The Secrets' Crusade
- Thread starter Snowfire
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Having Iris on the ship to spoof security in case it's needed.
Starman4308
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For me, it was that Amanda is in a bit of an emotional state, and it might help to not have to worry about her daughter.
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For me, it was twofold.
On the one hand, what @Starman4308 said -- having Iris be down there creates a risk factor that Amanda will fret over, whether warranted or not.
But the more important reason: We can only choose three people, so at least one person has to remain behind, and Iris is the one that has the weakest reason to come along. Mir is practically non-negotiable because of his potential (pun intended) as a conflict-halting trump card. Kalilah specifically asked to come, and between her raw Practice power and her longstanding relationship with Amanda, she may be the only one strong enough to stand in Amanda's way if Amanda loses control. If all goes well, then perhaps Iris could substitute in for Lea, but if anything DOES go wrong, having another Potential in Amanda's heartcircle to act as soul-level support is already valuable even before you consider that Lea is a Mender and might be able to heal an emotional injury. And especially since Vega will be there, having more Potentials to work into her Harmony skills could prove to be a force multiplier.
Now, I will admit: Having Iris around if Experience does turn out to be a simulation could potentially be interesting. If we weren't already so worried about the well-being of the team, I would swap Lea out for Iris for the information-gathering capability. But all things considered, I think we're just going to have to depend on the Platforms to manage the data archival.
On the one hand, what @Starman4308 said -- having Iris be down there creates a risk factor that Amanda will fret over, whether warranted or not.
But the more important reason: We can only choose three people, so at least one person has to remain behind, and Iris is the one that has the weakest reason to come along. Mir is practically non-negotiable because of his potential (pun intended) as a conflict-halting trump card. Kalilah specifically asked to come, and between her raw Practice power and her longstanding relationship with Amanda, she may be the only one strong enough to stand in Amanda's way if Amanda loses control. If all goes well, then perhaps Iris could substitute in for Lea, but if anything DOES go wrong, having another Potential in Amanda's heartcircle to act as soul-level support is already valuable even before you consider that Lea is a Mender and might be able to heal an emotional injury. And especially since Vega will be there, having more Potentials to work into her Harmony skills could prove to be a force multiplier.
Now, I will admit: Having Iris around if Experience does turn out to be a simulation could potentially be interesting. If we weren't already so worried about the well-being of the team, I would swap Lea out for Iris for the information-gathering capability. But all things considered, I think we're just going to have to depend on the Platforms to manage the data archival.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
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- Belgrade,Serbia
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Hm. If I had to guess Amanda is suffering from some form of PTSD caused by the trauma of what she witnessed and is trying to hold it together and not process that trauma right now because she wants to get this system done with first. As for what is bothering her? And why she caught the worst of the trauma from seeing how the Hjivin Sphere ended?
She saw her own worst fears realized in a dark mirror of her own position in Humanity in whoevers were the leaders of the Hjivin and thus the enslavers/devourers that were trying to turn the Sphere into a soul eating Uninvolved. If I had to compare her trauma to something it would be like if King Arthur got to see the whole life of Adolf Hitler if that makes any sense.
Dmol8
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OK so sorry to be so late with this, but this year has been shit including a trip to the Covid Hospital for me from which I had returned to find my mother's health had deteriorated and now she's been dead for a few weeks. So let's see how well I can explain what I'm talking about and what lens I'm using when I'm talking about both the dysphoria almost all species feel in this universe at this point and what I think the story of this quest is about. And of course what the terms I'm using are about.
So I'm going to be using the Unspoken meta-fictional analysis method which is the naming of a recurring element of fiction for what it's most common consistent attributes are. And this is where the first problem starts because the definition of what a "most common consistent attribute" of a "recurring element of fiction" is not in plain English.
I'm talking about a type of egregore concept here. To start with an egregore is at it's base a story that lives trough the people that tell it to others or themselves. Like say the American Spirit or Uncle Sam or Coca-Cola's take on Santa Claus or the Castle Doctrine. So the reason why this meta-fictional analysis method is called the Unspoken is because it looks at the egregores that aren't spoken about, but are instead assumed to be a part of concepts by way of a common cultural background. For an example see how most US fiction uses the Cross of St. Peter (a symbol of the Papacy) as the symbol of the Anti-Christ (which is what a lot of Protestants think the Pope is) even if it never brings up US' long history of Anti-Catholicism (the unspoken egregore in this example) in most readers' minds because it's that much of a cultural background noise at this point.
So the Unspoken meta-fictional analysis starts by dividing any action (whether real life or fictional) into it's Belief and Faith component. Belief of an action is the story that the person performing the action would tell themselves and/or others as the justification for the action. Someone's Belief of an action can be the truth, the lie or anything in between or outside such concepts. Faith of an action is the sum of the unspoken egregores that were the drivers (alongside the person's Belief) for the person to perform the action in question.
To give an example it is the Belief of the action of building a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier that it is to commemorate the unknown soldiers and the common memories of all soldiers killed in war. The Faith of that same action is that another shrine to Heracles got built. Wait what?
The logic here is that people built Tombs of the Unknown Soldiers in the belief that the tragedies of war should be remembered even for those who can not be remembered fully or at all. That's the Belief under which a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is built.
Now for the logic of Faith. Why a shrine to Heracles?
