Good Intentions: How Rem Saverem’s Philosophy of
Delusion Shaped a World


The ticket to the future is always blank. It’s never
right to take the life of another. Love and Peace. It
sounds so wonderful, so simple - Rem Saverem’s way of
thought is a kind, appropriately gentle one, promising
happiness and unity.

What it delivered was misery and the ultimate schism.

There’s nothing wrong with “Love and Peace” per se,
but upon closer examination of how Rem functioned,
that nice little quip becomes nothing less than
disturbingly flawed. Her way of thought assumes a
world of people who are fundamentally good, whose
psyches are clean and souls neatly pressed of sins;
or, if one is otherwise, that they are willing or able
to change. She believes in a world of pure good
intention, and that is her downfall.

Rem Saverem is not an innocent. She knows the world is
cruel, that suffering and death are inevitable - what
she sees but refuses to acknowledge is that this
darkness is a real and congenital part of life. That
is her crime: self-delusion, refusal to see reality
even when it came crashing down around her. Her pretty
words and dreamy outlook does not include child abuse
and bigotry, so she turns away from the truth even
when Vash and Knives start sprouting bruises and
shying away from Steve. Rem is self-indulgently blind,
and everyone around her pays for it, mostly with their
own lives.

That’s the sick irony of the situation. Even while
preaching about the sanctity of life, she sets up a
situation in which countless sleeping colonists die,
not to count the hundreds or even thousands that
perish years later, caught in the crossfire between
brothers that her echoes only serve to escalate. Rem’s
philosophy kills. Not directly, of course, but the
wages of her conscious ignorance are tragedy after
tragedy. Evil exists and does not like to be ignored;
when Knives (who represents the negative) begins to
mature beyond infancy and develop a personality, Rem
is disturbed to find that she is raising someone whose
very nature contradicts her beliefs. Whether she
realizes this or not - and it’s probably not - Rem
obviously favors Vash over Knives, leaving the dark
twin alone to basically raise himself. This, of
course, only serves to reinforce Knives’s antisocial
and aggressive, calculating behavior. In this way, Rem
commits child abuse and emotional neglect herself,
becoming the mother of her very own antithesis.

It’s reminiscent of a child building a sand castle
below the tide line and expecting it not to be ruined
because she doesn’t believe in the ocean.

I’m not the first to describe the situation as a
“domino effect” - Rem’s lack of care causes Steve to
get away with beating a child. Knives breaks away and
begins to formulate his own philosophy, purposely
defiant of Rem’s views. Sixty million colonists die.
Later on, Knives finds a child of his own to raise,
creating Legato Bluesummers as a twisted parody of his
own experiences under Rem and her irresponsibility.
The woman favored delusions over the protection of two
young children, and she got exactly what she sowed.

I’m not advocating anything like what Knives believes,
most of which is childish and incompatible with
reality itself, but I can certainly see where the poor
boy’s coming from. His world is built on exploitation
and the lack of any normal attention outside of Vash.
He had absolutely no one on which to model himself.
What Rem’s excuse for being an ignorant, pathological
twip is, I sure as hell don’t know. Something sappy
about a dead boyfriend? I’m not buying.

Rem supposedly joined Project SEEDs in order to
influence the fate of humankind, which she sure as
hell did. All I can say is that she had the chance to
make Eden, and she messed up. Badly. In a universe
governed by infinite complexities and shades of gray,
good intention is noble - but it’s just not enough.