Sorry for the delay guys. See prior post/calendar for update details. Doesn't help that flashback chapters are wordier than others... And at the end of the chapter, PLOT TWIST..? Hope you guys had a nice Thanksgiving... Enjoy!~
So.. is Taebin in love with Mooyoung or is it just bromance or...?
Yeah, plot twist indeed, when I typed it I was like "Awwww, man, now everyone will forget about the moral dilemmas, the symbolism and whatnot and all the talk will be on whether Taebin is gay or X is a troll or both".
Yup. But then again, the author could just be trolling us and Taebin does a shoujo thing and says that Mooyoung is his 'bestest friend' or something along those lines...
You guys are thinking of it too much in the lines of mainstream media(mivoes, manga, books) that we consume. Maybe the author oof dice will just be radical and just deal with Taebin's feelings like...just feelings, and do not deal with the fact that they are directed against a man? I mean, it is 2014, we should really stop giving a shit about who likes what, unless it is important story-wise - which it is here, as Taebin is apparently in love with the main villain of the story....Ok, the second villain. X is definitely the main villain.
We don't give a shit (at least I don't). However, the quest here was definitely meant to be taken as comedic by the readers. X IS a troll, after all. For me, I don't care if Taebin is bisexual, gay or straight. It is also a fact that Taebin did blush and was shocked at the quest. So the author introduced the innuendo, not we. The embarassment is there.
May I also point out that Taebin cultivated a "straight-man" façade while at Dongtae's school. And the way he taunted Dongtae about "how far" he went with Eunju is the kind of joke more often (though of course not always) associated with "straight" behaviour.
Sure, the manhwaga can be radical (I wouldn't even call it radical) and deal with the situation naturally (as it is in real life), but the very fact that he used the situation to close a key flashback chapter and made it into a complete surprise to readers most certainly means the predictable reaction seen in these comments was expected on his part.
Actually, I don't see how this new complexity contributes to the main plot, if it is true that Taebin has romantic feelings for Mooyoung. So far, it seems gratuitous, as it certainly did not factor in Mooyoung's behaviour.
And incidentally, since Taebin did become an A-Ranker, we know the quest was fulfilled. So Taebin has already confessed his feelings. I dunno, the way they have seen interacting in the rooftop massacre flashback and the cat-and-mouse game in chapter 67 do not suggest (at least to me) a past romantic confession. But maybe this is yet to surface. I wouldn't know.
And let's be honest. Sure, it is 2014, but if the author made it into a cliffhanger revelation, he surely expects most people to use it as a discussion topic. Otherwise, it would be conveyed in a much more neutral context.
I went by elimination and I believe it is Cloaking (the reasoning is a bit long, but you can read about it at Mangahelpers, comment #111). I think the barrier is to prevent Sungchul from flying away. Miju is going to wait for him to run out of Dice points to keep floating and be forced to land.
A good possibility Splicer but we've yet to be told two small details. 1, the consumption rate of points while flying and 2, how long the barrier lasts for 4 dice points. If the usage rate is about the same I suppose it comes down to who currently has more dice points available. Plus there is the chance that a yet unknown a-ranker to see the barrier and come in to pick off the winner who will have depleted their dice during the fight...
Gotta agree Cloaking has the highest probability. But other than Timestop, others have a possibility too, if she doesn't want to reveal her ability that soon and make some physical sparring first. TS on the other hand is good as soon as you use it.
Also if she upgraded her Cloaking ability, she may get to control what she get's to cloak, including her weapon (blade). Did the first Cloaker get to cloak his clothes?
By the way, I had lots of fun choosing the best fonts for Miju… that girl is scary! In the end I settled for Creeping Evil.ttf to use in her last scream!
I dont understand why people call x a villian or evil.. quest are sent based on your desires. X is just a middle man providing you with what you wants its easy to blame someone else but its truly you are your own villian, and whatever you consider evil is because your desires are evil..
