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Dragonlance: Everything You Need For Shadow of the Dragon Queen
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8818825" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>This is the point of the whole Cataclysm story. It's a story about the sin of pride, divine retribution for that sin, and repentance through suffering.</p><p></p><p>It is presented in a collective rather than individualistic framework because, within an individualistic framework, the whole thing doesn't even get of the ground - the whole moral framing involves pre-modern, and hence pre-individualistic, values (pride, humility, repentance, etc).</p><p></p><p>Because DL is not a profound work of literature - it's closer to a pulp - it's treatment of its themes is far from perfect. It struggles to explain how its idea of balance fits into its idea of divine providence. (JRRT doesn't use the concept of balance in his work. Ursula Le Guin does use it in hers. It's not as if the DL authors, or Gygax, just plucked this from thin air.) But we can tentatively sketch a reconstruction: good convictions can (somewhat paradoxically) undercut good action, because they can lead to self-righteousness and a lack of imagination about the full scope of human possibility. The existence in the world of genuine evil, that causes the good to struggle and also to focus on suffering outside of them rather than their own inner state of self-satisfaction, is necessary to avoid this potentially unhappy consequence of triumphalist good.</p><p></p><p>In offering that reconstruction, I'm not committing myself to its truth. But I think it's at least prima facie coherent, and has obvious connections to real world experiences and beliefs. (Eg some people think the US lost its way when the Cold War ended; or even when the Second World War ended. This is a theme from time to time in Captain America stories, for instance. You don't have to agree with them to understand their reasoning.)</p><p></p><p>When I use to teach philosophy of Buddhism, I would have many students who rejected the account of a happy life found in some of the Buddhist scriptures (which emphasise the endurance of an unperturbed mental state, largely independent of outside stimulus) because they thought that true happiness isn't possible without the contrasting experience of pain, suffering, loss etc (ie the perturbance of one's mental state by outside stimuli). Those students might be right, they might be wrong, but we can obviously recognise that they're not weirdos - there is endless popular drama and self-help writing that agrees with them! This is an obvious way of making sense of the notion that balance is necessary even though not everything that is in the scales is a good thing: familiarity with the bad is necessary to bring the truth of the good into focus, and without it our understanding is blunted or distorted, just as happened to the Kingpriest.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8818825, member: 42582"] This is the point of the whole Cataclysm story. It's a story about the sin of pride, divine retribution for that sin, and repentance through suffering. It is presented in a collective rather than individualistic framework because, within an individualistic framework, the whole thing doesn't even get of the ground - the whole moral framing involves pre-modern, and hence pre-individualistic, values (pride, humility, repentance, etc). Because DL is not a profound work of literature - it's closer to a pulp - it's treatment of its themes is far from perfect. It struggles to explain how its idea of balance fits into its idea of divine providence. (JRRT doesn't use the concept of balance in his work. Ursula Le Guin does use it in hers. It's not as if the DL authors, or Gygax, just plucked this from thin air.) But we can tentatively sketch a reconstruction: good convictions can (somewhat paradoxically) undercut good action, because they can lead to self-righteousness and a lack of imagination about the full scope of human possibility. The existence in the world of genuine evil, that causes the good to struggle and also to focus on suffering outside of them rather than their own inner state of self-satisfaction, is necessary to avoid this potentially unhappy consequence of triumphalist good. In offering that reconstruction, I'm not committing myself to its truth. But I think it's at least prima facie coherent, and has obvious connections to real world experiences and beliefs. (Eg some people think the US lost its way when the Cold War ended; or even when the Second World War ended. This is a theme from time to time in Captain America stories, for instance. You don't have to agree with them to understand their reasoning.) When I use to teach philosophy of Buddhism, I would have many students who rejected the account of a happy life found in some of the Buddhist scriptures (which emphasise the endurance of an unperturbed mental state, largely independent of outside stimulus) because they thought that true happiness isn't possible without the contrasting experience of pain, suffering, loss etc (ie the perturbance of one's mental state by outside stimuli). Those students might be right, they might be wrong, but we can obviously recognise that they're not weirdos - there is endless popular drama and self-help writing that agrees with them! This is an obvious way of making sense of the notion that balance is necessary even though not everything that is in the scales is a good thing: familiarity with the bad is necessary to bring the truth of the good into focus, and without it our understanding is blunted or distorted, just as happened to the Kingpriest. [/QUOTE]
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