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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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And fundamentally one of the big issues with the empire is, well, cultivation.

The gods literally walk the earth, devouring massive piles of wealth to fuel their insatiable lust for power. Their soft power is buttressed by a lot of innate hard power. Indeed, much of the soft power in Imperial culture is actually targeted at keeping the high nobility manageable and vaguely prosocial.
 
Erebeal said:
And fundamentally one of the big issues with the empire is, well, cultivation.

The gods literally walk the earth, devouring massive piles of wealth to fuel their insatiable lust for power.
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which is unfortunately strictly necessary due to well deathworld. So unless there comes a way to make the mass of low level cultivators equal to high levels in power more efficiently this problem is going to continue. clan, cooperation , ministry,sect,temple or whatever the group name is just flavor text .
 
veekie said:
Because thats revenge porn, not really fixing anything even if its satisfying.
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It'll be one less rapist with the political power to get away with it. It'll be one less sin of inaction weighing on the conscience.

Admittedly, that's not much in the grand scheme of things.
veekie said:
An audit isn't going to take a Viscounty into hitting range of a Baron unless it has already taken them to the point of open rebellion, since thats what happens when you try to break the back of an armed power.
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Hey, that'd be nice. Then we wouldn't even get into trouble for killing him. Bit of a pipe dream, admittedly.
veekie said:
Justice is going to lie heavily in setting up better protections and shelter for unaffliated mortals. Prevent harm rather than cause indiscriminate harm.
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Indiscriminate? That's just libel. :p

I do agree that better protections for mortals is necessary, but that does nothing to redress the abuses that already happened.
veekie said:
The initial marriage arrangement can't really be touched without rivers of blood. Nor can exiling from a clan, which is only fair to no longer benefit from clan resources if you refuse your role in clan prosperity.

But everything after that is mortal abuse which is illegal but poorly enforced.
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The exile wasn't the fucking issue. Who'd want to be family to someone that sells you like livestock to that beast of man anyway? It's the shit that's legally considered mortal abuse that deserves death for the man responsible and public shaming for the families that engaged in it to protect their worthless and fraudulent reputations.

As for rivers of blood, didn't I already share my theory that the MoI's going to end up purging most of the nobility because they're not going to stop with all the evil shit?
veekie said:
In practice, this depends entirely on where you live, who you crossed and how powerful you personally are.
If the area you can travel on your own is larger than the turf of your clan, you could leave and make your own living, assuming you have marketable skills.

Which means both travel and upkeep must be available, or you run facefirst into economics. Neither are cheap in a deathworld, somebody has to foot the bill, and somebody has to permit it.
Which is where you see the Great Sect system doing exactly that.
And the local nobility needing to have it shoved down their throats in general because it IS an infringement on their political soveriegnity.

As are the Empress' soup kitchens and similar initiatives. Those with political power dislike it because it erodes their soft power.
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Making the abuses harder to pull off is good, yeah. These seem like good starts to it. We should emulate them once said Empress abandons and betrays us.
 
I mean, I'm fine with assassinating whoever. But my assent isn't for moral reasons. Just think it'd be an interesting experience.

Plus, we've only killed barbarians till now. Well. And a corpse immortal, I guess, but he was already kinda dead AND super duper a million hyper exiled from emerald seas, so kinda also a barbarian if you think about it.
 
Ling Qis father is also the blame for the situation. We should find and beat him until some child support falls off him.
 
Winged One said:
It'll be one less rapist with the political power to get away with it. It'll be one less sin of inaction weighing on the conscience.

Admittedly, that's not much in the grand scheme of things.
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I think that's exactly the point. He's one less evil person in a city full of normalised corruption. It doesn't fix anything apart from making us feel better. It doesn't fix the larger societal problems which led to it. Hence, Renxiang's focus.

Ultimately, it does nothing but make us feel good for a short while before we run into another person just like him. And in Tonghou, that's a lot of people. Hence Jiao's heart demon.
 
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Oliver_Twister said:
I think that's exactly the point. He's one less evil person in a city full of normalised corruption. It doesn't fix anything apart from making us feel better. It doesn't fix the larger societal problems which led to it. Hence, Renxiang's focus.

Ultimately, it does nothing but make us feel good for a short while before we run into another person just like him. And in Tonghou, that's a lot of people. Hence Jiao's heart demon.
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One less evil person is one less person doing evil. It's fully worth pursuing even if we can't root out all corruption and has more effect than just making us feel good.

His potential victims may later be preyed on by someone else, but at least for a short time, they have some semblance of peace.
 
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"But you did not fix anything." argument always feels so silly.
Yes, i did not suddenly transform the world into a paradise, but there is now one less person abusing others, that is fixing a thing.
 
One less person doing evil is not nothing, but considering both the costs and the consequences of doing so, plus all the other opportunities to invest our time into, this does not seem like a good way to spend our effort from the "reduce evil" rationale. Plus, that aside, personally speaking I don't find this an interesting plotline. If we ever have a good opportunity to fuck that guy or Liu in general over, I wouldn't mind it, but actively trying to do so? Nah.
 
Oliver_Twister said:
I think that's exactly the point. He's one less evil person in a city full of normalised corruption. It doesn't fix anything apart from making us feel better. It doesn't fix the larger societal problems which led to it. Hence, Renxiang's focus.