Hmmm, I disagree. Most people nurture, even if temporarily or in moments of rage, dark desires. Life in society is in part exercising self-restraint not to act on those desires in order to keep a modicum of harmony. The fact is that X picks those desires that would never leave the realm of the mind and turns them into quests that result in their being materialised. And that is the very definition of evil according to several philosophical systems: it's the conversion of harmful intent into harmful agency.
It's not because the person wanted to kill their neighbour that the man who knew that and gave them a gun is less guilty. Actually, because they knew they are even worse. The name for them in legal terminology is "enabler".
Actually, desires are not even that well-formed within people's minds. To use the examples X gave to Mio: "I want to be stronger than that guy." "I want to be more popular than that girl". Instead of "attack them and beat them down", X could give virtuous quests like "work out three hours a day and I'll give you Dice" or "help your colleagues study or try to be friendlier" and the same results could be achieved. X actually said precisely that to Mio: "desires are only one ingredient in a quest". X is the one adding the other ingredients, and the recipe is quite foul, invariably. In other words, X deliberately chooses quests that will make people achieve their desires by way of harming each other. The quests are not neutral, they have intrinsic malice and aim at removing the moral and behavioural stoppers people normally have.
Your argument is tantamount to saying that people are guilty from nurturing dark wishes and agency makes them no worse. But actions matter, and while an intent is merely in the mind, there's always the chance that the person who harbours this intent will change their mind, see things differently and walk a more virtuous path. X messes with this and brings out the worst in people. The emphasis here is "bring out".
So he is a villain, in my opinion. The worst kind, actually, and a good metaphor for what several theological systems call the Devil. But one does not need to be religious (I am not) to agree that a middleman can do a lot of damage. Or do you think that Miju, nasty as she is, would ever have tried to kill Sungchul if X hadn't empowered her to do so and egged her on with quests that reinforced her personal ambitions?
The view you espouse is that people are not changing as Dicers. But people change all the time through life, and most of it as a consequence of their decisions. Each act we perform changes our mindset a little: if we decide to act on a desire, or to refrain from acting, our mind changes to justify our actions, and we become a little different from what we were prior to that decision. So a virtuous act makes our mind more virtuous, and a vicious act, more vicious.
(If you adhere to a "weak" moral philosophical worldview - i.e. one in which moral principles are only mental constructs and have no real existence, I can still urge you to consider that the actions people are led to carry out in pursuit of quests violate, at the very least, the Platinum Rule: "don't do unto others as you wouldn't have done unto you." It is a very weak moral rule, one that implies no agency, but which is essential to life in society.)
Or consider Sungchul, he was a bit of a fair weather friend prior to becoming a Dicer, but there was no indication he was anything other than a nice kid until he got his A Rank quest. X actively fed the worse aspects of his personality (which everyone has) until they overrode everything else and became his defining aspects. In the end, he tried to kill Dongtae.
Eunju alone has realised that, and she said it: "in the end, the only ones changed will be yourselves". Which is exactly what is happening.
I don't know, I think Dongtae proves that wrong. Sure, he must have had bad thoughts, but just about all of his quests are positive. Like you said, I think X is an enabler, but to blame them as the villain, I think, is clearly passing the blame for their own mistakes. 'It's not my fault I hurt others, video games made me like this'. 'It's not my fault I killed someone in an accident, I was drunk.' If you think X is the worst kind of villain, you would have to think a bartender is worse than a drunk driver. You said it, "actions matter" and they consciously chose to do harm to others. " Or do you think that Miju, nasty as she is, would ever have tried to kill Sungchul if X hadn't empowered her to do so and egged her on with quests that reinforced her personal ambitions?"", yes, and she has demonstrated as much! If it wasn't from X, it would be something else Machiavellian in nature. I completely get the devil comparison, but he gave Adam and Eve knowledge, which apparently is the greatest sin in all of existence (which I find to be a joke). I think the Devil is really a villain because he challenged the throne, but that's not really pertinent to this discussion.
Actually, I think the bartender (or gun seller, for that matter) analogy is imperfect.
A fitting analogy for what X does is not giving people guns or selling them booze. For guns, the analogy would be giving them a gun and telling them to shoot someone in exchange for more ammo. For the bartender analogy, it would be "I'll give you booze for free if after drinking you go home driving a car". That's the kind of person X is. And yes, that person is worse than a drunken driver, in my opinion, especially if they do it to everyone. Of course, we must not forget that X offers much more than booze, and that causes more people to fall in temptation.
