13 thoughts on “Debunking the “Tragic Asshole”: Why JJCAT Only Proves Eirikrjs is Looking for Racism when there is None”

1. … don’t you think this borders on harassment? I actually think Eirikr, maybe unintentionally, comes off as a bit anti-Japanese in that article, but you really are just making yourself look That much worse here.

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   • I’m not his employer nor did I threaten him or expose his private information. I don’t care about his feelings or who he is. I care about what he’s been falsely saying. I don’t care if I look “worse” so long as people understand that the facts are on my side. And he doesn’t unintentionally come off as a racist, he is a racist and he makes it quite clear with his racist diatribes on his question and answer sessions. Know the difference between ignorance and deliberate racism. Every time he doesn’t understand something that Atlus did, he labels it as part of a jingoistic, xenophobic culture that he patronizes as inferior as if Japanese people are incapable of certain forms of cognitive thought. He doesn’t make any distinguishing remarks or caveats when he literally says that the entirety of Japanese people and culture are that way. That’s racism. That’s bigotry. Time to stop defending his White Man’s Burden 2.0.

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     • the salt in your body is off the limits

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       • Learn to accept criticism.

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2. Jeeze, calm down. Having gone back and looked over a lot of this, you clearly have issues with him, and I suspect a lot of it stems from the fact he appears to have decided to ignore you at some point. Even if I don’t agree with him, I can’t say I blame him. And I’m sorry, I don’t see you having any more factual basis to your arguments than him. You’re both nuts, he’s just friendlier than you, you always come across as hyper aggressive. Seriously, I should just stop reading you guys’ stuff and just enjoy what I enjoy quietly.

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   • Hyper-aggression? So you assumed the intent by patronizingly claiming any criticism is anger? That’s a personal attack and not a valid point of criticism. If you’re going to interpret any disagreement with your views as “angry” then you’re the one with the problems. I have issues with his racist beliefs that I will call out. If you’re going to change the subject to your personal feelings and ignore his blatant racism, then perhaps you need to go do some growing up.

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3. Oh GOD NO HE’S BACK
   The Megaten community is better off without you. Go crawl back under a rock and harass some muslims like the racist, classist Islamophobic ass you are and stay off reddit forever.

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   • Islam isn’t a race.

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4. I stumbled across this post not long before checking out the other post about Siliconera, and then moved on to reading this one and decided I should respond to this as well. Do excuse the timing but this took quite a bit of time for me to write. I’m familiar with Eirikr’s post on the JJCAT thematics and, whilst I definitely have issues with its argument, I did find that, upon reading it, it’s not completely difficult to see where Eirikr is coming from, especially given his command of academic mythological source material. Because I also feel that Eirikr takes leaps with his arguments, I understand where it might feel necessary to dispute some aspects of his argument, I myself even laugh at some of his conclusions, which I feel align too strongly towards liberalism (I even cringed at that meme about Japanese-Israeli cooperation, if only because I see nothing desirable about giving Netanyahu in real life, or YHVH in the games, what they desire). But from the start I felt baffled by the accusation of Eirkr as being a racist, which in some ways strikes me as hyperbolic and overly sensitive response. I understand that you are despised by some other MegaTen fans for various reasons related to your opinions, but since none of the comments here have seen fit to engage the arguments presented, I think I would like to give this post the time of day.

   Let’s start with the original premise you mentioned in the beginning:

   “Just because they’re utilizing JJCAT as an occult background doesn’t mean that they’re anti-Semitic at all. The SMTII version of Yahweh is the Old Testament one – which you yourself assert wasn’t involved with JJCAT or anti-semitic in anyway, but the SMT3 – IVA Yahweh is clearly derivative of, and quite explicitly, the New Testament version of Yahweh. The Christian-Islamic Yahweh of the Abrahamic faiths.”

   The main problem with this part is that, as Eirikr would repeatedly point out, Kazuma Kaneko is on record with his more questionable interpretations of JJCAT theory, as he said in an interview:

   “”If we were to follow the theory that the [Japanese] Imperial Family is part of the Hebrew lineage, then [Masakado] would also become the one who opposed the Jews. The imperfect hero, so to speak. It would be cool if that kind of man existed.”

   Now you do mention this towards the end of your post, but I find that you use Kaneko’s Japanese ethnicity to sideline the concern that, perhaps, he found the idea of a guy who “opposed the Jews” to be “cool”. I really like Kaneko, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this to be concerning. .The point about how Masakado, by the logic of JJCAT, would also have Jewish roots thus making his opposition to the Jews incongruous is a point that must reflect Kaneko’s lack of knowledge of the subject, which, if framed thatr way, would be acceptable to consider considering we know that it’s not quite as if he was a serious adherent of JJCAT and instead merely considers it a springboard for creative interpretation – I mean let’s face it, occult conspiracy theories are ripe for this sort of creative exploration, and that might just be because they’re absurd and fun, not to mention hilarious in some cases (I’ll be honest, I find the JJCAT idea to be funny). Regardless, the idea that someone can be “cool” because he took up arms against Jews as a race, which realistically is what Kaneko was implying in his own comment, has anti-semitic implications that are easy enough to establish, and this cannot be sidestepped simply because the person who says it happens not to be white. Otherwise we’re just engaging in a kind of wokescolding, and if you do not like the idea of Eirikr engaging in such behaviour, I would advise against engaging in it yourself.

   Then there is the point on Radiou siding with Yahweh which removes anti-semitic undertones. I don’t quite oppose this argument, but at the same time, if we accept YHVH as not only the Jewish God but also partially the Christian one, which would make sense considering the overtly Christian-esque faction and decidedly Christian angels using their Christian (not Hebraic) names (alongside angels that do use Hebriac names to be fair) take the side of this God. Beyond this, we are dealing with a selective reading of Eirikr’s section on Raidou, The rest of that section points out that the Kunitsukami talk not only against Yahweh but also “the Hebraic gods”, which does usually hint mostly at YHVH and his coteries if we consider the original plot point in Shin Megami Tensei II, but could easily apply to other gods of Semitic origin (such as Baal, El, Asherah, Dagon etc.), thus creating an ethnic rather than doctrinal basis for the Kunitsukami ire. Other than that, though, it is certainly one of the weaker of Eirikr’s points, as before the paragraph you cited he admits that no JJCAT is employed here.

   Next, let’s address the point on Mem Aleph. In Strange Journey, she represents Mother Earth as an abstract idea, moreso than an actual goddess, which to be honest does raise questions. I mean, why not use the Greek goddess Gaia, which is not only a universally familiar Mother Earth archetype but would also tie back into the Cult of Gaia from the other games – finally, we could see the Gaia that the Gaians are supposed to be venerating, right? But instead we have a being who is not even based on an extant goddess but instead is sort of an invention based on references from Jewish mysticism. It is a stretch for Eirikr to refer to Mem Aleph as the embodiment of JJCAT, but at the same it is not completely unfair on the basis that it finds its basis on etymological straws, like many other instances in the SMT-verse (such as Set being Satan based on the Set-Sat-Saton-Satan hypothesis).

   After this, we come to your statement about Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (or as I like to call it The Sequel No One Wanted), and specifically Mitra-Buddha and the Divine Powers. Mitra-Buddha/Mitra-Bosatsu is flagrantly an invention by Atlus’ part, of this there is no doubt. You attempt to link Mitra-Buddha with Maitreya by citing Theosophy concerning Maitreya Buddha. However no link with Mitra is established within the very passage you established, and Maitreya Buddha in Japanese, Miroku Bosatsu, still makes no reference to Mitra. The only connection to Maitreya and Mitra I have ever been able to find is some vague etymological connection about both of their names sounding similar to root words meaning “friendship”, but beyond that there is no mythological commonality between the two entities. Therefore, this really is just a case of exactly the kind of mythological free-wheeling Eirikr pointed out. The link to Theosophy would be fascinating in the case of the Divine Powers given that they along with “Dagda” seem to share a similar goal of eradicating the current universe, albeit with the aim of creating a new universe instead of replacing the universe with nothing as the White want to do. Though, I find Krishna’s aims to be more of a sinister reflection of the aims of baseline Hinduism, and perhaps Buddhism to a certain extent, and the link to Theosophy is not entirely necessary to establish so long as you know that Hinduism and Buddhism consider the world to be illusory and wicked and that the point of salvation is to escape it.

   To your comment about the National Defence Divinities plotline, personally I think it’s weird that IV:A retconned all of the National Defence Divinities from SMTIV because of the supposed nationalistic implications in that plot element, but they kept one of them (Tenkai) in almost exactly the same role as he had in the last game just to deal with the Tokugawa Mandala created by Maitreya. It is incongruous to me that Tenkai would return in that game, but not Koga Saburo, Michizane, Omoikane, Yamato Takeru, or Yaso-Magatsuhi, when he is just as much part of the National Defence Divinity grouping as the others. Not to mention, isn’t Masakado still considered a National Defence Divinity in the game’s universe? Skins explicitly refers to him as such. But he is not retconned from IV:A, because of course that would be impossible without restructuring the entire story-world of SMTIV, which IV:A is directly based on. But this itself means the National Defence Divinities are still part of the essential building blocks of IV:A’s world. In fact, one of them is revealed to be Take-Mikazuchi in a side-quest. So the idea that this was simply washed away is patent nonsense. But of course, this also means you can’t just deflect by referring to the existence of Call of Duty. One example does not make the other right, insofar as we consider either to be dubious.

