Crimson King
Encyclopedia : C : CR : CRI : Crimson King
- For the similarly-named progressive rock band, see King Crimson.
- redirect [[Template:spoiler-about]]
Character history
The Crimson King is an immortal being with incarnations on most (if not all) level of the Dark Tower, the lynchpin that holds King's multiverse together. He first appeared as an actual character in King's novel Insomnia, controlling a citizen of Derry in order to commit an act of terrorism. This incarnation was wounded and possibly destroyed by Ralph Roberts, contributing substantially to the King's weakened nature in future stories.
He reappeared in the novel Black House, co-written with Peter Straub. Growing desperate with the loss of his full strength, the Crimson King attempted to bring down the Dark Tower itself but was stopped by Ty Marshall, a young boy taken captive by one of his minions who was later discovered to be a breaker. At the climax of the book, the Crimson King's forge is destroyed and his nature degraded further into lunacy.
In the Keystone World in which the physical manifestation of the Dark Tower exists, the Crimson King resides in an abandoned castle of men left behind from the Old Ones' war. He and his servants have access to a wealth of technology there, including travel between alternate dimensions and weaponry far beyond any in practical use throughout the rest of the world -- however they do not fully understand it and are unable to replace or repair it.
By the time that Roland Deschain draws close to his nemesis in the conclusion of the story, the Crimson King has gone mad with rage from having been defeated twice by mortal beings. After slaying nearly all of his subjects and committing suicide by swallowing a spoon, his now-undead form -- vulnerable to more permanent forms of death hitherto protected against -- races ahead of Roland to the Dark Tower to try and enter it first and bring the multiverse down by his own hand.
Contradictions
Some see contradictory features of the Crimson King are mentioned in various books. In Insomnia and Black House, he is portrayed as an omnipotent, omnipresent, god-like force of evil, a Satanic figure creating the evil in King's multiverse. He is also revealed to be the true power behind such major villains as Atropos and Randall Flagg.However, when the Crimson King is finally confronted at the very end of the Dark Tower series, he is an insane old man who has fled his own castle only to end up locked out on a balcony at the top of the Dark Tower, limited to flinging hand-held seeking grenades (called 'sneetches' here) at the Gunslinger and his companion Patrick Danville. The character was received as a particular letdown by some fans due to the fact that the majority of his final conversation with Roland consists of high-pitched, guttural shouts of "EEEEEEEEE!" They felt it difficult to resolve the incongruity between the Gunslingers' greatest foe being reduced to such a pathetic state.
Fall from power
Others see things differently. While the Crimson King projected the image of omnipotence in some stories and was certainly powerful, his omnipotence was in some sense the product of distance and fear. Like Randall Flagg, his weapons were fear, intimidation, illusion and ultimately the power to convince others to do his will. The King was in particular never shown to ever be all that sane. The goal of all his plots after all was the nihilistic desire to bring down the tower and destroy the multiverse. As the gunslinger drew nearer to the Crimson King, the truth of his kingdom was revealed. He was an old man surrounded by weak-willed followers using the last pieces of failing technology from the past to work his will through others. Broken in spirit by the failure of his plot to bring down the tower, he attempted to take it for himself only to fail and end up trapped. With regard to the Gunslinger, the ending of the story cycle revealed that his greatest enemy was himself rather than the Crimson King. Ultimately, if Roland had faith in himself, his enemies would destroy themselves and the true path to the top of the tower would be open, which explains, in part, the resumption at the end of the tale.There has been some speculation among those who see a radical change in the character; one theory suggests that after the events of Black House he lost most of his power. Another theory suggests that he is, in fact, the archetype which many of King's other villains, such as It, Flagg, and Mordred Deschain are iterations of in different worlds connected to the Dark Tower. This would mean that several events, such as the endings of Black House, It, and The Stand, served to weaken the Crimson King by disrupting several of his different incarnations simultaneously.