To keep it simple because of the various quirks of history and culture western/occidental culture dominates the global cultural landscape and as such a lot of modern cultural actions are derived in some way from the dominant western culture even in places that historically were not part of the west or even accepted their culture. In western culture's Ancient Greek roots you will find that the myth of Heracles was used to inspire soldiers into their profession whether by having Heracles be considered a God of Soldiers or by having Heracles be the Hero of Soldiers. And this inspiration got carried over first into Roman society and then through the inheritance of Romans' culture by other Christian nations into the rest of the world.
So why Heracles? Why not some other Mythic figure? Or some other idea/story/egregore? While the myth of Heracles that was/is used to inspire soldiery in ancient times and is the root of the concept of the Unknown Soldier (Heracles himself being the one Ancient Greek Hero without a known tomb because he died in a pyre/bonfire), by the time of the Tombs of the Unknown Soldiers getting built most people didn't even think about Heracles as a soldier's ideal. He was just strongest Ancient Greek Hero, but the ideas from those ancient times that used to be tied to the Myth of Heracles were not only still in use to define what a soldier is, but had been expanded upon in the meantime by western culture as was needed. It became a background thought process.
We're talking might makes right, wandering warrior doing daring deeds, exciting exotic places to visit, fighting as a retainer, propaganda pieces about protecting women from savage enemies, rage-borne combat prowess, promiscuity and bedding of partners out of wedlock, ect. You know stuff that is at this point in time is part of the cultural background noise about what it means to be a Man.
This is all stuff that used to be pointed to in the Myth of Heracles to paint him as an aspirational figure. And yes there are other Myths that could and have been used that are similar in some/most ways, but the Myth of Heracles takes precedence over them because of how Western Culture looks to Ancient Greece as it's cultural root.
So when a Tomb is built to commemorate the unknown soldiers and the common memories of all soldiers killed in a war because of the way Western Culture dominates world culture that Tomb also commemorates the Myth of Heracles that was once used to inspire the very concept of a soldier and is now an Unnamed Egregore. This is the Faith under which the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is built and well what else to call a place that embodies a mythical figure but a shrine?
This is how the Unspoken meta-fictional analysis method works: It looks at the common Faith of an action to see what cultural background exists in it and then uses the name of the Egregore to name the concept of the action itself.
Now onto the original question: The Pure Archer, The Scarlet Swordsman, The Mourning Judge, The Chloros/Khloros Cowl and The Golden Maceman are Egregores known as the End of Empires. They are the Unspoken version of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse used in science-fiction. Any piece of science-fiction that doesn't use one of these five egregores as it's Apocalypse is a subversion. That is how prevalent these stories are.
So the Pure Archer is about Holy/Divine and what it means when it is forced on others. It comes in two variations with either the Faith of action that might is the only kind of power that matters (so an abdication of any sort of abstract power for putting one's Faith into violence and armtwisting) or that the fact that you serve the Holy/Divine justifies one beating of others so they internalize one's definition of the Spiritual. See Khorne from Warhammer for the example of the former and the Shiplords in this quest for the latter. Which means that yes I got it wrong and the Shiplords aren't the Golden Maceman. These whole Uninvolved existences the Shiplords push other species towards is their Holy/Divine that they have had a lot of issues with getting spread to their satisfaction since every time something goes wrong the Shiplords double down on their violent lessons in the concept of being Uninvolved instead of figuring out how to spot the warning signs of people/species going of the deep end.
The Scarlet Swordsman is about apoliticism and what it means to care only for one's owns policies. It is named for the story The Scarlet Letter: A Romance and also comes in two variations. Either the Faith of action is put into trying to take someone else's wealth/fortune as it is seen as unjust that one doesn't have/hasn't received what someone else already has or it is about being focused only on one's work, deeds and hopes/dreams while ignoring the greater context of the world around one's self. The story The Scarlet Letter is a good example of how complex the former can be and Tzeentch from Warhammer and Kyubey from Madoka are both good examples of entities that exploit the latter. Either way one picks up a weapon and goes and fights wars with their neighbors.
The Mourning Judge is about self-destruction trough the rejection of truth. It comes in three flavors of Faith of action. One is to believe in a false savior figure and waste time and effort in their name, another is to think that just by pushing one's own concepts enough you will succeed regardless of what the reality of the situation is and the last one is about thinking that one can have infinite growth. For an example of the first flavor go see Donald Trump and the QAnon conspiracy that has sprang up around him, for the second flavor see Nurgle from Warhammer (The Glottkin Brothers are a particularly good example of this sort of story) and for the third flavor see the Zlathbu and their nanite tomb planet in this quest.
The Chloros/Khloros Cowl is about being lost in a haze of overwhelming stimuli to the point that one can't tell if they are dead or alive as the border between life and afterlife is erased. It is either about the extremes of one's passion and the seeking of ever higher stimuli for whatever reason to the point one starts dying and coming back to life in such frequency as to render death itself meaningless or it is about life being rendered meaningless trough one being cultivated/forced to exist as something to be spent by someone else. The former is the Eldar and Slaanesh from Warhammer 40k and the latter is the Hjivin Sphere whose destruction we are currently exploring.
The Golden Maceman is about objectivity and morality and, to paraphrase Lovecraft, going mad from the revelation of how such concepts interact and fleeing into the darkness of subjective perspectives and moral relativism. It's a mix of two things: A rejection of critical thought and striving for objective truths beyond the subjective/collective truths and a rejection of solid moral frameworks and one's own location therein. Think the Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 30k or Homura at the end of the Madoka Rebellion movie.
