Black Knights / Discussion

I like this as an alright setup for a mystery. It's a nice change of pace from the other entities and their expertise is an interesting hook.

Paired with this is a nondescript automatic rifle that fires something that while unidentified, is definitely not bullets.

I'm not a fan of this way of describing it. It says nothing about the projectiles, which is offputting for a survival guide. I understand what you were going for — mystery bait and all — but right here it's executed in a weird way. Internet horror likes to do this cliché a lot where they'll describe something supernatural by vaguely comparing it to something normal then shattering that comparison, but it usually requires some description setup to work well. This setup is absent here, and it's rather confusing to play it up as a mystery here when later on the guns are rather unambiguous scifi blasters.

I'm also pretty sure that's not the right use of nondescript.

The way the recorder literally melts into the table yet Diana only gets minor ear annoyance makes no sense. That sort of sound should at the very least melt her eyes too.

How the Black Knight appears and decides to attack Diana makes no sense. Why does it decide to go for the convoluted and lengthy knuckle input method rather than simply unslinging the rifle? Why does it not show up with the rifle already unslung and fire-ready as is customary for any kind of special ops deployment in the planet?

It also does not use the rifle later, when Diana makes a significant amount of distance between them. This makes no sense: for all it knows, she's still running off by the time it gets unstuck from the wall. Remaining armed with the icicle means it has zero range to speak of when chasing someone it's trying to kill.

Even assuming it heard her stop walking and hide, it knows she's armed and proficient at close quarters combat. The Black Knight is willingly putting itself in a situation that it has failed to succeed at just a minute ago, when it could very well change tactics and void Diana's close quarters experience.

This is especially strange because it's set up that the Black Knights are very well trained and tactically prepared, and the one in this tale succeeds at imitating her stance with just a few seconds of exposure. I'm not sure what the imitation was meant to convey, but I interpreted it as rapidly learning from its adversary — some kind of setup for the Black Knights' abilities —, an introduction that is entirely inconsequential as not only the Knight fails to do the same in the context of this tale, but this learning capability is also not ever explored again.

The Knight's characterization doesn't match the training and expertise strongly implied by the MEG file. It gets killed by a rather cheap trick it could have seen coming from a mile away if it was a little more careful or employed any sort of tactical approach to the situation. What would have made far sense to me was having it swap to its rifle, and be forced to traverse the corner by Diana hiding at a specific position outside of its range. This would've allowed her to disarm it using the icicle and then kill it.

Diana's character is wonky. She's introduced as insecure yet experienced, but the insecurity is immediately dropped for her smugly mocking the Knight. These aren't irreconciliable, but they're very distinct and different traits that aren't apparently connected, which creates a shallow perspective of the character. Diana's attitude could easily be set up as some sort of bravado for internal insecurity, but I think that'd require starting sometime before the action breaks in. I feel that's the optimal way to introduce a character anyway — not introducing them to an extreme circumstance from the get-go, but letting them show themselves a little at their normal point. This isn't ever done for Diana, and it has the detrimental effect of painting an unsatisfying picture of her character.

The nut allergy is a really interesting trait that is also taken nowhere. As a worse-than-fatal vulnerability for Diana and potentially a symbolic representation of her insecurity, it's really damn disappointing that it's immediately dropped.

There's also lots of examples of wonky prose throughout this entry. They are everpresent throughout the series, but I chose a few particular examples to picture my point.

She tapped the code into the gauntlet, and without fail the runes glowed in turn.

"Without fail" implies a continuation of something that's expected to happen and is happening so, implying a lengthy period of time. It's wonky here. "And the runes glowed in turn" would be better.

This pacing went on for a short time, but it felt like an eternity to Diana. They made 2, no, 3 rotations in total, eyes locked, before she stepped poorly on a remnant of the broken desk and stumbled slightly. This, it seemed was all it needed to see an exploitable weakness, and with haste it leapt forward with inhuman agility, abandoning all pretense of martial prowess.

I made an example correction of this.

“This circling went on for a brief time, but it felt like an eternity. They made two, no, three full circles in total, eyes locked, before she stepped on a remnant of the broken desk and staggered. This, it seemed, was all it needed to find a weakness to exploit, and it leapt forward with inhuman agility. It abandoned all pretense of martial prowess, reaching for a right blow with its bladed arm.”

It's still lacking in detail on the situation and emotional states of both characters. The description implies parity in merely visual terms, when it'd make far mores sense for Diana to feel outmatched and vulnerable. This is a problem in other fight scenes throughout the series: antagonists are usually blank punching bags, especially within the context of fight scenes.

