: Man, I'm sorry that I'm filling up the board with this
: stuff, but I can't stop thinking about it!
And I'm sorry I've snipped this up so much, but I didn't want it ending up seven hundred lines long!
: Okay, so I think I see the root of the differences in
: character between A and C, and it's chaos vs. order.
: Or anarchy vs. law. Or freedom vs. authority. All the
: same basic idea, though you use different words
: depending on which side you're on.
Which, of course, suggests Moorcock's sagas... maybe a veiled hint in your post name? Elric, champion of Chaos, going up against the Lords of Order... hmm... you might just be on to something, here!
: Doesn't this explain the disparate personality traits
: they have? A prefers a highly centralized, simplified
: government... C prefers a multilevel
: government because that embodies the principle of
: order... Everyone has a place,
: and knows exactly what their status is relative to
: those around them.
Okay, here's where we start disagreeing. I know you aren't arguing for a straight, one-to-one correspondence. The fact that Alric never reconvened the Nine is a good, strong point. However, I see no real evidence of him performing some grand campaign reform measure--the Legion remains as stratified in M2 as it was in M1, an orderly, organized, disciplined unit of fighting men with clear lines of rank.
On the other hand, you have Connacht. Yes, he had lieutenants. Beyond that, do we really know how he organized his armies? He relied pretty heavily on the Heron Guard, who don't seem that well organized. He relied VERY heavily on his sorcerors--chaotics, in your scheme--and on his artifacts. Could there have been a Wolf Age without a Tain? Which leads us to...
: Why does A like to gather magical artifacts, while C
: likes to destroy or hide them? Because magic is the
: enemy of law...
But C seems to rely on them pretty heavily. Yes, we know Connacht tried to destroy all the artifacts he could find. That's established fact. I've always thought that he did this because he looked back on his career and saw how much he had depended on them, and didn't want to leave them around as temptations for the next Leveller. He can't have had a natural antipathy for the things or he would never have ordered the Tain's construction.
You do get a bonus point for the fact that Balor doesn't seem to resort to the use of artifacts. How do you explain, though, that Balor, a C-type, is such a badass magician? Or that he goes so far out of his way to recruit the most powerful wizards in living memory? Simple expediency would suggest that he did what worked, that since his enemies were all Avatara he needed all the magical help he could get, but if he's all about the order, why would he use so much magic himself? I don't exact see mega-lightning as the weapon of choice for your anal retentive champion.
: The bit I mentioned about A preferring self-reliant
: soldiers, while C likes to give his soldiers precise,
: explicit, small-scope orders and have them obey them
: to the letter, fits perfectly...
Since you use my own argument as one of your props here, I suppose I should just let this one go. Nah.
If this were true, wouldn't Balor have come down harder on the Fallen Lords for infighting? They lost him the war, for Pete's sake. If the Deceiver and the Watcher had been required to play nice they would have crushed the Legion before it could come through Seven Gates.
Meanwhile, Alric is more than happy to detail explicit plans. Whether or not the Deceiver follows them is another matter, but shouldn't he have gotten a taste for discipline while working under Balor (and being that he was the greatest Avatara of the Wolf Age, whether he fought beside Connacht or not, he was at least raised in one of your Authoritarian eras, and should have had it drilled into him as a boy).
Perversely enough, if you squint right you can say that Alric fights orderly since he follows (for the most part) the rules of engagement and fights traditional, rank and file battles while Connacht fights dirty (chaotically) by tricking people. I liked you take on it, but it was almost diametrically opposed to what I was thinking when I made my observation (isn't this fun?).
: Now, I'm not saying A embodies freedom while C embodies
: order... the Light seems strongly allied to order while
: the Dark is linked to chaos...
Are you sure about this? I would say that the Dark is about as orderly as you can get--either they want conquest, which would be to rule the land with an iron will, or they want total destruction, which would be Entropy, which, as we all know, is perfect order because it's the absence of movement altogether. Conversely the Light wants either freedom from oppression, which you've identified above as falling on the chaos side, or eminent domain (the freedom-loving form of conquest) which is life spreading out of control. A while ago I suggested that the Leveller was simply an ecological balancer, keeping any given race from getting so numerous and powerful that it could wipe out all the others, the way the Trow did for so long. It seems to me that in this function the Leveller is the ultimate force for Order, yet it has always been identified as the primum mobile behind the Dark.
: We can see the influence of the two conflicts--Light and
: Dark, order and chaos--in the 4-Age cycle...
Some of your points here are brilliant, and I agree we have little information about the Age of Reason, but it seems to me it must have been a time of increasing order. We know even less about the Axe Age but it has always seemed to me to be describing a kind of pre-history, a stone age culture that was always on the run from the Trow. Therefore, the Age of Reason was not an enlightenment like the Realworld Age of Reason, but more like the Golden Age of Greece or Sumeria--a time when civilization as we know it came into existence. The reason in question is, I believe, the evolution of the human mind from animalistic, survival-oriented behavior (which the Trow had no real problem with--they were worried about other sentients, not chimpanzees) into the kind of cognition that could start forming fiefdoms and eventually empires.
: The Wind Age--ushered in by the A-Leveller Moagim, this
: is therefore an Age of chaotic evil...
Again, I've always thought it was the other way around. Okay, according to the cycle it's a dark age, but "Wind" suggests to me that this is when the great explorers of the Mythworld were born, the ones who built tall ships and went looking for new lands to conquer.
: The Wolf Age--ushered in by the C-Hero Connacht, this is
: therefore an Age of orderly good. And indeed, what
: it's famous for is harboring the "greatest empire
: the world has ever known."...
This one I buy. It was the age when the Cath Bruig, with its orderly empire, was at its height. Yes. An age of order. I only disagree in thinking that Myrdred's manipulations were designed not to take advantage of disciplined minds but to protect him from undisciplined savages. It's basic colonialistic thinking, so as far as I'm concerned, it still fits into your scheme.
: The Sword Age--this *was* going to be ushered in by the
: C-Leveller Balor, and would therefore be an Age of
: orderly evil...
You're assuming, of course, that the Cycle can't handle Alric's success. I dunno. I tend to think the Leveller initiates these things but doesn't particularly care how they work out as long as a lot of people die in the process.
I do think Alric's intention is to solidify an empire of his own. Since the Ibis Crown apparently gave him no real battlefield power and Balmung was, while impressive, not as big a whoop as a dispersal dream, I tend to think that his retaking Muirthemne was a political move rather than a tactical one. I think he saw an opportunity to make himself Emperor at a time when nobody cared about the normal rules of succession and he jumped at it--the timing of his coronation makes no sense unless you think he wanted to get on that throne while he was still popular enough to hold it.
: So, assuming you buy all this, there's an obvious
: question to consider. Why does the cycle run in the
: order it does? Why is a Light Age always followed by a
: Dark Age of the same order/chaos alignment, and why is
: a Dark Age always followed by a Light Age of the
: opposite order/chaos alignment? Tell me, tell me!
Wouldn't this be a natural function of the way thinks work? If the Leveller of each age is simply the Great Hero of the previous one returned, then if the Leveller wins he's going to keep going in the same direction while if the Hero wins he's going to turn everything upside down. If you're asking for some kind of grand comological principle that would make things so, I'm afraid I don't have an answer for this one.
: God, I love Bungie!
Me, too! :)
Oh, and BTW, I loved your theory. If I've spent this much time picking it apart I hope you'll understand that's a sign of respect for it. Mostly, above, I've been trying to play Devil's Advocate.
: --SiliconDream
--David Wellington
