: A couple quick thoughts (addressed to everyone, not just
: Sili): If the North is supposed to be more orderly,
: that would mean that both the Trow and the Berserks
: would have to be orderly people in the extreme. I'd
: buy the former; the latter I have a little trouble
: with. Again, in the south you would have chaotic ghols
: and dwarves. Hmm. The south seems to corner the market
: on technology (though the Trow were the first
: blacksmiths...). Would you suggest that comes from the
: creativity of chaos or the stability of an orderly
: society? Seems to me it takes a little of both.
: If it's evil to the east, good to the west, then is
: Muirthemne more evil than Madrigal? The avatara better
: people than the heron guard?
It seems to me that it isn't so much orderly North and chaotic South as a chaotic-Light, orderly-Dark North and a chaotic-Dark, orderly-Light south. More on this a bit later. Also, I'd say that technology's pretty much a Light thing--which matches your statement about it needing a little order and a little chaos to develop. The Trow only had a technological head start because they were about a million years older than everyone else. Humans and Dwarves have come much farther in a much shorter time.
: The problem, as I see it, is Brownian Motion. You seem to
: suggest that there's some kind of influence pulling on
: people in every corner of the world. Yet the mythworld
: is famous for its _lack_ of geographical
: segregation--the various races are quite mobile and
: cultures are radically mixed. If you think of
: mythworld people as particles of
: order/chaos/evil/good, they seem to have been mixed
: very well--like pouring cream and sugar into opposite
: sides of a cup of coffee and then stirring it
: vigorously with a spoon. After a while it's impossible
: to say where the cream was added and where the sugar
: entered. Even the untamed lands have been contaminated
: (specifically by Damas). Do people bring their
: tendencies with them, or has the Mythworld been mixed
: enough that such polarities are no longer noticeable?
: The obvious exception is Faraway, which, as far as we
: know, has only been seen or at most visited by a
: handful of mythworlders, and can therefore be as good
: or evil as it wants to be.
Well, here's my personal view. The order/chaos division, as I see it, isn't quite north-to-south. Instead, the intermediate "grey area" runs southwest to northeast, through the Province, Muirthemne and Gower. On the northeast side you have chaotic Light societies such as the Berserks and Skrael and fir'Bolg, and orderly Dark societies such as the Trow. (They may be politically independent, but their history of slavery and genocide points toward a Dark nature). On the southwest side you have chaotic Dark societies like the Ghols and whatever it is lives in the untamed lands, and orderly Light societies like the Dwarves. The middle band, the grey area, is populated almost exclusively by Light cultures.
Some may raise the Mauls as an exception to this classification--they're on the orderly-Dark side but they seem to be pretty uncivilized. I see two counter-arguments to this. One, the Brownian motion you speak of--given that the Mauls *hate* their homeland and much prefer warmer regions, and that they seem to get the worst of it in most military conflicts, I suspect that they may have originated down south in the chaotic-Dark regions but have been driven north by the expanding human societies. Two, the Mauls aren't all that chaotic--they're violent, sure, but they're also very hidebound and predictable. The Mauls may be thought of as small, dumb, Trow, perhaps--they smash things that annoy them and they're interested in establishing an empire, but they lack the power and intellect to pull it off like the Trow can.
What's the explanation behind this layout? Well, if you buy my idea that the Light is associated with order/chaos balance and the dark with extremes, then it becomes pretty obvious. To the Northeast, there's a strong influence of Order. Naturally orderly races like the Trow find their inclinations amplified into a mania and become Dark; naturally chaotic societies like the Zerks and Skrael find their inclinations balanced by the external influence and become hybrid beings suitable for the Light. In the Southwest, the opposite happens--naturally chaotic races like the Ghols become so chaotic that they can't possibly achieve civilization, and turn to the Dark; naturally orderly and rational races like the Dwarves have their natures leavened with a bit of freedom and unpredictability and join the balanced Light. In the middle band the cultures are mostly Light because their innate inclinations, with no external influence to back them up aren't strong enough to send them to one extreme or the other.
As for the Dark to the East, Light to the West thing--or, rotated to fit my theory, Dark to the Northeast, Light to the Southwest--this might mean that the chaos-order poles aren't at opposite points on the globe, but are both somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere. So over there, almost all the cultures are Dark because they're very near either one pole or the other, and yanked to one of the extremes; in the West by the Faraway, the people are farthest from either pole and tend most to balance.
(This is all pretty hypothetical for me; I'm not sure I buy any of the geographical distribution stuff. Unlike the "Ravanna is just pretending to be Shiver" theory, which is rock-solid.)
--SiliconDream