The problem are not the Dice. The problem are the quests, they are not neutral as a gun or a glass of wine, they have malice at their inception.
And that includes Dongtae. Even if he has no bad thoughts, and refrains from doing things that hurt other people in exchange for Dice, X can easily give him a quest that SEEMS innocent (sorry for the capitals, no italics in Blogger), but which X knows will cause harm even if Dongtae doesn't. So he can use Dicers as instruments to do evil even if they don't want to. An example is the prank he made Dongtae do by stealing Byungchul's maths answer sheets: it resulted in Byungchul being badly beaten.
As I said, I believe our decisions change us. Miju was different as a Dicer than she was before. She might have been Machiavellian, but most likely those worse aspects of her character wouldn't have become her defining aspects if it were not for Dice and the Quests. How many people do we know like her, and how many end up attempting murder?
I couldn't add that to the previous post due to lack of space, but my closing sentence was something like "The Dicers have responsibility for their choices to harm people, but that doesn't change the fact that X is trying - and succeeding - to bring out the worst of them, and for that he is the true villain of the story."
Actually, let me refine the bartender argument a little. As any analogy, it will be merely a representation of the real thing, but it will be good enough to illustrate my point.
I realised that when I told you about the "I'll give you booze for free if you drive a car afterwards", you would probably say that the bartender is definitely a nasty piece of work, but that the person who accepts such an outrageous proposal is worse.
Well, I'll tell you that X is a cleverer bartender than that… because he introduces a gradation to quests.
"I'll give you a shot of tequila if you slap the butt of random woman afterwards."
"You can drink a bottle of brandy if you break the window of an abandoned house."
"You can drink beer as much as you want this week in my bar if you pull a chair from behind an old lady who is about to sit on it."
"I'll send you a bottle of my best whiskey every day if you set fire to your neighbour's home while he is on holidays."
That's exactly what he did with Dongtae. First harmless quests, and then he asked him to tell a lie (and Dongtae did it, too). Only when Dongtae balked afterwards did X agree to only give him pranks.
You may say that no sensible person would accept those quests I suggested above. A daredevil might do the first two, but nearly everyone who is not a sociopath would draw the line at quest two.
Well, the problem is that X is a bartender who can tell who is an alcoholic.
As we see in Sungchul and other people, Dice are analogous to addiction drugs. It's the very essence of what Mooyoung tells Taebin: if you satisfy a desire, you will have other desires. Sure, there are exceptions like Dongtae and Taebin himself, but by casting a wide net, X can be confident that he will catch a lot of weak people who will get addicted to the power they can get from Dice. In other words, he is a predator of the weak. Does the fact that these people are weak exculpate X of his activities? Or does knowing they are weak make it even worse?
Do you agree that drug dealers are worse than consumers? If you do, we can stop here.
(About the Devil: I agree that the biblical story about knowledge as sin, at least superficially, is a bad joke, but the aspect of his behaviour I was thinking of is temptation. You know, targeting people's weaknesses to get them to act on their lowest desires. Giving them the little nudge without with they would never have fallen. Sweet-talking Eve and Adam into betraying god's trust, which is no different from betraying any friend's trust, god or not god.)
Taebin being gay would explain why he broke up with Eunju but it doesn't explain why he got with her in the first place or many of his actions regarding her. It will still feel like a cheap way to free her up.
Anyways, I'm not sure if X have a god complex or if he's just experimenting or enjoy watching the folly of human nature. Being the only voice of reason, Eunju would be the biggest threat to his "fun" but she's all but powerless. I wonder if this fact will eventually cause her to become a Dicer too.
Yeah, plot twist indeed, when I typed it I was like "Awwww, man, now everyone will forget about the moral dilemmas, the symbolism and whatnot and all the talk will be on whether Taebin is gay or X is a troll or both".
