Girardian Isekai Part 5: The False Prophet, Nirvana Moebius
In the story arc of Peace Land, Asuka Ren is not actively characterized as a villain. She is indirectly, not directly, responsible for persecution. The antagonists of her story are literally pagan: enemy men under the control of the Japanese serpent god Yamato No Orochi. However, Girard does not consider the return to pagan persecution, or Satan, the most dangerous threat.
Girard instead warns of the imitation of Christian rhetoric in the name of persecution.
This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.
In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him. This imitation by the usurper has long been present in the Christianized world, but it has increased enormously in our time. The New Testament evokes this process in the language of the Antichrist.
An appeal of ORV is its ability to take distinctly recognizable human characters and exaggerate them using the fantasy setting. For many, it may be difficult to bridge Girard’s description of the antichrist with tangible behaviors in our own world. The next character is a perfect bridge between the two. Nirvana Moebius is a cult leader whose appeal is explicitly based on assimilation.
He is Girard’s antichrist in its least subtle form. He leads the “Salvation Church”, a clear caricature of Christianity which elevates the immediate over the eternal. Nirvana does not believe in the afterlife or any kind of second world. What he says also draws comparison to many contemporary figures. Read for yourself:
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