The Burning God

Rin’s liberation of the Southern forces and civilians from the mountains is the event that mythologizes her as something more than human, amplifying The Corrupting Influence of Power. Rin’s deification represents the fulfillment of Daji’s advice in Chapter 13 that Rin should mythologize herself in the eyes of the people in order to achieve freedom from moral constraints. Rin adopts a third-party perspective to consider how the event looked from the eyes of the civilians:

They had been on the brink of extermination, trapped for weeks in tunnels without enough food or water, awaiting imminent death from bullets, incineration, or starvation. Then Rin had shown up, returned from the stone mountain with barely a scratch and two of the Trifecta in tow, and reversed their fortunes in a single chaotic morning (296).

Rin imagines herself as the human embodiment of the plot device known as the deus ex machina. This phrase, which translates to “god from the machine,” was originally used in classical Greek and Roman literature, when a god would appear to decide the outcome of the conflict. In contemporary literature it describes when an unlikely agent appears to solve a problem that seems unsolvable. Rin’s appearance collapses these two meanings, since she and the Trifecta literally operate with the powers of the gods. The long-term viability of the deus ex machina device is called into question later, as the gods that emerge to solve the problem actually cause more problems than they solve.

Rin has a complicated relationship with the Southerners. On the one hand, she feels kinship with them, particularly in their association with the symbol of dirt. Rin contemplates how Southerners are “people of the earth, and their bodies and souls belonged in the ground […] So what if that made them the Empire’s mud-skinned refuse?” (335). Southerners, including Rin, have a spiritual association with the earth as well as a cultural one, as they consider their souls as belonging to the earth and themselves the rightful caretakers of occupied land. On the other hand, a key aspect to Rin’s visualization of the Southerners as dirt is dirt’s disposability and commonness, an association she also brings to Southerners. Rin critiques Gurubai and Souji for locking the Southerners in the tunnels to die. Yet, Rin leads them on a months-long trek through the mountains, during which they desert or die in droves. Rin thinks, “[t]hey weren’t humans, they were stories” (341), showing that she sees the Southerners as elements of her mythology rather than people, tying her mythologizing impulse to The Dehumanizing Effects of War.

Under the corrupting influence of power, Rin betrays her old principles. Rin used to hate the Trifecta for their unjust treatment of their civilians, and she hated the Federation for what they did to Speer. When she learns that Riga had a hand in killing her people, she says that she knows he “made a necessary choice at Speer” (372). She says she “do[esn’t] care” that he facilitated the Speerly genocide because needs him to destroy Hesperia now. This is a complete reversal of every motivation that previously fueled Rin. At this point in the narrative, the pursuit of power has eclipsed all other values in her mind. 

What turns Rin against Riga isn’t the fact that he committed a genocide at Speer, which she already knew from her meeting with Hanelai’s spirit, but that he handed over Altan to Dr. Shiro, the Federation doctor who experimented on her and Altan. She takes this individual betrayal as evidence that he “didn’t think her human” over the mass genocide of her people writ large (375). Though Rin often posits that she has the best interest of the country at heart, her actions demonstrate how she uses people as tools to accumulate power and serve her personal interest. The final lines of Part 2 show the consequences of this method: “It felt so good to say that she’d survived […] that she didn’t even care that she was screaming to corpses” (385). Rin is so convinced that she is operating for the greater good that she doesn’t notice the mass casualties she is creating in her wake.