They translate the eponymous ship's name as 'Ship of Fools', so I guess no-one is supposed to come out of this looking good.
Spoilers after the jump
Kal'tsit spends the whole event palling around with a high-ranking member of the openly racist-nationalist Iberian Inquisition, gravitating as she so often does to the nearest centre of state power, no matter how violent.
We get a much clearer account of the Abyssal Hunters' status, as refugees too proud to seek any actual refuge, fanatically devoted to 'purging' their ruined homeland of a taint it turns out they all share to some degree or other.
The Cult of the Deep worship the seaborn, exalting them as a fast-track to the 'final state' of evolution as if that was a concept that made any sense or had any connection to what the word 'evolution' actually means.
The captain of the Stultifera Navis cleaves even harder to Iberian nationalism than the Inquisition, to the point that he no longer accepts the actual nation of Iberia as legitimate, even as he and his lover sink deeper and deeper into symbiosis with the Seaborn.
Thiago prevaricates between the Cult of the Deep and the people of Iberia, torn by the overlap of those two categories while fundamentally still driven by his loyalty to the Aegir he loved and his hatred of the Inquisition who killed her. Exactly how much of what he causes is a result of actual indecision and how much is wildly overambitious subterfuge and double-agency is impossible to tell but one way or another he makes a real mess of things.
Elysium is Elysium
Also there's a literal Don Quixote running around for reasons I still don't understand.
No-one comes out of it looking good (well, ok, Alive Until Sunset are there, they look good in everything).
For all its complexities, Arknights generally has a very strong moral compass. Right from the early chapters, its conviction has been that the Infected, and proletarian people generally, deserve material conditions in which they can thrive. If it hadn't been for that front-and-centre conviction, I don't think I'd have kept playing.
But Stultifera Navis complicates that; Thiago is the proletarian voice, but his dalliance with the Cult of the Deep doesn't resonate the way earlier characters' (especially Misha, but also Faust and FrostNova, as well as a number of side-event characters) Reunion commitments did, because the Cult of the Deep keep mouthing off about this facile 'evolution' bullshit, and Aegir doesn't get a clear representative, only the Abyssal Hunters with their quasi-fascistic 'purity' talk (at this point I basically always treat 'purity' as a fascistic concept).
I ended up siding with the Seaborn themselves. They don't talk nearly as much as Amaia and the cultists do about evolution (at least not evolution as a teleology with an end-point). Mostly they just talk about eating each other.
And like, yes, my name is Eat, I'm generally keen on eating.
But that's not just a shallow thing. I think the Seaborn eating each other is supposed to be horrifying (disregard the fact that this game is written in China and it could be a red scare-era hollywood metaphor for communism, the sacrifice of the individual to the whole), but it's... that's just nature, my dude. Not just in the sense that everything in nature has gotta 'eat' in some way or other, either. Life is eating, or more specifically digestion, the conversion of organic matter from one chemical state to another.
Sometimes we get on our Abyssal Hunter-esque high horse and decry some kinds of eating to be 'decay' - when maggots or molds or fungi gather on the 'dead' bodies of animals or plants - but really decay is just life we think is gross. Your gut, right now, is probably (hopefully - and if not I hope you can get some food soon) full of decay.
This post is already too long but I could go on forever about how I think western culture, broadly understood, could do with seeing itself more in that cycle of eating and being eaten, rather than 'above' it in some way. I'm also working on a longer post about lovecraftian gribblies under the sea which may or may not ever surface. I cede the closing thought to the Seaborn:
To consume, is without fault.
