by Victor Lark on March 11th, 2012, 9:24 pm
These ideas have been swimming around for a while, but I’ve never found a good reason to write them down. Maybe I’ll copy+paste them to my plotnotes later.
Victor worships Ionu, which, I’ve found, is a relatively popular choice on this site. Obviously, I didn’t choose Ionu because He is or isn’t popular; I didn’t really choose Her at all. Victor stumbled upon Ionu in a book, of all places, in Ravok, of all cities (which I admit is a creative license I may have stretched too far :P). Really, he’s perfect and primed to worship Rhysol, given his upbringing and his view on the world. His penchant for mischief and trickery manifests in (often malicious) deceit, and his skills in seduction and subterfuge might have once been useful to the Ebonstryfe. As a Chaon, he could get everything he wanted out of a person: their minds, their fear, their emotions, extrapolated by the chaos he would be about to inflict on their minds and bodies. I could make a similar argument about Sagallius, whom Victor emulates in every conversation he holds, trying to manipulate and lead everyone he meets.
But he chose Ionu. Why? Because mischief requires a response. Because illusion still leaves you with a choice. To truly explore a person’s emotions, and therefore the quirks and intricacies of their mind, you cannot try to control them. You must force them to be themselves, to act for themselves, to react to a novel situation. Victor has discovered that when a person is utterly deceived is when they are most honest. They cling to truth; they search for it. To Victor, who cannot understand the truth of emotion and therefore cannot really appreciate the truth of the world, watching someone search for the reality in the illusion is the next best thing.
He likes to think he worships Ionu with everything he does, and therefore has been kind of lax on the meditation and communion aspect of worship. While this is really a sort of cop out to real devotion, the philosophy itself has become self-fulfilling. He’s learned to embrace the randomness of the world and to take deception as a challenge to overcome rather than an affront that would humiliate him. He even commends Ionu as a divine who would no save him from trouble, but amuse him by putting him into it. He’s figured out that the reason for everything is that there is no reason, and at this point he’s feeling pretty optimistic. That’s what religion sort of needs to do, I think. It gives him something to belong to, something to live for, some meaning to define him. Without it, he’s just another drifter. In choosing Ionu specifically, he doesn’t have to really destroy something to understand it. (Okay, but he still does. No one’s perfect.)
Edit: Also I will pounce on the Inverted the moment they are developed.
Last edited by
Victor Lark on March 11th, 2012, 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.