Regrets message is "I wish I could have spent my life better". Priit spent his early life wasting both his life and the tribe's lives. His valiant struggle nearly destroyed the tribe, even if Aeva's mistakes aggravated it, he was not helping, he was only thrashing about and making the wound worse.
If Priit's mind at his deathbed was sent back to the body of 14 year old Priit, what choices would he have made?
-He probably wouldn't have married immediately. He was not ready, but he thought he was.
-When he found his adulterous wife he'd have dragged the family up to the Council of Big Men to demand justice, rather than react with immediate violence.
--Which meant that Priit would not have been spending years hunting furiously to pay an impossible debt, spent years where those who look up to him spoke ill of the tribe and thought to split off. Which meant that the massive quantity of lives spent in the early Northlands war would not be spent for they would have a great warrior to support them.
His impulsive actions of his youth led directly to the death of hundreds of the tribe against the Northlands, when his mistakes mixed with Aeva's mistakes to make everything so much worse.
Remember, due to Priit and Aeva's choices, the tribe crashed to the lowest legitimacy and stability in living memory. Right to the brink of outright kinstrife.
He has much to regret.
Anger sounds badass, but what does it actually mean? Who does he rage against? The Bitter Water tribe? The Northlands? The Mountain Clans? Arrow Lake?
His own tribe?
The spirits that favor the wicked and torments the innocent?
Anger is not a positive here. We've had our resolutions of violence grow increasingly disruptive as our population density rises. We need people to think twice about actions, to make violence their choice after considering the consequences.
The greatest warrior of legend going to his death raging against the world is just the wrong message for our circumstances.
I do not disagree with the message of "Priit wishing he could've spent his life better". What I disagree with is the fact that everyone is using one singular instance in Priit's life, one mistake as the basis for his entire life being regretful.
You're placing a lot of blame on Priit's shoulders for actions he had no control over:
It's the very last thing said in 17.2. He sees a threat (Aeva) and is using a problem/possible weakness that he'd previously identified against her.
Think about Priit's life. He's 21 now, probably no older than many of the posters here. By any conceivable standard, he's lived an incredibly fucked up life.
Age 9-13: Trained as a child soldier
Age 13-15: Sent onto the front lines as a child soldier
Age 15: Suffered a severe concussion in war, received basically no follow up treatment
Age 15: Gets married and eventually finds out he has a kid
Age 15-17: Goes back to being a child soldier, nonstop
Age 17: Returns from war and realizes that his spouse cheated on him and the kid he was fighting for isn't his
Age 17: He gets involved in a riot that ends up getting six people killed, some of those people were his comrades.
Age 17: He's convicted by a family member (+ their known lackey) and a man who hates him in a court of law that's both ex posto facto and unprecedented
Age 17-21: He continues to fight a war while suffering legalized abuse and slow starvation
Age 21: Returns home a war hero, single handedly saving his homeland, and calls out the person who legally starved him only for that person to try and have him arrested, presumably for more punishment
Age 21: He kills the aforementioned person in personal combat and now is suddenly acclaimed responsible for the lives of hundreds of his fellows in the middle of a vicious war that's lasted longer than he's been alive
Age 21: Faces the person who initially convicted him of accessory to murder and allowed his previous four years from hell.
This is someone who has every single reason to suspect that another shoe is going to drop. He sees someone who's lead him to harm in the past and is acting to get them removed from power.
I don't feel that in this case it is right to essentially put the blame for all of this on Priit's shoulders. The way the argument you are using is framed, it seems predicated on the fact that all the strife and chaos that could've caused the People to collapse were all due to Priit's actions on his shoulders. I vehemently disagree with that.
As we can see from the timeline above, Priit didn't instigate the war against the Northlands, he was barely older than a child before he was sent off to fight it. While it is true that his actions and struggle to get his own justice did not help during this instance, I do not agree with your framing of the issue that it was Priit's actions which caused the issue to arise in the first place, as the issue which would've led to the collapse, which you termed his 'valiant struggle', and which you attribute to causing the lowest levels of legitimacy and stability, was not actually caused by him. The thing that would've led to the collapse of the People was something started when he would've had no agency to do anything about it. Even if he had died in that judgement before him, or even died during his first fight against the Ivory-Blooded Chief, his removal from the equation would not have had any bearing on the issue that was defining the near-collapse of the People. So I find it absurd that you place blame on Priit for his struggle, which was simply a microcosm of the overall issues plaguing the People, when the real blame lay at the feet of either his direct leaders who fumbled into the war against the Northlands, or even the Spirits for it going so badly.
If you had Executed or Exiled Priit, you would have collapsed. Maybe not this phase, but definitely by next turn. Priit's Hero rolls single handedly saved you.
You would've fractured along the lines of Hill Guard/Crystal Lake and the Fingers. The former two would've gotten to the point where they simply refused to continue sending their young men to die. The Fingers either would've been overwhelmed and starved out, turned into the most vicious and violent group imaginable, or gained support from Arrow Lake or the Pearl Divers.