Another example:

putting bullets into people who, by their attire, are clearly not on fair footing.

She wiped her brow with her left hand, when she noticed a small glowing object on the back of her hand.

This would be better as:

"She wiped her brow with her left hand, flashing a slight blue glow into her eye: it emanated from a small object, glued to the backside of her palm."

Since she'd been unable to remove the armor, it had been several days, and it crept across her chest like an unwanted advance.

This sentence should be reordered so "it had been several days" is at the start. The comparison is confusing too.

I find it weird that she talks about the Black Knights having "medieval sci-fi" weapons. As far as they've been described;

• They look like spec-ops
• They have assault rifles
• The only melee weapon used so far is nothing like a medieval blade, just an energy icicle
• Nothing in the Knight's tactics suggested medieval customs or sense of honor or anything that would connect it to the period

The lines about "not knowing much" about the Backrooms are confusing as well. The entire point is that they're unknowable and infinite. It would make sense for Diana to feel she's not up to snuff in this regard and that everyone else seems to have gone farther in discovery than her.

This wasn't exactly a beneficial level of experience to have, given that the entirety of her experiences had occurred on Level 0 so far and didn't show any signs of changing soon.

I get what you mean but it's pretty clunky. "Recent experiences" makes it clearer, but still clunky.

Diana chuckled a little, and then grinned "Well, I can tell you why, it's because you know killing people is wrong. You're a human being after all!"

This makes no sense as a response. 783 has been describing himself as a defective robot off of an assembly line rather clearly, Diana has no reason to assume him to be human. This is especially true after she's just killed one of them and it bled a weird black sludge.

This is an alright chapter in terms of introductions, although I feel it doesn't go far enough in terms of elaborating on any of these characters. The trio does not get to share any time together before being thrust right back into the action, so none of their motivations and comradery get any sort of exploration and depth. 783's defects, while hackneyed, are a compelling theme for a robotic character and they're just brought up and dropped as a justification for him to be a good guy. J being mute completes the trio each having some kind of defect (although it's externally imposed rather than a core flaw), but we don't ever get anything on his character and desires beyond a very brief overview in Go With Virtue.

The choice to make him mute makes him barely have any presence or interaction with the world around him. This should be compensated with far more description about what he does and especially how he does it.

"Eyes up, Archivist. The armor is trying to take control."

This goes nowhere. The armor tries to take control this once then disappears for the rest of the series. It seemed to me like it'd be foreshadowing, maybe it'd act against her during the later fights of the chapter, but there is no sign that it's anything but an armor after this.

"Did you just say 'thee'?" she laughed. "Sometimes, with all the fancy tech, I forget you guys are actually, you know, Knights." Her gear was checked, her tactical equipment was adjusted, and she lightly sprinted down the hallway to her destination.

Making them into Knights now feels like it comes out of nowhere. There is zero visual clues of knighthood from the images in the article, and to this point neither of the two Knights introduced have acted anything like medieval knights. The way Seven speaks could just as easily be interpreted as clunky robot speech than knightly custom.

Seven says thee once and never again comes even near any sign of middle English. It's used only for this exchange and is then dropped — an exchange that doesn't add much to neither character anyway.

but she's learned to trust Seven.

This line is gratuitous. Even if something has happened offscreen that got Diana to trust him, this isn't conveyed to the reader in any way. For all we know, they barely just met each other.

She had terrible aim, but that didn't matter now, not when a single hit knocks a two inch radius hole in each Knight she catches in the crossfire.

The environment here has never been described, nor the amount and positioning of Knights. It makes it hard to picture how this is happening at all. I'm also not a fan of the whole Star Wars Stormtrooper thing — if they really are trained fighters as the MEG file introduces them, they should turn Diana into swiss cheese almost immediately. Using cover before starting to shoot makes more sense from Diana's perspective.

The introduction and fight with the Sentinel are confusing and disappointing. It just appears, doesn't get any amount of description or action, and gets immediately killed by J. There is not even a brief attempt at making it into a threatening foe by showing its power at all. I also don't understand what the hell an ARCHETYPE is supposed to be. The term is just dropped out of nowhere.

J's sudden powerup doesn't have any explanation. How does he know this code? Where did he learn it? Does it have any drawbacks? Why do none of the other Knights use it? Why did the Knight at the start not use it to kill Diana? What is a "pre-programmed set"? Why is the Sentinel incapable of defending itself against it at all when it seems to be a more powerful machine of the same line as the Knights? All of these question should at least have an implied answer for this scene to make any sense.