   On YHVH, his depiction in IV:A is honestly in large part a resurrection of his characterization from SMTII but with some occasionally merciful phrases thrown in for measure. Ultimately, and this is something Eirikr doesn’t quite get, his Flanderization into some kind of chimeric demon monstrosity is merely the logical conclusion of YHVH’s existing character colliding with the kind of conventional JRPG plot tropes that IV:A wanted to incorporate within itself in order to be billed as a “number one rpg” (in other words, an RPG that would “sell”, meaning of course to deliberately chase after the mainline JRPG market). But whilst there isn’t really an anti-semitic backdrop to it all save for residual elements, I find the argument that “nobody talks about Jewish conspiracies” to be a bit naive. No one really talks about Satanism in the games, but SMTIV’s Chaos alignment characters didn’t need to recite one rote of The Satanic Bible for their outlook to sound very much like quintessential Satanic philosophy. I know this because I played it back in the day and it resonated with me at the time for pretty much exactly that reason. I could read between the lines in a way that I sense you might not be particularly good at doing, no offence.

   Your comment on how Eirikr treats Stephen is strange, considering that when I read his remarks on Stephen, I took them to be him mocking his role in SMTIV and IV:A. It is in fact a key problem with the Neutrality found in those games. In SMTIV, Stephen shows up out of nowhere when you get locked in the Neutral playthrough to tell you that the unnammed Goddess of Tokyo is to be revived in order to save mankind, with no given explanation as to why that is (at least the Law and Chaos paths actually make sense whether they’re right or wrong). In IV:A, Stephen randomly shows up at various points at the plot, doesn’t really tell you why he’s here, and then at the very end of either the Bonds or Anarchy routes he tells you to go kill YHVH for some reason (in Anarchy it’s because he wants to stop you from creating a new universe with yourself as its new God, but in Bonds you just up and decide to kill him for…no given reason other than I guess because Stephen says so). Eirikr isn’t saying Stephen is worthy of trust except through sarcasm, but then his post wasn’t about Stephen, now was it?

   With Baal and the Axiom, however, there isn’t that much to say other than with Nocturne’s appearance it really does depend on if you consider the Yosuga Reason to be valid (which, to be fair, you probably wouldn’t due to it being murderous Social Darwinism without the emphasis on freedom that’s traditionally attached to the Chaos alignment), and with the Axiom, it’s a concept that feels so sudden that it’s a bit of a waste. It’s not a bad concept, but it needs a lot more exposition than IV:A actually gives it.

   There are other problems towards what I would consider the appendix of this post. For instance, the concept of Satan as “the Arbiter” is not particularly emphasized within Christianity, and it is essentially an extension of the idea of Satan as a judge, which is an expression of his Judaic role as the prosecutor of mankind under God’s orders. Satan in Christianity is still an adversarial figure, but towards God rather than just mankind. Therefore your point on Satan is misplaced. With Yahweh in IV:A, the stuff about him taking after the New Testament God could also be said of the Bonds route, his dialogue in both the Bonds and Anarchy route is very similar, but altered slightly in each one. And like I said before, there isn’t a wild difference between YHVH here and YHVH in SMTIV:A other than through the Flanderized writing IV:A employs.

   Eirikr only mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion once, but for some reason you go on about comparing JJCAT to the Elders of Zion theory, mocking the idea of their moral equivalence. It’s not the same idea, and the scope is not the same, but there are similar motifs and implications: namely, the idea that Jews comprise the elites that lay at the center of society unseen by most people, manipulating it for their advantage to maintain their rule. In the case of JJCAT the starting premise is that Jews make up the imperial bloodline and thus comprise the true elite in Japanese society, thus what we think of as Japanese culture is in fact foreign Jewish culture. The idea was invented by Europeans but was taken up by some in Japan, which must seem strange considering that it must be universally understand in Japan that their cultural affectations are native to Japan, though they may sometimes overlap with other cultures. It does make you wonder, what is the basis for the spread of this idea? And is the idea really not in the same camp as other anti-semitic conspiracies once you get into the premise that if it is Jews that created a foreign culture over Japan, the question that follows is inevitably “for what purpose?”. And what indeed is the purpose?

   The last point I will address concerns the statement that Atlus explicitly states that none of their story depictions are meant to reference real people or events. This is just the same thing every corporation says of any medium when they want to depict a work of fiction that is set within the real world and touching on very real themes and places. It’s not to say that Atlus is actually doing a historical re-enactment of the destruction of Tokyo, but the mythological themes that they intend to deal with are all real, many of the ideas are ideas situated within the real world and do not extend solely from fantasy, they deal with the real mythological field of our species on top of being situated within a wall-to-wall real city. This cannot be extricated from the context of SMT because, although SMT is fiction, it is not “mere” fiction in this sense, becaue “mere” fiction is fiction in the sense of the pure indulgence of fictitious creation and fantasy. Whereas SMT is fiction that attempts to express the real, or at least insofar as its writers attempt to do so. Therefore I find the statement to be relatively meaningless, no different to any other corporate statement.

   There are decent enough points contained within your overall critique but all in all I find it to be a little oddly defensive. I mean you say that Eirikr is a racist who aims to denigrate the entire Japanese race, even though surely he’s only taking aim at a couple of Japanese writers, without wider commentary on Japanese society as a whole – after all, JJCAT in Japan is, insofar as it is sincerely believed, a fringe theory in Japanese society, and certainly very obscure to Western audiences. It doesn’t make sense, then, to assume that Eirikr is denigrating Japanese people as a race simply because he chooses to criticize a Japanese development team. I would think this is a kind of wokescolding, handwringing Westerners for criticizing non-whites, and I don’t think is a game worth playing. Beyond that, I’m bothered by how small in scope the critique is. There are several other points Eirikr makes that go untouched upon in this work: there’s the sun crow Yatagarasu being described as YHVH’s messenger despite that having nothing to do with Shinto myth, there’s the choice of Kagutsuchi being the Great Will avatar of Nocturne’s universe, there’s Kaneko’s own comment that he considers YHVH to be the source of all gods in all myths (which from even an outsider’s glance is very laughable in terms of the actual history of mythology), there’s the Tengu element which you touch upon but never really unpack, the point about Baal you’ve covered but at the same time you don’t really touch on its full content just the role of Baal Avatar in Nocturne in terms of antagonist or otherwise, there’s the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, Kagome Tower, and then of course there’s the entirety of Masakado’s role in SMTIV. As such as I find this critique, whatever my misgiving’s of Eirikr’s conclusions, to be somewhat shallow and ultimately incapable of addressing many of the key contentions.

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   • First, thank you for taking the time to comment and I really appreciate your thorough response and will do my best to respond to you. Now, I will speak bluntly because I find that to be a sign of respect for others and we should all be encouraged to speak our minds.

     Well, your response reads like a character assassination of Kazuma Kaneko and an overly defensive response to a person who can’t be bothered to defend himself in his own comments section when people call out his racism for what it is.

     “I stumbled across this post not long before checking out the other post about Siliconera, and then moved on to reading this one and decided I should respond to this as well. Do excuse the timing but this took quite a bit of time for me to write. I’m familiar with Eirikr’s post on the JJCAT thematics and, whilst I definitely have issues with its argument, I did find that, upon reading it, it’s not completely difficult to see where Eirikr is coming from, especially given his command of academic mythological source material. Because I also feel that Eirikr takes leaps with his arguments, I understand where it might feel necessary to dispute some aspects of his argument, I myself even laugh at some of his conclusions, which I feel align too strongly towards liberalism (I even cringed at that meme about Japanese-Israeli cooperation, if only because I see nothing desirable about giving Netanyahu in real life, or YHVH in the games, what they desire). But from the start I felt baffled by the accusation of Eirkr as being a racist, which in some ways strikes me as hyperbolic and overly sensitive response. I understand that you are despised by some other MegaTen fans for various reasons related to your opinions, but since none of the comments here have seen fit to engage the arguments presented, I think I would like to give this post the time of day.”

     He goes into history and barely lists any mythological sources. He has no command over academic mythological sources, he even references the racist nonsense of Wendy Doinger as a source for understanding Hinduism in his Q and A. Wendy Doinger’s books have been labeled a mockery and insult with no basis in understanding Hinduism by the majority of people in India who care about this subject. The current response by US Indology has been to ignore criticisms by ridiculing all of it as angry brown people or the “Hindutva” political agenda. Meanwhile, US Indology is ignoring historic and established events of thoroughgoing human genocide in Indian history by Islamic invaders upon Hindus. Events established and verified by historic research as far back as 1935 in US academia. So his use of sources are in grave question when he references a woman who is part of a group that denies genocide and uses no archaeological or historic research at all. I know because I read their methodology, they admit it is completely non-existent in their Oxford Handbook.

