about Lost Canvas' three judges of hell

about Lost Canvas’ three judges of hell

Hey guys I was just browsing and reading comments about Lost Canvas’ Minos, so I started writing an answer but it got out of control and became big as fuck

nerd alert

also I write like a 10-years-old

also it’s OPINIONS so it’s not the ultimate truth, feel free to criticize or something!

Actually I started writing because I was thinking it was sad that Lost Canvas’ Minos died before understanding love. I don’t even mean loving romantically (could be or couldn’t be, I don’t know), I mean love as a feeling itself.

He was very egoistic, living for himself, without a care for the world around him, like an ignorant child. But when he realized Albafica was alive, it was the first time he truly contemplated something outside his own self… which I think its the nature of love: when you forget yourself for a moment to contemplate something that’s outside. Minos had never felt anything that was not directly linked to himself - so when he sees Alba alive, he gets confused, and ends up saying - “I will let you live” - Minos, of all people!! You can see something had changed in him there - Alba’s tenacity was powerful enough to take Minos out of himself for a moment, to break through his selfish reality and force into him the notion of something else, of “another”. Albafica’s existence gained enough meaning to make Minos actually consider it. His next response was hatred – another emotion that necessarily need a conscience of “another” to exist - that drove him to try and blow the entire village…. Not because he gives two figs about it, but because it represented, in that moment, the meaning behind Albafica’s existence, which he tries to erase so he can go back to his old egocentric reality. And then Shion stops him and he finally dies, angry and humiliated. He never had the time to experience ‘love’ - not only romantically speaking, but the feeling of ‘love’ itself… oh gosh that sounds very sappy but I honestly think that’s the case hahahaha!

oh look it’s Minos losing his shit

I think there’s something important, related to the fact that Minos is, as I see it, indeed the most egocentric of Shiori’s Specters. Even more so than Aiacos, because at least Aiacos had to consider his subordinates, in order to get to the logic that validates his will as the meaning of their existance. I mean, when confronted about his conduct, Aiacos answers with a rational statement - which shows that he gave at least a few minutes of his time thinking about the reason why his men’s lives were so insignificant when compared to his will - and his men’s death actually have a meaning, because these deaths are expressions of his will. In other words, their insignificance is what gives meaning to Aiaco’s power. In this sense, he had enough sophistication to at least explain to himself a reality completely centered on him.

Minos didn’t. When confronted with the death of his men, Minos shrugs. He doesn’t think about it at all. It really has no meaning. Albafica is the only one whose life and death make, for the first time, any difference in Minos’ reality - then again, only because he survives. I even wonder to which extent Minos is malicious or not, because I really see him like a child. If Aiacos has a crazy concept of moral and imoral, in which ‘moral’ is «total obedience to me» (“the world is my will”), and Radhamantys is also crazy because his notion of “moral” is «total obedience to another» (“the world is another’s will”), then Minos fits in as crazy by having «no morals at all». This may sound like a stretch but while reading I couldn’t help imagining Shiori’s judges as three extreme representations of the freudian symbolic brain - Aiacos as the ego/self, Rhadamantys as the superego/repression of the self, and Minos as the ID/lack of consience of self.

All of them meet a moment at which their morals/realities are broken, and they finally grow because of that, and all those three moments are relationated with both defeat and the realization of «another» in their realities - for Aiacos it is the realization that Violate’s death has meaning, as much as his own; for Radhamantys, he is, himself, the «another», as for the first time in his life he acts according to his own logic (one could argue submission can come voluntarily, but I think Radhamantys only starts to understand his own responsability in his submission after his fight with Regulus and, later, fully realizes it when he sides with Pandora against Alone.) For Minos, as I said before, I believe this comes in his battle against Albafica, because Albafica survives and ultimately defeats him.

I just think it is a bit sad because Aiacos lived like a king, Radhamanthys, like a dog, and Minos, like a wild thing, but only the first two got to die/be reborn as humans… while Minos, as I said before, died before understanding the feeling of love that would, ultimately, make him human too.