The sudden cult-ish behavior of the Knights comes out of nowhere without any foreshadowing. Kneeling and shouting "SENTINEL, SENTINEL" doesn't seem to match neither the tactical scifi aesthetic or the newly introduced medieval flavor. Kneeling in the middle of battle is bizarre in these same lines.

"Because you are a better fighter than I will ever be."

This is another really undeserved line. We do not see Seven's fighting skills at all, and Diana has exactly two fight scenes, one of which she wins by pulling the trigger until the gun goes dry. Seven has no justification to say this.

The fight scene with the Monarch is interesting in concept, but the extremely blunt exposition for no apparent reason makes it difficult to read through. I see no reason for him to say any of this, and a lot of the foreshadowing doesn't seem to go anywhere right now.

I also have trouble believing Diana would be the first person to beat him. As far as we understand as readers, she has no extraordinary fighting skills beyond having trained in taekwondo and being inventive in corner situations. These are good enough to make for an interesting fight scene, but the way the fight is resolved is unsatisfying. The existence of these "spells" is not known until a few paragraphs before she executes this one, and no spells ever show up again.

… Why and how did Diana remove her helmet? The entire point of the plot so far is that she had to remove the armor but couldn't. This is dropped immediately and I don't understand why.

From this point the plot gets really, really hard to follow. This is primarily because of three issues;

• Rapid movement between places that have few if no introduction
• Little explanation of the motivations to do this
• Rapid introduction of new and complex elements

This is exemplified in Level 654 with the intro of Nicole. We know nothing of Diana and her's relationship, and the dialogue about Isle, while referential, is entirely irrelevant to the plot. There is little sense of emotional weight in the conversation, and it makes no sense for Diana not to tell anyone about what has just happened, especially someone who's a close friend. There's nothing to go off of on how the place looks either.

The introduction of the Sage follows through. There is no intro for the place they're in, no explanation for their relationship with anything, no context for her relationship with the world, no explanation for the tablet or how Nicole got it, and most of all, no explanation of the relationship between the Sage and the Black Knights. It's just confusing how they're introduced as BK-adjacent then turns out to be an ally for no apparent reason.

I understand it's intended to be a wide mystery, but the sheer absence of any sort of explanation or implication to answer these questions makes it massively confusing. It feels disjointed. Hylius's fate is even more so — we don't even know who they are before this scene, or what happened to them or what the location is at all. These things are so relevant to the plot that making them mysteries or ambiguities is counterproductive.

The Black Knights are… well, you know how powerful they are. But are you familiar with why?

This is entirely unsubstantiated. There hasn't been a single fight scene this series where the Black Knights are anything but resoundingly beaten. The first encounter has a Black Knight get beaten by someone who just knows taekwondo. The Sentinel and Monarch get BTFO the very scene they're introduced, by their own equipment, and by people with little to no experience with combat or using this equipment at all. The intelligence and preparedness they are implied to have in the MEG file is never seen anywhere.

These are good guesses, but they're all predicated on the true source of their power: symbolism. In Arthurian legend, the Black Knight is a symbol of unknown force, and is used several times over the course of the centuries in which tales of King Arthur and his Round Table were written.

The way the archetype of the Black Knight is adapted to the backrooms makes no sense. The Black Knight is traditionally solitary, not wearing any heraldry and explicitly evil. In Arthurian legend specifically, it’s one person that people believe to be a demon because of his fighting prowess and unusual looks for the time. I don’t know what source of symbolism you’re drawing from, but as far as I see it the Black Knights are nothing like the archetype they’re supposed to represent. They even wear their own kind of heraldry!

Describing the Black Knight as an "unknown force" is a poor description of the archetype. Historically the Black Knight is a lone evildoer with no allegiance rather than a walking mystery. I'm also not convinced that the archetype is relevant enough to the human subconscious that they'd be so powerful in the Backrooms.

This place is a world of memory, a trap with the lure of nostalgia.

Nostalgia might be the wrong word here. Nostalgia is explicitly positive and warm, while melancholy is understood to be negative.

Diana's character in this tale starts to show large flaws in writing. It’s obvious that she wants to get to 783 but why this is important to her is confusing: she doesn’t even know him that well. There is not even a clue as to why he’s so important to her. Her main introductory motivation was insecurity about her own position and career, and this second motivation has zero apparent relationship to it. It's not clear why she wants to do anything except find her friend, but there's no reason why this friend would be so important to her that we as readers are privy to.