     His usage of mythology is also piss poor. He had all the facts available to him about the Tree of Death, but he was genuinely too stupid to understand that SMT Nocturne was referencing the Tree of Death. Not exactly much of an “expert” is he? He even tries to reference the Tree of Kabbalah rituals, which purport to summon angels and demons, as a deeply intense practice as if its somehow real and intellectual. I was too nice to say it, but what else can we call someone who really believes that there are secret practices that summon angels and demons in real life but completely out of their mind?

     “The main problem with this part is that, as Eirikr would repeatedly point out, Kazuma Kaneko is on record with his more questionable interpretations of JJCAT theory, as he said in an interview:”

     This interview had nothing to do with SMT3 Nocturne. You’re taking one comment out of context to label him an anti-Semite. An easy target because he’s an ethnic minority while Eirikjrs is “credible” because he’s a white man.

     “Now you do mention this towards the end of your post, but I find that you use Kaneko’s Japanese ethnicity to sideline the concern that, perhaps, he found the idea of a guy who “opposed the Jews” to be “cool”. I really like Kaneko, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this to be concerning. .The point about how Masakado, by the logic of JJCAT, would also have Jewish roots thus making his opposition to the Jews incongruous is a point that must reflect Kaneko’s lack of knowledge of the subject, which, if framed thatr way, would be acceptable to consider considering we know that it’s not quite as if he was a serious adherent of JJCAT and instead merely considers it a springboard for creative interpretation – I mean let’s face it, occult conspiracy theories are ripe for this sort of creative exploration, and that might just be because they’re absurd and fun, not to mention hilarious in some cases (I’ll be honest, I find the JJCAT idea to be funny). Regardless, the idea that someone can be “cool” because he took up arms against Jews as a race, which realistically is what Kaneko was implying in his own comment, has anti-semitic implications that are easy enough to establish, and this cannot be sidestepped simply because the person who says it happens not to be white. Otherwise we’re just engaging in a kind of wokescolding, and if you do not like the idea of Eirikr engaging in such behaviour, I would advise against engaging in it yourself.”

     1. Kaneko said the IMPERFECT HERO idea was cool. To say it was otherwise is actively looking to distort Kaneko’s comment to label him an anti-semite which I don’t find to be an authentic reading, but an attempt at racistly labeling Japanese people’s capability of thought as somehow inferior. No different than the racists in US Indology, no different than the racists in the so-called “social justice” who say certain ethnic backgrounds have no right to an opinion because of their skin tone. The idea that their ethnic background = inferior capabilities in thinking is racist. This is what Eirikrjs always does and now he’s actively distorting what Kaneko said and taking it out of context due to his own racist views against Japanese people. I fail to see how this sort of social justice is meaningfully different from White Nationalism.

     2. This deliberately taking one statement from an old interview entirely out of context to label Kazuma Kaneko, Atlus Japan, and Japan itself (Eirikrjs barely makes any distinctions on this point) as racist. It’s disgusting and indefensible. That is why I am calling out Eirikrjs on his racist beliefs about Japanese people because that’s all JJCAT really reveals.

     “Then there is the point on Radiou siding with Yahweh which removes anti-semitic undertones. I don’t quite oppose this argument, but at the same time, if we accept YHVH as not only the Jewish God but also partially the Christian one, which would make sense considering the overtly Christian-esque faction and decidedly Christian angels using their Christian (not Hebraic) names (alongside angels that do use Hebriac names to be fair) take the side of this God. Beyond this, we are dealing with a selective reading of Eirikr’s section on Raidou, The rest of that section points out that the Kunitsukami talk not only against Yahweh but also “the Hebraic gods”, which does usually hint mostly at YHVH and his coteries if we consider the original plot point in Shin Megami Tensei II, but could easily apply to other gods of Semitic origin (such as Baal, El, Asherah, Dagon etc.), thus creating an ethnic rather than doctrinal basis for the Kunitsukami ire. Other than that, though, it is certainly one of the weaker of Eirikr’s points, as before the paragraph you cited he admits that no JJCAT is employed here.”

     I.e. let’s take one comment completely out of context to label Japanese people as racist. That would be all that you would be doing with this since Asherah is Chaos-aligned in supportive of Mem Aleph.

     “Next, let’s address the point on Mem Aleph. In Strange Journey, she represents Mother Earth as an abstract idea, moreso than an actual goddess, which to be honest does raise questions. I mean, why not use the Greek goddess Gaia, which is not only a universally familiar Mother Earth archetype but would also tie back into the Cult of Gaia from the other games – finally, we could see the Gaia that the Gaians are supposed to be venerating, right? But instead we have a being who is not even based on an extant goddess but instead is sort of an invention based on references from Jewish mysticism. It is a stretch for Eirikr to refer to Mem Aleph as the embodiment of JJCAT, but at the same it is not completely unfair on the basis that it finds its basis on etymological straws, like many other instances in the SMT-verse (such as Set being Satan based on the Set-Sat-Saton-Satan hypothesis).”

     This is completely wrong. Mem Aleph is based upon Christian Kabbalah, not Jewish Kabbalah. Most of Atlus’s references, such as the Elohim prayer, SMT Nocturne’s Tree of Death, and even Mem Aleph are references to Christian Kabbalah. They aren’t Jewish in origin and the only time Jewish Kabbalah is used is when Christian Kabbalah proves unusable. I encourage you to read my refutation of Eirikrjs on Kabbalah references in SMT Nocturne.

     “After this, we come to your statement about Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (or as I like to call it The Sequel No One Wanted), and specifically Mitra-Buddha and the Divine Powers. Mitra-Buddha/Mitra-Bosatsu is flagrantly an invention by Atlus’ part, of this there is no doubt. You attempt to link Mitra-Buddha with Maitreya by citing Theosophy concerning Maitreya Buddha. However no link with Mitra is established within the very passage you established, and Maitreya Buddha in Japanese, Miroku Bosatsu, still makes no reference to Mitra. The only connection to Maitreya and Mitra I have ever been able to find is some vague etymological connection about both of their names sounding similar to root words meaning “friendship”, but beyond that there is no mythological commonality between the two entities. Therefore, this really is just a case of exactly the kind of mythological free-wheeling Eirikr pointed out.”

     You probably should have read my analysis on SMT4A before posting this:

     And goes on to say

     “Jesus taught through Mohammed; as Maitreya had taught through Him, so He taught through Mohammed. The Buddha taught through the Prince Gautama and Mithra, and Maitreya also taught through Krishna and Shankaracharya at previous times”. [16]

     Source: http://www.inplainsite.org/html/maitreya.html#BCM2

     Also, there general texts:

     https://books.google.com/books?id=Wb0M3ETo0l0C&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=maitreya+mithra+theosophany&source=bl&ots=sWyqrcNez3&sig=e5caLtB0OZtWTlAcfKevMJLIgfc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi017n5yPfWAhVB4SYKHZH7DF8Q6AEIYTAI#v=onepage&q=maitreya%20mithra%20theosophany&f=false

     It’s well-established from numerous accounts of the Theosophy belief system that they literally believed Mithras was Maitreya.

     If that isn’t enough, some denominations themselves share the idea that Mitra and Future Buddha could be connected. It’s a loose reading, to be sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitra

     Theosophy ran crazy with it and it does have tenuous religious connections between the Avestan and Dharmic faiths. So you’re completely mistaken on this point.

     “To your comment about the National Defence Divinities plotline, personally I think it’s weird that IV:A retconned all of the National Defence Divinities from SMTIV because of the supposed nationalistic implications in that plot element, but they kept one of them (Tenkai) in almost exactly the same role as he had in the last game just to deal with the Tokugawa Mandala created by Maitreya. It is incongruous to me that Tenkai would return in that game, but not Koga Saburo, Michizane, Omoikane, Yamato Takeru, or Yaso-Magatsuhi, when he is just as much part of the National Defence Divinity grouping as the others. Not to mention, isn’t Masakado still considered a National Defence Divinity in the game’s universe? Skins explicitly refers to him as such. But he is not retconned from IV:A, because of course that would be impossible without restructuring the entire story-world of SMTIV, which IV:A is directly based on. But this itself means the National Defence Divinities are still part of the essential building blocks of IV:A’s world. In fact, one of them is revealed to be Take-Mikazuchi in a side-quest. So the idea that this was simply washed away is patent nonsense. But of course, this also means you can’t just deflect by referring to the existence of Call of Duty. One example does not make the other right, insofar as we consider either to be dubious.”

     They didn’t retcon them. For it to be a retcon, we would have needed a background for their history in the first place. If anything, they were just expanded. I don’t understand how any retcons occurred when we didn’t know much about them before so I have no idea what you’re talking about here.

