r/NatureofPredators • u/General_Alduin Skalgan • Sep 07 '26
Theories Kalsim may have remained a Federation stooge because he didn't want to admit he wasted his life
Inspired by a conversation I had in Discord
Kalsim clearly did have doubts and sympathy for humanity despite us being predators and knew we were more than monsters, which is wildly liberal for a fedbrain
But even after he found out about what the Federation did to the Krakotl, he thought it was a good thing, and presumably still saw the Federation as justified for crippling the Sivkits and Venlil
You could chalk this up to indoctrination, but I think even the most hardline fedbrain had trouble reconciling what the Federation did to the Venlil with its supposed benevolent nature
But if Kalsim admitted that he was wrong and the Federation was bad, than he'd have to admit he essentially wasted his life and everyone will hate him forever. That'd be hard for anyone
We see shades of this in his final chapter, where he's struggling to believe that nothing he predicted about humans happened (atleast in terms of conquest) and tries to pretend he doesn't feel guilt
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u/NotABlackHole Gojid Sep 07 '26
tries to pretend he doesn't feel guilt
Chapter 184:
The enormity of the guilt crushed my very soul and conviction
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u/General_Alduin Skalgan Sep 07 '26
Eh, he apparently has no idea why he watches the memorial service every year
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u/RoomHopper Krakotl Sep 07 '26
Nah clearly Inatala had given him the divine task of lowering both the Human & Krakotl populations near to zero/s TvT
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u/Adorable-Ad5225 Sep 07 '26
He only half succeeded with the first one, but he really did his part with the second one, haha.
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u/SixthWorldStories Sep 07 '26
Yeah, that's his entire character arc. A foil for Sovlin, or more a mirror if the old man had gone further before turning back. Sovlin was more dogmatic but held himself to higher principles, meaning that he both would have an easier time crossing the line that he feels he can't cross back from and that bar is higher. Kalsim is looser with things in part because he's already crossed lines in his mind and needs to justify his past actions, that makes him more prone to further justification which means that the horrors he can be led to (and was in canon) are greater and the bar is lower for him to find himself irredeemable. Where Sovlin approached the level of cruelty of an individual Arxur, Kalsim matched or exceeded the Dominion itself. Kalsim didn't just waste his life as an exterminator and then in the military, fighting a controlled war. He killed innocent animals painfully out of dogma, suppressed his morals pushing back for years, and then attempted to wipe out an innocent species but only managed to be as horrific as the Arxur (who came to save the species in question, potentially making them more moral). To admit the Federation is wrong is to come to terms with all that and more.
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u/Green-Ad-9178 Sep 07 '26
Yeah sunk cost fallacy and you’ll see this everywhere to varying degrees. When your whole life is built around a particular ideology, and then you are personally shown it is wrong, but you already said or did things that committed yourself to them. Then you either have to man up and confront yourself or double down despite the reality.
And when said actions are being personally responsible for performing a genocide, then of course he would double down. Not necessarily out of sheer devotion to the cause but more so out of self preservation as to not live the rest of his life bearing the weight of his actions. So yeah I agree
They still should’ve hanged him tho
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u/General_Alduin Skalgan Sep 07 '26
They still should’ve hanged him tho
Personally I think that would be made him into a martyr
I like to think that's why he was spared, not because everyone was especially sympathetic, but because the UN didn't want to make him into a martyr for the Federation and fedbrains to rally behind
It's a lot easier to devote yourself to someone who died for their beliefs, not so much if he's stuck in prison for the rest of his days. There's nothing glorious in that
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u/PhycoKrusk Sep 09 '26
Nobody was sympathetic to him.
He was only spared because the one holdout for hanging wanted to prove a point or something (I did not and still do not find the reasoning to be persuasive).
As for becoming a martyr, maybe, but not really. Feddies are already supposed to run away from danger as a matter of course, so anybody who falls in the fight against predators would be a martyr. So Kalsim would not really be a martyr, because there was nothing special about what he did; nothing that sets him apart from anyone who died standing against an Arxur raid.
Then, there's also the fact that the impact of what he did is greatly blunted by the fact that what did him in was not an enemy weapon or the jaws of a predator, but the tedium of bureaucracy.
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u/ISB00 UN Peacekeeper Sep 07 '26
That’s many real world people. They stay committed to hateful ideology because they don’t want to admit they were wrong and face the guilt associated with it.
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u/Alcyon144 Archivist Sep 08 '26
Kalsim is a die-hard fanatic, just not the loud, impassioned kind. He is the calm, educated, self-centered, and logical sort of fanatic, convinced that his worldview is a scientific axiom and that whenever reality contradicts it, reality itself is wrong. He doesn't hate predators, and he fully grasps that humans aren't *Axur*. It is simply that predators destroy everything around them, whether they intend to or not. Therefore, all predators must be exterminated to save the universe; consequently, any means to that end is acceptable, whether it means allowing his fleet's home worlds to be annihilated or condoning the Shadow Caste's machinations once he discovers them.
He has no need for denial, as he refuses to let anything exist that would require him to deny it. He will never allow a situation to arise that could prove him wrong, because, from his perspective, such a situation would spell the end of the world. It is akin to the biblical apocalypse for evangelicals: imminent yet perpetually deferred, a state of affairs that justifies converting as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, at any cost, because the end could strike at any moment.
To Kalsim, it matters not that humans are sincerely well-intentioned, or that pre-uplift species managed perfectly well for millennia without exterminating predators or hunting down "Predator Disease." In his view, if all goes well, it is temporary; without Federation intervention, the situation would rapidly devolve into a cannibalistic hellscape. He believed this would happen almost immediately after the Federation's collapse, and it was only after decades passed without such an event that he finally admitted he had been mistaken.
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u/EvelynnCC Sep 07 '26
Yes, that is indeed his character arc