Earwa > Atrocity Tales
The inverse fire.
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Curethan ---So, most people seem to be of the opinion that this provides some kind of 'relevation'.
Specifically about how damnation is unavoidable for sorcerers and what damnation actually entails, which then subsequently justifies any measure taken to avoid it as well as simultaneously removing any ability to care about the earthly suffering of oneself or any other individual.
Which is not, in my opinion, how revelation works.
I'm sure we've all experienced some new way of understanding or thinking that makes everything seem changed or different before. And perhaps on reflection we can see that these 'epiphanies' are little more than blips of adjustment rather than redefining our personalities in any major way. The human personality is elastic and requires a deal of training to change.
As RSB is fond of pointing out, people don't just shift their moral goalposts in the manner that Nin and then Shae seem to, just through a little bit of firsthand experience (after all, 5 seconds of eternity is still just 5 seconds). It requires a lot of conditioning to make one ammoral in the manner of Kellhus, for example.
Those familiar with the way that many child molesters become so through the experience of being abused, and how internet porn can act as a type of skinner box might understand what I think the inverse fire actually is.
A neurological weapon that becomes a holy object after its used on you.
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What Came Before:
--- 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. Simply because Spanish Inquisition level torture is a Hawaiian vacation by comparison.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Curethan ---But that is not how it works.
Simply increasing the magnitude of a traumatic or 'reveletory' experience creates dissonance - like in people who suffer PTSD. Amp that up and you eventually get mental collapse.
The effect here is transformative in a specific manner, and results in specific operative behavioural differences. It's precisely the kind of directed change that RSB is worried that governments will be able to enact on 'criminals' and other deviants using neuroscientific methods.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Wilshire ---I could see both cases, but I don't think we have nearly enough information to simply say "thats just not how it works". We would need to know a lot more about who they were before measuring how much they changed. For that matter, we would need more than 1 or 2 biased character perspectives to come to any adamant conclusions at all.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 ---I have to say I still find the 120 Days of Sodom adventures post seeing the Inverse Fire to be nonsensical. But I'm beginning to suspect that Bakker and I have very different understandings about the nature of humanity.
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