For such an introspective chapter, it's offputting that there's been no time dedicated to exploring Diana's motivations and emotions, especially since we've gotten none of that since the series started.

I'd also like to mention two things that are last mentioned here and never again: the Estoc and J. They are clearly foreshadowed to have important roles but neither are talked about again. Granted, they could come back later, but the lengthy disappearance of the Estoc (which isn't even tested for its capabilities) and abrupt death of J come off as anticlimactic to what the series seems to be building toward.

Up until Natasha's introduction, it's been made rather clear that the Knights are haunted armors, but nothing is done to remark how this contradicts (at least in appearance: a solution to the problem is implied later on) we know about them.

However, Diana was unconcerned. Her opponent clearly had much more experience with this course, and the Chariot in general, but she knew that she was unmatched in on-the-fly ingenuity.

Her lack of concern here makes no human sense. No one would be "unconcerned" in a life-or-death situation like this. It makes even less sense from a character whose introduction portrays them as an insecure defeatist character.

I'm not a fan of the Russian quips. People don't talk like that. Even less so when they know their interlocutor doesn't understand them. It just reminds me of how Hollywood has comedic support characters that swear in poorly pronounced Spanish.

There is also a very sharp change in tone between Knight Fever and the first few chapters. The descriptions are finally sufficient but the tone they carry seems to swap hard between straightforward and serious to exciting and comedic. This stands true for the dialogue as well, including far more jokes and gags than before. Like swapping from a somewhat grounded setting to anime adventure. This produces a lot of whiplash and is made extremely evident in how Natasha reacts to the end.

"No, no! You did your best! Listen, listen, listen… these are bad people, the Technicians! They were never going to let you retire anyways! This is a good thing, I promise."

"This is probably why they replaced you. Because you have feelings, and they needed emotionless robots."

I don’t like how this is boiled down to “bad guys are bad”. The characterization of the BKs is extremely lackluster: they are not shown to do anything explicitly “bad” except kill the people at the outpost for zero apparent reason, their goals are not known even in an ambiguous way, there is not even a slight idea of their character except being honorable and knights.

Diana talking like she knows the Technicians at all or has experience with them doesn't match what little knowledge she does have. It would make more sense for her to narrate to Natasha what the Technicians tried to do to her, J and Seven. It’s also made clear that they need robots but why they do this or that they’ve been replacing old knights with straight up robots is entirely left up in the air, so making it an emotional plot point when it has barely had any bearing in the story so far beyond a plot device in Go With Virtue is strange.

It seems like everything is prepared to have a scene where Seven realizes his uselessness as a Knight and how he's going to be disposed of, but nothing like this happens. It's also majorly confusing how the plot point of removing the armor off of Diana has practically disappeared since Go With Virtue. It's entirely possible I missed it with how ludicrously quick the plot progresses — there's little time for reflection or for important events to keep their weight.

Diana looked over at Natasha. Oh my god, she doesn't know about friends.

How does she not know about friends but knows about being bisexual and making very clear innuendos to someone else? This could be an interesting question to answer but it just comes off as inconsistent right now.

"Yeah, well, I necessitate you giving me a heads up before trying to drop dead right in front of me."

The way she expects this is bizarre. As far as we readers understand, there’s no reason for 783 to have any way to communicate with Diana. This might be a joke, but I genuinely don't get why she'd say this the way she does. Some kind of joke about not answering calls would fit better I think.

"Why do you apply loose cloth to this limb here? It did not look damaged to me." She points in the vague area of 783's naked lower body.

IMHO: this is a majorly uncomfortable exchange that has no reason to be here and it provides nothing to any of the characters.

Diana narrows her eyes. "Alright, we'll start you out as a he/they for now, but that can change.

I get why you’re doing this, it’s just kinda weird that Diana is doing it when he literally does not understand anything she’s talking about. What she says later about “copping [herself] a he/they” comes off as forcing her fantasies onto someone who’s fucking clueless, which I don’t think was the intent at all. This should, at the very least, be played up as weird.

The three of them sit around the dining table, with the newly christened Kevin propped up on a beanbag chair.

The lack of environmental descriptions hits really hard here. It's difficult to even imagine where they are.

"Your team has an area set aside for such an eventuality in your record keeping. I reviewed it along with all data available on your life before entering the Headspace after it was collected by the Sentinel sent to kill you." He looks mournfully at his pasta, and then scoops a small portion up to examine it, as if anticipating a poison.

