Key Themes in the Bloodblade Fight Club Chronicles: (Patreon)

Bloodblade Fight Club was thought up during the COVID-19 crisis and the world-historical events that followed. Since 2020, trends in technology, surveillance, artificial intelligence have accelerated at an alarming rate, as has the expansion of oligarchic control, data amalgamation, the loss of citizen privacy and the homogenization of cultures and identities. If that seems dystopian, it's because it kind of is! I try my best to encapsulate that in the Bloodblade world and though the story is hyperbolic for the sake of entertainment, it's kind of where things are headed in multiple fronts: the blurring of national, cultural and individual identities in favor of a mass-consumer and mass-laborer, amorphous concept of the self and others, the complete loss of the private, inner world to phenomena like AI and social media, the expansion of state control as well as the subsumption of the state to transnational corporations, increasing governmental corruption and the undermining of sovereignty, and the erasure of truth in favor of metanarratives established by and disseminated by elites.

For those of you who have read the books or followed the lore in the codex, you've probably noticed each of the protagonists is fighting this in his or her own way. For example, Ming Hua's government is being sold by reformist-minded, corrupt oligarchs like Wei Chuan to AI corporations in order to enrich these corrupt officials and further their aims of dominating their internal enemies and control of their country's political processes and economies. This is something that is happening in real life in many countries; corrupt, "neoliberal" minded politicians and power brokers actively undermining the sovereignty of their countries by privatizing industries and selling off state functions to transnational corporations, incorporating AI and surveillance apparati from private corporations, and selling off bits and pieces of their national resources to investors and foreign governments. For Ming, who is aligned with the Maoist-JinPingist "new socialist" faction led by Feng Lai-Shen, what motivates her is exposing this corruption and stopping officials like Wei Chuan. Wei Chuan's actions can be explained by the concept of bureaucratic drift; as bureaucracies and organizations expand, the managerial class begins multiplying and their private interests- expanding their control, chiefly- takes the forefront and sidelines the goals of the organization or country as a whole. Here we see Wei selling the stability and sovereignty of China to overtake his rivals; though we can see the same thing happening in corporations or other organizations; a drift toward entropy as managers and bureaucrats find new angles to cause dissolution and chaos in an attempt to accrue more personal power for themselves.

Darian's struggle, too, is against the encroachment of technof-scism in Britain. In the story, the MI-6 is already infiltrated and Darian's mysterious involvement is shown to be through a network of rogue elements in the agency that are investigating the ideological aspect of technof-scism, in particular its growth through American channels under the control of Washington's power broker Ron Holmes. Holmes seeds this ideology (the ideologies of Yarvin and Land) throughout NATO countries in order to undermine their liberal democracies and pave the way for Brian Kahn's Tabantor to subvert them and assert control over them. This then binds these countries totally to the United States, and the U.S., Israel and Europe become one political bloc under the totalitarian control of Tabantor. This is kind of actually happening in our timeline- needless to say, Tabantor was inspired by companies like Palantir. Anti-democratic, illiberal ideologies like neoreaction manufacture consent against the social contract of political liberalism and democracy, paving the way for the "CEO-as-monarch" concept and creating public assent, or at least removing public resistance to, this transnational takeover. Darian represents a critical look at the ideological aspect of what is happening in our world today with technof-scism.

Rukhsana embodies the metaphysical and spiritual aspect of this struggle. Hailing from a vanquished empire that fell from the corruption of its nobles (symbolized spiritually by the Cabal/Ahriman's spreading of entropy), she is tasked by Ahura Mazda to fight this battle on a metaphysical level, to herald the arrival of the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian messiah). She represents Asha, or Truth in Zoroastrian metaphysics, and in a way her character embodies the resistance of Order and justice against the forces of entropy and decay. Likewise, Spektra's fight against the entropic Voidbringers, a nihilistic alien force that subsumes her planetary system, is a sci-fi retelling of the same themes of humanity and order holding out against dissolution. And on the flipside, the Cabal itself, modeled on Zoroastrian metaphysical concepts of Druj (the Lie) and Angra Mainyu, sees its holy duty as spreading and hastening entropy and chaos on Earth in order to subvert humanity and bring about the return of Lucifer. Other characters also fight this fight against entropy and corruption; the disgruntled policewoman Deringer happens upon the island after uncovering the chain of corruption in New York City, Harrison uncovers how this evil controlled him in his life and almost turned him into its agent, and Sandra explores the angle of revolutionary ideology in combatting this phenomenon.

More about this is written in Codex Satanica's first chapter. Oh, also! As the re-editing and publishing wraps up, I will begin writing Ascension to finish the saga. Once that's done, I'll be completing Codex Satanica for all who want to learn about and think about the real-world phenomena explored in Bloodblade, the philosophy behind it, and the psychology of each character.