     “On YHVH, his depiction in IV:A is honestly in large part a resurrection of his characterization from SMTII but with some occasionally merciful phrases thrown in for measure. Ultimately, and this is something Eirikr doesn’t quite get, his Flanderization into some kind of chimeric demon monstrosity is merely the logical conclusion of YHVH’s existing character colliding with the kind of conventional JRPG plot tropes that IV:A wanted to incorporate within itself in order to be billed as a “number one rpg” (in other words, an RPG that would “sell”, meaning of course to deliberately chase after the mainline JRPG market). But whilst there isn’t really an anti-semitic backdrop to it all save for residual elements, I find the argument that “nobody talks about Jewish conspiracies” to be a bit naive. No one really talks about Satanism in the games, but SMTIV’s Chaos alignment characters didn’t need to recite one rote of The Satanic Bible for their outlook to sound very much like quintessential Satanic philosophy. I know this because I played it back in the day and it resonated with me at the time for pretty much exactly that reason. I could read between the lines in a way that I sense you might not be particularly good at doing, no offence.”

     This is completely wrong and there is no “residual anti-semtiism” at all. Funny how you say I can’t read between the lines, but you seem to be completely mistaken on this point since it’s actually a reference to Megami Tensei, Bonds is directly paying reference to Kyuukyu Megami Tensei II’s boss fight with YHVH asking Nanashi to sever ties or burn in hell: https://youtu.be/V27Wmd10Tso?t=546

     “Your comment on how Eirikr treats Stephen is strange, considering that when I read his remarks on Stephen, I took them to be him mocking his role in SMTIV and IV:A. It is in fact a key problem with the Neutrality found in those games. In SMTIV, Stephen shows up out of nowhere when you get locked in the Neutral playthrough to tell you that the unnammed Goddess of Tokyo is to be revived in order to save mankind, with no given explanation as to why that is (at least the Law and Chaos paths actually make sense whether they’re right or wrong). In IV:A, Stephen randomly shows up at various points at the plot, doesn’t really tell you why he’s here, and then at the very end of either the Bonds or Anarchy routes he tells you to go kill YHVH for some reason (in Anarchy it’s because he wants to stop you from creating a new universe with yourself as its new God, but in Bonds you just up and decide to kill him for…no given reason other than I guess because Stephen says so). Eirikr isn’t saying Stephen is worthy of trust except through sarcasm, but then his post wasn’t about Stephen, now was it?”

     Eirikrjs wasn’t even suggesting this at all. He treated Stephen’s addition as leading them to a generic goody-two-shoes ending. If that’s your view of things, then I’d say we should call it a difference of opinion since Eirikrjs poorly phrased and nonsensically sarcastic responses to his own jokes in his blog posts don’t do him any credit.

     “With Baal and the Axiom, however, there isn’t that much to say other than with Nocturne’s appearance it really does depend on if you consider the Yosuga Reason to be valid (which, to be fair, you probably wouldn’t due to it being murderous Social Darwinism without the emphasis on freedom that’s traditionally attached to the Chaos alignment), and with the Axiom, it’s a concept that feels so sudden that it’s a bit of a waste. It’s not a bad concept, but it needs a lot more exposition than IV:A actually gives it.”

     Actually, under Divine Command Theory, Yosuga is entirely valid. Kagutsuchi ordained that the Manikins didn’t matter (they die off if you pick any ending besides Demon and TDE) and the Manikins merely act as “trials” for the human characters to overcome to obtain Magatsuchi. So long as Kagutsuchi approves, Chiaki is entirely justified. It’s an interesting twist on the Law alignment since the motto for Law was Power without God is evil, so a Might Makes Right philosophy is justified so long as God approves.

     The Axiom was foreshadowed in IV. Talk to Mastema when you get the Neutral route.

     “There are other problems towards what I would consider the appendix of this post. For instance, the concept of Satan as “the Arbiter” is not particularly emphasized within Christianity, and it is essentially an extension of the idea of Satan as a judge, which is an expression of his Judaic role as the prosecutor of mankind under God’s orders. Satan in Christianity is still an adversarial figure, but towards God rather than just mankind. Therefore your point on Satan is misplaced. With Yahweh in IV:A, the stuff about him taking after the New Testament God could also be said of the Bonds route, his dialogue in both the Bonds and Anarchy route is very similar, but altered slightly in each one. And like I said before, there isn’t a wild difference between YHVH here and YHVH in SMTIV:A other than through the Flanderized writing IV:A employs.”

     Satan isn’t a demon in traditional Jewish teachings. Satan is just a term meaning adversary and not traditionally a demon. Even in the Book of Job, he’d be an angel and not a demon according to Jewish teachings, but even that isn’t really recognized. The Satan that is the Christian concept doesn’t exist in Judaism. Source: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/satan-the-adversary/

     “Eirikr only mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion once, but for some reason you go on about comparing JJCAT to the Elders of Zion theory, mocking the idea of their moral equivalence. It’s not the same idea, and the scope is not the same, but there are similar motifs and implications: namely, the idea that Jews comprise the elites that lay at the center of society unseen by most people, manipulating it for their advantage to maintain their rule. In the case of JJCAT the starting premise is that Jews make up the imperial bloodline and thus comprise the true elite in Japanese society, thus what we think of as Japanese culture is in fact foreign Jewish culture. The idea was invented by Europeans but was taken up by some in Japan, which must seem strange considering that it must be universally understand in Japan that their cultural affectations are native to Japan, though they may sometimes overlap with other cultures. It does make you wonder, what is the basis for the spread of this idea? And is the idea really not in the same camp as other anti-semitic conspiracies once you get into the premise that if it is Jews that created a foreign culture over Japan, the question that follows is inevitably “for what purpose?”. And what indeed is the purpose?”

     Yet more attempts to accuse Kazuma Kaneko of anti-semitism via wild speculation (which you clearly show in the latter half) while trying to defend Eirikrjs racist views. Your problem is that you assume the intent of Kaneko while trying to portray Eirikrjs, a man who literally believes Angels and Demons being summoned constitute an “intense” and intellectual subject matter, as somehow blameless.

     That is not the case here. Atlus Japan uses Chemtail, Marvel, and various other sources as inspiration. Having some background info be based on a crackpot conspiracy theory; which doesn’t emphasize Jewish people, Jewish origins, or even the Jewish faith at all; isn’t anti-Semitic. At no point are they blaming Jews for wild conspiracies, at no point are they labeling Jews as collectively evil, and at no point do they denigrate Jewish people in any way, shape, or form. If there is any anti-Semitism, I’d say look at the teachings of Jesus Christ, he was among the worst anti-Semites in history and a clear inspiration for the Nazis which is why Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf repeatedly. The anti-Semites cite John 8: 21-44 as their reasons because Jesus Christ really did preach anti-Semitism because he was a hateful man preaching hateful teachings against Jewish people.

     “The last point I will address concerns the statement that Atlus explicitly states that none of their story depictions are meant to reference real people or events. This is just the same thing every corporation says of any medium when they want to depict a work of fiction that is set within the real world and touching on very real themes and places. It’s not to say that Atlus is actually doing a historical re-enactment of the destruction of Tokyo, but the mythological themes that they intend to deal with are all real, many of the ideas are ideas situated within the real world and do not extend solely from fantasy, they deal with the real mythological field of our species on top of being situated within a wall-to-wall real city. This cannot be extricated from the context of SMT because, although SMT is fiction, it is not “mere” fiction in this sense, becaue “mere” fiction is fiction in the sense of the pure indulgence of fictitious creation and fantasy. Whereas SMT is fiction that attempts to express the real, or at least insofar as its writers attempt to do so. Therefore I find the statement to be relatively meaningless, no different to any other corporate statement.”

     Translation: Fiction isn’t fiction because I want to find a way for it to offend me.

     I have no idea what you mean by mythology that is real. If you mean the literary genre of realism whereby it goes into stories that have an impact in our current society, then that still doesn’t change the fact that it is fiction.

     “There are decent enough points contained within your overall critique but all in all I find it to be a little oddly defensive. I mean you say that Eirikr is a racist who aims to denigrate the entire Japanese race, even though surely he’s only taking aim at a couple of Japanese writers, without wider commentary on Japanese society as a whole – after all, JJCAT in Japan is, insofar as it is sincerely believed, a fringe theory in Japanese society, and certainly very obscure to Western audiences. It doesn’t make sense, then, to assume that Eirikr is denigrating Japanese people as a race simply because he chooses to criticize a Japanese development team. I would think this is a kind of wokescolding, handwringing Westerners for criticizing non-whites, and I don’t think is a game worth playing. Beyond that, I’m bothered by how small in scope the critique is. There are several other points Eirikr makes that go untouched upon in this work: there’s the sun crow Yatagarasu being described as YHVH’s messenger despite that having nothing to do with Shinto myth, there’s the choice of Kagutsuchi being the Great Will avatar of Nocturne’s universe, there’s Kaneko’s own comment that he considers YHVH to be the source of all gods in all myths (which from even an outsider’s glance is very laughable in terms of the actual history of mythology), there’s the Tengu element which you touch upon but never really unpack, the point about Baal you’ve covered but at the same time you don’t really touch on its full content just the role of Baal Avatar in Nocturne in terms of antagonist or otherwise, there’s the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, Kagome Tower, and then of course there’s the entirety of Masakado’s role in SMTIV. As such as I find this critique, whatever my misgiving’s of Eirikr’s conclusions, to be somewhat shallow and ultimately incapable of addressing many of the key contentions.”

