Duel Dynamics

In the gameplay loop of anything centered around the continual retrial of a single area, the player is engaged in a Duel with their opposite, the particular level or boss. The discourse of the player, their movements, attacks, abilities, etc, encounters and plugs into the discourse of the enemy. This relationship meets is climactic point in the death of either, where one discourse is able to more perfectly execute movement through the other.

Such is the purpose of the duel, distinct from any function of warfare, state violence, or other actions done with similar tools and narratives. In honorable combat, the two foes lock theirselves into combat, hoping to more adequately move through the self of the other. In this meeting of the two is the axiomatic third, the scenario itself, which forms the true text of the scenario. The duel is a form of warfare purely for the sake of the warrior (as in, the warrior after his creation by the apparatuses of warmaking), allowing the warrior to obtain transcendence by its violence. Victory or defeat matters little, the action remaining the same across both - the two combatants locking against each other within the neutral plane they both adhere to and worship, the martial system of Honor, the knightly code.

The mechanics of this action reveals the nature of libidinal interaction. As in Sadomasochism, the winners and losers, dominant and submissive, are irrelevant for the true source of power in the Duel (such is recognized by Esdeath), that being the unifying YangFlow both parties have engaged their libidinal drives within. With the entire duel being a continuous flow of the empty arena, first draw, final blood, empty arena, the Sadomasochistic scene is the same, a continuous and singular YangFlow across the entire scenario, which is the sum of all libidinal energies being utilized in the particular scenario. For this reason, both form a type of mystic practice, the meditative trance induced by immersion in an overwhelming force, a partnered equivalent of auto-flagellation, ecstatic dancing, or standing beneath a waterfall.

That this practice is discursive of a single YangFlow demonstrates the problem of the human’s composition. The practitioners in the Duel engage their Yin completely, locking their Yin into each other in order to fulfill the full circuit of the Duel. The Yang is alien, an outside flow that is between them both. Such too, is the nature of existence, thrust upon the receptive human.