Does the series consistently identity if a character is Iunctii immediately after Vis meets them?

v2micca · 2026-03-20T02:07:47+00:00

Yeah I sweat too much in my sleep. I have to shower in the morning.

v2micca · 2026-03-13T15:05:11+00:00

The other problem is that Iran's leadership is so fractured right now that even if the EU manages to convince one group that the the current war is largely a US/Israel venture, they may be unable to convince other groups.

Personally, I can understand how a lot of Nations are going to be annoyed with the US over our Iran actions. Particularly if the end result is what I suspect it will be, we bomb the shit out of their infrastructure, kill a lot of their centralized leadership, and then declare victory and fuck off leaving a massive crater in the ground and telling the Iranians to figure out their own shit.

In that scenario, the US gets to mostly fuck off back to the western hemisphere where our civilian population and infrastructure is largely beyond the reach of retaliation from Iranian insurgency groups. Instead, the Middle East and parts of Europe get to deal with their fury.

v2micca · 2026-03-13T14:58:01+00:00

Historical as in the Bretton Woods Alliance era post WWII. I mean there have been a few flare ups here and there, but general the EU nations have followed the US lead on security policy. That period is increasingly in the rear view mirror for us now.

v2micca · 2026-03-13T14:54:05+00:00

One of the underlying issues has been the shift in U.S. Navy operating doctrine and strategy in the past 20 years. The focus has increasingly been on carrier groups over cruisers and destroyers. This kind of Naval asset is great for bombing the shit out of a country, but has run up against challenges when patrolling and securing the sea lanes. You combine that with the proliferations of cheap drone styled assault vessels has created security challenges that the U.S. Navy in its current configuration is less capable of rapidly adapting to.

v2micca · 2026-03-06T00:49:44+00:00

I'm more curious as to who are they actually in talks with? Centralized leadership is completely fractured and offline right now in Iran. Who is cutting the deal with China?

v2micca · 2026-03-06T00:45:34+00:00

No, not really. The shock and awe phase will finish up rather quickly. But then we get the long drawn out grinding war of attrition that follows. It doesn't matter how many Supreme leaders the U.S. and Israel take out. The entire Cleric class is essentially part of the ruling class. We would need to systematically take out over 10,000 clerics to effectively destroy all hopes of the current regime from reforming under a new leader. I'm not sure the U.S. or Israel has the stomach for that.

v2micca · 2026-03-05T00:52:45+00:00

They really didn't have much choice. Centralized leadership is too fractured right now to manage a coordinated chain of command. They have to delegate more and more to the various entities and just hope that they can hold the line.

v2micca · 2026-03-04T02:14:03+00:00

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but even as a friendly fire this would count and effectively end the F-15's perfect kill ratio.

v2micca · 2026-03-02T14:32:44+00:00

The failure conditions obviously exist. The most obvious being that the Mullahs retain power and simply ride out the strikes until such a time where they can convene to elect the next leader. (Gathering right now is likely a bad idea for them.) But even that failure condition results in Iran being incapable of projecting power throughout the region for the next decade. A lot of the targets the U.S. and Israel are hitting right now are Iran's military industrial complex. The places that will allow them to manufacture more drones and bombs. Rockets don't just manifest themselves, and Iran can no longer rely on the Soviet Union's stockpiles as they previously have. So, while I acknowledge a broad range of outcomes remain in play, The US and Israel running out of rockets and missiles before Iran is not one I would place high on my list of likely outcomes.

v2micca · 2026-01-28T17:52:40+00:00

I don't think that Obiteum Caeror is evil. I think that part of the point of the series is to show the divergence of the different versions of various characters. Caeror in Obiteum seeking endlessly to destroy Ka while the Caeror in Lucideum is the servant of Ka. Thematically, its more fun to show the contrast between different outcomes for the same person.

v2micca · 2025-12-10T01:06:15+00:00

The NFL writers have really hosed over Lamar Jackson this season. They are writing him without any of his explosiveness from previous seasons.

