Alrighttttt so Medieval Cop 10 Part 1 just dropped, I am high on giddiness and theorizing, it's time for a massive dump of my thoughts on whatever the hell happened.
HEAVY SPOILERS FOR ALL OF MEDIEVAL COP 10 PART 1, AS WELL AS SOME PREVIOUS EPISODES
Well, that was a bombshell and a
half! There’s certainly a lot to ruminate about.
Okay – first off, Ada was a treat! She
has something called the “Resonance,” which essentially makes her a lie
detector of fate, and she’s amusing in general, being the resident crazy lady
to Dregg’s straight man act. Ada was great! I loved the little montage of Dregg
and Ada just traveling around and bonding.
Now, a list of the reveals about
all of this.
Dr. Dregg’s world has been beset by
a pandemic. Tira is still looking for a boyfriend, but Polly is not married,
nor does he have children. The latter is apparently consistent across all
universes except for, uh, I’ll call him Headband Dregg, who is the Dregg we
all know from games 1-8. Headband Dregg’s world is also the only one in which
Cayla and Virole have kids. The other ones either have them split up, divorced,
or some other way that results in no Ina or Mina.
Critic Dregg’s Rightia is about to
be swallowed by a flood. King Frake is grieving over his wife and is
functionally useless, so Advisor Icelot has to step up to the plate and take
control of the Kingdom. In doing so, he decides that creating a cult around a
false angel is the way to unite people. I mean, religion is important to
culture and faith can be incredibly powerful, but somehow this just…sounds like
a dumb move. To give him credit, it works pretty well until Dregg starts to
disrupt things (as you do) and the angel backstabs Icelot. Hm. Sucks for him. We get several
things from this. First, apparently the world went through a bit where the flow
of souls gets disrupted, which drastically decreased the number of births.
Sound familiar? Yeah, Mental Dregg also notices that the event sounds
suspiciously similar to his world’s
predicament of no new life. (I assume this bit applies only to animals or humans.
The plants look fine to me, so….) You could argue that this event would apply
only to Critic Dregg’s world, but this is more of an alternate timeline
situation where all this Dreggs are branches of a shared history. Hence, I
inferred that the universe’s soul disruption event is something shared amongst
all the Dreggs’ worlds. The second thing that we note is that the Queen died.
She passed away 2 months in her pregnancy, and this is another trait shared
between most of the worlds, regardless of whether the incarnation of the queen
is female or male (in Dreggerina’s case, the king passed away two months in his
wife’s pregnancy. It’s still the same version as the queens in the other
worlds). This is the case in all the alternate timelines/universes except two:
Headband Dregg’s (where the queen gave birth to Sarah before she died) and Mental
Dregg’s (where the queen never got pregnant in the first place because of that “no
new births” thing). We learn that’s there’s a lot of Angels – enough to look
like a “white rain” when they first manifested on earth. One other detail that
I noticed during Critic Dregg’s segment was about the statue. Critic Dregg
refutes that the statue could not be of Arc, because the statue has black hair,
yellow eyes, and a fierce expression. Black hair, yellow eyes, fierce
expression. It sounds suspiciously like Ada, who checks off all but one of
those boxes, and the last one can be activated once she gets her game mode on.
And we know that Ada is connected to the angels – first, she houses Azure, the
Angel of Ambition, and the last part of the episode suggests…even more. I’ll
get to that later.
To summarize, the special things
that Headband Dregg’s universe has going for it is that 1. Cayla and Virole,
and Polly and wife, are respectively married and have children, and 2. The
incarnation of the queen successfully had a child.
Things that are consistent across all universes: the world
went through a time where soul recycling got disrupted, resulting in fewer
death, and that Arc chose Dregg to be her Soldier.
…let’s talk about Mental Dregg’s
universe. In Mathio’s place in the Calm Wing it is Ada. Ada has this “Resonance,”
which functions as a fate compass and guides her according to the universe’s
will. Okay. We find out that Scion at one point declared war on Rightia. Frake,
knowing that Rightia straight up wouldn’t stand a chance, surrenders, is
captured, and is scheduled to be executed. Bernard is more of a threat! He
kills his remaining brothers, for one, but personality-wise he’s still
pathetic. A super fun thing that got revealed was that Duke’s wife is his Boss’s
daughter. I demand more knowledge
about their relationship. It sounds so fun. The Death Games are still going,
and serve a dual purpose as a site for public executions. Wonderful. So Frake
escapes, and at the end of the episode we pan over to his wife the Queen, and
that’s were things get really interesting.
