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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9566497" data-attributes="member: 6796468">It's practically impossible with good and evil because good and evil are ideologically locked opposites. You can absolutely disprove the dichotomy by providing neutrality...But a third pole that somehow opposes both good and evil, is pretty much impossible without being one of those three things, mainly because of how we define good and evil. If our culture were to shift so that what we consider "Good" were no longer "Good" then good and evil would still be diametrically opposed as their definitions, and sphere of ideological function, shifted.Most things we think of as "Opposite" can't do that, because while every dichotomy is a false dichotomy, ideological dichotomy is malleable. Fire and Ice are concrete things... but ideas permute. They come to encompass more, or less.While the stakes for a Law/Chaos/Neutrality trichotomy are certainly less dire (particularly when you try to frame it as entropy and creation, rather than legalisms) you still face the issue of neutrality taking part in both sides, rather than being a true "Third Way".This is why lots of writers who try to do "Three Sided Battles" try to do things like "Nature, Magic, Technology" or something similar as the trichotomy. (Even though in those settings Nature is secretly the basis of magic and technology for obvious reasons)It's weird. As a culture, Americans eagerly chase dichotomy even though we understand they're false. So we try so hard to invent a "Third Way" into dichotomies we create for ourselves and it never really works in a meaningful way, like Muscular Neutrality. Instead of a triangle, we try to create a spectrum, and get annoyed when the middle is tepid.</blockquote>

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