u/OtherAugray

Because I ended up getting three of them on level 2, each dropping an artifact.

I have avoided this sub before finishing the book,
so forgive me if I am the last person to notice...

But it seems clear to me that the authors are telling a fictionalized and mythologized retailing of the origins of the Jewish faith. Obviously, the first book had the same patterns of captivity and deportation, but after reading that book, I just saw it as a motif. But once the second book introduced the idea of that deported and captive people writing and collecting their own mythology as a form of resistance, the parallels just became too strong to ignore.

The Jewish faith and scriptures have their origin in the sack of Jerusalem, and captivity of all the leaders and intellectuals of Jerusalem's civilization (around 4,000 people- the same as deported from Ajin) to Babylon, a multicultural empire filled with the intelligencia and leaders of other conquered peoples. In that captivity, the Jewish deportees form an identity around the stories of their lost civilization, purportedly
becoming some of the most effective agents of their captors, while also establishing their unique identity and codifying the books and stories of their religion and identity.

This religous movement would eventually become
Judaism and Christianity, a destabilizing movement for empires of all kinds.

This is like Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series, but retelling the Jewish scriptures in sci-fi instead of the Mormon scriptures.

One thing I have been thinking about lately is how differently the Empire portrayed in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back is. This has very good in-universe reasons to be: The Empire basically collapsed as an institution after the destruction of the Death Star, and was basically run as a rogue military until the end of the Civil War. The Emperor's death halfway through that process cemented the end.

Because of how much we rely on ESB to inform our storytelling, however, later works have flubbed the nuance a little bit.

In A New Hope, the Empire has overt and covert elements of oppression. Darth Vader tries to cover up the seizure of Tantive IV. The Stormtroopers on Tatooine invest significant time in disguising their attack on some Jawas as a Sandpeople raid. The Moff Council is initially worried that the Senate will not allow them to proceed.

The Empire, pre-Yavin, is an institution that cares about it's public image, even on Tatooine. It is an institution where people can get in trouble for killing civilians. It is an institution that has to attempt to conceal it's evils or paint them as rogue actors.

Of all media, of course, Andor gets closest to exploring this correctly, but I think it could be argued that the majority of pre-Yavin depictions of the Empire depict them with anachronistically post-Yavin behavior and priorities.

I beat the game with Warrior, then with Mage. Both weren't too bad. But now I can barely even get out of the sewers with Huntress. Is she just significantly more challenging than warrior and mage, or am I missing something?