Re: bienavota discussion thread - Pan

2024/12/06 (Fri) 11:15:41

Good to see bien's blog got uploaded I need to reread it again bien's my favorite character

Re: bienavota discussion thread - gui

2024/12/04 (Wed) 13:46:29

i like how bien draws himself as just a red silhoutte. maybe media looking like a black box and the blocks bien sees when reading research is related

Re: bienavota discussion thread - kii URL

2024/12/04 (Wed) 10:15:15

i had to convert the pic (why does breaadavota use WEBP PICS??????) but i also noticed that biens drawings of media look like black blocks but they have the eye of time in them if u look at the pic in a new tab or dl the pic

Re: bienavota discussion thread - kii

2024/12/04 (Wed) 10:07:03

wanted 2 share this here on breadavota.cafe the new way to find biens blog is typing CHANGE THE WORLD (caps lock) in the code input its the code sar tells you in i1-5rd if u read all the books on his shelf

Re: bienavota discussion thread - gui

2024/06/27 (Thu) 20:03:13

finally speedran through everything, don't really see every entry in bien's blog worth commenting on so i'm just going to summarize the most important lore, loosely categorized

THE WAR

the wars are held in the valley of the dead but they're contained in something like a magical simulation? and that's why even though scarecrow lives there they can't find bien. the war is structured like a game where they have different "rounds" with different themes

it's implied that the other soldiers bullied bien, and idk if this is the intended reading but what i got from it is that they bullied him for not being subtle about his incest thing with scarecrow. it doesn't look like bien really knows what "incest" is so he probably didn't understand that people who do would think he's not fucking normal

the wars are held by another one of heaven's companies, filsid, which is probably under heaven's conglomerate. this is the third heavenly company introduced, after celes industries and soulfoods

the purpose of the wars is likely similar to celes (collecting souls) but bien also mentioned that mass deaths "remind" reality of the existence of death and that this would help combat the undead phenomenon. at this point we don't actually have a real reason for why the undead exist (we know bien and ava raised the soldiers specifically but i think the undead existed even before then).

charlotte tells us her theory is that uncollected souls possess vessels but she hasn't actually proven that. it looks like filsid's theory is that reality "forgets" that people should die. these aren't really completely contradictory so it could be both at once though. anyway we also learned if bien kills somebody they stay dead so there's that.

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THE ANGELS

there's a minor character named aadesh (although bien doesn't call her that because he forgot her name but aadesh was already revealed a while back in one of rpp's drawings elsewhere) who recruited bien. surprisingly the angels don't seem to have a reaction to bien being a demon, in fact taking him with them to tea parties between rounds

so far it looks like the angels are consistently characterized as being callous and shallow and don't seem to care about the living as anything more than pawns to their greater job of soul collecting and creating new universes. charlotte has her moments of being shallow and hypocritical but this does contextualize that she at least TRIES to be nice.

the angels are once again shown with some advanced technology, although notably ava says that magic is a marginal thing and that angels and demons don't use magic because angels and demons deal with what is "real" and magic is "fake" (more on that under "magic")
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THE MARGINALS

bien talks about marginals who are less similar to the living than media. their physical forms aren't described in depth but it looks like not every marginal is humanoid and that they speak in gibberish. the story has hinted at that media's one of the few "coherent" marginals but this is the first time we've seen an example of the marginals besides the mains speak

besides that, when marginals go out in public their objects urge them to attack the living as "proof" of their love for their objects and i assume this is one of the reasons the marginals are said not to go out much

stuff about media specifically: we're shown a glimpse of his world with a few pictures, but the pictures seem to be bien's drawings so how accurate they are to the appearance is unsure. bien's kinda a shitty artist. we did learn that there are corpses in the seas of media's world and that media always hears them trying to reach the surface. so yeah it's been known that marginals are literally "alien computer ghost universes" but it's nice to see more onscreen stuff emphasizing the ghost part because the comic has been dwelling more on the computer part lately

we also learn that the "margins of reality" are where ALL minds go to when they're asleep, but that for the living because their minds are tethered to their souls/bodies this usually doesn't mean anything special. this is consistent with the lore for the annotations so far, with the marginals needing "tethers" otherwise they can get lost in the margins or their objects and the objects of other marginals meet in terrible ways. we already have heaven and hell and the story seems to be going in the direction of treating the margins as the equivalent of purgatory or limbo, which yeah i guess that's why the marginals are called ghosts

