: The Leveller seeks not to conquer, but to destroy. He
: does so because he is evil and wishes to dominate
: things with power.
Before I start, this is not a personal attack aimed at anybody but a lingering doubt I have about something in the game that seems to be taken for granted. If I'm attacking anything it's the general principles here.
I know that this is dogma by this point but I've always had a problem with it. The game is so complex, and even the darkest units have deeper agendas than that. To just say the leveller is "evil" and "wants to destroy" just strikes me as simplistic. Did Soulblighter cause all that trouble just so he could crack the cloudspine? I kind of doubt it--I think he wanted to start a new empire and wasn't real picky about how he did it. The events of the Forge always felt to me like the act of a desperate man forced to the breaking point. Not "oh good, things are going according to plan, now I can destroy everything!" but more like "#@?&! That Alric has ruined everything--and now HE has an empire and I don't! Boo hoo! Well, if I can't have it, nobody can!"
Okay, of course, SB wasn't the leveller... well, Balor's motivation seems more complex to me as well. He comes on the scene, raises an army, destroys Muirthemne... and then sits around for a while. A long while. Finally he gets off his ass and goes after the West. If all he wanted was destruction, why didn't he just keep going? Strategic reasons play a part there--he needed time to cement his power and create Fallen Lords and so on--but if he was so single-mindedly bent on destruction, why would he care about strategy? And even if he did--that pause gave Alric time to grow into avatara-hood and for allegiances to be formed in the West, and so on--it was a bad move strategically because it gave the West time to fortify. I can't for the life of me figure out why he waited like that--leveller or no.
Being the Leveller seems to come with a certain amount of power, but anybody with half a brain (and Balor was Connacht, the Odysseus figure in the Mythworld, so he must have had a brain and a half) will see the problem: if you want power, you don't want to destroy the world, you want to own it, so you wouldn't want to pick up the mantle of "Destroyer". Obviously Balor had no choice in the matter--he didn't choose it, it chose him.
Well, this is the Asylum, so I need a theory. Okay. The comet comes around. Some alien intelligence that's bound to it sees the Mythworld ripe for the plucking and sends out feelers, looking for anyone in desperate enough straits to be vulnerable, and poisons their mind. But why? Well, "Leveller" to me sounds less like "Destroyer" than "Cleaner", as in, time to clean off the game board so we can start over. It also sounds like "the Great Leveller", which was a medievil name for Death, since everyone both noble and common had to die eventually.
So here's the weird part of my theory: the Leveller (the spirit, not the bodies it inhabits) is actually a Good Guy.
Okay, now that I have your attention: the Leveller saw what happened with the Trow. Nyx (who I always thought of as female, BTW, since the Trow are her consorts) made them too powerful and gave them the means to commit endless genocides. Wyrd might have done something about it but he was too busy tripping on the one dream (he's a consummate hippy god, man). The Leveller decides it can't let this happen again--none of the young races can be allowed to get so powerful they start wiping each other out.
Now the Leveller, up on its comet, is a kind of God and Gods are known for taking the Extremely Long View. It doesn't matter if people get killed left and right--what matters is the eventual destiny of entire species. If that means an absolutely horrific conflagration every thousand years, the Leveller is willing to put up with that--there will always be survivors, which is not how it worked with the Trow (how many races' destinies did they put a stop to?). The Leveller exists to Level the playing field, not to destroy it. Maybe it also inspires the great heroes--or maybe it just knows that one will always come along.
So why isn't everyone all grateful for Balor and Moagim and Moagim's various incarnations? Well, individual units are just people, and people are known for taking the Extremely Short View. Think about it this way. You're a tree. Your branches are looking especially nice this year--huge, so huge they might just obscure that pesky street, maybe huge enough to damage that pesky house that's always annoying you. Then some guy comes along with a twenty-foot pole and starts cutting off your damned branches. Do you thank it for letting you coexist with the street and the house? No! You start crying about how there's the evil paingod called the Pruner that comes around every so often in a repeating cycle and wants nothing so much as to utterly destroy you.
Silly, I know, but I kind of like it.