The
Queen is still alive in Mental Dregg’s universe, having never gotten pregnant
because of the “no new births” thing. Ada tracks her down, intending to kill
her – I presume this is because the Queen is
meant to be dead. That she is still alive is an anomaly, so I guess Ada
consulted her fate compass, got a pretty strong response, and went off to kill
her. The Queen knows she’s coming, and traps her in a police ambush. In
previous episodes, we’ve established Ada is extremely clever and deadly. The
Queen just outsmarted her. This is a big deal. Then, she introduces herself as
Pari Angelheart, an adopted daughter of the Angelheart family, Arc’s
stepsister. Then, she activates and weaponizes Ada’s Resonance against her,
indicating she already knows how the Resonance works. Queen Pari lauches into a
lore dump, telling us how the universe was betrayed and nearly destroyed by its
ally at one point, which we can infer is the “Great Soul Depression” that was
emphasized earlier in the episode. We know this is true, because it gives Ada a
massive headache. The universe, in response to this tragedy, abandoned its “Heart,”
who was the one to betray it in the first place. A few things: the Brain is
Death, and its job is to reap souls; the Soul is Life, who recycles the souls
into new bodies. But we don’t know what the Heart does, just that it got
abandoned at one point. The final reveal – Ada’s full name is Ada Heart, and
that “it’s time her to join her siblings. The resurrection of the universe
starts with her.” Oh dear.
Pari
Angelheart’s entire dialogue tells us something. I’m gonna pick out the parts I
find most interesting. First, the line “If a shepherd knows the wolf’s
weakness, then the shepherd’s ambition can overturn the wolf’s existence.” Previously,
Pari claimed the wolf’s weakness is “bait.” Yep, that worked. Ada got trapped.
But Pari knows how the Resonance affects Ada – by intentionally giving her
splitting headaches, Pari turns the Resonance from an advantage to a weakness.
And by exploiting that second weakness, Pari is able to subdue Ada. It is
implied that Pari can “make” Ada join her siblings, which could be interpreted
as a loss of existence if that happens. Yes, I‘m turning into my English
teacher; no, I regret nothing. But all that isn’t the most important bit about
that quote. It’s that Pari knows what the Shepherd has to do to subdue the
Wolf, and in this context, Pari is acting as the Shepherd.
Remember
in Wolf’s Bane 3, how Evelyn wrote letters to an anonymous Shepherd, warning
whoever it was about Ada and her rampant ambitions? I think she wrote to Queen
Pari – remember, Evelyn at one point was in Rightia. We don’t actually know
about where she and Ada was before Ada got dropped in Scion’s Graceheart
orphanage. And Pari herself has connections to Scion, since her hand in
marriage was fought over by the Emperor of Scion and the King of Rightia, which
was what caused the Emperor to hold a grudge towards King Frake in the first
place. For all we know, Pari was working with Scion to lock up Ada after the
massacre, which was something Evelyn advised so that Ada wouldn’t go nuts
again. Evelyn writes “By the time you receive this letter, you would probably
be dead.” And Evelyn’s correct, but not quite. She’s writing to Pari – in most realities,
Pari would already be dead – we’ve established that. But in Mental Dregg’s
universe, the letter did get to Pari, because that’s the only universe where
Pari survives. Pari knows the story of how the universe abandoned its “Heart.” A
hole where the heart should be, if you will. Pari was contacting Evelyn Hollowheart, the mother of Ada Heart.
Ada’s
probably an Ascended, like Amber. They have the same last name, they are both
hosts to a “4 guardians” angel (Amber for Aurum, and Ada for Azure), and both
can communicate with animals, though Ada’s choice in animals has considerably
more teeth. Ada’s meant to “join her siblings” which we can assume is the other
angels, and that “resurrection starts with her.” I previously thought the
Ascended were angel hosts that also had latent angel powers, but given recent
revelation, I think they’re closer to reincarnations of aspects of the
universe. Arc isn’t a true angel, neither is Death, nor who “Heart” is. Amber
Heart, we know, is derived from Arc, the “soul” of the universe. Ada Heart, I
think, is derived from whoever the “Heart of the Universe” is. And the abandonment
of the “Heart” is what caused this phenomenon in the first place. Ada is the
start of the Resurrection. We’re starting with the reincarnation of the abandoned
part of the universe. How ironic. I’d like to also to point at the statue for a
bit – the statue was first assumed to be of Arc, so I thought if there were
other statues they would be of the 4 angels that guard her. But I’m pretty sure
that if there were a set of statues, then they would be of the Brain, Soul, and
Heart of the universe – because the statue bears a striking resemblance to Ada.
