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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1513021" data-attributes="member: 3146">Maybe so, but if you ask what it means for Eadric to be true to himself, you're likely to get a dozen contradictory interpretations.It certainly can't be that whatever Eadric does is being "true to himself"; otherwise it would be meaningless.OTOH, Eadric's identity isn't fixed either. Otherwise, the ideas and interpretations he lived by under the older Orthodox Oronthonianism would be the standards he still needs to live by. And in that case, he's no longer at risk of falling because he fell the moment he showed mercy to Nehael.Of course, if you ask the "I can be a slut and still be good because sluts are cool and they don't have to like to like kill babies" crowd, Eadric could go on a romp that makes Ortwin look like a prude and not fall/still be true to himself. If you ask me, justifying that in terms of Eadric-as-presented-so-far would be such a complete change that it's unclear in what way the new "Eadric" would resemble the old. But if identity is infinitely mutable, that wouldn't necessarily prevent him from being true to himself. It would just mean that his new self and his old self had little in common.Then again, it may be that Eadric's identity isn't infinitely mutable and there is a core of "Eadricness" that is based on the interaction of several key virtues (justice, mercy, chastity, honesty, etc) and any activity that would be seen as conflicting with that core of Eadricness would be being false to himself or false to Oronthon and falling. It might be in conflict with the rest of the world where truth, falsehood, and even Oronthon are mutable concepts, but since the whole point of the world's relativism is to permit inconsistency, it would be a consistent piece of inconsistency if there were an essence of Eadricness somewhere.On the whole, it seems to me that Eadric falling or not falling as a result of acting or not acting in any particular way is a combination of: A. His player deciding that he does or does not fall, B. How good of a rationalization he can come up with for whatever he wants to do at the time and how convincingly he can deliver it (convincing deliver=really believed=true to self; unconvincing delivery=bad faith=falls or some such rubric), and C. Whether or not Eadric ends up killing babies, raping girls, or anything else that can't be rationalized as good behavior.Of course, exactly what it means to "fall" in a world where truth is up for grabs and future actions change the past is up for grabs. For that matter, what it would mean for Ahma to fall is unclear too. For all we know, if he really did fall, it's likely that a significant number of Oronthonians and/or others might see it differently--perhaps Oronthon changed again and Eadric's fall defined that change or perhaps Eadric was fallen from the beginning but was justified in falling and thus it wasn't really Eadric that fell. And in Sep's world, as I understand it, that would be true for them. Whether or not it would be true for Eadric himself is another question.But there we go. That's all fairly incoherent because it's pointless to speculate about necessities or what will/would happen if in a relativistic system. The point of its being relativistic is that there are no definitive "If"/"then"s. All that will really matter is the story. (And, if it isn't apparent yet, I think the story quite interesting despite its metaphysics).</blockquote>

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