On today’s blog, we’re going to be dealing with the contentious captain of the Pequod! The avatar of anger, the bilious badass, the carnage-craving commandant himself…Captain Ahab.

Ahab is an anti-hero, even villainous: he is consistently portrayed as mentally unstable, hungering for vengeance against a ‘dumb beast’ as Starbuck notes (something that Starbuck himself considers a blasphemy).

  Ahab’s hunger for retribution outweighs literally everything else in the story: his family, his ship, the safety of his crew, and even his own sense of self-preservation. He is hell-bent on vengeance on the white whale, the monster that took his leg and scarred his face: Moby Dick. Every waking moment of his life is spent obsessively hunting this creature.

According to Wizards, someone who is focused completely on revenge to the EXCLUSION of any other traits is the colors above (White-Black-Red). For example:

and cards that reward aggression over logic:

I confess, I had a hard time swallowing a three-color explanation for something as simple as revenge. But then I pondered it a bit, and it turns out that revenge (and Ahab!) are a bit more complicated than they appear. Let’s break down the component colors and how they apply to Ahab.

White mana is chiefly concerned, in this combination, with justice and order in the abstract sense. I can hear you saying ‘justice isn’t revenge!’ Well, no, but the basic premise of justice is a sort of legally sanctioned retribution. When seen in that context, White makes perfect sense for Ahab. White is also the most obsessed with order and planning: one of my favorite scenes from the book is Ahab in his study (Ok, it’s someone else DISCUSSING the amount of planning Ahab put into this voyage but still). Ahab   figuring out where Moby Dick will be at any given time through his knowledge of the seven seas and copious amounts of maps, charts and reports on pods of whales and their patterns. His hours of study (eventually) pay off (sort of) in the end.

Black mana, at least as it applies to Ahab, is chiefly concerned with the self. It  doesn’t hurt that black mana has historically the longest reputation for being ‘good at killling’ and views homicide/whale-o-cide as the sword that cuts the Gordian knot of life’s problems.  Ahab is completely obsessed with fulfilling his vengeance, it’s a purely selfish desire. As noted above, he forsakes hearth, health and the lives of his crew: everything is coin to be spent to in pursuit of his revenge. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that if blowing up a lifeboat full of orphans would somehow help Ahab fulfill his crusade against Moby Dick he’d be down in the hold measuring out the gunpowder before you could say ‘unfettered’. Ahab has discarded a large part of his humanity in pursuit of his goal, and that’s exactly what black mana is all about: making deals with the devil (or your id) for power or a desired result.

 

 

Red is chiefly concerned with passion and the primacy of emotions. Ahab’s emotions, his, shall we say, burning desire for revenge is what keeps him going for the whole book. While Black or White might calculate the loss-gain ratios of an action, red doesn’t even bother. Ahab places feelings, in this case, hatred, so high on the list that he is willing to pay any price to achieve it, to get that emotional satisfaction. He also insists on killing the whale himself, with a harpoon, as opposed to a more pragmatic option like opening up on Moby Dick with a broadside. This sort of blood lust is characteristic of red characters.  Ahab is being kept alive and awake at night by the sheer power of hatred, not logic or purpose. On an animal that has no concept that it has done anything wrong. Yep, the logic part of Ahab that doesn’t involve killing Moby Dick checked out a while ago.

So that’s Ahab. Join me again for next week, when I’ll return to Westeros and deal with our favorite bastard.