Hill Guard and Crystal Lake would've quickly become dominated by shaman.
As you can see here with the quotes above, had Priit died or have been exiled we still would've collapsed long before he had the time to start a faction. As I keep on stating, while Priit's violence aggravated the issue and the stability of the People at the time, I do not believe he was the cause of the issue that was causing the People to approach collapse in the first place. That issue was the war against the Northlands which was going terribly wrong at the time and which was sapping the People of their young men and warriors.
It may be easy for Priit now to look back on things and regret his choices. However, taking the view here as an outside observer I find it wrong to place the blame here on Priit when at the time he followed past precedent in order to receive justice, only for those at the top to change said precedent.
So while you could say that his actions led to the loss of hundred of lives against the Ivory-Blooded Chief due to his absence, I say that the responsibility for that lay not with him but with Aeva.
Again, as I have said before, I do not disagree with point that Priit has some things to regret in his life, what I do disagree with is regret being the driving emotion while he is at the doorstep of death. Did Priit commit mistakes in his life? Yes. But then again, who hasn't? As he acknowledged much earlier everyone makes mistakes, even the spirits.
His regret there was that he met out violence without proper justification and support, thus, it changed from justice to a crime. The message is that going to violence as your immediate solution can make the problem worse.
Except at the time, he was acting based on precedent until we changed said precedent to go against him, meaning we made an ex post facto decision to change what justice meant into a crime, hardly something he should be held culpable for.
Was this what Aeva had felt? Was this the reason she cling to power, even to the point where she was dying?
It made sense. A twisted horrible sense. The spirits sent their tests, always pushing to see where the People would break. It was necessary, but...
In the end, as Priit lived out his last days covered in blood, slaughtering men and women a quarter of his age. He died a death that could not be fought and felt only a single emotion.
The thing is, if we are to take Priit, and what will be his eventual story, I do not want his story and mythos to be one of regret. He was fallible and human, like all spirits, similar to the Gods of ancient myth who were imperfect and reflected humanity in that sense. However, for all the mistakes he has made I believe that he has done much more to atone for them and achieve greatness because of them.
For all that Priit's faction was a bad thing, you cannot gainsay the fact that it achieved much in terms of reforming the People and making them greater.
That is why when we look at the quote above, I feel that anger here is a justifiable and potentially a positive option.
If we look at the quote above, it we take in the context of it and apply it to the vote, it seems to me that the emotion he is feeling as he dies is not just in regards to his own lived life but that of the whole of the world as well, the ordeals sent by the spirits and so forth.
So looking at things in these terms, and looking at things when Priit is to become a spirit himself with his legend being that of a War God, anger works perfectly fine in this instance.
Anger in this instance can be anger at the state of the world, anger at the spirits for the spirits being so capricious against the People. In terms of Priit's story, anger here be construed also as determination in a sense. For was it not Priit's anger which led for him to fight the system of injustices that wronged him so, that changed that system to what it is now? Was it not Priit's anger which smote down the enemies of the People? From the Northlands who were converted into allies, or the enemies of the Peace Builders and Arrow Lake?
If we look at the emotions had and apply them to Priit's life, while regret surely applies, if we look at things from the point of view of his overall mythos, anger is a fine point to have. Anger is a basic human emotion, and while generally negative there are certain contexts for when it can be justified. In the instances of Priit's life, his anger was justified as his anger was used to rail against Injustice, and used to fight the enemies of the People. The culmination of which is Priit's achievements to this day with the law.
While it is true that our current situation of intra-tribal violence is not something positive, it's roots come from much before Priit's time. In my view, Priit's anger against the kinstrife that occurred in Hillguard could be used as justification for why he had it changed in the end.
Considering all of the comparable mythos' we have seen of heroes and demigods raging against the world, the fates, the spirits, or the gods, I feel that it is fine if we have Priit's final moments being one of anger, because when looking at things through that context his anger is justified. From a certain point of view he is angry at the world for the injustices still present, angry that he has only one life to live, angry at the current situation due to having perfidious neighbors.
In context such as that, I feel that anger is a perfectly fine emotion to have. For it could motivate the People to stand up to the injustices of the world, to not back down when faced by it. We had a choice last turn, where we could've easily avoided war and violence had we submitted to Arrow Lake's terms, yet in the end we roared defiance against them and fought back.
I do not want Priit's last emotions to be one of melancholy and regret, tarnishing his legend, but one of a warrior still fighting for his People and what he believes is right.
Edit: Caveat: It should be pointed out that the both of us here could be both right or wrong regarding the context of how this affects the Values of the People. Yours seems based around how it will affect our Might Makes Right Value, while I see it on the other hand having more to do with our Ordeals Value. Considering the last vote, and how we were wrong on that, I wanted to just point that out for the record.
