fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Ugh. Right. Good point. Sorry not voting to kill the dead lady that totally deserves it. But I am not going to be at all upset if that vote wins.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
- Location
- Terror Australis
They aren't doing the right thing though.
Lady Eiko wants a degree of redemption but isn't actually willing to give up infernal power to get it. Letting her and the other Akuma walk means they are going to keep doing horrible things both to serve Emma-O and to benefit themselves.
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As I understand it, it's not just infernal power. It's essentially everything she has and is. She's given a choice of "gain freedom for your soul, lose everything else, both what you got from selling your freedom and what you had gained before and after selling it, and become a powerless wan kuei trapped in hostile hell you'd need to get out of" and "retain what you have and remain a slave". That's a very scary choice. I don't fault her for not essentially Cold and Lonely Worlding (only even harsher) herself in the middle of Kakuri.
She wants to retain her power while also wanting to redeem Emma-O. That's understandable enough for me. If we can help, I believe that we should. The net result is still redemption of Emma-O. And we absolutely can negotiate later the code of conduct she'll have to abide by in order to retain our help.
- Location
- Germany
If anyone in this world know that they can in fact claw their way out of Hell and walk the Road of Return, it's the Wan Kuei.
She's been there, done that and that's while starting from a worse point, with little to no sanity and a strong Shadow-Soul.
Edit: And she wouldn't loose everything. Lowered Dharma would limit her abilities to 5 dots max, but other than that she would keep what skills and Disciplines she earned before her infernal investitures.
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- Location
- Terror Australis
You are skipping over the serious harm she will do in the mean time, for a very distant and flighty goal. She wants power more than she wants redemption and will keep doing horrible things to benefit herself even if she does ultimately want both power and a degree of redemption.
You are falling into the trap of redeeming a bad person is worth excusing great amounts of preventable suffering happening to innocent people.
EDIT:
In addition she would hardly be losing everything, she would lose her infernal investments and status but she would still have her knowledge and learned skills.
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Part of the issue here is that Eiko being unable to leave Emma-O is that it's a lot like (and in some ways actually is) someone who is unable to leave an abusive partner.
Emma-O has a much more personal relationship with his shikome than is usual for a Yama King and their akuma. He grooms them to see him as some twisted combination of father/husband/god (and then betrays that by having them be sexually available to other men). Particularly for older female Wan Kuei brought up in strongly patriarchal polygamous societies, that's a strong social role. When backed up by increasingly large social pools are, given the power he grants his shikome, probably focused brainwashing magic, it would be very hard to choose to escape.
Compounding that, we don't know what Emma-O's own backstory is. Unlike in vanilla Kijdred of the East, where Emma-O's fall, while tragic, is basically all his own fault, in ExWoD and so here it may not be. It's suggested that part of the reason Yomi Wan and by extension the Yama Kings are so messed up is that they're built/live in top of the cosmic waste dump the Infernal Exaltations were stored in, and the corrupt energies they were leaking is what corrupted Yomi Wan.
Depending on how DP reconciles history, Emma-O may not have been as bad as he is now until quite recently. That quite recently might well coincide with when he excavated our Exaltation. It's possibly that just as feeding on the host or an Infernal Exaltation is unhealthy, medium term exposure to Primoridal essence that has become aligned to your Hell from an Exaltation that isn't restricted by being bound to a mortal soul could make a Yama King worse.
Eiko could well suspect this, which is why she wants to examine what the Exaltation does. If she's old enough to know Emma-O when he wasn't so bad she may be able to see a different pre and post exposure to the Exaltation.
Lesser akuma lose all their (non-demon, I think) disciplines when they lose renounce their dharma and are (usually) granted them back via additional Investments which grant powers that mimic those learned via their prior disciplines.
She'd lose those investments when she was freed and have to relearn her disciplines.
Emma-O has a much more personal relationship with his shikome than is usual for a Yama King and their akuma. He grooms them to see him as some twisted combination of father/husband/god (and then betrays that by having them be sexually available to other men). Particularly for older female Wan Kuei brought up in strongly patriarchal polygamous societies, that's a strong social role. When backed up by increasingly large social pools are, given the power he grants his shikome, probably focused brainwashing magic, it would be very hard to choose to escape.
Compounding that, we don't know what Emma-O's own backstory is. Unlike in vanilla Kijdred of the East, where Emma-O's fall, while tragic, is basically all his own fault, in ExWoD and so here it may not be. It's suggested that part of the reason Yomi Wan and by extension the Yama Kings are so messed up is that they're built/live in top of the cosmic waste dump the Infernal Exaltations were stored in, and the corrupt energies they were leaking is what corrupted Yomi Wan.
Depending on how DP reconciles history, Emma-O may not have been as bad as he is now until quite recently. That quite recently might well coincide with when he excavated our Exaltation. It's possibly that just as feeding on the host or an Infernal Exaltation is unhealthy, medium term exposure to Primoridal essence that has become aligned to your Hell from an Exaltation that isn't restricted by being bound to a mortal soul could make a Yama King worse.
