Warning: this may be an Arknights story summary that will give lore enthusiasts high blood pressure This article contains extremely severe story-distorting deconstruction and hell-joke-style blunt summaries. Please don’t take it too seriously; after reading it you’ll most likely think I just escaped from an Ursus insane asylum
In the world of Terra in Arknights, the storylines of other countries are usually filled with bloodlines, racism, gods, ancient grudges and primordial behemoths, but Columbia’s storyline isn’t boring racial brawling — it drags you straight into a modern capitalist free-for-all of antitrust law, patent wars, NASDAQ bell-ringing and legalised gangsters
This article will start by analysing the first part of the Columbia arc: Mansfield Break
If you only look at the surface, Mansfield Break is a very standard Hollywood-style Shawshank Redemption remake:
The protagonist Mountain (Anthony): a gentle, refined young master of a gangster/financial conglomerate, framed by his enemies, sentenced to a heavy term and thrown into the fully enclosed Mansfield mobile prison
The one planning his escape is the former Rhine Lab researcher Silence. Unable to bear seeing a good man wronged, she pays out of her own pocket to hire Kafka, and Robin, a worker with nowhere else to turn, to infiltrate the prison and try to break the young master out from the inside
With a riot stirred up in the prison as cover, the male lead has a showdown on a rainy night with Jesselton, the top assassin sent by his enemies (top-tier, really?)
In the end, the former Rhine Lab security director Saria comes out, punches Jesselton into oblivion with three blows, and leads everyone off in style
But that is only the surface. If you carefully take apart the logic of how Columbian society operates, you’ll find that behind all of this is nothing but cannibalistic capitalist business
In this whole affair, the mastermind framing Mountain is a major Columbian conglomerate, the Hyde brothers. Why do they want to take down Mountain? Not for revenge, but for a business acquisition
Mountain’s family business, Simon Company, stood in the way of the Hyde brothers’ money in the construction-materials sector. In other countries, dealing with a competitor might mean assassination. But in Columbia, this society of the rule of law (rule by law), the Hyde brothers chose “legal means”: bribe the prosecution, forge evidence, and brand the heir of Simon Company a felon
Once the heir is imprisoned, the company’s stock price will plummet, and the Hyde brothers can complete a hostile takeover of Simon Company on the capital market at an extremely low price. This is the Columbian-style corporate war
Mansfield Prison is the darkest microcosm of Columbia. It is not a state apparatus of violence at all, but a for-profit private enterprise
The prisoners here don’t need to be reformed, and don’t need to be executed. Because every prisoner is free, bottomless labour
The warden doesn’t care at all that the prisoners form factions, run underground boxing, or even ccb, as long as they can go to the factory on time every day to run sewing machines and make industrial parts, creating KPI for the prison
In the eyes of Columbian capitalists: the death penalty is too wasteful. Depriving a person of political rights and turning them into a biological machine that runs 24 hours a day and needs no five social insurances and one housing fund — that is the maximum utilisation of social value
The villain assassin Jesselton is mocked by the player base as the most pathetic clown boss in Arknights history; this man is a perfect embodiment of Columbia’s workplace ecology
He is clearly an assassin, yet he talks endlessly about decency, rules and company systems. He goes into the prison to kill only because it’s a project the Hyde brothers outsourced to him. He thinks he represents Columbia’s supreme capitalist power system
When he meets Saria descending from the sky, what collapses him most isn’t that he can’t win, but that Saria doesn’t play by workplace rules at all. Jesselton is a senior worker alienated by capital; he thinks he is the enforcer of the rules, only for his worldview to be smashed to pieces by a single punch of real force
The characters who appear in this event embody the price Columbia pays for trading humanity for value
Why does Robin infiltrate the prison to help someone escape? Because her father has Oripathy, and to scrape together money for treatment she can only sell her own life to do this kind of illegal work. Columbia has Terra’s most advanced medical technology, Rhine Lab, yet the people at the bottom here can’t afford even a single aspirin. The more advanced the technology, the more expensive the medical care, and the faster the poor die
Silence, on the other hand, is an absolute idealist, trying to fight the entire system with her meagre strength. She thinks she has planned a flawless prison break, but in fact every move she makes is under the surveillance and tacit permission of big shots like Muelsyse and Saria
Why is it Saria who settles it with one punch in the end? This actually hints at a core rule of Columbia: on this land that boasts of freedom and law, the real law is always in the hands of those super-oligarchs with absolute power
As the opening of the Columbia series, Mansfield Break actually only exposes the lowest, most mundane side of this country: for money and efficiency, grinding the common people down and using them as lubricant
Although Mountain successfully escapes and flees to Rhodes Island, he has lost his family and his life forever. The Hyde brothers still call the wind and summon the rain in Columbia, and the private prison is still endlessly receiving “free labour”. The protagonist group won a tactical victory, but Columbia’s gears of capital are still roaring and turning
In this chapter, Columbia is still only at the level of capitalists
But in the next part, Lone Trail, we will see where Columbia is truly terrifying
