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KanzenAU
Senior Scribe
Australia
763 Posts |
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CorellonsDevout
Great Reader
USA
2708 Posts |
 Posted - 18 Jul 2017 : 00:04:49
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Sweet water and light laughter |
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Aldrick
Senior Scribe
909 Posts |
Posted - 18 Jul 2017 : 05:15:48
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quote:
Originally posted by KanzenAU
Important to not fall down the rabbit hole of determinism = nothing matters, evrrything is fated. The roles of people and things in events are still incredibly important, even if things are determined by the past - that's a key difference between determinism and fatalism. The absence of free-will does not mean "nothing matters", though admittedly if the concept of free-will is important to you then that can be a hard boulder to move around. I highly recommend any philosophical textbook on the issue of free-will - always a great read! That said, I'll move on from this thread now and leave it to you good "free-willers"!
Since we are laying our cards on the table, I should make clear for the purposes of the discussion that in real life I am a hard determinist, because of cause and effect and all that.
I am not making my arguments out of any sort of philosophical point of view, but rather from a what-is-good-for-the-story point of view. I am also arguing from a point of view of internal world consistency. From the point of view of internal world consistency, the world appears to be fiercely fatalistic--as in, things are fated to play out in a certain way. No matter what happens, it was fated to happen exactly as it happened.
This creates the problem you brought up:
quote:
Originally posted by KanzenAU
Also, saying that the Elven Sundering caused the other two Sunderings takes all the agency out of the rest of the stories.
It's the issue of agency--the feeling as if someone's actions actually mattered or made a difference. It is one of the reasons tropes like, "it was all just a dream!" At the end of a story anger people, myself included. It makes us feel angry because it makes us feel as if the story is a waste of time, that the events did not really matter.
How things are in the real world does not matter, because what is true in reality may actually suck for a story. "You have no agency, and everything that happened always was fated to happen!" Sucks for the story. 
I mean, this is such a serious issue that it starts to bleed over into other things. "Oh, it's not his fault that he murders and rapes children, that was just his fate! He can't really be evil because for him to be evil his actions would have to be freely chosen." "We should not worry about redeeming this guy over here, because he was fated to be evil--we should just kill him instead. This is his fate." "What? It's not our fault he dies. He was fated to die by our hand." Yeah, that makes a bad story.  |
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KanzenAU
Senior Scribe
Australia
763 Posts |
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2nd Sundering musings