This is shorter than I'd like so feel free to ask questions if you want me to expand on this. @Simon_Jester that goes for you too.
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My heartfelt condolences.
There's a bit more to the concept of an 'egregore' than that. Since it refers to the idea of a thoughtform or occult entity arising from the thoughts of a group of people and all that.
Also, one of the dangers of this kind of 'Unspoken' approach is that it lets you more or less arbitrarily assign values to things. Being free to select whichever correspondences and symbolism are most convenient to the underlying argument makes it easy to argue for the existence of 'egregores' that aren't "real" in the sense that people actually believe them. At some point, you're left making sweeping assertions about the collective unconscious with no proof that the stuff you're talking about is in the collective unconscious.
I could argue something about fiction based on the deep human terror of slowly dripping orange juice and gigantic cyclopean walls of billions of Lego bricks, but I'd be wrong in my analysis. Because I'd be taking some specific inexplicably scary images from my own childhood nightmares* and assuming everyone has those same fears.
Likewise, you can link the upside-down Cross of St. Peter to an upside-down cross used to represent the Antichrist, and maybe that's touching on cultural background noise of anti-Catholicism... but then, a lot of Americans, including Protestant evangelicals who often don't go much in for scholarly education on comparative religion and church history, don't even know the Cross of St. Peter is a symbol of the papacy. I didn't know that until I started reading your post, for instance.
This "Unspoken" method seems to be very much at risk of creating a lot of false positives, leading you to confidently assert that the human collective subconscious creates deep meaningful divisions between categories of things... Divisions and categories that you more or less made up on the spot.
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*(to this day I have no idea why I had a nightmare about orange juice and gigantic Lego walls; I loved orange juice Legos).
In other words, you just made them up.
Much as you made up the "shrine to Heracles" characterization for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Because at several steps in the process you're glossing over points where the underlying myth has long since been forgotten. You could equally well argue that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was a shrine to placate ancestral spirits, or in some way connected to Norse or Old Germanic mythology instead of Greco-Roman mythology. Or you could completely fabricate some arbitrary entity that no one has ever included in their mythology (say, "the Glaring Widow") and say it was a shrine to that.
Because there is no clear consensus reality that all this symbolism and association connects to. You are very literally dreaming up symbols without referents here, and then more or less arbitrarily assigning them to whatever you're analyzing.
To establish that these symbols actually 'exist' in the sense of connecting to genuinely recurring themes in human culture, and that they have the ancestry you say they have, would itself be a major project. You can't just assert that there's a "Golden Maceman" archetype floating out there, because there's no such thing as an 'archetype' that nobody has ever heard of. The defining trait of an archetype, after all, is that people recognize it and that it will show a clear resemblance to other things, places, or people that we are familiar with.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
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Thank you for your condolences.
I'm not arbitrarily assigning values or arguing for egregores that aren't real. They are real and not arbitrary. For instance just because you didn't know (and most modern culturally protestant people don't know) that the Cross of St. Peter was used to symbolize the Pope by Catholics and was then later used to symbolize the Pope as the Antichrist by most Protestants doesn't change the fact that Lorenzo Valla criticized the Papal temporal power trough his analysis of Latin and that the Pope was portrayed as the Antichrist first as a way to castigate him for abuse of power and then later as a way to politically/theologically break away from the Holy See of Rome. This political/theological break from the Holy See led directly to the Anti-Catholicism in the US. These would be just the most basic references that explain how US culture is using the Cross of St Peter as the symbol of the Anti-Christ and that is an Egregore since it's a form of thought that usually spreads these days trough watching/reading religious horror in a cycle of members of the audience becoming writers/directors of new religious horror.
The references are unspoken either from not being known or not being shown, but they are still there if one looks. As such I am not being arbitrary with my choice of divisions since they are there as cultural background noise most people never think to examine since they have lived with it their entire lives.
The Myth hasn't been forgotten, it has just been decoupled from the Myth of Heracles most people know. Also I'm calling a Tomb of Unknown Soldier a Shrine to Heracles because I can't think of a better term for the action of Faith right now. I even phrased that shrine part as a question at the end of my example argument.
The Golden Maceman is a slang term for a type of King/Ruler. The Golden Mace is a slang term for the Scepter which represents a Ruler's authority and how that Ruler is using it specifically.
It's not an archetype nobody has ever heard of, it's an archetype that usually most people don't feel the need to speak about.
Edit: forgot to write these days first time around.
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The sentence that popped in my head when I read that was "If you can't find an article about it on TV Tropes, then maybe it's not really a thing."
I think the issue for me is that while it can be some value in being aware of "the long-lost ancestor of an idea", it's NOT slang or shorthand if nobody else knows what is being referenced. Using pop-culture intellectual properties may be losing some nuance, but when the only real Google result for "Golden Maceman" is the post in this thread, then by definition it leads to a breakdown in communication.
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I think there's probably some level of truth to the analysis. There ARE certainly a number of assumptions that have become so baked into our culture that even if we've forgotten the origins of the symbolism, we still recognize the symbols themselves. I think some of the examples given here aren't good examples because the symbols themselves have even been forgotten. (For example, people associate the Cross of St. Peter with the Anti-Christ not because of Anti-Catholicism but because it's a visual inversion of the symbol of Christ -- any cultural history behind the symbol has become completely overridden by that simpler association. And it isn't anywhere close to "most fiction" as you assert because the relevance of the symbol at all has been in rapid decline since the 1980s.)
