Old habits die hard.
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Old habits die hard.
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Is she a healer?
In page “healer” FERADIN take the arrow out of ATEDAYIS eye, and our author’s comment is “One guess what Feradin’s job was before the city got bubbled.”
Then our author is fond of sligthly understated or flippant comments, like here “Old habits die hard.”, as if it were a mere matter of habit.
But (I guess intentionally) he is telling a much bigger story about humanity, identity, freedom, memories: FERADIN obviously was a mindless demon imprinted in the well of memories with the “skills” of a woman doctor, so she has the *skill* to help Baradei, but the point here is that like with TORIS, ATEDAYIS, she also has the compassion to motivate her to use those skills to help both fellow demons and humans.
The story of Noridun is that demons don’t acquire just memories, they are not just tools, as the Notidi thought or wanted to think: when they acquire human memories they develop a sense of right and wrong, they acquire emotions, they understand that they are enslaved and could be free. And that is the immense paradox of the story of Noridun: that precisely by giving demons names and memories the old Noridi also gave them enough identity and personality to resent and fight back against that enslavement. Now a hundred years later both some demons and some Noridi have found ways to treat each other as people.
Of anything the worse people are the demons like CANATOPIS and ATEDAYIS that still hate the descendants of the Noridi who enslaved them (and not that cruelly) even if they personally have done nothing to harm them. And they still steal their names and memories, reducing them to blanks, which is in some way worse than the slavery that the Noridi inflicted on them.
I’m half-guessing here… but was she the “Traitor” and Toris is simply the one that’s been blamed by the other demons this whole time?
My current guess is that TORIS a few pages ago truthfully confessed that he was the “traitor”. In the recent “entrance” page however FERADIN was on the human side behind the human soldiers, not attacking them.
I suspect that some demons, like TORIS and FERADIN, just wanted to be free, more than take revenge on all the humans.
The question however is how the demons became free… In page http://overthewallcomic.com/otw/2012-11-21/ MOGIS (original name CANATOPIS) claims that the Noridi priests gave the demons too many names, and “we made ourselves free”, but in the this storyline it looks like that “demon freedom day” happened all at once, not gradually. Maybe it was TORIS who triggered the realization of freedom by demons, or maybe it was FERADIN, and it backfired. I say TORIS because he had the memories of Roris who knew all the priestly scrolls, and in page “memories-2” Koris says that preserving certain memories is too dangerous, and FERADIN because she has the memories of a medic and probably of the priestly caste and compassionate.
I’ll just note that the online version changed a lot when I printed it (more than I remembered, honestly) — this bit about the demons being given more names was changed in the final book (I think I had a different plan for how the demons worked back in 2012).
Although I just flipped through the printed Over the Wall and noticed another inconstancy about Mogis, so, uh. I suppose when you work on a thing for this many years a few plot holes happen :P.
Also in that page “healer” ATEDAYIS accuses FERADIN to be as bad as the traitor when she says of the humans “just looking for what they’ve lost. Not so different from…” implying that the demons also lost something. But what? The memory-imprinting lost them their mindlessness, is that something so bad? Then it lost them also their freedom, but they regained it, and they seem immortal (except when “killed”).
I still believe there is more to it than them being “mindless” beasts in their natural unaffected form.
I suspect it has to do with them existing in the spiritual realm naturally, and once they get affected by human memories, they end up pulled into the physical realm. Thus “trappped” as they seem to refer to in various places.
Perhaps the demon vanishing got whatever it needed so it could cross into the spiritual realm and fulfill whatever duty it needed.
How the demons function sans human consciousness, I hope we see more as the series play out.
There is an interesting details about Baradei: the soldier-demon had merely *started* getting his name and memories, and in any case “vanished” (page “victory”) when Kohjen killed him. Perhaps returned to the demon realm. Shouldn’t then the name and memories have reverted to Baradei?
BTW that everybody is startled that a demon vanishes when “killed” is very strange: obviously the Noridi soldiers fought demons when they rebelled, and perhaps Noridi who visited the city afterwards were also armed, so it should be knowns that demons can be “killed” and they vanish.
Either that or just released into the spiritual realm. In the spirit realm they likely don’t have a physical form, so appear “mindless”.