Ultimately, it does nothing but make us feel good for a short while before we run into another person just like him. And in Tonghou, that's a lot of people. Hence Jiao's heart demon.
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I feel like CRX could use his arrest/trial as a way to go after other corrupt figures. It would also provide Ling Qiu and her mother some closure witch is fairly important given her cultivation.
 
LucidProp said:
One less evil person is one less person doing evil. It's fully worth pursuing even if we can't root out all corruption and has more effect than just making us feel good.

His potential victims may later be preyed on by someone else, but at least for a short time, they have some semblance of peace.
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Okay, for further clarification. Spending all of our resources to get rid of one evil person in a city with normalised corruption does nothing when those resources could be better spent addressing the systemic corruption that allowed him to thrive. You're wasting time addressing one minor effect without targeting the many causes that led to it.

As many people have pointed out, we're only a baby baron with limited resources while he's a viscounty scion.

Will it help everyone in the short term? Probably not. In the long run though, it will.

Valmond said:
"But you did not fix anything." argument always feels so silly.
Yes, i did not suddenly transform the world into a paradise, but there is now one less person abusing others, that is fixing a thing.
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It's not silly. You're just putting a bandaid on the problem until another asshole rips it off one minute later. It'll use up most of our political capital for one person when we could spend it doing something better, like preventing a possible war or, you know, convincing others to set laws that limit such behaviour in the first place.

It's not about making the world a paradise. It's about making sure that the wound heals instead of constantly replacing bandages until you've bled out. Or well, putting well-crafted bandages that can hold long instead of flimsy ones that fall out in minutes, since this is a wicked problem.
 
Adhoc vote count started by Oliver_Twister on Jul 27, 2023 at 11:29 AM, finished with 91 posts and 45 votes.
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Oliver_Twister said:
It's not silly. You're just putting a bandaid on the problem until another asshole rips it off one minute later. It'll use up most of our political capital for one person when we could spend it doing something better, like preventing a possible war or, you know, convincing others to set laws that limit such behaviour in the first place.

It's not about making the world a paradise. It's about making sure that the wound heals instead of constantly replacing bandages until you've bled out. Or well, putting well-crafted bandages that can hold long instead of flimsy ones that fall out in minutes, since this is a wicked problem.
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It is silly because the problem being solved is not "there are bad people" but "there is this bad person".
Will there be more problems, sure.
But that's a new issue.
As for using our political capital to make laws to stop something like that, the time when we have that much power is centuries into the future, and more probably never.
I'd rater fix a problem here and now, because as much as i am enjoying the summit, we stumbled upon it be change, i am not going to bank being able to do something that far reaching soon (we probably will just because of the nature of quests and stories, but i am not going to vote based on that).
 
The problem is not "there is one person". The problem is there is corruption in Tonghou because of the clan of that one person. And the ability of clans to wield such power and abuse mortals because of petty stuff like not wanting to get married. And clan dynamics that allowed the He to marry off Qingge without her consent.

It's not just "one problem" if we want to prevent what happened to Qingge from happening again. Because, well, he's one person of many, and his death will only give us "feel good" points instead of saving another Qingge.

While you'll need a lot of power to do things, you'll also need a lot of time to build up and create a network and deals to support you. And we can start doing that right now. And again, that Liu scion is not a problem. He's a symptom of it.
 
If you demand all problems are solved at once, then nothing well get solved.
And, again, you are incisting on focusing a different problem.
Corruption is a problem, sure.
But so is this one person.
Killing them does not destroy corruption (though it does reduce it), but it will remove that one person.
 
Valmond said:
If you demand all problems are solved at once, then nothing well get solved.
And, again, you are incisting on focusing a different problem.
Corruption is a problem, sure.
But so is this one person.
Killing them does not destroy corruption (though it does reduce it), but it will remove that one person.
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At the cost of wasting resources that can more effectively help more people elsewhere.
Your argument would be perfectly reasonable if we had infinite political power, but we don't.
 
The way I see it, it's not just a different problem. Without corruption, Qingge wouldn't have been forced to be a prostitute. And that's not the only thing I pointed out, so that's not a fair point.

And I'm not saying we should solve all problems at once. I'm saying this is a complex problem with many moving parts/factors, and the Liu scion is one of them, a very minor one at that. It's a wicked problem. There are no perfect solutions. Using and slightly changing the previous analogy so we'll need to craft enough well-made bandages to cover it up so that it can heal, instead of just a flimsy one that can't cover 1% of the problem and will fall off immediately.

Killing him doesn't reduce corruption. There are still the people that enabled him there, the people who looked away, and the many, many people like him who can now fill in the empty role his death will create. It literally does not do anything but make us feel good.

Actually, say we kill him, and only him like you're suggesting. Then we leave. What happens to the person who fills the role? Do we go after them too, and kill them? And then kill some more people like them? Say we kill all the people like him. What about the circumstances that led to his creation? Or the fact that his toxic culture would trickle down below, so people will eventually copy him?

What happens to the women he hurt? Will they even be compensated? Will they lose the safety they have because, well, they at least had status as his "concubines"? What happens to the future women who can still be sold off to marriage because their clans have the power and legal right to do so?
 
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