However, there are two major problems with this formalism.
The more obvious one is that the labels are effectively bogus. As far as I can tell they've only ever been used in exactly one work, and it's not obviously available online. (Are you, perhaps, not a native English speaker, and you're translating the terms from another language?) This means their purpose as "language" fails: language is meant to communicate concepts, and those terms do not communicate those concepts.
The second is the assumption that the specific concepts hold universally. This is... to put it mildly... culturally shortsighted. There are extremely few concepts that hold universally across all cultures on Earth. Those that do are almost certainly not "unspoken," and to suggest that all works of fiction must unavoidably invoke or subvert them is certainly overbroad.
For example... The "Pure Archer" based on your description may be one of the universally understood concepts -- the idea that strict adherence to a specific creed can be a force of oppression is something that can be attested to even in ancient literature. The implications of that concept, however, aren't universal. Some cultures look at it as a test to be endured, some look at it as an inevitable truth that must be fought against, some look at it as an expression of cosmic balance, some use it as a parable to demonstrate that strict adherence is bad, et cetera. There are few if any common symbols shared in the telling of this story across cultures, but the meaning is acknowledged and well-understood, not lost in the noise of cultural history.
But by contrast, if I understand your description of the Golden Maceman correctly, that is a concept that is fairly unique to European post-Enlightenment philosophy. The distinction between subjective experience and objective truth is something that hasn't had the same kind of weight in other cultures, and the notion that such a dichotomy can drive one mad is particularly unique to the modern West -- indeed, the entire concept of "madness" as we understand it is highly culturally-linked. In some philosophies, the opposite is held to be true: objective truth is itself an illusion, and the paradox of disagreeing subjective experiences being simultaneously true is held to be a sublime mystery that should be appreciated.
The "Unspoken" toolkit for literary analysis, based on your description, is probably not meant to make universal comparisons, then. It appears to be better suited as a tool for finding common traits in stories that descend from a common cultural background. Identifying egregores is a technique not for discovering universal meaning but for boiling down specific ideas in specific stories to highlight a common aspect. And if I'm right about this, then that means that you can't just assume that an egregore is present in a work, but you have to do the research on the cultural background of the work to be sure, and if you're comparing works (which appears to be the strong suit of the technique) then you have to make sure there really is a common background to compare them through.
However, there are two major problems with this formalism.
The more obvious one is that the labels are effectively bogus. As far as I can tell they've only ever been used in exactly one work, and it's not obviously available online. (Are you, perhaps, not a native English speaker, and you're translating the terms from another language?) This means their purpose as "language" fails: language is meant to communicate concepts, and those terms do not communicate those concepts.
The second is the assumption that the specific concepts hold universally. This is... to put it mildly... culturally shortsighted. There are extremely few concepts that hold universally across all cultures on Earth. Those that do are almost certainly not "unspoken," and to suggest that all works of fiction must unavoidably invoke or subvert them is certainly overbroad.
For example... The "Pure Archer" based on your description may be one of the universally understood concepts -- the idea that strict adherence to a specific creed can be a force of oppression is something that can be attested to even in ancient literature. The implications of that concept, however, aren't universal. Some cultures look at it as a test to be endured, some look at it as an inevitable truth that must be fought against, some look at it as an expression of cosmic balance, some use it as a parable to demonstrate that strict adherence is bad, et cetera. There are few if any common symbols shared in the telling of this story across cultures, but the meaning is acknowledged and well-understood, not lost in the noise of cultural history.
But by contrast, if I understand your description of the Golden Maceman correctly, that is a concept that is fairly unique to European post-Enlightenment philosophy. The distinction between subjective experience and objective truth is something that hasn't had the same kind of weight in other cultures, and the notion that such a dichotomy can drive one mad is particularly unique to the modern West -- indeed, the entire concept of "madness" as we understand it is highly culturally-linked. In some philosophies, the opposite is held to be true: objective truth is itself an illusion, and the paradox of disagreeing subjective experiences being simultaneously true is held to be a sublime mystery that should be appreciated.
The "Unspoken" toolkit for literary analysis, based on your description, is probably not meant to make universal comparisons, then. It appears to be better suited as a tool for finding common traits in stories that descend from a common cultural background. Identifying egregores is a technique not for discovering universal meaning but for boiling down specific ideas in specific stories to highlight a common aspect. And if I'm right about this, then that means that you can't just assume that an egregore is present in a work, but you have to do the research on the cultural background of the work to be sure, and if you're comparing works (which appears to be the strong suit of the technique) then you have to make sure there really is a common background to compare them through.
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Dmol8
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The sentence that popped in my head when I read that was "If you can't find an article about it on TV Tropes, then maybe it's not really a thing."
I think the issue for me is that while it can be some value in being aware of "the long-lost ancestor of an idea", it's NOT slang or shorthand if nobody else knows what is being referenced. Using pop-culture intellectual properties may be losing some nuance, but when the only real Google result for "Golden Maceman" is the post in this thread, then by definition it leads to a breakdown in communication.
Well if it's the TV Trope you want for Anti-Catholicism in the US it is Christianity is Catholic and it talks about modern forms of Anti-Catholicism in the Real Life section.
