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The mechanics of Irregulars as Rulebreakers


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#1
naphack

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So... Skimming through the forum for a bit, I found that there is still discussion about how exactly Irregulars interact with the rules of the tower. Since a couple of the ideas people have about how irregulars can seemingly violate contracts and rules at will seem way over the top, I will propose a more rational and level-headed approach. "Simply ignore all the rules and do your own thing anyway because irregular!" Might sound cool on paper, but it seems rather arbitrary. So without further ado, let's take a good look at the specifics.

 

Firstly, there is control over shinsoo. There are no restrictions on irregulars with regards to when, how and under which circumstances they can control shinsoo. They can simply do it, unlike normal citizens of the tower who require a contract with the floor's guardian first. And here is where the debates already start. Is this truly a violation of some arbitrary rules or is requiring a contract simply something people of the tower got used to, but there is no actual rule forbidding the control over shinsoo without a contract, making it seem like there is a rule when in actual fact there is not?

 

So either the tower automatically grants anyone who enters a higher authority over shinsoo than the guardians, or the tower only accepts those who have the talent to control shinsoo on their own in the first place. The answer to this question could be found in Rachel if she wasn't so FUCKING USELESS. In any case, Irregulars have unrestricted control over shinsoo and they do not seem to break any actual rules by doing so.

 

But here comes the big one. The example that really hammered down the image of Irregulars as rule breakers. Their ability to kill Zahard in spite of his contract for immortality with the guardians.

If we lay this out in very general terms, there is only one way, how this can work. The other two options can easily be dismissed because they are kind of ridiculous and either require a selective enforcement of rules or an amount of control and a set of privileges that are simply ludicrous. But let's lay them out first:

 

The first one would be the "rules lawyering" option: Since Zahard's immortality contract merely states that "citizens of the tower" can't hurt him, illegal immigrants from outside the tower can still do significant harm to him simply by virtue of not being covered by the contract. Where this runs afoul of logic is that there are a lot of contracts and rules in the tower, especially surrounding the regular system, the right to move to a higher floor and other things. A lot of the tests rely on contracts for stuff like teleportation to work properly. It's simply not believable that all those rules are written in a way that they work for irregulars, yet Zahard is unable to formulate his own contract in a way that includes irregulars.

 

The second option would be that Irregulars can somehow overrule, annul or suspend a contract. In the tower, where rules are absolute and contracts are everything, this is kind of problematic. The scope of this kind of authority seems rather arbitrary and it would kind of defeat the purpose of having to form a contract for things like immortality, when an irregular could simply write their own rules, as this ability would imply.

 

This leaves the most natural option, I call it "overpower the guardian." Irregulars are not exempt from any contracts whatsoever. They still follow the rules of the tower to the letter, it's just that enforcing those rules on them is kind of a problem. With a normal citizen of the tower, they can't fight back once the guardian chooses to enforce a contract, since their powers were borrowed from the guardian in the first place. However, an irregular has authority over the same medium that the guardians use to enforce their contracts, which kind of limits the guardian's ability to dish out punishment or enforce a rule, if the irregular chooses to resist.

Let's take a simple example: If Baam chose to smack Kaiser in the face in violation of the Name Station's rules, the guardian would issue a command to terminate Baam's life. However, since unlike a normal regular, Baam would still have the ability to control shinsoo, he could hypothetically expand an area of shinsoo that negates the influence of the Guardian and stop himself from being deleted that way. The Guardian would probably be like "well, it looks like my job here is done! Goodbye everyone!" While Baam would keep punching the snot out of a totally shocked and bewildered Kaiser.

In a sense, the most probable explanation is that irregulars are exempt from the consequences of the rules rather than from the rules themselves.

With regards to killing Zahard, if the contract with the guardian states that nobody can harm Zahard, then the Guardian will take painstaking effort to make sure that nobody who uses shinsoo through their contract can use that shinsoo in any way that would harm Zahard. However, this still leaves a huge blind spot to people who can use shinsoo without a contract and even if there is more to the contract and the Guardian chose to take a more active role, Enryu has already shown that Guardians are not absolute beings and can be can not only be overpowered but even outright killed.

 

However, this whole thought experiment shows that there undeniably are risks to breaking the rules of the tower, so one should not go around carelessly violating contracts even as an irregular.


Edited by naphack, 02 April 2017 - 04:27 PM.

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#2
101010

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I think just thinking of it in terms of contracts is good enough. It requires the assumption that Jahad and the Ten made a contract on 100F that forbids any of them from killing the other 10 or killing themselves. Then enforce this contract on anyone who wants to use Shinsu. Essentially, if you want to use Shinsu you have to honour all the contracts that Jahad and the Ten have made. Therefore, an Irregular doesn't not have to honour those contracts and can kill anyone of them. This also explains why V was able to kill himself (reminder: he didn't fight/kill a Guardian).


Edited by 101010, 02 April 2017 - 04:46 PM.

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