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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5614197" data-attributes="member: 4720">I would guess my pithy comment did little to illustrate how I really feel about Planescape.  I don't think of it as a "jokey" setting, although it is full to the rafters with jokes (and unlike most settings, the jokes work).  But then, so is life.  Irony and humor are central to my view of life in general, and are not anathema to wonder at all.  At my day job I can wonder at the beauty of what I'm working on, and then have one of them promptly fart in my face.  I can be involved in a surgery that elegantly establishes that living beings are fundamentally sacks of meat, and acknowledge that without losing my ability to walk into the next room and be moved by a poetic moment.  You need both wonder and humor to properly appreciate the world.  And in my line of work, the ability to achieve clinical distance from both at a moment's notice doesn't hurt, either.  If you're denying wonder, you're lost, but if you're denying how silly living beings (especially humans) are, you're living in a dream.The Factions are, in their way, brilliant.  Human beings have a strong tendency to laugh at anything they can't quite get their head around.  Well, either laugh or try to kill it.  Which pretty much describes how the Factions view each other: objects of ridicule or ideas to be destroyed.  Planars, after all, have concrete answers to some of mankind's most pressing philosophical questions.  But instead of using that information to step past boundaries, they just created a different set.  They can see how silly the boundaries and divisions of Primes are (worlds, nations, races, etc), but they are rabidly invested in a different set of boundaries.  Those boundaries are probably illusory as well, but a little bit of understanding, as usual, just made people more dangerous.  And those boundaries are simultaneously airily philosophical and entirely mercenary and practical.  That's human nature in a nutshell.  It's simultaneously sad and wonderful.  Ridiculous and admirable.  To die for an idea, in a place where you have proof that certainty is a mug's game....  That's life.  It's also Planescape.Life (both real life and life on the Planes) is inherently ridiculous.  Planescape is comfortable with that without the setting becoming a joke.  That was an achievement.Man.... I think most of that sounds bleaker than I intended.  I guess the wonder part really is harder to put into words.</blockquote>

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