A "unified" fanon theory suggests that the Crimson King is a representative (or possibly an avatar) of It on certain levels of the Tower. Therefore, when It was defeated, the King lost most of his power, forcing him to act through others (i.e. Atropos, Lord Malshun, and Flagg). This theory gathers most of its evidence from the King's nature as a "were-spider," as well as his mastery of illusions and description of himself as "the Kingfish" (which It called Itself on occasion.)
Another possibility is that the Crimson King's weakness in the Dark Tower may represent Stephen King's judgement on the nature of evil. Rather than being a seductive or mysterious force, such as it appears from a distance in King's other works, evil is finally revealed as being ultimately pathetic and will eventually destroy itself without its opponents having to compromise themselves. That what is ultimately necessary to destroy evil is confront it and make a stand against it at which point it will collapse in on itself. This idea is similar in theme to those in The Stand.
There is another theory concerning the Crimson King that he is consisted of two separate entities. The first of these is trapped at the top of the Dark Tower in a physical form in which he cannot escape. His second entity is the omnipotent/spiritual form from Insomnia and Black House. This form cannot affect the worlds in a physical way, but works through psychological influences to influence beings toward his will. Atropos and Lord Malshun are two examples of the King's work. The many events that weaken the King affect both his physical and spiritual manifestations.
Death
The Crimson King was partially erased from existence by Patrick Danville, a character from Insomnia who was foretold to defeat the King, leaving only his floating red eyes behind, forever trapped on the balcony to gaze over the Scarlet Field. Though having the ultimate villain defeated by a character which had only just appeared may seem anticlimactic (even though said character was an important character from a previous novel), The Artist did require Roland's blood (mixed with crushed petals of a Rose) to make the paint he used to draw the Crimson King. This procedure resulted in the loss of another of the Gunslinger's right hand fingers, completely preventing him from using this hand effectively from then on. To defeat the Crimson King, Roland, in effect, symbolically abandoned the use of his "guns" as a solution, demonstrating that he didn't need his weapons in the first place to reach the tower.Alternative theories on the character
The \"Twinner\" Theory
One of the more interesting (but less popular) theories concerning the Crimson King is that the King, Flagg, Mordred, It, and many other villains are all iterations of the same archetypical evil, the ultimate representation of The Red — the "true" Crimson King, in other words. This theory is less accepted by the Dark Tower fandom at large, but is recorded and preserved for its uniqueness, if nothing else.
In order for this to be reasoned out, certain thematic elements have to be established between each villain, or at least enough to make the point clear.
Villainous Links
The King, Flagg, and It are all obsessed with creating heirs, a way of continuing their legacies. All of their children are treated with a reverence and fear like unto that of the anti-Christ, although Mordred is the only one to have ever been born.
Mordred Deschain and It share similar forms, in that both of them are actually hideous, spider-like entities, though It is revealed to be a massive blazing Star in the Universe that destroys and corrupts with its light. Both are capable of metamorphosing into different shapes, though this is far more pronounced in It than in Mordred (perhaps due to Mordred's age and starved condition). Mordred and Flagg seem to share a more or less exclusively-held power to take control over another person's body, in Flagg's case so completely that the person does not even remember being possessed. The chief difference between them is that Mordred's skill does not seem quite as refined as Flagg's - even though, at the end of the Dark Tower series, Mordred is capable of possessing Flagg himself. Flagg and It both leave messages in bright red paint (or blood, if paint isn't readily available), typically with cheery overtones.
Such thematic links, however, can probably be attributed to an unspoken or under-appreciated tendency on King's part to keep certain similarities between his characters. In order for the theory to be represented, one must appreciate the existence of similar relations on different levels of the Tower, and how their fates are linked.
Twinners
The idea of "Twinners" originates most clearly in King's original collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman. In the book, characters of significant importance have Twinners, different versions of themselves on different levels of the Tower - in this case, just the Territories. In general, the Territories seems to be a lot more selective concerning Twinners than the rest of the Dark Tower, in which entire worlds can be looked at as carbon copies of each other, except for whose face is on the dollar bill.
