Thanks for the nightmares I’m going to have tonight while sleeping 
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This is new to me. I’ve never seen him
WoW, thank the First Ones for players like you. I would not have known about it.
I did Torghast as little as possible, only to have my functional legendaries on my various Characters. And the Characters I played the least are my Kyrian Alts. So the chances of me seeing that… well… I have not seen that. That is interesting.
Well she did get a cinematic where she got WTFPWNT and smacked down to the floor like a pro wrestling jabroni.
Okay, that made me laugh because it’s honestly so true.
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“Break his her back and make him her humble.”
https://i.imgur.com/nc9YwZe.jpeg
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The Kyrians were right, though. We literally saw exactly what happened when a Kyrian retained their tragic memories and still tried to do their job. It resulted in someone being condemned to the Maw without proper judgment beforehand because Uther made an emotionally charged decision.
Not to say that having negative memories is necessarily a bad thing, as those experiences can teach you a lot. But for someone in the business of ferrying souls to their respective eternities, yeah, they need impartiality. If that’s an issue for someone in-universe, then Bastion probably isn’t the afterlife for them.
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The idea that one cannot be satisfyingly impartial if they have retained their memories makes absolutely no sense to me. Following that logic, we should replace human judges with robots and AI software systems, and I don’t think many people would be particularly thrilled at such prospect. Blank pages shouldn’t be entrusted with delivering justice.
It is especially ridiculous that Kyrians had to go through something as horrible as being robbed of their memories if the only justification for it is that who knows, some douchebag might decide not to respect the procedure. I don’t know, just replace the memory erasing with a proper formation and education about the importance of not interfering in the judgement ? Or you know what, maybe just replace Kyrians with robots, if robots is what you want, and entrust people with other tasks ? Why exactly does Bastion need sentient beings if the job merely consists in ferrying souls to the Arbiter ?
I swear this system sounds insane to me
(EDIT : Also, the Kyrians were admittedly wrong, since they changed the system afterwards)
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The writers and story kept flip-flopping on the Kyrians. On one hand, erasing a person’s individuality is a problem. On the other hand, they have a valid point that personal biases and prejudices would compromise their job as psychopomps (imagine if one of them hated humans or orcs; they’d abuse their position to hurl human or orc souls into the Maw without a trial).
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The Kyrian don’t actually judge anyone- they merely deliver the souls to the Arbiter for judgement. However, we literally personally see Uther toss Arthas into the Maw, raising the possibility that maybe they could dump souls wherever they want- this isn’t made clear.
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Sorry? How was Devos worse than Kyrians sending all of the souls (and thus, all of the magical power) in the multiverse straight, directly, and only to Ultra Satan???
Nah.
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She actively and knowingly sided with said Ultra Satan?
I would say Uther tossing Arthas into the Maw, “you do not pass Oribos, you do not collect 200 Anima” style shows that Kyrians can just dump souls wherever they want.
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They knew the Arbiter was broken.
And they actively and knowingly fed Ultra Satan.
They knew what was in the Maw.
They knew that souls weren’t intended to default to the maw.
And even if you want to claim they didn’t know*, eventually the other covenants found out and told everyone who didn’t know.
*(which is 100% false, Devos’s warbringer or w/e proves they knew that the Maw was Zoovy’s jail)
Yikes. Considering the Kyrians actually admitted they were wrong and changed their own system, claiming they were right is an odd stance.
It feels like there’s quite a few narrative ways to approach this issue that don’t involve making the Kyrians utterly awful. The obvious answer was already posted - everything else is constructs, so why not?
But fine, we have to use mortals, for reasons. How about that when the Arbiter judges folks, the ones sent to Bastion can’t have horrifically tragic deaths and lives.
Okay maybe someone will argue that’s impossible for folks dedicated to duty and service (it’s not, but whatever). How about this? Kyrians don’t go back to their respective worlds so they don’t interact with folks they may have known personally.
Maybe some cosmic interaction will cause people traveling between worlds to accidentally collide (the odds seem pretty slim there, but whatever). So let’s add a “Kyrian dispatcher” who sends particular cultists (and let’s be fair, my first impression of them was that the Kyrians were a cult) - I mean angels - to grab souls?
Of course but what if they have a grudge and decide to manipulate a series of events to get someone tossed into the Maw. Clearly the solution was to have them wipe their memories.
Perfect sense.
Oh wait, no, they were wrong, so they should be allowed to pick and choose what memories they keep.
This just reminds me how frighteningly awful Shadowlands is/was.
Going through the introductory leveling campaign my initial impression was we were going to overthrow the horrible system in place in Bastion and that the Forsworn rebellion would be the good folks. At the very least, the videos made it seem clear that the “Higher Ups” didn’t seem interested in anything related to the wound that had cosmic implications, and of course, we know with the Arbiter off-line, everyone’s just being dumped into the Maw, so the leadership comes across as part of an evil plot.
Except that doesn’t end up being the story at all. We get something that is nonsensical ending with the strange cultists being the good guys, sort of, but not really, since they were wrong, but still good.
Instead, we got the story of the plucky rebels in Revendreth, where the leadership was corrupt and bad and we needed to side with the prince. I love Sire Denathrius as a character, but in hindsight I realized it might just be the voice actor. The choice of Denathrius as a villain being manipulated and used by Zovaal is awful in comparison to the Archon.
