Earwa > Atrocity Tales
The inverse fire.
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---
--- Quote from: The Sharmat ---I don't find it that hard to believe that it's just a technological artifact that lets the user look into hell. The reason it has such a transformative effect is that Hell is so inconceivably horrifying compared to any atrocity possible in the physical world that the viewer becomes instantly and permanently desensitized to any crime they may commit.
--- End quote ---
I second this.
Curethan, I'm not sure the normal rules of cognitive dissonance apply. Also, perhaps, "seeing" the Inverse Fire is more experiential than the metaphor implies. Maybe it's a completely visceral, sensual, VR experience, where three seconds is experienced as an eternity of bodily pain and torment?
Like, "I never want to experience that shit ever again, what can I do never to ever die and be damned? Now."
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 ---One thing to keep in mind is that Kellhus could have apprehended the God and secured his own redemption. That doesn't mean he can't keep lying through his teeth to everyone else who is still damned.
An interesting question is what happens to all those Dunyain that are supposedly damned? Dunyain don't have many emotions, so how much fun is it to torment them compared to tormenting more emotional beings?
Also, what motivates the tormentors of damnation - I mean there are apparently, according to Mimara's Judging Eye, whole species of demons devoting their eternal, immortal existences to tormenting souls...doesn't this get boring after awhile?
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Curethan ---
--- Quote from: Madness ---Curethan, I'm not sure the normal rules of cognitive dissonance apply. Also, perhaps, "seeing" the Inverse Fire is more experiential than the metaphor implies. Maybe it's a completely visceral, sensual, VR experience, where three seconds is experienced as an eternity of bodily pain and torment?
Like, "I never want to experience that shit ever again, what can I do never to ever die and be damned? Now."
--- End quote ---
I'm more looking at the whole, "That was intense, but now I've got a hankering for genocide, torture and interspecies sex. Ha, and my concience has completely disolved."
I'll back that up by pointing out how Shae is worried that the possibility of Aurang seducing Titirga would result in him (Shae) getting killed (thus eternal damnation for him).
But that doesn't concern him...
--- Quote ---Did Aurang seek to seduce the Sohonc Archideme? Could he not see that Titirga was not one to suffer rivals, that Shaeönanra himself would be doomed were he to embrace their Holy Consult?
But these were vain questions. They fell away as quickly as Onkhis offered them up, so flimsy were the concerns that moved them. All that mattered, the Ground’s only consequential thing, was what he had seen…
Damnation.
--- End quote ---
So at once he will do anything to forestall damnation - but it's not really his own fate that worries him?
And then there's the fate of the Three - the two ishroi killed on Cet'ingira's recomendation because they were 'possessed'... it just doesn't add up to me.
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---I'm not sure what you mean about the Three (Cet'ingira was one of them).
I interpret that passage you are quoting as Shaeonanra reaffirming that Titirga would simply be another obstacle. Shaeonanra knows that at some point he will die and he had better have solved the damnation issue.
--- Quote from: Curethan ---I'm more looking at the whole, "That was intense, but now I've got a hankering for genocide, torture and interspecies sex. Ha, and my concience has completely dissolved."
--- End quote ---
Well, Cnaiur is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance becoming a reason, a license for any and all trespass. I believe the Mengaecca committed all their atrocities because they were hoping that something in life would feel worse than the "fact of Damnation," as they perceived it by the Inverse Fire.
And they found nothing...
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Curethan ---Well, there's not really enough info about what happened to the three.
However, the Ishroi weren't sorcerers, and their minds were broken.
Cet'Ingira has regained enough of his faculties to betray them when they return from the golden room. The fact that he tells CC they have been possessed is telling, the easiest lie is the one that is closest to the truth.
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Your example of Cnaiur serves my point. He is actively and purposefully broken by Moeghus so that he can conspire in Moe's escape.
The alteration of his moral code proceeds from an existing weakness and must be carefully nurtured and steered until Moenghus controls his moral framework enough that Cnaiur serves Moe's ends. Repitition and conditioning, using the framework from which aberant behaviour usually arises.
But because it is steered, it becomes an act of possession. Moe breaks him in order to use him for his own ends.
When Moeghus no longer guides him, it is only by strictly adhereing to cultural norms and traditions, and thus supressing his aberant behaviour that Cnaiur forestalls his spiral into self destructive madness, becoming a time bomb in the process.
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I'm fairly sure that Scott has edited TFS a bit since my last read. Beyond arguing about how psychological change tends to occur, I'll quote a few of the bits that further inform my veiws on this subject (some that I suspect might have changed); subscript is mine.
--- Quote ---He [size=50](Shae)[/size] had exalted in the trackless void, the hole where good and evil had once been.
...
They had visited lunatic misery on innocents, and they had found themselves utterly impervious, immune to the least remorse. Some of them had even laughed.
...
[size=50]Shae[/size] “Possessed, you tell yourselves. Possessed! We are different because we are no longer ourselves. ...
“So tell me , if we are possessed, who is our new owner?”"
...
[size=50]Titirga[/size] “A lunatic God… perhaps. The Hells that you think you see. Something… Something adulterate, foul. Something that craves feasting, that hungers with an intensity that can bend the very Ground.”
--- End quote ---
Ulimately my point is that the human brain just doesn't rewrite itself so abrubtly and effectively (that is, maintaining rational cognitive behaviours) upon such massive changes.
I think the inverse fire has something to do with the outside, yes, but it is not some ultimate, freeing truth about damnation. It's got to be some kind of brain frying thing.
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off topic; Perhaps this thread should be moved to the Atrocity Tales subforum, it's getting pretty spoilery.
--- End quote ---
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