This entire exchange made 0 sense to me. I understand that these are preexisting concepts, but you should rely as little as possible on the reader already knowing things. Within the context of a story, everything should be at least introduced and explained in the surface.

The amount and density of concepts this series deals with and without much explanation is just confusing. There's a real need for some exposition so it can be reasonably followed without knowing them beforehand, and to give time to chew on their introduction. Start of the Dark/Light introduces Jungian psychology, and from that we go to Backrooms-specific esoteric science, and then straight up to time travel in Revelations. That's way too much whiplash.

"You say this, Diana, of learned experiences you have take from outside world. Just because… eh… 'Kevin', is a human, like you or me… does not mean he is precisely human like you or me. His… how you call it… 'immune system'… it is largely uninvolved. The armor, it does most of work. Without it, he is not well."

Really, really weird that this hasn’t been mentioned before as important. It doesn’t make sense that neither Natasha or him would talk about this when it's a legitimate life-or-death risk.

This scene majorly fucks with two very important plot points of the series;

• The armors being unremovable except by Technicians

Which is now changed to being removable anyway if you just want to. No explanation, no justification. Diana just does it. Why is an important rule like this, which the plot is predicated upon, get suddenly busted apart? She does take her helmet off before, but the armor being unremovable is made out to be a big deal, with proper introduction and exposition sequences to explain why… And this is changed with a quick dialogue gag. It's a major anticlimax and thoroughly unsatisfying.

• The "other"-ness of the Black Knights

The BKs as a group have been treated as Stormtrooper cannon fodder so far, and continue to be later in the series. Diana is only now being introduced to the fact that each and every Knight is a human underneath (which was not foreshadowed at all in the early chapters) and she does not find this implication troubling at all? She's filled at least a few dozen human beings with holes, which she knows from her dialogue with Natasha and later with Kevin that they are most likely deluded rather than intently evil.

Hope to find supplies, hope to save her friend, and in turn… hope to win the war she'd inadvertently entered via her own hubris.

Diana's motivations are beyond obtuse at this point. There is no indication of how seeing the murder of everyone in that MEG base has affected her, no indication of any expected sense of belonging to her old life, and no sense of why Kevin is at all important to her. I might’ve missed something but her hubris doesn’t seem to have played much of a role anywhere in the events leading up to this point. Feel free to correct me here.

Has she also just not thought of splitting open her own armor for the black liquid?

She wouldn't be running from a fight ever again, and resigned herself to the distraction of chasing the shape down the alleyway.

I don't understand this. Running away isn't made out to be a character flaw ever. When she does run away earlier, she clearly does so to beneficial effect and to no psychological impact to herself. Shouldn't she value running away as a strategic move seeing how it saved her life in chapter 1?

I know you better as Diana, Knight-Breaker and Overseer of the M.E.G.: Human Resources division."

Unless you plan to subvert this later on, practically spoiling the plot isn't a good idea. Bringing up the MEG again just makes me confused about her current relationship with them. Didn't she have a job? A position? Other friends or sense of belonging? The series makes it feel like her connection to the MEG is nonexistent.

The sense of urgency from the start of the tale is plain gone by the middle. She enters the city desperately rushing to try and help Kevin somehow, but then gets distracted by time travel shenanigans? I also don't like how Kevin's health status becomes a major plot point in one chapter and gets immediately resolved in the next with an instant drop in stakes and tension. It goes nowhere, Diana gains nothing personally from this, no character develops. It feels aimless.

The sudden entry of Spitfire and time travel shenanigans and Naito and the city and everything else is a bombardment of information that's majorly hard to follow. The series manages far too many scientific concepts without doing much with any of them and introduces them one after another after another without breaks or time to let the reader see them settle into the world as a coherent part of the whole.

I don't have a lot to say so far because the series isn't finished and I've already talked at length about the problems it has right now, so I feel I should share some positives.

• The Sage and their environment are really interesting and captivating. It's a huge damn shame that it gets nearly no attention except as a source of exposition.
• I really liked Natasha. She's fun, even with the misplaced bouts of Russian. Shame she gets kicked into third wheel position.
• The humor is hit-or-miss, but it works best during Knight Fever as a part of Natasha's character. Elsewhere not so much, too Marvel feeling.
• I like the dynamic between Natasha, Kevin and Diana, even though the character of the latter is poorly defined. I feel the scenes where they were together were far more enjoyable than the rest of the series, even though it takes some questionable plot developments for it to happen.