TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is something that kinda got glossed over in the ensuing discussion but which I actually wanted to highlight 'cause it's a concept I really like in general and crossover shit is my guilty pleasure in particular. Mages are defined by the fact that they love to argue. Almost every Mage has their own occult research, their own experiences, their own theories about all kinds of wild stuff based on who trained them, what they've witnessed, and their personal convictions. A lot of the time these don't match up neatly! And that's 100% valid because they live in a reality under the tyrannical regime of the Lie and so much of the truth lives in shadows and darkness, beneath the world's skin. Like Hell yes, give me Mages who have all kinds of weird fucking theories about where vampires or werewolves or changelings come from and will get into heated-ass arguments about it.
"It is generally accepted that vampires are descendants of the native inhabitants of the Lower Depths, indigenous to a plane of reality without Life-" a Moros begins.
"VAMPIRES ARE SPIRIT-FLESH HYBRIDS AND I HAVE THE ARCANA TO FUCKING PROVE IT." The Thrysus shouts as he leaps from the top rope, about to give them the people's elbow.
Mages can't even agree on what Atlantis was like or when or where it existed (or will have existed). There should be academic brawls about all kinds of other stuff too.
Yeah, building off of what I said above Mages can and often do have really wild interpretations. They're blind men feeling around an elephant, and it's not helped with shit like (iirc) survivor colonies of Atlantis or ancient ruins often being of wildly different styles, eras, and designs. The fragments of some grand and terrifying thing washed up on the shores of reality. Fragments of worldlines that never happened but these places are still there. The business of Mages is inherently about trying to flay back the skin of the world they only think they understand and find out what lays beneath. Trying to piece back something that has deliberately been smashed and destroyed and defaced. Reconstruct something when they don't even know what it originally looked like.
And yeah it's kinda like you said: they know what the Truth is in broad strokes, but if they had a full understanding and mastery of it they'd basically be archmages. And archmages are obscenely rare, deeply alien, and to Mages what Mages are to normal people.
I'm on my phone so I can't go point-by-point like other people have, but I kinda did want to address in broad strokes that you're very much throwing a lot of babies out with the bath water here. Like enough that they can probably start some kind of semi-feral alligator-worshipping society of infants in the sewers. Rising up twenty years later with an army of flushed away zombie goldfish to retake the surface world.
It's not great, is what I'm trying to say. It's not great and it's not really engaging with what the the Guardians or the gameline is actually saying and seems to have a heavy "X Organization of Authority is Wrong and Exists to be Wrong and Mean".
Fundamentally viewing Paradox as a moral failing is a straight up, like, genuinely principled stand to take. Paradox is literally the tendrils of a virulent, hateful, viral anti-reality kissing this one. Probing and slithering and trying to find a way to break through, and the things that can crawl through the cracks are horrorshows that will feed indiscriminately on Sleepers and can jeopardize the Fallen World in huge swathes if they're not brought under control. Paradox is fundamentally dangerous, it's not an incidental byproduct of your work, it's you straining too hard, pushing yourself too far, and opening the door a crack to something obscene. And whatever your reasons you still opened that door. You decided you were okay, in the abstract, with the barriers being worn a little thinner, with people being hurt in horrifying ways. And building off of that it's kinda funny I guess how you, on the one hand, knock the Guardians for saying "Paradox is a no-good-bad-thing" by posing hypotheticals where Paradox might be necessary to accomplish good. And then tear up the Guardians for "ends justify the means is just cowardly bullshit". When the "Sins for a Just End" precept is the one that would say "Paradox is bad, incurring Paradox even to save people is a sin, but if you can save people by incurring Paradox you should do it anyway".
Like you get how you're basically criticizing them for- you're going "You should do X and not Y it's outrageous that you wouldn't". Guardians: "We do do X, we just also think Y". "How dare you do Y and not X."
The Guardians of the Veil are intensely conscious of the paradox (lower-case p) inherent to "Who watches the watchers". By and large they want to do good, by and large they genuinely want to help the world, by and large they often do. They prevent people who would horribly abuse Awakened power from attaining it, they try to cultivate those who would wield it with care and compassion, they watch those have Awakened power for signs of seduction and moral corruption. Atlantis fell once, and they are so much less now, they could all fall again and so much easier. They work to contain Abyssal incursions (and the Abyss, notably, only feeds on the Awakened preferentially, but Sleepers and anything else it sinks its teeth into will work in a pinch) and bring to task those Mages who recklessly cause them. They are trying to build a world in which people like them will no longer be necessary, fully conscious of the painful reality that right now the Pentacle needs them. It needs them to be alert. It needs them to be ready. It needs them to ask the ugly, cruel questions because the stakes they're playing for are catastrophic and the comfort of ignorance is one that comes at too high a cost. And they hope and they dream that it will all one day be proven worth it. That all their doubts and all their burned bridges and all their pain and everything each one of them has lost will have helped bring about the future they all want so badly. That there will be a Messiah and they will be forgiven, because nothing short of divine grace could.
And they're flawed, sure. They're not perfect, sure. They're intimately aware of that and the consequences of their own fallibility are often horrific.
But that just...makes them very human to me imo? And very sympathetic. They're people doing the best they can with what they have, in a world that is unfair and unforgiving. And pretty much every Diamond Order is like that. They have their own sins, they have their own vices, all of them have their own demons and their own shit that they need to answer for, and sometimes (often) they make mistakes and sometimes they're just kind of cunts heh.
But they're all opposed to the tyrants above and the Seers below, fighting against the people who would shackle humanity forever. Slaves to the exarchs. Slaves to Heaven.
Honestly a lot of your criticisms of that and your desire to throw it all out, reject it completely, come across as the result of engaging with all that through a heavy film of personal bias and a kinda...unwillingness I guess? To engage with what the text is actually saying. Because for pretty much every point your readings were either deeply uncharitable or outright incorrect, and there's not a lot to say beyond that imo. Besides suggesting that you read it again but with more good faith and put it in the context of the line and setting.
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