Based on this tidbit, if Ada’s derived from the “Heart,” she’s a direct
incarnation, not a reincarnation like Amber is. Amber’s derived from Arc, yeah,
as the Angel of Hope. We don’t know what kind of angel Ada is. I don’t actually
think it’s ambition – in WB2, it’s directly said “Azure, Angel of Ambition.”
Amber is a reincarnation of Arc, and ends up looking completely different. We
see Arc transferred into Amber as a reincarnation, but we don’t know what
happened to the “Heart” after it was abandoned. Meanwhile, Ada looks exactly
like the statue of the “Heart.” She’s not just a reincarnation of the “Heart” –
she is the manifestation of it after it was abandoned by the universe.
Update: I'm a dumb dumb. Mcop 9-3 calls Amber the "Hope of the Heart." I guess the Heart of the Universe left, then popped back as the "Ascended" generation of angels. Or angels in general, since angels came down *after* the whole disaster souls whoopsie event.
I’m going to jump off of my “Pari is the Sheperd” thing for a bit. The order of events that is supposed to happen is as follows: Evelyn’s death, Massacre of Scion, Arc’s death, then years later Pari’s death.
Evelyn knows that Pari dies at some point, and she thinks it's soon, so she writes to Pari "oh by the time you get this letter you're probably dead" but Pari is still alive in all timelines at that point; Ada is also in Scion so Pari contacts the emperor and gets Ada locked up in the asylum.
Pari later dies because pregnancy and thus can't go "my name is Pari Angelheart, prepare to die" in the future like we see in Mental Dregg's verse. In Headband Dregg's verse, Ada gets released because of Duke and crew (note that by the time Ada is freed Draziel has come in and started controlling the emperor, weakening the emperor's power).
So...Draziel is only a thing in Headband verse's Dregg. Draziel came about by possessing the principal of the defense academy after meeting Dregg so Draziel doesn't exist in the other timelines, since Dregg never entered the defense academy and Dimensional Bustered Ziel like in MChr8-2. Draziel isn't there in most timelines: that's why Ada stayed in the asylum. There was no Draziel in the Scion govt, meaning the emperor keeps his cognitive faculties and keeps Ada locked up. Incidentally, with no Draziel, it would also explain why Rose is...still difficult to deal with, but wayyyy nicer. I should clarify something: when I say that Draziel never came about, I mean that Beelzebub never possessed Ziel and started to run around wreaking havoc. Beelzebub exists in the other timelines the same way Arc exists in the other timelines, but it’s only in the Headbandverse where Beelzebub is physically able to enact his plan.
So I think the things only for og dregg's verse is 1. Polly/Cayla are married to their respective spouses and have kids, 2. Pari Angelheart is dead, sarah exists, 3. Draziel exists? I guess?? The only problem with this is Dreggerina's verse: she also became a cop, but we don't know if she went through the same thing with her Ziel. If she did, then Draziel came up in her universe, but we don't have enough information.
Before I write down my final
inference, I think Pari’s name is interesting as well. In the beginning of
Medieval Angel, Amber gets a book titled “Swargiya Pari.” Annnnd the
supposed-to-be-dead Queen just also happens to be named Pari. The very
suspicious Queen with Angelheart connections and angel connections in general
has another connection to the book that gave Amber her Dimensional Debate
technique. Something to think about, is all.
The
last bit of Pari’s dialogue I want to look at is this line – “I was adopted
into a certain family, and I am the stepsister to their only living heir.” Pari
was adopted into the Angelheart family, as we can see from her name. At first I
thought she was the stepsister to Arc, because that’s the only other Angelheart
sister we know, and she also happens to be the heir. But Pari says “living
Angelheart heir.”
But Arc is dead. That’s why there’s no
new life being born, and that’s why Pari is still alive in the first place. There’s
another Angelheart sister out there.
…I’m so, so grateful if you actually made it through all that. I don’t know if any of these speculations are gonna be true, but if so….goddamn. I’m gonna feel like the smartest person in the world.
Your reward is a bonus funny scene doodle below
Email: jesfu919@gmail.com
I check email more often, or you can put it in the comments.
Another AngelHeart... Amber?
ReplyDelete