The Second Coming of Trotsky
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[cr. 2026-08-03T10:28:26H]
Trotsky tries using what he thinks is a forward spell
he bursts into flames and turns into a pile of ash
various Trotskyist theorists are scrambling around trying to figure out what to do, if they should look for some way to revive him or not. some think it would empower and complete the Fourth International, some think it's the kind of thing Stalin would believe in which is unfair and would unbalance it. they can't come to a consensus
then Jackson shows up
and says, no, I want you to revive him, because I need a rival that's worthy of my power [*db]
the Fourth International theorists all look at each other and are finally like, huh, okay, I guess we'll do it then.
various people from the Fourth International throw together a pile of names that are handed to the remaining relatives, and Jackson leads them through the ritual to rebuild Lionspark, creating a Trotsky clone that has all of his potential as a Marxist theorist / alchemy user / Advance Form but is a new individual. when he is generated he is physically the same age as Jackson. [*c]
after looking through all the name suggestions, they name the new heir of Trotskyism "Xaguar" (jaguar), a suggestion from Spanish migrants to Mexico. [*x]
I love this on a symbolic level because on the surface it's funny to see this very "anime" trope you'd think is unrealistic smash into scenarios from Communist history, but below the surface, it's actually an interesting reflection of the concept of ages of world history and how at a certain point both Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism have to reinvent themselves from the beginning to be of any use in the new post-1991 age.
that is the meaning of these characters to me. Jackson and Xaguar are like the embodiment of a completely new age where both Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism have to abandon all their previous assumptions and start over from only what they observe and what models they observe actually fitting real history and predicting _each other_ — a new age where meta-Marxism replaces the Marxisms of old but allows them to reconstruct each other.
it's funny to see, like, the concept of using particular known figures in historical fiction turn into mythical hypostatization where Stalinism is just incarnated as Stalin and Trotskyism is just incarnated as Trotsky like named Marxist tendencies had their own local-gods or something. I don't think I would want to do this clone thing for other theorist characters in the Ironblood setting. I think I just want it to be Stalin and Trotsky, and other theorists die when they die but some of them can live a long time if they don't die in a war of some sort. the lifespan of the characters is a plot device more than a serious sci-fi mechanic, where I want to keep around some characters of every tendency so I let some of them live absurd lengths of time to not have to create more characters, but I will take other characters and find different solutions like the conceit of Stalin and Trotsky clones, or any number of other ways, including just the more normal and realistic option of characters nominating new theorists inside the same tendency as their successors. or, you know, publications or social structures of a given swatch alignment, when we're being realistic about this.
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[cr. 2026-08-03T10:28:26H]
"tiger"
Spero Cyrus Lucas
"jaguar" Xaguar Iaguar Giaguaro Oselotl[!]
Castilian: language from the region of Castile and León. in Spanish it's [x] (J), in Castilian it's [ʃ] (X)
Elijah - bible name that proclaims allegiance to God but hilariously implies there are other gods
Atlas - hilarious after what anticommunists have done with it
James - nominated by fans of James P. (Patrick) Cannon. gosh I never knew what the P stood for. but knowing it is almost kind of cursed.
James Jacob Jakov Jakob Diego Xacobu Koba
Asturian: regional language in Spain.
Koba - some Stalinists think they're being funny and get behind the whole Jacob variants thing just for the Stalin joke
they pick Xaguar because of the influence of "Xacobu" and thinking Xaguar sounded similar but better.
I have no idea why so many people from Spain are putting in names. maybe some of them are from Mexico or other parts of Europe but just happen to know those names. that kind of thing slowly gets more likely as you get closer to the 2020s.
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[*x] pronounced shag-wahr / [ʃɑˈɣ̞waɾ]. in-universe many English speakers end up mispronouncing it as [xaˈɣ̞waɾ], thinking of the x in Mexico. but it actually comes from Castilian Spanish.
[*db] gosh I'm trying to think of where this idea came from in my mind and I think my reference is _Dragon Ball_ and like, Goku finishing his battles and letting the various evil kings come back to life, all because he gets his ability to do good starting from his sheer power and he kind of doesn't know what being good actually is.
here I think the context is kind of different and it's not quite the _same_ idea. Jackson actually has reason to support other variations of Marxism existing as "the rational thing to do", because historically Stalin's Marxism has never had all the answers to its own core questions, and even listening to Maoism or Che Guevara's Marxism will bring some kind of improvement when they all work together — though Stalin's Marxism finding the best parts of Trotskyism and listening to those may bring the best results.
Jackson doesn't even need to be a nice guy to realize that eradicating Trotskyists is a bad idea on a logical level. but I think the idea _would_ be that he had gone through character growth and risen out of his days of edginess and resentment to become more selfless. he sees the value in trying to lift Trotskyists up in that they are the closest to being his allies and he can have more "friends", but he also has high expectations. he has become the kind of person who is impressive enough you're embarrassed to disappoint them, which is an interesting thing to throw into a sea of Trotskyists who can sometimes be very self-assured and arrogant even in comparison to Lenin who would say a particular swath of anti-bourgeois statements "as certainties". basically the original Stalin was snarky, but this one is too nice and makes you afraid you're an insufficient version of _yourself_. he's the Stalin of the demographically-bourgeois Existentialist age we're experiencing in real life; he's more palatable to political-agorist types in that he torments people into horrible spirals of depression and death in exactly the way they do. love and compassion are his weapons and he can use them to commit murder.
[*c] which... hmm. are they like real-world clones? do they have a bunch of hidden diseases? I don't really know.
I want to say the neo-nazis got super disgustingly obsessed with finding the purest genome sample to the point they actually did a decent job at creating Jackson more or less free of genome damage. hypothetically if you have enough cells with the same genome in them you could kind of put the genomes together and 'remaster' them into a consensus genome, only if you had any idea how to tell which cells contained errors. in the real world you probably wouldn't be able to guess that perfectly, given only a few cells. but then again, the more cells you had to work with, the more you would simply see the same sequences come up over and over again and the mutations become infrequent in comparison. if you only wanted to revert harmful changes and not attempt to make anything "more perfect", you could hypothetically get to a point where the error rate was so low it would resemble the rate of random mutations when people are born normally.
so... what I imagine is the neo-nazis obsessively making sure they have as many cells as possible to put into the shining witch-fire and it's like, _hey we found another sample, oh wonderful, there may only be a little bit of the sequence in that one but we need it anyway._ they look totally crazy from the outside, like this is classic black magic, this is pagan superstition, but somehow it works.
Jackson appropriates the Duginists' dark arts that were once going to be used to oppress him for his own purposes, allowing him to create another nearly impeccable copy of someone's genome for reasons that do not purely benefit him. surprising everyone when nobody expected that out of a "Stalinist" on a moral level, or out of anyone period in terms of ability.
thus, against all odds, the nazi obsession with DNA finally did something good for the world for the very first and last time. but it only became possible because Marxists hijacked what nazis were doing and applied the classic Marxist principle of reinterpreting things (British India, globalization, republics, capitalist corporations, etc.) in terms of their consequences rather than their original intentions.
;=> https://theeverymom.com/boy-names-that-mean-hope/
;=> en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xaguar#Galician
;=> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_(given_name)
;=> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castile_and_Le%C3%B3n
; Secundaria Materiae
:: cr. 2026-08-03T10:28:26H
; created
; title created
