Marion didn't like theater. She tried to qualify this with the knowledge that she didn't like most things, but the fact remained that theater was Alvad work and she hated it on principle.
Her art was more subtle, the kind that actually meant something. Theater was... nothing. It was storytelling, with bodies as puppets, trying to recreate something in reality that could really only come alive in imagination. It was an illusion, an art form ground in falsities that failed to recognize the beauty in authenticity. Marion was biased, of course. Alvadas might have been her hometown, but it was never a home to her, and it was there that she was first exposed to the horrors of illusion and denial, of the hypocrisy of control in a place that claimed to surrender itself to whimsy.
Lies were their art, and while they pretended, she did. What they accomplished through tricks and slights, she accomplished through sheer power of will, and they had condemned her for it. Lies were their art, and Marion didn't lie well enough.
She'd thought herself better for it, but they'd won in the end.
It'd hadn't been until after she'd left Sunberth that Marion realized what she had become, not that it was entirely her fault. Alvadan blood ran deep, and in a city where being honest could cost you your tongue (at the least), it was only natural to adapt. That was simply how the world worked, and she, above all, understood that. So she played the part, showed them what they wanted to see -- Marion the interrogator, Marion the asker, Marion with the mask, but never Marion the morpher, and once she was able to look back at who she'd been for the last year, she realized she was also Marion the actress. Marion the pretender. Marion the liar.
There was nothing she could have done to prevent it though, and while a part of her raged against that fact, the feeling of being unable to prevent things from ending up the way they did, a wiser part of her simply accepted it. That was all she could do, after all. The damage was done, she was pure no longer. And perhaps it was for the best, to have gotten it over with already, for she doubted she could have stayed pure when she considered all the places she still had yet to go -- dark places, unspeakable places. It was better to relinquish morals; there was more freedom that way.
And it certainly made this easier.
Her art was more subtle, the kind that actually meant something. Theater was... nothing. It was storytelling, with bodies as puppets, trying to recreate something in reality that could really only come alive in imagination. It was an illusion, an art form ground in falsities that failed to recognize the beauty in authenticity. Marion was biased, of course. Alvadas might have been her hometown, but it was never a home to her, and it was there that she was first exposed to the horrors of illusion and denial, of the hypocrisy of control in a place that claimed to surrender itself to whimsy.
Lies were their art, and while they pretended, she did. What they accomplished through tricks and slights, she accomplished through sheer power of will, and they had condemned her for it. Lies were their art, and Marion didn't lie well enough.
She'd thought herself better for it, but they'd won in the end.
It'd hadn't been until after she'd left Sunberth that Marion realized what she had become, not that it was entirely her fault. Alvadan blood ran deep, and in a city where being honest could cost you your tongue (at the least), it was only natural to adapt. That was simply how the world worked, and she, above all, understood that. So she played the part, showed them what they wanted to see -- Marion the interrogator, Marion the asker, Marion with the mask, but never Marion the morpher, and once she was able to look back at who she'd been for the last year, she realized she was also Marion the actress. Marion the pretender. Marion the liar.
There was nothing she could have done to prevent it though, and while a part of her raged against that fact, the feeling of being unable to prevent things from ending up the way they did, a wiser part of her simply accepted it. That was all she could do, after all. The damage was done, she was pure no longer. And perhaps it was for the best, to have gotten it over with already, for she doubted she could have stayed pure when she considered all the places she still had yet to go -- dark places, unspeakable places. It was better to relinquish morals; there was more freedom that way.
And it certainly made this easier.