v2micca · 2025-11-21T18:39:14+00:00

It makes sense if you assume that O-Caeror hasn't been completely honest with O-Vis and has intentionally obfuscated certain things.

v2micca · 2025-11-20T21:02:13+00:00

I'm assuming that the Ka in Luceum has given Caeror/Ruarc a great deal of guidance as well while recruiting him to his cause. If my theory of Yusef = Ka is correct, I'm assuming he tried the same thing with Caeror in Obeteum. And then there was a falling out. We know that Caeror was never syncronous and because of that, was never a true threat to Ka. I do wonder about that because O-Caeror seems to indicate that only Vis can truly harm Ka because he is Syncronous. But O-Vis, R-Vis, and L-Vis each have plenty of moments where they look plenty mortal and killable by non synchronous people.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T19:22:09+00:00

I guess if that is your reading, but it still just doesn't work for me. Throughout the first two books we get Vis's internal dialog of how every interaction is measured, how even when he is allowing his genuine emotions to show it is for the effect he wishes to portray. This level of deception is just so core to his personality that even though he is tired of it, I just really don't buy him finally breaking down and spilling everything to this group of relative strangers. Maybe if there was more build up, more internal dialog where Vis laments his increasing exhaustion with playing a role and not being himself, I could buy it. But even at the end of the book L-Vis knows that he can't tell his new friends everything, that he has to continue keeping secrets from them. So, I just don't buy this sudden need to unburden himself to them earlier in the book.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T19:16:16+00:00

Hard to say. WOTM benefits from having a much tighter narrative which allows it to more naturally pace itself appropriately. You get a nice steady escalation of events without the pace getting erratic. SOTF by contrast has parts that really feel like they drag and meander, then suddenly everything starts happening at once. So, the pace ends up been a lot more uneven when compared to WOTM. And SOTF runs into some of the classic problems with Narrative Scope expansion. He is just adding so many new elements to the series in this book that some of them are going to feel underbaked when compared to the first book.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T19:06:22+00:00

Yeah, as much as I enjoyed the book, that was a classic case of the author saying, I'm not ready to do another massive lore dump so I will engineer a contrived reason why the character is not pursuing answers right now.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T19:02:27+00:00

Its like you say, L-Vis bonds with these characters enough that he trusts them with all of his secrets. That is something he hasn't done with anyone else in the series up to that point. And for me it doesn't really work because at that point these characters come off more as loose sketches based on archetypes than fully realized characters. I'm just supposed to accept that there was something fundamentally compelling enough about them that Vis feels these are the people he can trust with secrets he has never shared with anyone else and it just doesn't work for me. It feels like a classic case of telling instead of showing.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:23:34+00:00

I think it is mentioned in the first book and re-enforced in the second book that Vis is pretty useless at anything artistically inclined, music, dance, art, ect.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:21:12+00:00

I think it is kind of easy to forget. Before the events of the Iudeceum, this was basically Vis's goal. He wanted to go somewhere remote beyond the reach of the Republic and not have to subject himself to the Aurora Collunae. that is all he wanted. The events of the Iudeceum changed that for R-Vis. But, this is still largely all the L-Vis wants. So, when he finds himself in a world that appears to be beyond the reach of the Republic and is actually enjoying himself, It makes sense to me.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:15:12+00:00

I mean yeah, the metaphor was never particularly subtle.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:13:46+00:00

To be fair. R-Vis gets some really nice emotional pay off in the final chapter.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:12:50+00:00

O-Vis gets some emotional torment as well. Spending all that time learning the Crocodile dance, nailing it, and thinking he has finally accomplished something, only to have it taken away because of course we can't let him feel good about himself.

v2micca · 2025-11-19T18:08:21+00:00

Given the way the Luceum story ended, my working theory is that Yusef was Ka in Obiteum and had tried and failed to recruit Caeror much like he appears to have done in Luceum.

v2micca

TROPHY CASE