ReplyDeleteYup. But then again, the author could just be trolling us and Taebin does a shoujo thing and says that Mooyoung is his 'bestest friend' or something along those lines...
DeleteX has to bebeheaded funniest thing in this , God he's such a troll tho XD
DeleteD.!! probably that's why he hate him so much
DeleteBy the way, is Taebin narrating all of this to Dongtae? Can you imagine the face he made when Taebin told him the content of his A-Rank quest?
DeleteYou guys are thinking of it too much in the lines of mainstream media(mivoes, manga, books) that we consume. Maybe the author oof dice will just be radical and just deal with Taebin's feelings like...just feelings, and do not deal with the fact that they are directed against a man? I mean, it is 2014, we should really stop giving a shit about who likes what, unless it is important story-wise - which it is here, as Taebin is apparently in love with the main villain of the story....Ok, the second villain. X is definitely the main villain.
DeleteWe don't give a shit (at least I don't). However, the quest here was definitely meant to be taken as comedic by the readers. X IS a troll, after all. For me, I don't care if Taebin is bisexual, gay or straight. It is also a fact that Taebin did blush and was shocked at the quest. So the author introduced the innuendo, not we. The embarassment is there.
DeleteMay I also point out that Taebin cultivated a "straight-man" façade while at Dongtae's school. And the way he taunted Dongtae about "how far" he went with Eunju is the kind of joke more often (though of course not always) associated with "straight" behaviour.
Sure, the manhwaga can be radical (I wouldn't even call it radical) and deal with the situation naturally (as it is in real life), but the very fact that he used the situation to close a key flashback chapter and made it into a complete surprise to readers most certainly means the predictable reaction seen in these comments was expected on his part.
Actually, I don't see how this new complexity contributes to the main plot, if it is true that Taebin has romantic feelings for Mooyoung. So far, it seems gratuitous, as it certainly did not factor in Mooyoung's behaviour.
And incidentally, since Taebin did become an A-Ranker, we know the quest was fulfilled. So Taebin has already confessed his feelings. I dunno, the way they have seen interacting in the rooftop massacre flashback and the cat-and-mouse game in chapter 67 do not suggest (at least to me) a past romantic confession. But maybe this is yet to surface. I wouldn't know.
And let's be honest. Sure, it is 2014, but if the author made it into a cliffhanger revelation, he surely expects most people to use it as a discussion topic. Otherwise, it would be conveyed in a much more neutral context.
Wohoo~
ReplyDeleteSo what's Miju's ability? Teleportation? The only thing possible to catch him.
I went by elimination and I believe it is Cloaking (the reasoning is a bit long, but you can read about it at Mangahelpers, comment #111). I think the barrier is to prevent Sungchul from flying away. Miju is going to wait for him to run out of Dice points to keep floating and be forced to land.
DeleteA good possibility Splicer but we've yet to be told two small details. 1, the consumption rate of points while flying and 2, how long the barrier lasts for 4 dice points. If the usage rate is about the same I suppose it comes down to who currently has more dice points available. Plus there is the chance that a yet unknown a-ranker to see the barrier and come in to pick off the winner who will have depleted their dice during the fight...
DeleteRavepuppie
Gotta agree Cloaking has the highest probability. But other than Timestop, others have a possibility too, if she doesn't want to reveal her ability that soon and make some physical sparring first. TS on the other hand is good as soon as you use it.
DeleteAlso if she upgraded her Cloaking ability, she may get to control what she get's to cloak, including her weapon (blade). Did the first Cloaker get to cloak his clothes?
Clothes do get cloaked from the outset, but the things the Cloaker is holding don't. (Otherwise chapter 47 would have been even funnier.)
DeleteX is the ultimate troll.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I had lots of fun choosing the best fonts for Miju… that girl is scary! In the end I settled for Creeping Evil.ttf to use in her last scream!
ReplyDeleteAhaha, that's funny, X
ReplyDeleteI dont understand why people call x a villian or evil.. quest are sent based on your desires. X is just a middle man providing you with what you wants its easy to blame someone else but its truly you are your own villian, and whatever you consider evil is because your desires are evil..
