” he said. “For being honest.”

“I try,” Valentine said, and he saw them grin on the other side of the small window. “Is that the end of your story?”

“Pretty much,” Cody said. “Val and Friday found us and brought us here. And you know what happened after that. And now John’s missing.”

“He’s not missing, you just haven’t found him yet,” Valentine said, practically. It sounded a little silly, but hearing it put that way made Cody feel just a bit better. Talking to Valentine had that effect, apparently.

“I should go back to looking for him,” he said.

“Sure,” Valentine said. “I should go give Valerie my condolences about his church. Do you feel like you’ve said everything you need to?”

Cody looked away from the small window, and towards the dark confessional door. He felt a little lighter than he had when he’d sat down, like a pressure had been taken off his chest. Like he could see clearly, even in the dark.

“I think so,” he said, finally.

“Then go look for your boy,” Valentine told him. “And, for what it’s worth? I’ll put in that good word for you, but I think you’re gonna be fine even without it.”

10.6 || 10.8