     No, I covered all things that were relevant. He spent most of it going on very stupid jokes that had no factual points and nothing meaningful in them. I touched on all the points that I deemed significant after spending 4 hours reading the entire blog post. He didn’t say anything else that was worth commenting on and most of what you’re suggesting is purely his opinions and not about JJCAT. I did touch on the idea of YHVH being the source of all, which was clearly abandoned with the introduction of the Axiom in IVA and the World of Possibility in IV. If he somehow missed the obvious there, then it’s probably because I suspect that he never even played any of these games that he’s labeling to be anti-Semitic.

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     • Sweet mama this was long so let’s cut right to the chase with each point.

       Let me start here, because essentially everything else about the Kaneko matter can simply be addressed here for brevity.

       You say here: “Well, your response reads like a character assassination of Kazuma Kaneko and an overly defensive response to a person who can’t be bothered to defend himself in his own comments section when people call out his racism for what it is.”

       I ask: how can it be character assassination exactly? It is merely his own words, and we make a judgement upon them. A very careful one if I may add, on both mine and Eirikr’s part. You might indeed expect us to simply throw him out, but we do not, because we do understand the nature of his comments and we make our judgement accordingly. We may still defend Kaneko to some extent, we may still say that he was merely being creative, but that does not allow us to pretend that what he said was in fact something else, and we cannot dismiss this as “character assassination” as a result.

       Your claim that Eirikr does not use sources is, I’m sorry to say, a lie. And I know it’s a lie because his primary sources are very clearly listed and made ample reference to within the article itself, and that upon reading the article anyone can see the sources, examine their references and then examine the works independently. I know for a fact that you are capable of doing this too, because anyone else is, and if your issue is with his ostensible lack of scholarship, why not simply address the quality of the scholarship itself. And oh, before you respond, fallaciously labelling Wendy Doniger is a racist because she does subscribe to what is, I’ll say it, a blatantly ideological construction of Hinduism, does not qualify as an attempt to address the scholarship being addressed. There are sources listed in the article, and if you want to address their quality, you should address them directly in order to actually demonstrate the low quality of research you hold to be the case. The fact that you cannot do so, especially without immediately resorting to attacking his character, while playing the race card, says more about you than anyone else.

       I’m surprised a secularist such as yourself is not aware of the Hindutva phenomenon, first of all, and I do not believe it is something that should be dismissed if one is sincerely committed to said secularism. Whilst in power the BJP, the main political representative of the Hindutva movement (and also tied to a militant organization called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has set about altering Indian school textbooks for the purpose of erasing references to the Mughal era of Indian civilization on the grounds that the idea humiliates them, which is utter nationalist nonsense because it requires you to retcon the Taj Mahal, India’s most beloved architectural icon, as somehow a Hindu edifice when in fact it was created by a Mughal (and thereby Islamic) leader. On top of this several BJP leaders talk about exterminating or expunging religious or political opponents, such as Christians, Muslims, leftists and the like, and the founders of the Hindutva movement, Vinayak Damorder Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar both openly praised Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during their lives. Let me reproduce their most famous quotations on the matter below. First Savarkar:

       “Surely Hitler knows better than Pandit Nehru [the first prime minister of India] does what suits Germany best. The very fact that Germany or Italy has so wonderfully recovered and grown so powerful as never before at the touch of Nazi or Fascist magical wand is enough to prove that those political ‘isms’ were the most congenial tonics their health demanded.”

       And then Golwalkar:

       “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by. Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.”

       These are both praises of Nazism and fascism from two of the key figures of the Hindutva movement, and they cannot be categorized as anything other than xenophobic by any sane reading. That’s why many people who know about Hindutva have a problem with Hindutva, and look on with a sense of horror at its growth in India for the same reason they would be terrified of religious fundamentalism and xenophobic nationalism growing anywhere else in the world. Later on you attempt to cast my commentary on Kaneko as racist simply because of the fact of Kaneko being non-white, but the idea that non-whites are somehow incapable of xenophobic attitudes towards other races is simply laughable. Several black nationalists have traded in anti-semitic canards too, such as Louis Farrakhan and Marcus Garvey (the latter of whom actually claims to be the world’s first fascist), and some have even collaborated with white supremacists such as the American Nazi Party on the grounds that ethnic separatism is a shared goal for both movements. If your premise is that it is only white men that are capable of racism, but non-whites are not, then you are engaging in the same kind of wokescoldery that you would rightly condemn more progressive figures for, and I told you before, this is not the field you should be playing in.

       Your response to the interview quote is bizarre. First of all, at no point did either myself or Eirikr attribute the interview to Nocturne, In fact it is correctly attributed to the Digital Devil Apocalypse book which was published in 1999. You say the comment is out of context, but this requires substantiation in the form of you establishing what the correct context is. The interview he says it in is easily accessibly via Dijeh’s translations and you are more than welcome to peruse them yourself in order to establish what you think the true context is. But even more bizarre is your accusation that I am simply using Kaneko as an easy target on account of his ethnicity while blindly trusting Eirikr for the same reason. I do not happen to care about the ethnicity of either party, whereas you seem to place a particular emphasis on them in these arguments, even when no one brought it up.

       It is true that Kaneko referred to Masakado as the “imperfect hero”, but this in itself establishes an open-ended context that raises multiple questions. What is the imperfection? No doubt it this would be the idea of Masakado opposing the Jewish lineage of the imperial family, unless you could determine what else is the imperfect element. And why is this heroic? You say that Kaneko says “imperfect hero” as if this magically changes the context but in fact it is the very source of the questions Eirikr poses. It is not a distortion, unless you can somehow find a version of the Kaneko interview that does not have the exact words Kaneko said. But that does not stop you from equating Eirikr with white nationalists, which funny enough is exactly what you did for the Siliconera admins in a completely different context. Is everyone you dislike simply the moral equivalent of white nationalists? How is that any different from the “social justice” wokescolds you despise? It is a poor service to a man who you say cannot defend himself to commit the same errors that you accuse others of doing. You may indeed argue that Eirikr is indicting Kaneko and Atlus, but it does not seem sensible to me to say that he is indicting the entire society of Japan. That is a projection that you place upon him unfairly, for a reason that is not clear to me.

       I’ll elect to skip your commentary on the Raidou post since honestly it’s engaging in merely the same type of deflection that was demonstrated earlier, along with the response to the Mem Aleph point because it ultimately does not change the central point being made.

       I’m impressed that you go out of your way to give external citations for your response about Mitra-Buddha. Unfortunately, these sources still do not establish a credible link. Your Wikipedia link on Mitra, for instance, tells me nothing that I have not already established as far as etymological links are concerned, and within the same source there are reasonable objections listed to the idea of a mythological connection. In Peter C. Rogers’ book, Mithras is mentioned a few times, and in this capacity he is mentioned separately from Maitreya, and no effort is made to connect the two. Both Maitreya and Mithra are mentioned alongside Krishna, Jesus, and Gautama Buddha as savior figures, so by this logic why is there no Krishna-Buddha based upon Maitreya? In general I would also take this author with a robust sense of skepticism considering the nature of his books, which tend to be very New Agey. Your other source still doesn’t generate enough of a connection for a Mitra-Buddha extrapolation to be possible, as Maitreya is not really connected to Maitreya. Gautama Buddha is in the sense that he “taught through” Mithra, but Maitreya is taken as a separate entity teaching through different entities, namely Krishna and Shankaracharya. So this connection is hardly solid from a mythological perspective or even the Theosophical one.

       For the National Defense Divinities, it’s not like there’s that much info added in IV:A either. All we know now is that they’re the result of cruel experimentations done on humans, and the side-quests that establish this sort of leave it there other than also establishing that they went out of control by some means. This detail is not only absent in SMTIV, it’s also distinct from the previous SMTIV lore. Why would beings that could be explained as some sort of scientific experiment turn into a mound of rocks upon defeat and require spiritualistic mediums for the purpose of summoning them? In fact this mechanic is still referenced in IV:A via Tenkai, the only National Defence Divinity that returns in IV:A.

       I will skip your response on YHVH because to be honest it is rather pointless: I explicitly stated that there wasn’t residual anti-semitism, but you felt the need to respond as though I believed the opposite. This I believe gets you nowhere. I’ll also skip the Stephen response because all it comes down to is just “I don’t understand irony”. Your point about Satan later on is also not in conflict with what I do not already know, and is already implied by my argument. In no way is Satan referred to as a demon, and in fact him being on God’s orders in Judaism implies this to be the case.

       With regards to validity in relation to Yosuga, I meant ethically valid, not canonically valid. This seems to be a confusion. The main theme of the non-Reason endings, framed in this light, becomes the decision that God in his approval of patently unjust philosophies renders him ethically suspect, and if that means going against the Supreme Being then so be it. That’s a source of appeal for both the Neutral and Chaotic paths, both in Nocturne and more generally in the series.