If you want the tropes for the whole Heracles is the Unknown Soldier um there isn't only one. Like grab Heracles' entry on the Classical Mythology Mortals and Demigods page and then also grab the War is Glorious and the Spartan Way tropes Real Life segments.
As for the rest? See below the quote.
Other way around: It is because the Cross of St. Peter is an inversion of the usual Latin Cross that it was originally used as a shorthand for the Anti-Christ nature of the Papacy. Basically it was always about that simpler association being there. The rest is just the history that explains how it is used.
Not all works of fiction. I'm talking about Space Opera Science Fiction which has it's roots in European and North American cultures even when it is written by writers from other cultures because it draws from the Age of Discovery/Sail/Contact when European powers started colonizing the rest of the world. Like yeah sure I fucked up not noticing that I apparently didn't type Space Opera before Science Fiction in my post yesterday. My bad. I've been working on that thing since February and I just hit post after it looked like it had the right idea in it from my point of view.
The paradigm from which a culture looks at the Pure Archer varies, but the Pure Archer is the same for all. The name is from American English and is obscure because it is religion neutral since the less obscure names like Conquest, Antichrist and Pestilence are linked to the religious groups they came from: American Catholics, American Evangelicals and American Jews respectively.
The name Golden Maceman is a slang term as I have already explained. It is Serbian slang yes, but that is only because I don't know the English term for the concept. The other four names: The Pure Archer, The Scarlet Swordsman. The Mourning Judge and The Chloros/Khloros Cowl are all English terms. The Pure Archer and The Scarlet Swordsman are American English but religiously neutral so a lot more obscure than terms that are connected to specific religious groups, The Mourning Judge is a word play on the Hanging Judge but I'm not sure from which English it is and the Chloros/Khloros Cowl is an English academic slang term for the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Yeah no. I have to disagree there. All cultures have objective concepts of both truth and morality. It's just that priests/philosophers/scientists that obscure such concepts have always been able to find rich employers that preferred religion/philosophy/science bend to their will instead of the other way around.
Well yes for instance how some Anime use the pigment of a characters skin as a symbol for how much Tsumi a character has accumulated in that moment, usually focused on Kegare especially in Hentai oriented works, to give an example: How in Naruto someone's skin turns an unnatural darker color when they use the higher levels of Orochimaru's Curse seal to symbolize their spiritual descent in service to the Mad Scientist as both soldiers and guinea pigs. Or how East Asian Cyberpunk and/or Post-Apocalyptic settings sometimes have the concept of Cultivators (people who use Viruses/Nano-machines to gain powers by using them to better connect to their Qi) in them while Western Cyberpunk assumes that there is no way for Conservative Buddhists to be cyborgs if they are mentioned at all.
I don't know of any Space Opera settings that don't have at least one of the End of Empires in them so if could point me to one please do. I would be grateful for getting my worldview expanded.
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Ehhhhh... it would be going off on too much of a tangent to rebut this properly, but I think you've got cause and effect mixed up; the idea of an Anti-Christ was present in the Gospels, but associating it with the Papacy didn't happen until the 16th century. Turning symbols upside-down to reverse the meaning is a practice that dates back to the classical era. The Cross of St. Peter is a coincidence that was conveniently fortunate for the early Protestants.
The name might be from American English, but the symbol is not. American culture has no domestic history of archers; firearms had been the norm for decades by the time Europeans began migrating to the Americas in any significant numbers. As a result, the symbol of an archer here does not carry the connotation of someone who is strong, direct, and accurately follows a course; it instead carries a connotation of one who deviates from cultural norms, someone who embraces things that are out of the ordinary -- often historical/anachronistic, primitive, or self-reliant. A symbol based on fire would be far more meaningful to an American audience, because we culturally recognize it as something life-giving and essential, a symbol of superhuman power, but also terrible and destructive if not kept managed, and we DO have a historical story about fire being used as an oppressive weapon of faith: the Witch Trials.
Nope, I've got specifics: The particular philosophy I was citing was Buddhism; some forms (Mahayana comes to mind but versions of the concept may apply in others) hold that the concrete world is the sum of the subjective experiences of the people living in it, and that the ultimate nature of reality is void of inherent characteristics. There were also some forms of early-Christian Gnosticism that held that objective truth was divine and could only be comprehended by humans by what it was not; there were some branches of Platonism with similar beliefs.
Honestly, more come to mind that DON'T than that DO. I can certainly identify stories that incorporate at least one theme, but I wouldn't consider them to be at all foundational to the genre. And space opera is characterized by exploring humanity and relationships through the perspective of long-distance space travel, so I would expect that the vast majority of works in the genre would share the same themes as any other exploration of humanity and relationships.
But to give a concrete example of one that doesn't include any of the themes you listed, 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind.
The easy ones: There are no divine forces being used against the unwilling (Pure Archer) and there is no self-destructive rejection of truth (Mourning Judge). The plot doesn't depend on injustices or jealousy (Scarlet Swordsman).
The Khloros Cowl may superficially seem to appear -- one character is lost to an unimaginable phenomenon and it's not clear whether he's alive or not even after he returns -- but that isn't a theme of the story, and the meaninglessness of life and/or death doesn't play into it at all.
