thinking about Ultimis Dempsey dying in the cryopod again. it fucks me up so bad actually in so many different ways. hold on. gonna attempt some kind of organization.
like surface level you can recognize this suicide by proxy is coerced. primis Dempsey DOES NOT want to do it. so like that's his autonomy stripped from him, but at least he is allowed to be the one to put him down. compared to his Ultimis self, who is asleep and doesn't have any agency in the slightest. the entire fuckin map is about him being carted around and Us having to get him back just to kill him. which is inherently fucked up but that's just surface level.
symbolism: it's Richtofen's cryopod he's in. Richtofen put him in there and then another Richtofen refuses to let him out. despite the fact that...it would probably be fine?? there's four of them and one of him and he's been frozen for like months. bro is NOT winning that fight. Ultimis' disdain for him is textual, but Primis saying "he probably didn't have anything worthwhile to say anyway" is genuinely one of the most monstrous things he's done. I want you to fully grasp how awful that is. that he feels no remorse for taking away a man's agency and life and that denying HIS Dempsey (who he supposedly LIKES) was fine actually. I don't want to be dramatic but that's so horrific to me. your words don't matter to me specifically so you'll die silently and without your own input. because I think lesser of you. because I think you're stupid. because you have nothing to say. You will die and you'll have no opinions on it and it will make my life easier.
going another layer, meta. because I'm the fucking meta guy. Dempsey is silenced by the story itself. His map takes place in a 935 facility. his character goes completely unexplored. He dies silently and even in Alpha Omega, has no recollection of it despite everyone else knowing how they died. He is purposely left in the dark. He doesn't get a name, doesn't get a map, and doesn't get any agency.
(I always found it very interesting that waw Verruckt was retconned pretty early on to be Dempsey and his marine recon team. He's the only Ultimis character that we play as before their "corruption". Even before "Tank Dempsey" was conceptualized and implemented in Shi No Numa, he was always a Playable Character. He was never fully autonomous.)
It's so terrible, I think, that Takeo saying that Dempsey being unable to meet with himself might have some consequences was never given any weight. Turns out Ultimis Dempsey dying was fine. we didn't need to know about him. no one needs to know about him. he just needed to die and have no opinions on it. Richtofen is always right.