Eiko could well suspect this, which is why she wants to examine what the Exaltation does. If she's old enough to know Emma-O when he wasn't so bad she may be able to see a different pre and post exposure to the Exaltation.
Lesser akuma lose all their (non-demon, I think) disciplines when they lose renounce their dharma and are (usually) granted them back via additional Investments which grant powers that mimic those learned via their prior disciplines.
She'd lose those investments when she was freed and have to relearn her disciplines.
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- Location
- Terror Australis
Were are you getting her losing all her non-investment disciplines from? KoTE 1000 hells doesn't mention that for the Rite of Renunciation, just that extra granted Investments can be stripped at any time. While she would lose elder disciplines (and super human attributes) due to having insufficient Dharma she quite likely didn't have any before becoming an akuma anyway.
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Confusingly, the akuma rules are split over two sections. On page 62 we're told:
The powers granted to akuma vary from Yama King to YamaKing. Most common among these are abilities that mimic standard Kuei-jin Disciplines. These gifts must be granted to akuma by the Yama King he serves, since akuma, having no degree of enlightenment, have no ability to use Disciplines.
- Location
- Germany
But DP said she would likely have returned to Dharma 1 on a Path, so unless her memory of the use of Disciplines has completly faded she'd still be a lot better at it than any fresh
From what I recall; when you no longer meet the prerequisites to use a Discipline you lose the dots are have to relearn it.
It's why Moments of Blindness are so bad for elder Wan Kuei.
- Location
- Terror Australis
Precisely how much power she would be renouncing is somewhat irrelevant anyway. What matters is she wants power more than she wants redemption and thus isn't going to stop doing the bad things that secure her power. Even if it would probably better for her in the longer term, as if she actually forswore Emma-O any power she developed would be hers and not something that could be revoked at whim.
Turned on its head, she fears losing power more than she wants redemption. Or, at least, she did at that moment when she was given a choice. That's something I sympathize with. She still wants redemption, and in that we can help her.
- Location
- Terror Australis
Yes that is my point, she cares more about the power than redemption and you are ignoring the costs to others of her running around. She isn't going to just sit in a lab researching things, she is a significant agent of Emma-O, she is going to be carrying out his will and that means engaging in acts of cruelty and corruption.
She cares about both, which is why I am willing to extend her a hand. The second part is an issue, yes. We'll have to work on it. Maybe she'll be able to get herself assigned to Chicago to monitor / spy on Molly by Emma-O when the "grab it by force" gambit fails. That's plausible enough.
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of this, but I'm going to push back on it being the right thing to do.
That implies that it's the only morally correct choice, but this isn't exactly a simple situation.
It'd also be perfectly valid to say that Emma-O chose this and knew what he was doing when he did. This isn't a case where someone fell into a vat of evil goo and got corrupted or something.
That being the case, he doesn't want redemption and it can't be forced on him anymore than it can be anyone else.
Someone being redeemed instead of killed is a better outcome, but you can't decide for someone else that they should pursue it and if playing this game prolongs the conflict then it's asking innocents to suffer for the sake of their abusers.
The research we'd be doing will unavoidably empower Emma-O's servants and has slim odds of actually working, so I think there's enough grey here to argue that it's just one of many morally reasonable responses rather than the obviously superior one.
This was me being bad with articles. Englsih is not my first language, and this part of it has no direct analog in Russian. I try to believe that I am fluent in English, but sometimes subtleties of it elude me.
- Location
- Germany
What did mom say after we killed Kattrin?
I think it was something along the lines of mercy for the guilty being cruelty to their victims?
I think it was something along the lines of mercy for the guilty being cruelty to their victims?
From that NWS vision it doesn't seem like she has any positive emotional attachment to him. Which makes sense; he's the guy she sold her soul to, not her favorite uncle turned demon lord.
And yet Knights of the Cross. And an in-game precedent of letting rampires go. Our further interactions would heavily depend on what she agrees to later. Not (actually) fighting her now is still a reasonable choice, even if we don't continue any collaboration afterwards.
- Location
- Terror Australis
I just want to point out that the White God is not a good source for complex moral choices. The White God supports its definition of Free Will, not what a modern person would call free will, this is an entity that is fine with permitting coercion, mind-control, addiction and various other supernatural nastiness.
A small note here, she has also been confronted with what is Emma-O's better nature, his honor, his compassion etc... She knows as a matter of fact that he can be better. That probably impacted her choice in Molly's opinion.
The fact that the Yama King has been unable or unwilling to destroy Jizo also has interesting implications, though there are too many possibilities to hazard a strong guess as to why that might be
In ExWoD we don't know that's true. He may have been corrupted by the emanations of the sealed Infernal Exaltations.
I don't think we've been given any reason to believe this is the case.
Emma-O's recruitment MO is to groom his shikome to see him as a combination father/husband/god. That's how he gets them to sell their souls to him.