Basic rules governing "Twinners" are as follows:
Every person in the Territories has a twin somewhere on Earth (in most worlds of the Dark Tower, this is true of every person, so for the sake of argument we will assume every person has alternate versions of themselves in different worlds.) These sets of twins, or "Twinners", serve as foils for each other by virtue of some simularity - if not physical, then psychological or philosophical. One twin might be incredibly different from the other (one might be an overweight businessman while the other one is a physically fit sorcerer), or the two could be so similar that they are completely interchangeable. In general, the fates of Twinners are intertwined - if one dies, then the other tends to die in a similar fashion. The only cases where this isn't true are the deaths of Richard Sloat and Jack Sawyer's Twinners. In other worlds of the Dark Tower, this also tends to hold true - in the case where Jake Chambers was saved from the death shared by other versions of himself, he was nearly driven insane.
The Crimson King is arguably the single most important entity in the Dark Tower, and has on at least one occasion had a different iteration in at least one other level of the tower. Considering that, in every world of the Dark Tower except the Territories, there exists at least one iteration of every important person, one can assume that most worlds have some iteration of the Crimson King's archetype. However, there is only one Dark Tower, one set of beams and one Crimson King near the tower.
Twinners' identities have to be established through drawing some links in their basic fates. An incomplete list follows:
- Flagg's evidently diminished power in Wizard and Glass, judging from his apparent power in The Stand, coincides with the Kingfish's defeat in Insomnia.
- It lives after Pennywise the Dancing Clown's apparent death in It - this is signified in Dreamcatcher, in which a sign painted with Pennywise's trademark red paint claims "PENNYWISE LIVES." Pennywise apparently dies in It, though it is not unimaginable that he survives; two possible explanations are that It and the version of the Crimson King that lives in Derry are the same entity, or that It died when the rest of the Crimson King's Twinners did not, contributing to their slow fall from power and the King's spiraling into madness.
- Flagg's apparent death and rebirth at the end of The Stand (reminiscent of Jake Chambers' death in The Gunslinger) would appear to coincide with the first erratic behaviors of the Crimson King as chronicled in The Dark Tower VII.
- Susannah Dean's becoming pregnant with Mordred Deschain coincides with Flagg giving up on having an heir of his own. This brings into question whether Flagg felt an empathic satisfaction of that need because the King felt it, but no other explanation seems to make much sense when compared to how vehemently Flagg was trying to have a son in The Stand.
- As Mordred matures, he generally becomes more like It: he is able to control the minds or bodies of lesser people, his true form becomes less human and more spider-like, and in general his spider form becomes more unnatural and grotesque.
Such a hypothesis would help explain all of the following: Flagg's apparent fall from power, the Crimson King's spiraling into insanity, and Mordred's apparent quest to kill one or both of his fathers. Flagg's apparent death in The Stand, the events at the end of Black House, It's apparent death, the Kingfish's defeat in Insomnia, and even the death of Barlow in Salem's Lot could all contribute to the Crimson King's fall from power. But the final book of the dark tower series itself suggests rather clearly that the destruction of his project to bring down the beams drove him over the edge.
This also shows Mordred in an interesting light - it's arguable that, in killing Flagg and absorbing his power, Mordred was actually working towards re-establishing the King's dwindling power. It is probable that the final step would have been a meeting with the King himself - whether this would have resulted in Mordred killing the King, or the King killing Mordred, or some other exchange of power, is of course never made clear. But it must be remembered that Mordred, had he survived, would have been compelled by his nature to seek out and destroy Roland above all else. And had the timing of events been slightly different, the final beams would probably have been broken by the Crimson King (destroying everything) at about the same time.
Trivia
- The character's name may have been influenced by the band King Crimson, particularly their first album, In the Court of the Crimson King. It may also have been inspired by the 1895 collection of short horror stories ''The King in Yellow.
- The metal band Demons & Wizards released Touched by the Crimson King in June of 2005, which referenced the character. The album featured Dark Tower related songs such as "Crimson King", "The Gunslinger", and "Terror Train". The cover art does not represent the king himself but does include an image of a rose which is a recurring element in the Dark Tower series.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.