ReplyDeleteHmmm, I disagree. Most people nurture, even if temporarily or in moments of rage, dark desires. Life in society is in part exercising self-restraint not to act on those desires in order to keep a modicum of harmony. The fact is that X picks those desires that would never leave the realm of the mind and turns them into quests that result in their being materialised. And that is the very definition of evil according to several philosophical systems: it's the conversion of harmful intent into harmful agency.
DeleteIt's not because the person wanted to kill their neighbour that the man who knew that and gave them a gun is less guilty. Actually, because they knew they are even worse. The name for them in legal terminology is "enabler".
Actually, desires are not even that well-formed within people's minds. To use the examples X gave to Mio: "I want to be stronger than that guy." "I want to be more popular than that girl". Instead of "attack them and beat them down", X could give virtuous quests like "work out three hours a day and I'll give you Dice" or "help your colleagues study or try to be friendlier" and the same results could be achieved. X actually said precisely that to Mio: "desires are only one ingredient in a quest". X is the one adding the other ingredients, and the recipe is quite foul, invariably. In other words, X deliberately chooses quests that will make people achieve their desires by way of harming each other. The quests are not neutral, they have intrinsic malice and aim at removing the moral and behavioural stoppers people normally have.
Your argument is tantamount to saying that people are guilty from nurturing dark wishes and agency makes them no worse. But actions matter, and while an intent is merely in the mind, there's always the chance that the person who harbours this intent will change their mind, see things differently and walk a more virtuous path. X messes with this and brings out the worst in people. The emphasis here is "bring out".
So he is a villain, in my opinion. The worst kind, actually, and a good metaphor for what several theological systems call the Devil. But one does not need to be religious (I am not) to agree that a middleman can do a lot of damage. Or do you think that Miju, nasty as she is, would ever have tried to kill Sungchul if X hadn't empowered her to do so and egged her on with quests that reinforced her personal ambitions?
The view you espouse is that people are not changing as Dicers. But people change all the time through life, and most of it as a consequence of their decisions. Each act we perform changes our mindset a little: if we decide to act on a desire, or to refrain from acting, our mind changes to justify our actions, and we become a little different from what we were prior to that decision. So a virtuous act makes our mind more virtuous, and a vicious act, more vicious.
(If you adhere to a "weak" moral philosophical worldview - i.e. one in which moral principles are only mental constructs and have no real existence, I can still urge you to consider that the actions people are led to carry out in pursuit of quests violate, at the very least, the Platinum Rule: "don't do unto others as you wouldn't have done unto you." It is a very weak moral rule, one that implies no agency, but which is essential to life in society.)
Or consider Sungchul, he was a bit of a fair weather friend prior to becoming a Dicer, but there was no indication he was anything other than a nice kid until he got his A Rank quest. X actively fed the worse aspects of his personality (which everyone has) until they overrode everything else and became his defining aspects. In the end, he tried to kill Dongtae.
Eunju alone has realised that, and she said it: "in the end, the only ones changed will be yourselves". Which is exactly what is happening.
I don't know, I think Dongtae proves that wrong. Sure, he must have had bad thoughts, but just about all of his quests are positive. Like you said, I think X is an enabler, but to blame them as the villain, I think, is clearly passing the blame for their own mistakes. 'It's not my fault I hurt others, video games made me like this'. 'It's not my fault I killed someone in an accident, I was drunk.' If you think X is the worst kind of villain, you would have to think a bartender is worse than a drunk driver.
DeleteYou said it, "actions matter" and they consciously chose to do harm to others. " Or do you think that Miju, nasty as she is, would ever have tried to kill Sungchul if X hadn't empowered her to do so and egged her on with quests that reinforced her personal ambitions?"", yes, and she has demonstrated as much! If it wasn't from X, it would be something else Machiavellian in nature.
I completely get the devil comparison, but he gave Adam and Eve knowledge, which apparently is the greatest sin in all of existence (which I find to be a joke). I think the Devil is really a villain because he challenged the throne, but that's not really pertinent to this discussion.
Actually, I think the bartender (or gun seller, for that matter) analogy is imperfect.
