Appreciation post for Priest Vucub (LB7 Spoilers)

I wasn't really expecting it, but Priest Vucub ended up being my favourite Deino in this Lostbelt. Which to be fair, there's only like 4 named Deinos so there wasn't much competition, but he's still the guy I decided to make a post about so there's that. As a reminder, he's the angry little pteranodon that was kinda super racist and helped the Ocelotl steal the sun.

So when Deinos were first introduced, I figured they were basically humans but dinosaur-shaped. Maybe unusually friendly, but Vucub was an *sshole to us so I figured we were just lucky with our interactions. Then stuff progressed, and it became really weird how nice everyone was being. We were here and total aliens, but nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Well no one except Vucub, but because everyone else was so accepting, he just seemed racist. And perhaps it was strange that nobody cared that we were foreign invaders with an end goal of ending their world, and they were just happily listening to our stories, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. All the while, Vucub was muttering about how he should be king in the background, making him seem like a power-hungry maniac.

Then he "betrayed" the Deinos and helped the Ocelotl invade the city, steal the sun, and got a lot of Deinos killed. Obvious d*ck move. But then the reactions of other Deinos were even more unsettling. They didn't care at all. A huge chunk of their population just died, and one of their own was partly responsible, but their reaction was to shrug and roleplay Proper Human History, and that's the only reason he was punished at all. The story made a point about how the Deinos were an utopic society with no conflict and no envy towards what others have, where everyone is equal. But that's horrifying, as pointed out by Mash. If everyone's equal, that means no one's important. If they have no envy, that means they have no desire (or at least no will to act upon their desires). If there's no conflict, that means there's nothing they find important enough to fight for. It's a society where everyone's playing a single player game and only vaguely reacting to the fact that other people exist.

To be honest, that interpretation of the species feels like a bit of a retcon from the first half where the Deinos were super hyped about the "soccer" game and wanted to win, and the fact that the warrior Deinos exist also contradicts the later depiction Nasu went with, but I'll chalk that up to religion and tradition. The point is, Deinos as a species had evolved to their point where their lives were superfluous.

It was when it was revealed that the sun was going to blow up in five days and nobody gave a f*** that made Vucub make so much more sense to me. He was the only Deino in the entire city who had a self preservation instinct. He was the only one who cared about extinction. Maybe there was selfishness and ambition mixed into his motives, but he wanted to be king and did all the things he did because he was the only Deino who cared about the survival of himself and his species. He was treated as different because he didn't want to die. Some Deino even made a comment about pteranodons being weird about mortality because of their shorter lifespan, which is pretty much the only racist thing a non-Vucub Deino has said. He was semi-outcasted for having common sense.

And honestly, him looking down on the Ocelotl was arguably more respect than any other Deino showed towards them, as pointed out by the Ocelotl child in the end. The other Deinos treated the Ocelotl as NPCs --- not even interactable NPCs, but the kind that are just there for decoration. Vucub may have looked down on them, but he respected them enough to make a deal with them and treat them as actual adversaries. He was the one person who recognized life as a PvP game instead of a solo farming simulator.

And in the end, he died. His whole motivation was to not die, but he still chose to go out in a blaze of glory against a vastly superior foe. As much as he wanted to live, he was still willing to be irrational to join everyone else in their final charge. (I still can't get over how fast the Deinos decided that guns were the answer). It's kind of funny. He was the one most resistant to our cultural invasion, but he was the one who understood us from the beginning.