In the narrative, his entire motif is about elegant parties and extravagance, except then he dumps a massive amount of anima into the Maw, sacrificing of himself (which seems out of character). He could easily stand alone as a villain without Zovaal pulling the strings (a cautionary tale when those responsible for leading the atonement of villains become villains themselves).
Without his dumping the anima into the Maw (and simply relying on him hoarding it for extravagance) - I would say the Archon was more supportive of the Zovaal (and would’ve made a far more appropriate enemy). Then it makes sense why the Archon was maintaining the status quo and therefore feeding souls directly to the Maw through a broken Arbiter.
Adding the dreadlords to Denathrius was … okay … but it felt narratively it would’ve been more appropriate for them to be creations of Zovaal (and not lent to him by Denathrius). At the “end” we even see Mal’Ganis as a boss before the Jailer (even though the Jailer abandoned Denathrius). Denathrius’ creations are almost single-handedly responsible for all of the actions that help Zovaal escape.
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Were they wrong, though? The whole reason they take away memories is to prevent bias from creeping into the soul ferrying process, and judging by Uther and Devos’ actions, the Kyrians were completely right. How would an aspirant even know which memories to keep and discard if they did go that route? Would they really want to just discard the painful memories that taught them poignant lessons in life? Maybe the people who don’t want to lose their memories in order to be a Kyrian should just be redirected to a different, but equally pleasant afterlife.
Yeah that would’ve made a lot of sense tbh.
Sounds like you were biased to begin with.
You thought the Forsworn, who went around attacking and murdering aspirants for no good reason, would be the good guys?
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Well by their own admission, the Kyrian have realized that forcefully stripping the memories from all of their kin is a mistake. Like, sure, the reason is sound, but it’s still taking all the good memories from the Kyrian as well as the bad ones.
Which is why they decide to change from ‘Take all the memories’ to ‘You can volunteer if you don’t want to keep your memories’.
It’s possible that only Kyrian that choose to lose their memories will be selected to ferry souls. Others like the crafters, teachers, soldiers etc, they’ll likely get to keep theirs without issue.
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It’s a philosophical argument of the self and/or ego. It’s really rooted in old/Ancient Greek philosophy which sounds a lot like Buddhist philosophy.
shrugs The point of their arc seemed to me, you don’t get a resolution, you get to decide as the “reader”.
Personally, the old way of shedding “self” was a path to a freedom (or peace) and for those who at their core, wanted to be of service to others.
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Wait, what? <—also had no idea. Then again my Kyrian character is my priest so I avoided Torghast on her except when forced to by the story line. >_> Good to know.
My main issue with the Kyrian was that it went from our character arriving in Bastion and Kleia being excited because we’re the first ‘soul’ that’s arrived in a long time. And there literally comes a point before we even head out into Bastion proper when she asks us to explain why we’re here.
So, our character didn’t bother to actually tell her “Yeah, this mysterious drought that’s causing all your problems? It’s because the Arbiter was attacked, no souls are being sorted and they’re all automatically being flushed down into the Maw…since you guys are the ones who deliver souls to the afterlife you might want to work on that until we can fix your soul sorter robot.”
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It’s a lot easier to write for bad guys such as demons and devils because they fit more with the world we live in. It’s very hard to write for actual “good” angelic characters… because they don’t.
The only angel Blizzard has ever written decently for was Tyreal, and he falls. Not until he falls and becomes mortal does he really begin to understand the human condition.
The other archangels who were actually in charge are kind of jerks and the only reason the humans of Sanctuary were still around is that apparantly the Angris Council needs a unanimous vote for Armageddon and Tyreal was the lone dissenter.
Typicall the usual dodge is to have the Good supernaturals carry an Idiot Ball to explain why they let things get so screwed up, and the Kyrian might as well be the cosmic Basketball team at doing this.
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Sorry, my wording was unclear and it created some confusion.
My initial impression was that the story would be overthrowing the system in Bastion. The Forsworn seemed like they would be fighting against a system that came across as a cult, forcing people to give up everything of their mortal lives - and many individuals struggled with it. On top of that, the Kyrian hierarchy seemed to completely ignore Uther’s wound (which seemed to be due to bureaucracy) leading to (a fairly reasonable) disillusionment among members.
The campaign made it clear (especially toward the end when they became known as the Mawsworn) that they were not the good guys. And during the campaign, while it became clear the Forsworn were “worse” they really didn’t make the Kyrians sympathetic as “good” guys.
In the end, I think that’s partly why you see them welcoming the former Forsworn back in and finding a middle ground - because the Kyrians weren’t completely right and the Forsworn weren’t completely wrong. The Forsworn were just misled by their leadership - their complaints were at least somewhat validated.
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Well to be fair, a good chunk of the Forsworn (including Uther) really thought that’s what they were fighting for. They didn’t know Devos and Lysonia were knowingly and willingly serving the Jailer and had become Mawsworn until Lysonia betrayed Uther (because unlike Devos she didn’t give a crap about him) and they were forcibly converting the unwilling Forsworn into Mawsworn.
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