       Your point on JJCAT begins with bizarre territory. You have so far failed to establish why Eirikr is racist, yet continued to assert this anyway. Kaneko is not even mentioned within the passage, but you kneejerkishly feel the need to defend his honor when it is not even being sullied. And who is the blameless entity here? I’m afraid I don’t deal in those because it is a concept I don’t particularly care about. Then, even stranger, you respond to claims that are at no point made. No one is saying that Jews are being blamed for conspiracies or conspiracy theories; not myself, not Eirikr, not Atlus Japan. You however not only engage in this bizarre game of attributing malice to Eirikr, you also attribute anti-Semitism to Jesus, who you in fact cite as one of the worst anti-semites in history. The fact that Jesus, assuming he was even a real person, would have been Jewish to start with, and the fact that the Bible preaches that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) indicating racial universalism rather than racial hatred appears to be lost on you. I know about the anti-semites you’re talking about. They selectively cite and interpret the Bible and the doctrine of Christianity in order to justify the idea that Jesus simply hated the Jews, and unfortunately, although you are not an anti-semite yourself, you appear to be making that same mistake. In fact, within the same Bible verse you cite, Jesus directly refers to Jews who accept his teachings and divinity as his disciples, and their ethnicity as Jews does not stop Jesus from doing so, and the Jews that say they are children of Abraham that just because they are children of Abraham does not mean that they are not “slaves of sin” meaning subject to vice, temptation and evil behaviour. He is if anything establishing racial equality, saying that Jews as a race are no less morally superior to other races, bearing the same potential both for succumbing to sin and for attaining salvation as anyone else, and it is only the parts where Jesus says “if God were your father” that anti-semites get their ammunition, because they interpret this to imply that Jews are the children of Satan or something, which makes no canonical or theological sense considering that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Pharisees is essential to God’s whole scheme of redeeming mankind. Now I must establish that I am not a Christian man, but I am propered nonetheless to defend Christians from baseless accusations such as this if necessary as I have done in the past.

       The reason anti-semites cast Christianity as anti-semitic is, plain and simply, because they are morons who will look to any aspect of any doctrine that might allow them to justify xenophobia towards Jews. Consider the amount of neo-Nazis who flock to volkisch neopaganism because they have identified Christian teaching as antithetical to their beliefs. And as for Hitler? Hitler may have believed in Jesus to some extent, but he also mocked the doctrine of Christianity as a religion of the weak, praised Islam for its warlike tendencies, and many of his cabinet not only were not Christians but they were also into some kind of Wotanist ethnic neopaganism that they believed was the true religion of the German nation. Now even though Hitler eventually got annoyed with people like Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg’s obsession with occultism and neopaganism, Hitler nonetheless did not affirm Christian doctrine beyond some kind of perversion of Christianity that is employed for nationalistic reasons (see “Positive Christianity”), and meanwhile many of his opponents within the NSDAP, such as Otto Strasser, were in fact devout Christians.

       Finally I believe you appear to have misunderstood my point about myth, and you appear to have deliberately bastardized it for polemic purposes. I explicitly stated that we are dealing with fiction. Your issue appears to be that I consider there to be distinct categories of fiction. Myth itself is one of those categories. Whether it’s the story of Jesus, or Lucifer, or Dionysus, or Zeus or what have you, I think we both agree on the premise that these are not historical accounts, in the sense that they represent accounts of concrete historical events. In that sense, it is fiction. But at the same time we do not consider myths to be merely fictional, despite that they do not represent actual events. Why? Because what the myths represent entail a form of wisdom and truth that pertains to the way humans relate to each other, to the world, to the generations before and after themselves, to the nature of reality in a natural and psychosocial sense. Carl Jung, whose influence on Kaneko must have been palpable for far more than just the Persona series, and because of this I eternally credit Kaneko for leading me towards Jungian ideas, is famous for extrapolating some real social and psychological phenomenon to myth that, in the traditional positivistic understanding, would be reduced to mere spooks and fairy tales. It’s not that the gods and the demons are real, but what they represent is.

       That is why I hold the mainline SMT series with such high regard, and that is why I say it is not “mere” fiction. It *is* fiction, yes, nobody denies that. Nobody says that YHVH is real and that he’s going to try to nuke the world in about 17 years time. But what I mean is that it tries to express the real world of myth in its own creative way, and in the process reimagines the mythical realm, taking the myths, gods and demons and placing them in the context of a modern setting, and most crucially depicting them with both robust creativity and sincere faith – faith, that is, in terms of faithfully reconstructing the gods and demons and their contexts into a world where they can act out anew, thus giving them new life in an eternal drama. This, combined with the excellent gameplay contained within the games is, in most cases, the primary merit of the series. Now to be fair the Persona series attempts this too, it even lays direct claim to the Jungian tradition as its inspiration, but in the same vein it does not truly express the mythic world in the way the mainline SMT series does. The gods and the demons appear in Persona, but they exist as isolate agents in relation to their mythic origins, their role is not contextualized by a larger drama that derives from that world.

       None of this has anything to do with “offense”, unless you have decided that the ability to critique meaningful discourse of myth and its expression in a game series that aims to engage in precisely this can only be framed in some kind of “social justice” attitude wherein we must all be offended at everything without regard to why. The fact is we have a difference of attitude to the SMT series. You reduce them to just another JRPG franchise to be consumed, while I do not, at least that is how I see it.

       To your last point, I dispute the claim that you have covered all of the major points in Eirikr’s original article, because when I read both yours and Eirikr’s articles side by side it becomes clear that this is not the case. You have simply decided on select points that are relevant to you personally, or more or less points that either you might actually be capable of addressing or may allow you to construct the character of Eirikr as some kind of bigot for the high crime of being a white man who criticizes a Japanese game developer irregardless of context. And even then a lot of your argument devolves into strange and unnessecary accusations upon the character of those who might disagree with you. The fact that you accuse him of not even playing the games is a bit of a strange move, considering it is necessary to play the games to truly interface with them, and thus assess them meaningfully.

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       • A bit of a mistake in my original comment.

         It says “And oh, before you respond, fallaciously labelling Wendy Doniger is a racist because she does subscribe to what is, I’ll say it, a blatantly ideological construction of Hinduism, does not qualify as an attempt to address the scholarship being addressed.”

         When it should say “And oh, before you respond, fallaciously labelling Wendy Doniger as a racist because she does not subscribe to what is, I’ll say it, a blatantly ideological construction of Hinduism, does not qualify as an attempt to address the scholarship being criticized.”

         I cannot edit my comment here so this addendum is necessary

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       • “You say here: “Well, your response reads like a character assassination of Kazuma Kaneko and an overly defensive response to a person who can’t be bothered to defend himself in his own comments section when people call out his racism for what it is.”
         I ask: how can it be character assassination exactly? It is merely his own words, and we make a judgement upon them. A very careful one if I may add, on both mine and Eirikr’s part. You might indeed expect us to simply throw him out, but we do not, because we do understand the nature of his comments and we make our judgement accordingly. We may still defend Kaneko to some extent, we may still say that he was merely being creative, but that does not allow us to pretend that what he said was in fact something else, and we cannot dismiss this as “character assassination” as a result.”

         This is such a vague response that you’re quite clearly attempting to avoid the details of the discussion in order to insist Kaneko is making anti-Semitic comments without evidence. You didn’t rebut anything here, but choose to insist Kaneko is a racist. That’s shameful of you.

         “Your claim that Eirikr does not use sources is, I’m sorry to say, a lie.”
         I did not in fact say this. You claimed he had expertise, I showed evidence that for all his research, he fails at connecting dots. This is you lying about what I said.
         “And oh, before you respond, fallaciously labelling Wendy Doniger as a racist because she does not subscribe to what is, I’ll say it, a blatantly ideological construction of Hinduism, does not qualify as an attempt to address the scholarship being criticized.”

         Their own research basis is that they completely make-up anything they want on Hinduism. They offer no archaeology, no textual research, no analysis based on the teachings themselves, and don’t have any awareness of what the Pramanas even are. Oh, and by the way, the ones labeling it as racist (and dedicated to Nazi theories that were discredited to boot!) are their own fellow scholars who have completely discredited Indology scholarship. This is because, prior to their own fellow Scholars lambasting them, it is academically recognized that Religious Studies is the least scholarly department in all of academic studies on ancient histories.

         And yes, Wendy Doinger and her little band of US Indologists calling every rebuke as politically motivated just because such people come from an Indian ethnic background is a racist act to do. You can’t even describe what you’re talking about as far as the ideological construction of Hinduism. Wendy Doinger’s little band of White Man’s Burden couldn’t accept that atheism is accepted in Dharma, so they made-up their own views and then argued it was copyright. If the views they’re presenting really are copyright, then by definition they’re making it up since copyright only protects people’s original concepts. It can’t both be ancient traditions that they’re uncovering analogous to archaeology and copyright infringement on the ideas themselves.

