It’s Almost Karu’s Birthday + Rule of Contrary
On the 3rd of March, Karu will have his birthday. For this, a new issue of Starlight Radio will be released ahead of it. It’s the closest I can get in a few years.
As such, we’ll talk here about one way we can read hanaak: the Rule of Contrary.
There are two or more layers to the Rule of Contrary. One layer parses positive to negative, which is simple RoC, and another layer parses the direct meaning of an object, which is complex RoC.
Simple
Simple RoC takes a character and flips them into a ‘negative’ of that character. Good guys are bad, bad guys are good. I must warn that it’s rather unsettling. Let’s use Karu as an example.
What we’re going to do is analyse his personality and then flip it. Whatever doesn’t exist on him will not be - only existing traits will be flipped.
He’s the eldest character - youth
He’s named after a moon - the sun
He drinks tea - energy (tea, opposite of coffee)
He’s goth - shadow (goths wear white on Kulieva. We have to stay contextual to the worldbuilding)
He’s a musician - engineer (I’d say doctor, but there is such thing as musical doctorates)
And when we add them all together we get… Oh. Dear G-d, no. Maybe you don’t see what I see. I should have expected that… but this is actually a good thing.
Now that we’ve deduced the anti-Karu, we see what Karu, directly, stands for - he’s welcoming of immigrants, and is made to fight against racism (we’ll see more of that on a later date). This anti-character is what the direct character should be fighting against. So, we write our rules depending on the anti-character. If we throw our character into anti-character behaviour, we have broken fundamental rules.
Complex
Complex RoC is a little friendlier, but like the name implies, it’s harder to work around. We have already done half the work above, but now we have to flip the negative back to positive. This might sound like direct meaning would be better to apply, but trust me - you could apply a direct meaning to tea and be wrong. What we’re looking for is a meaning whittled down from the object.
Let’s flip the above:
Youth - wisdom
The sun - life
Energy - calm
Shadow - insight
Engineer - creative
What can we deduce from here? It’s like he’s a fatherly etheric being using his power of creativity to bring peace. There can be more to his meaning, but we haven’t reached that yet, have we.
Try it with your favourite character. If there’s not enough to deduce, then that character is underwritten (sorry if they were your fave ;( ).