dragonflight288 wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
I'm trying to remember, but I believe one of the Devs once suggested that Rivian view their Seers as we view nature: not benevolent, and not beyond a natural disaster every once in a while, but not something wailing or fretting or hating can change.
I remember that as well. But that same dev also said that abominations are very rare, even among the Rivaini who willingly have Seers allow themselves to get possessed.
What does 'rare' mean, though? Especially in such a lack of context: is one a year rare? One a season?
The relevance of the nature analogy to me when I heard it wasn't that abominations in the Rivian aren't a fact of life, but rather that they're
perceived as a fact of life: the costs are tolerated and endured, not absent, but no longer seen as reason for fear.
Which sounds nice at a distance, but rather than benign or evidence of an absence of harm it can simply be a sign of deep-set fatalism. Rivian muggles may view the Rivian witches as so established that there's no point being afraid: they'll either kill you or they won't, and what happens happens. Without the deliberate orchistration of fear (like in Tevinter), such threats can simply become accepted, like IDF on a FOB in Afghanistan or Iraq. Sometimes people die, usually it's not you, and once it's done you pick up and carry on.
Or so my sense of fatalism warned me: a lack of fear is not the same as a lack of harm. But then, I freely admit we don't have much on Rivian at all.
From my understanding, using Wynne as an example, she is possessed by a spirit of Faith but is not an abomination as she has full control of her faculties, and isn't driven by madness or what her spirit represents. Anders would qualify as a part-time abomination in that when Justice took control of his body and he lost the ability to control himself, during those times he's an abomination but when he's in control he isn't.
As Wynne says in Origins, madness and lack of control are the hallmarks of an abomination. If these are lacking, then one is not an abomination.
I wouldn't categorize it along those lines myself, but that's because I hate making an overarching category dependent on something as variable as mental state. I might categorize Wynn as benign, but I would certainly categorize her along with Anders as possessed. Her possions just happens to be one that brings her benign aspects.
While freely admitting a lack of information, I suspect that the Rivian abominations are a mix of Anders and Merrill: understanding the risks, occassionally falling to them, but proceeding with them with a sense of relative control.
And relative control they might have... and the rest might be just conditioning the locals to accept the occassional costs, with less fear but just as much resignation as the Tevinter Magisters did.
I personally don't see these Seers as abominations unless we hear more about them and learn that they are. Otherwise we may simply have a bunch of lovely ladies who are like Wynne.
That's rather optimistic in my view, considering how spirits seem to reinforce what is already there. Just as I suspect the spirit of Justice, had they gone with Velenna, would have fixated on the plight of elves rather than mages, I suspect the same spirit of Faith that bolstered Wynn's idealism would have a completely different effect with someone more zealous like, oh, Petrice. And considering the setting and genre of Dark Fantasy, anything that could sound too good to be true probably isn't.
But then, we know extremely little about Rivian. Outside of what we do know, such as Rivian developing its own variation of a magocracy, I don't commit to any view on it.
Retour en haut
Erm You have had several "enforced" sterile societies in our own history.