The Golden Maceman is the closest to applying, but it's a stretch. HAL 9000 is a computer, advanced enough to participate in the story as a character instead of as a set piece, but it still thinks and acts like a computer. As such, it operates exclusively on facts and objective reasoning and logical principles. And while tasked with supervising and managing a mission, HAL 9000 does (essentially) go mad, and the circumstances leading up to that are tied to conflicting perspectives and conflicting requirements. However, again these are only superficial facts, and the underlying theme that these facts are meant to represent is not present. No one flees into subjectivism or relativism, no one rejects critical thought, and nothing depends on any character's position according to any moral framework.
Indeed, it seems that these five archetypes are exceptionally poorly arranged if they're meant to be universal.
For example, Mourning Judge is a strict subset of Golden Maceman, adding nothing at all to the theme of descending into bad behavior as a result of a conflict with the truth. Similarly, Pure Archer and Scarlet Swordsman are different perspectives on the same underlying theme; Pure Archer is about the divine while Scarlet Swordsman is about selfishness, but both are about the damage that a narrow worldview causes to other people.
And if the point of Unspoken is to boil down themes to an essential egregore that remains when you remove the decorations that differ from culture to culture, then why is Khloros Cowl so specific? Losing oneself to powerful experiences is certainly a very common theme, and thinking about that in terms of life and death isn't unusual (the movie Soul that came out last year is an example), but concluding that life and death are meaningless as a result takes a sudden sharp turn away from a generalizable theme into something too specific.
So like I said... There's a good core idea for literary analysis in there. But these five archetypes aren't a set that encompasses the whole of human literature, or even the whole of the space opera genre. The most obvious missing theme is "love" -- none of those themes come anywhere close to describing the exceptionally common theme of overcoming hardship through strong relationships.
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I think that yes, @Dmol8 is mixing up cause and effect here.
The Cross of St. Peter comes from an apocryphal Christian legend about how St. Peter was (like Christ) eventually crucified by the Romans. Supposedly, because his Lord had been crucified the usual way, St. Peter insisted on being- and was, for whatever reason- crucified upside down. Because he was unworthy to die the way Christ had. Since this particular bit of apocrypha caught on and became popular, and since in Roman Catholic tradition the supremacy of the pope comes from how the pope (in his role of the archbishop of Rome) holds a position passed down in direct line from St. Peter, by extension the upside-down cross became a Catholic symbol representing the death of St. Peter and symbolically associated with the papacy.
However, to KNOW THIS, you have to be familiar with Christian apocrypha and symbology, or Catholic traditions, or both. Religious education in the relatively secularized Western world is... patchy in the present era, and has been for some time. Even groups like evangelical Christians often remain ignorant of basic principles of Christian theology and facts about Church history, or apply a high degree of selective editing to the overall body of lore.
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Thus, in modern and only modern societies, one gets very simplistic thinking that is entirely ignorant of this enormous mass of information about early Christianity and its lore. And (especially in Protestant countries) exceptionally ignorant of Catholicism, because the details of Catholic doctrine and history are utterly irrelevant and indeed invisible to people who are so ignorant of the subject as a whole. In a way this is cause and effect in the right direction but not by the right mechanism, because anti-Catholicism promotes general ignorance (not just false beliefs but outright ignorance) of Catholicism among the masses in certain Protestant countries, especially the US.
And because of that ignorance, you get a much simpler origin for the Petrine Cross.
Take a cross.
Flip it upside down.
BAM! Instant symbol of... whatever the opposite of Christ is! Right? Right?
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The problem here is that it's impossible to disentangle the "Catholics use the Petrine Cross" fact, which is true, from the "a bunch of metal fans and evangelical protestants use a cross that's arbitrarily upside down because it looks subversive of Christian symbology to them and they know nothing important about St. Peter" fact, which is also true.
In... fairness to @Dmol8 , "self-destructive rejection of truth" sounds like a pretty good fit for how HAL-9000 descends into madness, at least on a superficial level- @Dmol8 has added so many little curlicues and specific bits to his synthetic 'astroturf archetypes' that almost anything can be said to be, or not to be, a good fit if one cares to.
So if we're going to confront the whole scheme on its own terms, we should at least acknowledge that.
And this is an excellent overarching criticism of the scheme. @Dmol8 has created, entirely out of whole cloth, these... I'm going to call them 'artificial archetypes.' He asserts that they exist, he gives them names no one in all of English literature has ever used before, and that are not part of the consensus translation of any non-English work of literature. He maps them vaguely to a handful of fictional examples, particularly the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40k, which it must be pointed out is one of the most popular of pop culture SF stories in the present day.
To me, this sounds like the product of someone who is excessively impressed by a small reference pool of fiction, trying to examine this very small pond, deduce the nature of the biggest fish in that pond, and then generalizing that these fish are in fact gigantic whales that dominate the entire ocean. And that every weird little detail of these specific fish is replicated, in huge, excruciating detail, on the whales.
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Dmol8
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The first historical case of someone calling a Pope the Antichrist happened in 991 as far as I am aware. I agree that the Cross of St. Peter being the symbol of the Antichrist for Protestants started as a coincidence of History, but it evolved into a cultural symbol of both the Antichrist and the Anti-Catholicism in the US. Usually trough the previous generation recycling the symbols of their parents and grandparents. I mean Pope Nights are no longer a thing in the US and Anti-Catholicism is at this point confined to more liberal/left leaning institutions in the US, but it's still there.