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THE DEMONS

bien being an artificial demon still makes it unsure how much we can generalize but if the voice of reality itself recognizes him as a demon i'm just going to assume he's close enough to the real thing until proven otherwise

the greatest reveal here is that demons don't usually use language, change or learn about anything because the moment they manifest in the universe they're supposed to blow it up. bon and bien are the exceptions because media "gave" them language. bien doesn't elaborate how media does but he makes the point of specifying media didn't teach them, he GAVE them language

connecting the dots from what we've seen so far:
- the marginals are minds/made of mindstuff
- margitech runs on "an inky substance" that is probably mindstuff (since ava's radio had a margibird in it)
- the marginals provide basic needs to maldevarans which probably includes food that, based on "like a duck" are marginalian objects
- bien becomes paranoid and delusional when he's "hungry" and sar feeds him food made with/by/of the margibirds. when he lived in exile he also ate food that was mailed to them once a month, and notably bien would eat but bon wouldn't (or not where bien could see at least)

"bien" himself might not actually think/speak at all, or at least not completely. there is a "mind" inside of him from the mindstuff that thinks "for" him, and this is why he complains so much about feeling like his words aren't his, why his interpretations of sensory information are so fucked up and why he sometimes speaks in a way similar to media while asking himself if that's really how he talks

i also think this parallels sar's statement in his entry about how performing magic isn't actually you yourself doing magic but having something else do the magic for you

ava points out that the "compulsion towards language" makes both bien and bon speak, and i wonder if that means that having marginal mindstuff (which is almost definitely media's) stuffed inside of them suppresses their powers

interestingly bien does biological functions like eat, sleep, get sick, throw up and even breathe but he himself doesn't know why he does these things despite being a demon and immortal

despite bon and bien looking like humans, bon says that demons don't actually look like humans, demons instead look like angels and that angels can look like humans. it's unknown what different forms angels can take since all the ones we've been shown are humanoid, but it's said that they don't "have" to look human

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MAGIC

magic relies on language. this isn't the first time it's been said but sar does clarify that this means to cast a magic spell you need to put the spell into language (singing, writing, talking, etc.) with the chosen format changing the "effect" of the spell

another thing i noticed is that marginals use "magical technology" and angel technology can counteract some forms of margitech (a previous example being anthony's notebooks being immune to the corruption that comes from living in the court, in bienavota the angels inject nanobots that neutralize the marginal's nanobots). idk how important this will be but it probably gives some hints on the limitations of magic

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ETC

bien dreams a lot with most of the dreams being daily life activities with either bon or jacques, but he does point out having one weird dream where he has a tea party with jacques and jacques tells him a story of some kind of AU bien getting harassed by the rest of demonkind to start the apocalypse already. bien in this story was OOC (more assertive and swearing) and bien himself was confused over it

jacques then shows him letters from living beings supposedly from all over the universe begging to be saved from the apocalypse, and at some point a human doll is suspended from the roof except jacques calls it a "god"

this is interestingly similar to a chapter from the main comic (from violence comes the birth of you) with bread (a human doll ) tied to the wire hanging from the ceiling and talking to jacques

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ANDREW HUSSIE META BULLSHIT

sar, ava and bien seem to be established as the fourth wall breakers of the story. sar has the most examples, being able to directly address the audience and occasionally writing in the footnotes where rpp's foonotes are. ava breaks the fourth wall less often but she can do so (she can recognize when the comic is "on hiatus" and in bien's blog at one point she comments when bien mixes up a homophone even though she wouldn't "hear" that)

the blog happens in the past since it's still set in bien's bunker before he goes to anselir but i think at the present point he has some slight fourth wall breaking powers already since ava taught him how to look at the breadavota blog itself to "see" the hiatus post

considering the whole "reality rewrite" plot, the connection between magic and language and the type of things ava and sar are trying to get bien to learn, i assume their tactic to defeat media is basically to get control of the literal story. lord english wishes he was this meta

Re: bienavota discussion thread - kii

2024/06/30 (Sun) 20:44:35

if i had a nickel each time media drowned somebody as a show of l*ve i have two nickels

Re: bienavota discussion thread - gui

2024/07/01 (Mon) 15:21:54

he's normal like that