#but so much of it is just suvi empire so suvi bad be like ame. like it's not even good anti-imperialism bc it's so shallow

[utilitycaster]

#this is SO real#wbn#there's a strange determination to sort everyone into either witches OR wizards and not just. townsfolk. people.#and to a degree that is where the story has led us (ame has been leaning much heavier on the spirit side of her communication role)#but the mortal world is just as complex and deserving of attention and sympathy as the spirits#and it's almost bizarre to treat everything suvi says as empire fodder rather than legitimate frustration and confusion at a world that#has been closed off to her#'you get what you get' has been taken so far out of the context in which she said it for example#yes I believe she has the incorrect viewpoint imo but there is so much nuance in how suvi doesn't want people to be hurt and wants to-#be able to control that. and how the spirits represent an absolute lack of control with the ability to do whatever they want#(for the most part)#and her fear and even occasional disdain of that is from a further place than empire propaganda#it's from her desire to have control and knowledge of her surroundings. to be able to Know everything#and the spirits laugh in the face of that very idea#and it's not entirely invalid of her to be frightened of that!!!#it's the wizard the witch AND the wild one!!#suvi would not be there if her viewpoint was not valuable if very very flawed#her end goal should not be to become ame because like she said. she's a wizard and she Knows magic!#there is virtue is her strategy and determination and logic#but people seem to favor ignoring that to smooth over the nuance and hope for her to realize her wrongs soon#sorry this was a giant ramble lol

@thespoonisvictory (not putting this on the post bc it's already a long one) Yes to all of this! Like, I think first and foremost people are ignoring that she is a 20 year old whose parents died for the citadel when she was a very young child and that this has been her only home since then and if she did a sudden about face "oh I was wrong about everything" it would be just as fragile and biased as her current worldview; while epiphanies and turning points are real, true and lasting change is ultimately a process and I don't trust an ideology that is adopted as a rapid about-face rather than an ongoing exploration.

The firesides make it clear that she and Ame are in fact very similar people; both will often ultimately do what they want despite personal danger or dangers to others in the party, both genuinely do care a lot about common people but both are at times deeply ignorant of the privileged positions they have held from a very young age (even though Suvi will throw her weight around, the realization that Galani would not have been given the same second chances has absolutely rocked her); and both are extremely out of their element in this story! I think it's also worth keeping in mind that we're in the "so wizards have really fucked up badly here" arc. There's plenty of time to explore the idea that, for example, one corrupt witch could do some pretty significant damage. The main thing that divides Suvi and Ame is what they were taught, and yeah, Suvi is frightened and unsettled by the world of spirits that Ame has been taught to respect and understand and that she never has. I think it's also really worth keeping in mind that Suvi knows that Eursulon's life here is in part because she broke rules she had no possible way of knowing, and I can't imagine she - a person who is all about knowledge and rules - has truly found a way to live with that yet.

For what it's worth I find it fascinating that the meta about Suvi is by and large fairly harsh criticism, and the meta about Imogen is "how dare you speak ill of my 28 year old baby daughter", and also that meta about the imperial wizards in WBN is largely "fuck them bitches, they trapped a god and everything they do is wrong and bad" but there's plenty of meta about the imperial wizard in Critical Role that goes "well he sucks as an individual but his plan is pretty cool actually" because I see a lot of parallels and I know there's overlap in fandoms. It does genuinely feel like people just see the word "god" or "empire" and react without actually listening to the other thousands of words surrounding it.

#for reasons of honor i cannot publicly provide my other thought here re: imogen and suvi but check back on sept 9 #or dm me #anyway. i love suvi very much and a lot of the meta about her is like. i don't care if you criticize her #she is a lot of negative things she is impatient and arrogant and unwittingly uncaring and yeah she supports an imperial force #but so much of it is just suvi empire so suvi bad be like ame. like it's not even good anti-imperialism bc it's so shallow #wbn spoilers

[utilitycaster]

A lot of people who try to analyze religion in Exandria need to watch the Adventuring Academy episode where Brennan and Matt talked about worldbuilding, specifically when Matt said “In a game like dungeons and dragons, or a lot of role playing games where ultimately part of the game is to overcome villains and rise up and become a hero, there has to be some level of universal antagonism… there is a pure and defined entity or force that is evil, it may not be realistic to some stories out there, but that’s [how it works in DND].”

This is true, and it's really interesting to watch this happen because Matt will make a huge, unambiguous evil like Lucien or the Vanguard, or Brennan will do so with Asmodeus and people will do everything they can to try to come up with reasons to woobify them or argue why they're justified...but I haven't seen this happen in most of the D20 seasons, and I think it's because the villains in most D20 seasons have been things that reinforce people's beliefs, namely, capitalism and abuse of religious power. And to be clear, capitalism and abuse of religious power fucking suck, but it's telling that people assume the villain is capitalism in places where that doesn't apply on a wide scale, or in some cases, exist (EXU Calamity, Neverafter); or that the Ruby Vanguard or Tomb Takers, both of which have pretty much every single hallmark of a cult but just aren't affiliated with the main pantheon, are actually the good guys.

Incidentally: this is like, quite literally how people get sucked into cults. One of the leading cult researchers in the world, Janja Lalich, is a survivor of a now dissolved explicitly leftist/anti-capitalist cult. Abuses of power, which is, ultimately, what both Brennan and Matt lean on as their Universal Antagonist traits, rely on confirming people's existing biases and exploiting them - even if those biases are broadly good! This is in fact why I can get so fucking adamant about what is mostly silly fandom shit, because I do, on some level, look at some takes that completely lack critical thinking and am like oh you'd 100% buy into all kinds of dangerous patterns of thought if someone packaged it nicely; even something as stupid as the Caleb Werewolf Theory relied on circumstantial evidence and false information that you could easily verify was false. And it's annoying but mostly harmless in the context of fandom, but it always makes me wonder - does this person do this with political posts on social media?

Anyway getting back to the main point, I think watching/listening to Brennan commentary on Adventuring Academy is generally a really good idea because he is a very smart guy with a philosophy degree and has a strong grasp of the genres in which he works as well as TTRPGs as a storytelling medium, and talks to other people who also have a good understanding of the morality of fantasy stories. And if you listen to this, you will in fact get that the basis of evil in these stories is not something as specific as "capitalism" or "religion"; it's quite literally as basic as "exploiting other people simply because that is an option available to you and you don't care about them." And obviously that's the whole basis of capitalism, and it's a serious problem that exists within organized religion, but like...not to repeat myself from this weekend but I keep thinking about the "Suvi without the imperialism" and it's like...she is a 20 year old woman whose parents died for a cause and we have had ONE episode with her as an adult. We know nothing about the Empire except that it's an empire and it is at war. Like, can you look at imperialism and understand why it's bad? Can you separate the concept of imperalism - which, to be clear, is based on power structures - from say, your 21st century understanding of empires in the real world? Or do you see the word Empire and go "Bad Thing" without any capacity to analyze because that's how you end up looking at two flawed things in a story (well, if we're lucky; see the middle paragraph) and deciding one is perfect and correct for no reason other than because it opposes the thing you think is worse. And Brennan is REALLY good at skewering that, and Matt is REALLY good at portraying multiple complicated and flawed perspectives, but you do have to like, use your brain slightly.

#answered #Anonymous #i'm having flashbacks to when people were like The Dynasty (theocracy ruled by the same person for a millennium) is perfect no notes #simply bc the dwendalian empire was ALSO bad #cr tag #long post