the Wordherder Online

Understanding the Avatar

The Sanskrit definition of “avatar” is a hint to the psychology/philosophy of an active serial killer that has been working undetected by law enforcement for years because of a very unique modus operandi.

The killer in the Avatar Murders sees himself far above the lives of the people around him. He sees himself with a godlike ability to take lives and impact the futures of other lives. However, he does not allow such “mortals” to ever see him. He attacks his victims from behind, his patsies never see him, and investigators always see the patsies as those that committed his crimes. The patsies are his avatar – a false representation that he chooses to represent him to the lives not worthy to view his true form.

A symbol that he leaves for his signature is a form of avatar as well. His arrogance does not allow him to give all credit to his “work” strictly to the patsy alone and so he “needs” to leave an actual trace of himself, though in a form that does not easily implicate him nor reveal the point of staging his crime scenes to lead to a patsy.

Kalki – (from wikipedia)The origins of the name probably lie in the Sanskrit word “kalka” which refers to dirt, filth, or foulness and hence denotes the “destroyer of foulness,” “destroyer of confusion,” “destroyer of darkness,” or “annihilator of ignorance.” Other similar and divergent interpretations based on varying etymological derivations from Sanskrit – including one simply meaning “White Horse” – have been made.

A Play on Morality

There exists a strange view of morality in the sense that the characters are surrounded by a decaying city collapsing in on itself because of sloth-like neglect from its citizens, corruption and greed from its leaders, and the vanity and overall self-serving bigotry of the working and upper-classes that have fled the city for the suburbs.

The killer, committing the worst of human acts – murder – is in some respect the hero within a troubled world. He sees himself as such and in that he finds justification for the killings. The commentary within this strange moral dissonance is that of Mankind being a flawed and doomed being.

Even the “good guys”, represented in the investigators, have significant personality flaws and in the end they inevitably lose. Clearly there is a commentary here that the good guys actually do not always win… and further, who really are “the good guys” when even those that seem to be on the side of righteousness are, themselves, certainly not pure in character.

Much like The Conqueror Worm, mankind is doomed to chase their Phantom while unknowingly being guided by the evils around them as well as within them. The only consolation in the end is always a sad and usually rather abrupt loss to the inevitability of death.

There is, however, something very cruel in the fact that the victims that actually are killed end up suffering the worst fate in the story despite being the only truly innocent characters. The killer points out within his philosophy that he believes no one to be “innocent”. This puts the idea that “man is inherently bad”. Aside from the killer, the characters within the story see more of a frustration with life – not that mankind is born bad or even predestined to turn bad. More-so, they believe that through the trials of life, it is hard to imagine how anyone could not become tarnished at some point.