Um...yes exactly. Which is why American Evangelicals call the concept the Antichrist and have been calling it that since the latter half of the 19th century. It's the American Catholics (and other Christians that hold to older Cultural heritages) that call it Conquest.
??? Some forms of Mahayana hold to that, but as far as I am aware some forms of it actually hold that some things are subjective truths (like the concept of a table) and some are objective truths (like the concept of wood or stone). My familiarity with Buddhism is suspect to myself so take this argument with some salt.
I asked for an example of a Space Opera Science Fiction. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a Science Fiction Epic. Also an unimaginable phenomenon is one of the ways people define something as Holy/Divine and in fact the Monoliths for 2001: A Space Odyssey are the most famous example of the Ancient Astronauts concept. Since the Monoliths are the Holy/Divine in the story and is the driver of violence in the movie and the twisting of a character into something they themselves did not want to become the Monoliths themselves could be argued to be the "Arrowheads" of a Pure Archer.
The Pure Archer is about those seen as Others/Outsiders and the violence one is driven to inflict upon them for because it is the proper thing to do. The Scarlet Swordsman is about one's own neglect of their own tribe. Likewise The Mourning Judge is about the selfishness of using your own subjective truths over the collective/objective truths and the Golden Maceman is about the rejection of the concept of something greater/better than an individual's paradigm. So yes narrow worldviews and the damage they do is the theme of all of the End of Empires.
The Chloros/Khloros Cowl is about the cycle of exploitation and addiction. It either starts as the exploitation of life to the point of death or an addiction to death to the point that the next brush with it is the only thing worth living for. Then it moves onto either stimulants to delay/reverse death so that life can be prolonged to be exploited more or the reversal of death so one can live to brush it once more. It ends either way in a cycle of no release from life by death since the afterlife is also at that point exploited and addictive as a resting stop.
Depending on the strength of love being shown in the work and how a person wrongly applies their love it can be fit into any part of the End of Empires. If it is Love as a Holy/Divine force that is under the Pure Archer, if it is love as something denied or unrealistic then that is the Scarlet Swordsman, if it is love as an obsession then that is the Mourning Judge, if it love as a means of exploitation then that is the Khloros Cowl and love of an ideal is under the Golden Maceman.
Love that doesn't tear down isn't an ending, but a beginning and/or a continuation so um how could it fit in the End of Empires?
Also @Simon_Jester at least some of the original heavy metal bands were knowingly using Christian Apocrypha and various other superstitions as part of their imagery. It's the fans that didn't know the history. Look up the sign of the horns and it's history in heavy metal for an example. The trademark claims did not and do not help with this sort of thing.
As for the terms I've already given some explanation from where they come:
And yes I'm using the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40k precisely because it is one of the most popular pop culture SF stories on this site as it is easier to reference and be understood. Should I have used something less popular and thus less well known?
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[Shrug]
I mean... maybe? But the underlying problem here isn't specifically about this one image of upside-down crosses that may or may not have originated as someone identifying the papacy with the Antichrist, or may or may not have originated as someone just randomly turning a cross upside down to denote "opposite of Christ, who is symbolized by a cross."
The problem is general. It's not that you can't mount a defense on any single point, it's the structure of the argumentation itself.
When a scholarly argument is entirely about symbolism, each successive link in the chain of symbolic references makes the argument much weaker. This is because it is possible to construct nearly any arbitrary combination of assertions about the connections between two things, by using enough symbolism, metaphor, and very selective cherrypicking of the cultural reference pool. This becomes especially true when the speaker feels entitled to define his own set of archetypes, artificial 'archetypes' that do not need to be truly general or to truly line up with what other people think and believe.
And that is the problem I have with your approach. You're acting as if you've discovered fundamental laws of how to define and categorize human thought and fiction. But there are many other equally valid approaches that are not compatible with yours. And the very nature of your style of argumentation is creating a situation in which you accept only the validity of your own 'evidence,' that is to say the fiction and ideas you are familiar with. And then you build complex arguments about very large amounts of history and literature, based on the idea that you can extrapolate all of Western literary history from a very small reference pool that nobody else understands or recognizes.
And nobody calls it "the Pure Archer," as far as I can tell.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have names in the English Language. You could just say "Conquest, War, Famine, and Death," or something like that.
One layer of the problem you've created for yourself by trying to advance your arguments in such an impenetrable manner is that you are either:
1) Refusing to learn terminology that already exists in the language you're advancing your arguments in, or
2) Trying to use complex terminology derived from a small reference pool, that refers to things your audience isn't sure actually exists.
Neither of these is a good practice.
Which is fine and good, but as far as I can determine you just made all this stuff up, and it does not represent a valid universal paradigm in which to evaluate fiction. You can rationalize how everything fits into your framework, but (and this is important) any fool can create a framework everything fits into. It's not actually difficult. If you want your analysis to be of any interest, you must either work within a framework others understand and can engage with, or engage in careful, learned efforts to persuade others to use your framework.
You can't just namedrop "the Chloris Cowl" and expect other people to care what that's supposed to mean or believe that this thing they've never heard of, and that doesn't really sound like any specific thing they've heard of, represents a deep insight into the nature of civilization or of fiction regarding the end of civilizations.
The problem is that you're using a template that already closely matches the template you want to build ("the four evil supernatural entities that embody different forms of destruction and suffering). If we start trying to broaden the perspective, the argument tends to weaken. Are these really archetypal forces that everyone is subconsciously aware of and thinks about? Or are they just weird random things you dreamed up that are themselves derivative of some other archetype other people actually share?