         Also, if you’re interested, here’s my review of Indology which you might find helpful:
         https://jarinjove.com/2019/07/02/western-indology-genocide-denial/

         My review of Andrew Nicholson’s laughably idiotic book. You can see for yourself how good his so-called “scholarship” is when he starts questioning why Islam and Hinduism never fused together:
         https://jarinjove.com/2018/07/06/unifying-hinduism-errors-in-reasoning/

         “I’m surprised a secularist such as yourself is not aware of the Hindutva phenomenon, first of all, and I do not believe it is something that should be dismissed if one is sincerely committed to said secularism. Whilst in power the BJP, the main political representative of the Hindutva movement (and also tied to a militant organization called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has set about altering Indian school textbooks for the purpose of erasing references to the Mughal era of Indian civilization on the grounds that the idea humiliates them, which is utter nationalist nonsense because it requires you to retcon the Taj Mahal, India’s most beloved architectural icon, as somehow a Hindu edifice when in fact it was created by a Mughal (and thereby Islamic) leader. On top of this several BJP leaders talk about exterminating or expunging religious or political opponents, such as Christians, Muslims, leftists and the like, and the founders of the Hindutva movement, Vinayak Damorder Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar both openly praised Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during their lives. Let me reproduce their most famous quotations on the matter below. First Savarkar:”

         I’ve discussed Hindutva in copious lengths when criticizing Ex-Muslims of North America, a Secularist non-profit hoping to normalize dissent in Islam. My criticism of them regarding India in particular can be read here: https://jarinjove.com/2020/03/20/five-lenses-3of5/

         By the way, RSS is a boy scouts group and not a paramilitary organization, I debunk Pieter Friedrich’s nonsense here: https://jarinjove.com/2020/04/26/pieterfriedrich/

         They aren’t trying to deny Mughal success, they’re trying to restore the history of what the Mughals did, as can be shown in the link regarding Western Indology’s genocide denial. And as one my links point out, Golwalker’s book has been out of print since 1948 and he took it back himself because he was ashamed. Nobody in the modern Hindutva even follow his philosophy, the follow B. R. Ambedkar whom they see as the true father of Secular India.

         “Later on you attempt to cast my commentary on Kaneko as racist simply because of the fact of Kaneko being non-white, but the idea that non-whites are somehow incapable of xenophobic attitudes towards other races is simply laughable. Several black nationalists have traded in anti-semitic canards too, such as Louis Farrakhan and Marcus Garvey (the latter of whom actually claims to be the world’s first fascist), and some have even collaborated with white supremacists such as the American Nazi Party on the grounds that ethnic separatism is a shared goal for both movements. If your premise is that it is only white men that are capable of racism, but non-whites are not, then you are engaging in the same kind of wokescoldery that you would rightly condemn more progressive figures for, and I told you before, this is not the field you should be playing in.”

         Not at all, I didn’t try to cast it as racist because of your skin tone. I cast it as racist, because of the lack of evidence and the wild speculation that assumes Kaneko’s intent without any justification. Also, your inability to accept that fiction is fiction when a Japanese man makes fictional content despite the warning that everything in the game doesn’t reflect real life which is in the beginning of nearly all Atlus games because people are stupid.

         “Your response to the interview quote is bizarre. First of all, at no point did either myself or Eirikr attribute the interview to Nocturne, In fact it is correctly attributed to the Digital Devil Apocalypse book which was published in 1999. You say the comment is out of context, but this requires substantiation in the form of you establishing what the correct context is. The interview he says it in is easily accessibly via Dijeh’s translations and you are more than welcome to peruse them yourself in order to establish what you think the true context is. But even more bizarre is your accusation that I am simply using Kaneko as an easy target on account of his ethnicity while blindly trusting Eirikr for the same reason. I do not happen to care about the ethnicity of either party, whereas you seem to place a particular emphasis on them in these arguments, even when no one brought it up.”

         I’m confused, were you not talking about the context of Eirikrjs blog despite claiming to be responding to points of agreement and disagreement with Eirikrjs? That was the context. Eirikrjs taking one quote way too far out of its original context whereby Kaneko was simply saying that he liked imperfect heroes.

         “It is true that Kaneko referred to Masakado as the “imperfect hero”, but this in itself establishes an open-ended context that raises multiple questions. What is the imperfection? No doubt it this would be the idea of Masakado opposing the Jewish lineage of the imperial family, unless you could determine what else is the imperfect element. And why is this heroic? You say that Kaneko says “imperfect hero” as if this magically changes the context but in fact it is the very source of the questions Eirikr poses. It is not a distortion, unless you can somehow find a version of the Kaneko interview that does not have the exact words Kaneko said.”

         That would mean that he saw opposing the Jewish Imperial family as a negative and not a positive. It would completely disqualify Eirikrjs argument about anti-Semitism.

         “But that does not stop you from equating Eirikr with white nationalists, which funny enough is exactly what you did for the Siliconera admins in a completely different context. Is everyone you dislike simply the moral equivalent of white nationalists? How is that any different from the “social justice” wokescolds you despise? It is a poor service to a man who you say cannot defend himself to commit the same errors that you accuse others of doing. You may indeed argue that Eirikr is indicting Kaneko and Atlus, but it does not seem sensible to me to say that he is indicting the entire society of Japan. That is a projection that you place upon him unfairly, for a reason that is not clear to me.”

         It isn’t a projection. He makes no distinction and I’m not the only one who notices. He comes off as an anti-Japanese bigot and a racist. I’m simply vocalizing what many in the MegaTen community already think of him. You’d be amazed how many disagree with my points, but concur that I am correct about Eirikrjs being a racist. The majority of the community agrees that his comments are xenophobic, bigoted against Japanese people, and yes, even racist against Japanese people. You want to know why? Because they read the same comments of his that I did on his blog and concluded that what he said was racist.

         “I’ll elect to skip your commentary on the Raidou post since honestly it’s engaging in merely the same type of deflection that was demonstrated earlier, along with the response to the Mem Aleph point because it ultimately does not change the central point being made.”

         Translation: I disregard all evidence that proves I am wrong.

         “I’m impressed that you go out of your way to give external citations for your response about Mitra-Buddha. Unfortunately, these sources still do not establish a credible link. Your Wikipedia link on Mitra, for instance, tells me nothing that I have not already established as far as etymological links are concerned, and within the same source there are reasonable objections listed to the idea of a mythological connection.”

         This is completely false. They do in fact establish a link. If you’re going to just ignore evidence that disproves your point that’s quite unambiguous then your belief is a faith and not based on evidence.

         “Mitra (Proto-Indo-Iranian: *mitrás) is the name of an Indo-Iranian divinity from which the names and some characteristics of Rigvedic Mitrá and Avestan Mithra derive.
         The names (and occasionally also some characteristics) of these two older figures were subsequently also adopted for other figures:
         • A vrddhi-derived form of Sanskrit mitra gives Maitreya, the name of a bodhisattva in Buddhist tradition.”

         “In Peter C. Rogers’ book, Mithras is mentioned a few times, and in this capacity he is mentioned separately from Maitreya, and no effort is made to connect the two.”

         Yet again, false. Theosphy believed the ascended masters were all reincarnations of the same supreme soul.

         “Both Maitreya and Mithra are mentioned alongside Krishna, Jesus, and Gautama Buddha as savior figures, so by this logic why is there no Krishna-Buddha based upon Maitreya?”

         Sigh

         That’s not how mythology works. Most of this is self-contradictory nonsense that Theosphy “mystics” continued making up as they went along. First it was that they were Ascended Masters, then they claimed all the “ascended masters” represented the final coming of Maitreya and were all the same person. Atlus Japan seems to have used the latter of their beliefs. Mithras / Mitra was mentioned repeatedly as the beginning and end. Atlus separating it into different parts is normal for any storytelling medium and not a knock against them. If anything, they made it more sensible.

         “In general I would also take this author with a robust sense of skepticism considering the nature of his books, which tend to be very New Agey.”
         Do you even understand what we’re arguing here and what your original claim was? We’re arguing about how Atlus Japan made these connections. They took from Theosophy’s Occultism.
         “Your other source still doesn’t generate enough of a connection for a Mitra-Buddha extrapolation to be possible, as Maitreya is not really connected to Maitreya. Gautama Buddha is in the sense that he “taught through” Mithra, but Maitreya is taken as a separate entity teaching through different entities, namely Krishna and Shankaracharya. So this connection is hardly solid from a mythological perspective or even the Theosophical one.”

         Wrong.

