Queen-Of-Stuff wrote...
CulturalGeekGirl wrote...
The thing is, Thedas is not... here. The rules and way things work are fundamentally different. Those things that may be inextricably entwined with the physical here may not be, there.
Have you ever read His Dark Materials? In that book, in our world, the human 'soul' is just an inseparable part of 'us,' while in Lyra's world it is a physical thing that runs around outside of you. When one of us visits her world, we get a physical thing that runs around outside of us.
I am saying that the physical and metaphysical components of emotion vary from world to world, or dimension to dimension, or reality to reality, however you want to define it. When speaking about things like this, how you believe things work in OUR world has little relevance. You need to examine the evidence present in that world, and alter your conclusions about how that world works based on that new evidence.
If this were a realm of study, I'd call it "magical theory." It is a sublimely useless discipline for anyone who isn't a writer (or a traveler between realities). But in a world where you can hide a piece of yourself in an object in order to avert your death, you're clearly dealing with a different ruleset, a place where the relationship between the nature of self and physical reality is profoundly other.
Oh, dears. Clearly I need more whiskey. 
If that's the case, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to enter a discussion like this, if people in Thedas work so completely differently from what they do here. I don't have enough information.
I also could use more Whiskey. If you like bourbon, I'd suggest Buffalo Trace, which I am currently out of. Best bourbon I've ever had... incredibly sublte, with a lovely finish that reminds me of brown sugar.
But yes, I do believe that in any universe where there is a definite, clearly existing spirit world which one can visit through clearly-defined means must be evaluated by different standards than a universe in which no such spirit world can be reliably visited. A world in which metaphysical concepts have physical or provable analogues, metaphysics must work fundamentally differently than in universes where metaphysical concepts cannot be proven.
To provide an example of how to deal with one such world... first you look at what is different about the world, and then you make conclusions based on the observed differences. In some cases the conclusions are "a wizard did it,' but in some cases they follow concrete, understandable rules. For this example, I'll tell you the rule beforehand, and you can see how both the people in the story and the readers of the story may divine it.
Spider Robinson once wrote a short story with the following premise: assume reincarnation. What does that mean for cryogenics? So the fundamental difference in this elseworld is that reincarnation is definitely and provably a thing.
In the story, a rich lady's husband is the first person to ever be cryogenically frozen when he dying of a disease and sucessfully unfrozen and reanimated when the disease is cured. The thing is, when he's brought back to life, she realizes that he is not her husband. So she searches for people born at the same time as her husband's brain activity was halted, and finds a match. She does recognize this person as her husband, despite the fact that it is a small child. So she plots to kill the child at the same instant they attempt to revive her husband again, with the idea that when her husband was brought back to life he gained a "new" soul rather than his old one. The protagonist points out that the reincarnated version of her husband seems to be a fundamentally happier and kinder person than her husband was, and premises that reincarnation may serve an actual purpose. She disagrees, and he kills her to prevent her from killing the child. (I have greatly simplified this story, there is a lot more trial and error before the lady comes to the conclusion that reincarnation is responsible.)
In 'hard' Sci-fi, often these fundamental differences are usually ones of physics or scientific theory: it's possible to travel faster than the speed of life, sentience actually does correlate with bipedal humanoidism a significant portion of the time, Earth's atmosphere is heavier or lighter, gravity less or more. In some science fictional worlds the differences are merely historical: everything works the same, but the circumstances are different - what if humans and neanderthals lived on separate continents and thus developed parallel societies until the 1600s, when they finally met. That kind of thing.
In Fantasy, the fundamental differences are often metaphysical. I picked the story above because it was a circumstace where only a single metaphysical idea was declared by the author to be an absolute truth for this particular universe, and the fallout from that truth was clearly observable by both the reader and the characters in the story. Thedas obviously has a number of such variables.
The thing is, in some fantasy, the variable is basically just "magic works" which is code for "anything I want, pretty much." In others, magic works and has specific rules, but nothing metaphysical is provably different than here (I'd actually put Mass Effect's biotics in this category.) In others, magic works and there are proven variations in the metaphysics, but the way they connect together is pretty hazy (Star Wars with its force powers and force ghosts of powerful Jedi, as well as the ability to sense distant events based on the force.)
Thedas is the rare fantasy world where some of the metaphysics are provable (within the world itself), and they follow some set rules, which actually frequently interact in ways that display clear rules and patterns. This is mostly exhibited by visits to the fade, interactions with demons and fade spirits, and tranquility. Also, the blights, and the archdemons, and the songs associated with them.
In a world where a man can fuse himself with the anthropomorphic personification of an emotion/concept, and where other people can be physically posessed by anthropomorphic personifications of emotions, obviously the nature of emotions is fundamentally different from a universe where such things do not happen. As to how to engage in debate about such a universe... well that's where 'magical theory' comes in handy.
If we were people in this universe, we could actually expiriment to test the bounds of our understanding of a subject. Having Vengeance manifest itself around tranquil mages and interviewing them about the results would be one way to obtain more data, as would (tragically) attempting to make an abomination tranquil. Anders is a truly unique case, so studying him would likely result in a huge gain in understanding about the rules by which spirits, mages, and abominations are bound.
As players who are simply watching the story and determining different pre-set outcomes, we can't actually perform expiriments. Instead, we must derive our conclusions about the world from observable evidence about the world. When mages are severed from the fade, they lose a substantial portion of their emotions and identity. Thus we can reasonably assume based on that evidence that there is, in fact, some connection between emotions and the fade in Thedas. This conclusion has no bearing on how we think emotions work in our world, because there isn't any similar evidence in our world... Just as a preponderance of bipedal humanoid life in Science Fiction does not lead us to assume that the universe is likely full of bipedal humanoid species. It's just that in this case the conclusion is a metaphysical one while in the example of the aliens it is scientific.
This reovlves a lot around the idea that some concepts may be purely theoretical or metaphysical in one universe while empirically provable in another. That's the fundamental idea behind the skill or discipline of 'magical theory.'
TL;DR
In universes where there is evidence that something works differently than it does in this universe, assume it is fundamentally different, and examine the evidence to make your best guess as to what rules, if any, it is consistently following.
Edit: wow. That is a long wall of text, even by my standards. Sorry everybody!
Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 24 juin 2011 - 08:43 .
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Have a kitten?
) and Varric are examples of people who do not want a piece of Hawke. They don't have to be romantic interests to have their orientation represented, if you know what I mean.
