Tales from the Dawn

[Cleretic]

By the way, I replied to your response from earlier, but it was after I'd slept and ended up at the bottom of a page.

You did! Dreadfully sorry it got drowned out by people that you can now very clearly understand why I put on ignore.

It's not human. Like, can you ever in a million years imagine that train of thought being reasonable when applied to our own world by anyone who isn't completely insane?

No, I can't. Because here's something super defining to me about the story of Zodiark, Hydaelyn, the Sundering, and most of the Ascians: they've completely blown out the scale of human comprehension of their actions. And that's good and fine. Because what that generally does for me is turn their actions and crimes into an abstract; I can comprehend the scale of neither the Zodiark sacrifices or the Sundering, so they become general vagueries. 'Sacrifice life to prolong society' versus 'break society to continue lives'. It's like reducing a mathematical problem to a lowest common denominator. It's like how the insane actions performed by gods in myth and legend don't really map to human laws and crimes, and none of their followers treat those gods like they do (although as mentioned many pages back, some religions do in fact call out their gods, it's just not on 'hey that's a crime' scale).

And that's actually helpful, because it makes Venat and most of the Ascians* actually... you know, relatable. 'Smashed planets into each other seven times to bring back old world' becomes 'did bad to bring back home', because my brain can't comprehend how enormous the Calamities were; and that's good, because I can sympathize with 'did bad to bring back home'. 'Sundered planet to stop sacrifices to ensure life exists in some form even if it's not what I know' becomes 'hurt people for the greater good' because frankly, the Sundering is baffling, but I can relate to 'hurt people for the greater good'. It even helps boiling down specific characters' actions: Fandaniel's actions both as Hermes and Amon are unfathomably crazy, but because of that I boil Hermes' down to 'wanted to understand uncomfortable truths, took said truth bad', and Amon's down to 'hurt people due to existential terror about death'; and I can relate to all of those.

Amaurot was not a part of the story that functioned on levels like concrete politics and population numbers, and it wasn't meant to; it's written as sort of a parable, much like its inspirations, Atlantis and of course its namesake. So the fact the scale of things stops being relatable isn't a bug, it's a feature.


*The one exception on this is Emet-Selch, because his crimes as Emperor Solus actually are things that I can understand on a human scale, those are real-life war crimes that I can't abstract. But that's a very different conversation, that we will not be having here! Especially not now, because it's very late here, I'm going to bed, and I'm probably not checking this thread again.