         First of all “Maitreya is not really connected to Maitreya”? I assume you mean Mithras. They’re all connected. The tail-end of Theosophy argued they were all the same person. You’d have to look up the theology in more depth, if you really care that much. Here’s an example:

         The Yugas in Theosophy
         This evidently draws on the Indo-Iranian similarities between the Soshiosh (Saoshyant), Mithra and Maitreya. The next mention is that of the relation between the four bodies of Brahma in the exoteric account of the Vishnu Puranas, so there is not much you can squeeze from there. Another very brief mention in The Secret Doctrine is a passage of Parashara instructing Maitreya in the Puranas again, about the Sun, and them knowing that the earth revolved around the Sun.
         Source: https://theamericanminvra.com/2015/10/22/the-truth-about-the-future-maitreya-buddha-in-theosophical-writings/

         I had it more in-depth sources, but the websites seem to have collapsed and been deleted unfortunately.
         If you’re really curious, let me explain further. From this source: https://blavatskytheosophy.com/maitreya-in-the-light-of-real-theosophy/

         Take note of the following:
         “It is true, as the Hindus say, that the Kalki Avatar (i.e. the Buddha Maitreya) will not appear on Earth until the very end of the Kali Yuga. The Kali Yuga is the “Dark Age” through which mankind is presently passing. It began 5,000 years ago “at the moment of Krishna’s death” and will not end until sometime around the close of the Sixth Root Race. We are currently still in the Fifth Root Race and even the dawn of the Sixth Root Race is still thousands of years in the future. (“The Secret Doctrine” 1:384, 2:483)”

         This event and other aspects of Theosophy is heavily referenced over and over in both SMTIV and SMTIVA, but they took component parts separately.
         The Fifth Root Race is the current generation of humanity in SMTIV-IVA.
         The White call Flynn “Our fifth Son” referring to both the Jewish festival of Passover and the Fifth Root Race in SMTIV that Flynn is a part of. The Sanat Kumara DLC (Sanat Kumara himself being the prophet of Theosophy, but in demonized form to reference Christians vilifying Theosophy) Sanat Kumara explains that he’s facing off against the Fifth humanity to see how far they’ve grown. From what Beadman told me, there’s a Theosophy tale of Ancient of Days coming back as a demonic form which seem very close to the Ancient of Days and Sanat Kumara DLCs; it seems Atlus Japan split the Theosophy story in two and referenced the first part in Ancient of Days and the second part in the Sanat Kumara DLC.

         The Kalki should be self-explanatory. You may ask, why was it Flynn? Flynn was on the Cross and the way SMTIVA treats him in general is a reference to Islamic Jesus. The Al Mahdi of the story being Nanashi. The False Jesus (in Islam, it is literally translated as False Messiah which Lucifer and Merkabah call Shesha-Flynn) deceives the people and then the Al Mahdi rallies the true followers to slaughter all the polytheists. Nanashi literally destroys the Polytheistic Alliance. After slaughtering the polytheists are done and final battle is about to begin, Jesus will appear behind the Al Mahdi for Judgment Day. You attain Flynn as your reward for slaughtering the last of the Polytheistic Alliance. He’s even risen again after death in the Anarchy path. There’s more, but I’ll stop here.

         “For the National Defense Divinities, it’s not like there’s that much info added in IV:A either. All we know now is that they’re the result of cruel experimentations done on humans, and the side-quests that establish this sort of leave it there other than also establishing that they went out of control by some means. This detail is not only absent in SMTIV, it’s also distinct from the previous SMTIV lore. Why would beings that could be explained as some sort of scientific experiment turn into a mound of rocks upon defeat and require spiritualistic mediums for the purpose of summoning them? In fact this mechanic is still referenced in IV:A via Tenkai, the only National Defence Divinity that returns in IV:A.”

         I genuinely don’t understand your point here. Of course the scientific experiments would want mediums to fully control them.

         “I will skip your response on YHVH because to be honest it is rather pointless: I explicitly stated that there wasn’t residual anti-semitism, but you felt the need to respond as though I believed the opposite. This I believe gets you nowhere. I’ll also skip the Stephen response because all it comes down to is just “I don’t understand irony”. Your point about Satan later on is also not in conflict with what I do not already know, and is already implied by my argument. In no way is Satan referred to as a demon, and in fact him being on God’s orders in Judaism implies this to be the case.”

         Translation: I wish to see nothing that proves my arguments wrong and will deny the charges I made as merely a quibble and insult your intelligence for calling me out on my bs.

         “Your point on JJCAT begins with bizarre territory. You have so far failed to establish why Eirikr is racist, yet continued to assert this anyway.”

         I’ve explained this numerous times already, in full detail.

         “No one is saying that Jews are being blamed for conspiracies or conspiracy theories; not myself, not Eirikr, not Atlus Japan. You however not only engage in this bizarre game of attributing malice to Eirikr,”

         I beg to differ:
         “ 4A’s YHVH is characterized as an entirely egotistic entity and master manipulator, in the style of anti-Semitic canards like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that purport a self-serving Jewish cabal secretly runs the world. In trying to put a new spin on Megami Tensei II’s and Shin Megami Tensei II’s conclusions, they succeeded only in adding shameful insult to embarrassing injury.”

         This is quite clearly this racist bigot, Eirikrjs, claiming that 4A’s depiction of YHVH is morally equivalent to hateful anti-semitic shit like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Right there, in plain English. Eirikjrs is a racist.

         “you also attribute anti-Semitism to Jesus, who you in fact cite as one of the worst anti-semites in history. The fact that Jesus, assuming he was even a real person, would have been Jewish to start with, and the fact that the Bible preaches that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) indicating racial universalism rather than racial hatred appears to be lost on you. I know about the anti-semites you’re talking about. They selectively cite and interpret the Bible and the doctrine of Christianity in order to justify the idea that Jesus simply hated the Jews, and unfortunately, although you are not an anti-semite yourself, you appear to be making that same mistake. In fact, within the same Bible verse you cite, Jesus directly refers to Jews who accept his teachings and divinity as his disciples, and their ethnicity as Jews does not stop Jesus from doing so, and the Jews that say they are children of Abraham that just because they are children of Abraham does not mean that they are not “slaves of sin” meaning subject to vice, temptation and evil behaviour. He is if anything establishing racial equality, saying that Jews as a race are no less morally superior to other races, bearing the same potential both for succumbing to sin and for attaining salvation as anyone else, and it is only the parts where Jesus says “if God were your father” that anti-semites get their ammunition, because they interpret this to imply that Jews are the children of Satan or something, which makes no canonical or theological sense considering that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Pharisees is essential to God’s whole scheme of redeeming mankind. Now I must establish that I am not a Christian man, but I am propered nonetheless to defend Christians from baseless accusations such as this if necessary as I have done in the past.”

         Because Jesus Christ was an anti-Semite as I pointed out. He said Jews who disagreed with him and stuck with Judaism were following the Devil. And what for? Because they didn’t worship him as a God. He was a narcissist who claimed anyone who didn’t agree with him was going to hell. He wasn’t peaceful, he wasn’t a good teacher, and he had nothing of value besides being a psychopath saying anyone who disagreed with him was going to hell. Jesus Christ was a hateful anti-Semite. Oh, and the Catholic Church made Hitler’s birthday a national holiday every year of the Third Reich, the belt buckle of all SS soldiers read “Gott Mitt Uns” i.e. God on Our Side, and the Nazi party’s first treaty was with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was also neutral to the Holocaust when it was happening.

         “Carl Jung, whose influence on Kaneko must have been palpable for far more than just the Persona series, and because of this I eternally credit Kaneko for leading me towards Jungian ideas, is famous for extrapolating some real social and psychological phenomenon to myth that, in the traditional positivistic understanding, would be reduced to mere spooks and fairy tales. It’s not that the gods and the demons are real, but what they represent is.”

         Jung was just as wrong about many of his beliefs like his mistaken belief that Hinduism didn’t allow for atheism and his arguments can’t be reproduced in psychological trials.

         “That is why I hold the mainline SMT series with such high regard, and that is why I say it is not “mere” fiction. It *is* fiction, yes, nobody denies that. Nobody says that YHVH is real and that he’s going to try to nuke the world in about 17 years time. But what I mean is that it tries to express the real world of myth in its own creative way, and in the process reimagines the mythical realm, taking the myths, gods and demons and placing them in the context of a modern setting, and most crucially depicting them with both robust creativity and sincere faith – faith, that is, in terms of faithfully reconstructing the gods and demons and their contexts into a world where they can act out anew, thus giving them new life in an eternal drama.”

         There is somewhat of a problem with this for some stories. Some of them conclude with nonsensical logical impossibilities that have no bearing on human experience today and others, like Zoroastrianism, would just be a copy/paste of the Good vs Evil ethics of Christianity, so Atlus Japan decided to instead use most of Zoroastrianism to portray Nietzschean philosophical ideals to make it more current and interesting to our modern human experience. Reworking the myths and making tales that may counter the old stories “truths” is also part of mythology and is true even during the times those myths were constructed.

         “None of this has anything to do with “offense”, unless you have decided that the ability to critique meaningful discourse of myth and its expression in a game series that aims to engage in precisely this can only be framed in some kind of “social justice” attitude wherein we must all be offended at everything without regard to why. The fact is we have a difference of attitude to the SMT series. You reduce them to just another JRPG franchise to be consumed, while I do not, at least that is how I see it.”

         No, I agree with your sentiments here. That’s why I find what Eirikrjs did to be so unforgivable.

         “To your last point, I dispute the claim that you have covered all of the major points in Eirikr’s original article, because when I read both yours and Eirikr’s articles side by side it becomes clear that this is not the case. You have simply decided on select points that are relevant to you personally, or more or less points that either you might actually be capable of addressing or may allow you to construct the character of Eirikr as some kind of bigot for the high crime of being a white man who criticizes a Japanese game developer irregardless of context. And even then a lot of your argument devolves into strange and unnessecary accusations upon the character of those who might disagree with you. The fact that you accuse him of not even playing the games is a bit of a strange move, considering it is necessary to play the games to truly interface with them, and thus assess them meaningfully.”

         You’ve yet to provide any examples of this claim of yours.

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