DeleteA fitting analogy for what X does is not giving people guns or selling them booze. For guns, the analogy would be giving them a gun and telling them to shoot someone in exchange for more ammo. For the bartender analogy, it would be "I'll give you booze for free if after drinking you go home driving a car". That's the kind of person X is. And yes, that person is worse than a drunken driver, in my opinion, especially if they do it to everyone. Of course, we must not forget that X offers much more than booze, and that causes more people to fall in temptation.
The problem are not the Dice. The problem are the quests, they are not neutral as a gun or a glass of wine, they have malice at their inception.
And that includes Dongtae. Even if he has no bad thoughts, and refrains from doing things that hurt other people in exchange for Dice, X can easily give him a quest that SEEMS innocent (sorry for the capitals, no italics in Blogger), but which X knows will cause harm even if Dongtae doesn't. So he can use Dicers as instruments to do evil even if they don't want to. An example is the prank he made Dongtae do by stealing Byungchul's maths answer sheets: it resulted in Byungchul being badly beaten.
As I said, I believe our decisions change us. Miju was different as a Dicer than she was before. She might have been Machiavellian, but most likely those worse aspects of her character wouldn't have become her defining aspects if it were not for Dice and the Quests. How many people do we know like her, and how many end up attempting murder?
I couldn't add that to the previous post due to lack of space, but my closing sentence was something like "The Dicers have responsibility for their choices to harm people, but that doesn't change the fact that X is trying - and succeeding - to bring out the worst of them, and for that he is the true villain of the story."
Actually, let me refine the bartender argument a little. As any analogy, it will be merely a representation of the real thing, but it will be good enough to illustrate my point.
DeleteI realised that when I told you about the "I'll give you booze for free if you drive a car afterwards", you would probably say that the bartender is definitely a nasty piece of work, but that the person who accepts such an outrageous proposal is worse.
Well, I'll tell you that X is a cleverer bartender than that… because he introduces a gradation to quests.
"I'll give you a shot of tequila if you slap the butt of random woman afterwards."
"You can drink a bottle of brandy if you break the window of an abandoned house."
"You can drink beer as much as you want this week in my bar if you pull a chair from behind an old lady who is about to sit on it."
"I'll send you a bottle of my best whiskey every day if you set fire to your neighbour's home while he is on holidays."
That's exactly what he did with Dongtae. First harmless quests, and then he asked him to tell a lie (and Dongtae did it, too). Only when Dongtae balked afterwards did X agree to only give him pranks.
You may say that no sensible person would accept those quests I suggested above. A daredevil might do the first two, but nearly everyone who is not a sociopath would draw the line at quest two.
Well, the problem is that X is a bartender who can tell who is an alcoholic.
As we see in Sungchul and other people, Dice are analogous to addiction drugs. It's the very essence of what Mooyoung tells Taebin: if you satisfy a desire, you will have other desires. Sure, there are exceptions like Dongtae and Taebin himself, but by casting a wide net, X can be confident that he will catch a lot of weak people who will get addicted to the power they can get from Dice. In other words, he is a predator of the weak. Does the fact that these people are weak exculpate X of his activities? Or does knowing they are weak make it even worse?
Do you agree that drug dealers are worse than consumers? If you do, we can stop here.
(About the Devil: I agree that the biblical story about knowledge as sin, at least superficially, is a bad joke, but the aspect of his behaviour I was thinking of is temptation. You know, targeting people's weaknesses to get them to act on their lowest desires. Giving them the little nudge without with they would never have fallen. Sweet-talking Eve and Adam into betraying god's trust, which is no different from betraying any friend's trust, god or not god.)
Chapter 73 has been uploaded to the reader, Jin will probably put it here soon.
ReplyDeleteTaebin being gay would explain why he broke up with Eunju but it doesn't explain why he got with her in the first place or many of his actions regarding her. It will still feel like a cheap way to free her up.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I'm not sure if X have a god complex or if he's just experimenting or enjoy watching the folly of human nature. Being the only voice of reason, Eunju would be the biggest threat to his "fun" but she's all but powerless. I wonder if this fact will eventually cause her to become a Dicer too.