Dmol8
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Uh @Simon_Jester we are talking about Space Opera Science Fiction here and that genre's definition of the End of Empires. I did try to expand that into the rest of science fiction and then failed when I realized that trying to explore concepts related to the Fermi Paradox was much more universal. This quest we are talking about this in is a Space Opera in part though so it does fit.
I'm not trying to evaluate all of fiction with the End of Empires as I've described it here since that is only universal to Space Operas as far as I know. Um where did I give the impression that I was talking about the End of Empires being universal instead of the Unspoken meta-fictional method of analysis? If I did that I would like to know because that is a mistake on my part.
I'm not trying to evaluate all of fiction with the End of Empires as I've described it here since that is only universal to Space Operas as far as I know. Um where did I give the impression that I was talking about the End of Empires being universal instead of the Unspoken meta-fictional method of analysis? If I did that I would like to know because that is a mistake on my part.
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Let me take a step back.
The problem I see here is that when you talk about the entire genre of space opera, even though this is a much more restricted category than "all of fiction" or "all of history," it is still very, very large and complex. There are many fictional portrayals of many societies ending for many reasons. If you wish to characterize all such possible reasons, then you run into problems.
One problem is the need to make things overly symbolic. Things that are not presented as gods being described as 'holy,' or very metaphorical descriptions of 'boundaries between life and death,' because otherwise almost nothing like 'the Chloris Cowl' will ever appear in fiction. Since very few settings are jaded hedonistic burnout societies that have absorbed the afterlife itself into a blurred haze of pleasure-seeking, so a literalist interpretation of 'Chloris Cowl' is unlikely to appear.
And the other problem is that there may well be other characterization schemes that fit your data better. Just because you have one scheme for dividing up reality (or a genre of fiction) doesn't mean you have the only scheme, or the best scheme, the one that works by "carving it at its joints" instead of force-fitting things into categories.
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With an hour's thought, I could take any arbitrary "listicle" of things (the four classical elements, the four humors, the seven deadly sins, or anything else) and come up with categorization schemes that purport to break down fictional settings into categories. I could then argue that everything fits into the categories, probably arguing well enough that it would be hard to prove me wrong.
But the arbitrary listing wouldn't make sense or be useful as a concept.
Dmol8
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I'm sorry all I understood of your argument in this post is that there are other paradigms to describe commonalities in fiction and that you yourself could come up with other one that could be as encompassing as the ones I'm working with. Yes and what is the point of this argument? Cause I'm missing it from this post.
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The point of the argument is that you have generated a lot of words about how your paradigm is very significant, but that others are not convinced, because you have not adequately established that your paradigm is a good one.
I'm not sure how you'd go about proving that, not at the moment. But I don't think it's been done yet.
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And, also, I am making the repeated point that your casual use of terminology that is not found in normal discussions of English literature, or in English-language fiction in the genre you're talking about, isn't helping you.
Thebigpieman
I've got this, I think.
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Dmol8
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Only the Golden Maceman. The rest of it is me trying to avoid implying certain religious attributes of names like Conquest, War, Famine and Death and then failing by using too obscure English names.
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I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by trying to do that.
My advice is that you back up and try to make the explanation again, this time using names that are clearly recognizable in the English language, and just adopt a stance of detachment involving the use of imagery that may be implicitly Christian in origin. The same detachment you'd use talking about Greek or Hindu mythology. You don't have any trouble calling a modern secular monument a "shrine to Hercules." Why not call a literary concept "Famine" and see if it fits?
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The sequels establish incontrovertibly that it was a paradox of irreconcilable truths instead of a rejection of truth.
We could debate classification forever, because genres aren't strictly defined and traits cross over between them. 2001: A Space Odyssey is presented as an epic in terms of how it's framed and filmed, but the story satisfies many of the defining characteristics of space opera -- it's set primarily in outer space, it focuses on a risky adventure, it ties into an ancient interstellar civilization... A good tool for analysis shouldn't stop being relevant when a work stretches the boundaries of a particular genre.
But fine. Let's look at Asimov's "Robbie" (the first section of I, Robot) for an example.
* The story is entirely devoid of anything supernatural, so Pure Archer is right out.
* The Scarlet Swordsman could be argued -- with an extreme stretch -- to make an appearance, in that the climax of the conflict occurs when a little girl bypasses the normal policies without regard for why the greater world around her is set up the way it is. But that's all the deeper it goes; there's no injustice or jealousy, just naivety.
* The Mourning Judge would again require an extreme stretch. The Talking Robot inadvertently self-destructs when trying to process a fact that it had no framework for understanding, but that doesn't have anything to do with following a false leader or pushing one's own ideas despite reality.
* The story doesn't involve life and death or passion, so Khloros Cowl isn't relevant.
* Morality isn't a major theme of "Robbie" (though it does appear elsewhere in I, Robot) so the Golden Maceman doesn't apply.
However, "I, Robot" does include another theme that's very common in space opera that isn't represented in these archetypes: the character that explores the boundaries not between life and death but between consciousness and unconsciousness -- when does an AI become a person? when does a human stop being a person? how can you tell if an alien lifeform is a person? -- and how they relate to the rest of the world. This is so important to character relationships in space operas that its omission is pretty glaring.
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