((Sarsi has always been a fervant believer in the free undead, recently a finale plot has shaken her or disillusioned her and she wrote an essay about it;
I thought it might be fun to post it as a “published” essay that could invite discussion and debate from various characters this thread is meant to be an IC round table working under the assumption the characters have read this essay and are now discussing or debating it. It can be assumed one’s posting character is the PoV of their post. I hope everyone has fun, and remember that IC != OOC))
There are and have been complications in relations and opinions of undead. Undead are at their core, people who were murdered and stolen from their painless rest to serve a coercive war machine hellbent on the assimilation of all free peoples into its fold. Undead are victims, they are those once loved and then lost to the pain of dying.
Many of their actions cannot be levied as their responsibility when their very act and actions are controlled by body and mind by a king of wickedness and evil. In this, there can be only one outcome; to lay to rest those cadavers who are no longer controlled by the people they once were, to safeguard those who can yet be saved by laying low the stolen bodies that are used as weapons against their owner’s will.
Where the complication arises then; is the emergence of the free undead. Those individuals and groups who have broken their shackles and obsentibly reclaimed their humanity and their will. No longer coerced to be a weapon of the Scourge. These are generally the same innocent people murdered long ago and denied their final rest in order to force their body to make war.
And further to complicate, free undead of many walks sometimes continue with deranged goals and experiments. I recall the works of the Forsaken, the Wrathgate in the Scourge War was not orchestrated by coerced cadavers with no will of their own, but by vengeance driven Forsaken who were slighted by the world and driven by anger and vengeance, their calls of ‘death to the scourge, and death to the living’ ring more substantially than their call to be left alone in peace.
These very same Forsaken developed and put into production and use chemical warfare far more sinister than the grain distributed by the Cult of the Damned in Lordaeron. A blight that eats and corrodes and leaves nothing but bony husks of those caught within it.
How then can we dictate and justify what undead are hostile and what undead are not? Do we assume innocent until proven dangerous? That allows malicious undead time to propagate. Do we slaughter all undead without regard for anything? That harms innocent people just trying to live their (un?)life, and punishes people for being victims raised by the Scourge.
Perhaps we give them Lordaeron in its entirety. Give them a kingdom and a city and then keep them to those borders to live in peace? But that restricts the freedom of movement of innocent people who may not have been to Lordaeron, or even want to live there.
There are no good options and no easy solutions to the undead presence. We cannot follow in the steps of the Scarlet Crusade and start a witch hunt for the sake of purity of the living-that is without a doubt wrong. We also cannot allow undead the impunity of action for any and every scheme because I believe there is evidence that undeath fundamentally warps the mind of the person who they once were.
What then can be done to ensure undead can coexist with the living and not encourage either side to hostility against the other? Undead were once living; people murdered and turned into something else and more often than not set upon violently against those they loved, with no chance to stop themselves.
Living survivors were harmed and hurt, and traumatized by the actions taken by ghouls and skeletons. These undead assisted in the formation of a desperate crusade to defend their homes that became twisted with fanaticism.
Is the Scarlet Crusade a model for what we should do? No, absolutely not. Blanket assumption of innocence and guilt and vengeance and punishment for perceived undead when more than not they harmed the living more than any scourge is wrong.
They also did not have a wholly unjustified formation as a desperate attempt to save their homes against an enemy they never thought they would have; the dead of their loved ones. In that we can consider two different crusades as having existed; the first, a last gasp attempt at self defense and the second, a fanaticly corrupt cult focused solely on the purity of the living. Intrinsically linked, but altogether separate in motivation.
Similarly, two different foci of undead also exist. The risen Scourge, enslaved and coerced to terrible things but wholly innocent of their actions despite all the terror they wrought, and free undead which emerge as a new society and a new culture of survivors and freed scourge with the minds of who they once were at least nominally intact. And their actions accounting to their own will, but their innocence is not so monolithically assured.
We can see evidence of certain changes in demeanor between living and undead. This evidence takes form in everything from the goals of the undead, to sometimes their very names should they choose to forgo their living identity completely and embrace their existence as an undead. This is not inherently bad or wicked, many people forgo who they once seemed to be for who they are now even among the living.
But with undead they may take it to troubling lengths of their motives and goals and very fabric of their moral character shift after their death and subsequent raising into undeath. One might argue the person in their head is not entirely similar to their predeath persona and a new entity with the mind and emotions and memory of their body’s life takes root in the moving cadaver they reside in.
This again is not inherently wicked, new life borne from death in some form or another but marred with the trauma of experiencing actual death and sometimes great suffering and torment before that. This is a phenominon to be explored and studied with reference and respect for it deals in not one, but potentially two different souls to to speak. The person once residing in the body in life, and who they care now or who resides in it now after their death.
We are built on our experiences and those memories that shaped us are permanent. No one living can claim to have the living experience of death so in truth we cannot claim we can survive death by becoming undead because our experience for all intents and purposes is changed by experiencing death and the entity that emerges from that death, though us in body and memory, can never be our living us before our death.
Soxwho is it? And what causes these free undead to change so radically that they shed their living names and their living loves and lives.
Can an entity borne from the violent act of death on a living body truly be considered innocent? Are they perhaps suffering a second birth as a new being whose innocence and guilt relies on action after their raising, but only if they are not raised into the servitude of the Scourge?
Can we integrate free undead into our everyday lives or are their minds too fundamentally altered to ever coexist in the living world again? And how can we help them solve and work through the challenges of their mind twisted by dying? When you read this, I urge you to sit and discuss what you feel is the right or wrong way.
Penned by,
Sarsiaparila Jenna Ogden
Essay on the existence and trials of the undead, and their coexistence with the living