Originally posted by Quarto:
. . . Raptor had provided you with plenty of details about Tolwyn's behaviour matching symptoms of mental illness . . .
No, he provides interpretations of details that he merely claims match mental illness. What most bothers me though is that he treats the matches as obvious, as if anyone would hit themselves aside the head and say “Why, of course!”
Well Blair, Paladin, and Eisen don’t. They even have a fundamental disagreement over whether Tolwyn is in any way a changed man, let alone a deranged one. And Schwarzmont certainly doesn’t buy into the idea, which is curious given his aims in his novel.
Basically, the problem is non sequiturs galore. Flattened effect? Assuming that’s true for the moment, could that have anything to do with the fact he’d effectively sentenced a fair number of people to die previously during the Battle of Terra? (At any rate, he seemed sufficiently emotional on the subject during the confrontation before the Senate.) Paranoia that magnifies a potential threat? I thought that leaders in the military/intelligence are supposed to be focused on potential threats during peacetime. (And didn’t “something” happen not too long ago in our own reality that demonstrates the need?) Anyway, what’s the deal with “potential”? Tolwyn knew about the coreward race that the Kilrathi were concerned about. I could go on with the other claims, but it’s just not worth it.
At any rate, if you're gonna insist on precise canon proof . . .
Not to be cute, but I’d say it’s the canon that insists upon it. I didn’t concoct the questions I asked above; they arise quite naturally out of the canon itself.
Originally posted by Quarto:
[Y]our argument (that we must provide canon, ie., inviolable sources, but that some inviolable sources are less inviolable than others) is not in agreement with itself . . .
Originally posted by Raptor:
So, depending on one's viewpoint, any form of canon* is open to question depending on the questioner's interpretation of what those who created that piece of canon were trying to do. If one is questioned, then all come into question. And then we don't have canon anymore.
Hmmm . . . methinks I spy a few oversimplifications and exaggerations here.
But your two related concerns also arise in just about every other sort of “belief system” we could name, from the religious to the scientific.
Your first point really involves semantics. You say canon is inviolate. But which one are you talking about? We don’t use the word consistently, which is largely the fault of the word itself because it has different meanings–among other things, it can be a priori beliefs or dogma, it can be an “official” opinion or a “settled” fact, or it can be a “standard” of judgment. Pretty much following suit, we have used the word to refer to the “essence” of WC, i.e., the defining traits that make it WC and not Star Trek (the principal “givens” like the Confederation, the Kilrathi War, the Pilgrim trait, the particular physics, etc.); we have used the word to refer to the official “trivia” of the WC universe (the jump-line arrangement of space, the characters and their histories); and we have used the word to refer to the validating “sources” of those principal traits and trivia (the games, the guides, the novels, the movie, etc., all of which lead back to Origin).
So in which uses of the word are we talking about something inviolate? For the most part, none. The bulk of our belief system is always subject to change by Origin in its creative omnipotence (e.g., Tri-System, Pilgrims, Nephilim). But we have, in practice, also caused it to change, either in our efforts to “clean up after Origin” and resolve conflicts/ambiguities (e.g., the Concordia’s seven vs. eight AMGs; the history of the Iason) or to “anticipate” Origin by trying to infer new facts from the old (e.g., the
Ranger-class and the Victory; the standardization of ship stats). And despite such changes from time to time, the WC universe shows no signs of crumbling into chaos as far as I can tell, which is what matters most. (In fact, such “additions”, “corrections”, and “logical extensions” to canon seem only to have enriched WC lore, not undone it.) Still, I would agree that we do have one inviolate canon that is mirrored in the foregoing: our supreme standard of validation that what Origin says, goes.
But as also reflected above, what Origin says is not always clear and unambiguous. This brings us to the second point you raise–interpretation, or more particularly,
literalness. You seem to be saying, in conjunction with the notion of canon being inviolate, that even if Origin’s “statements” aren’t always clear or unambiguous, we should still treat all of them as qualitatively the same and accept all the information we’re given at face value and without further question.
We could choose to follow that conservative approach of course, but the results would be, IMHO, unwanted. We could then only wonder about the contradictions in ship/fighter stats between the games and the manuals. The history of several ships, from the Victory to the Eisen, would remain blurred if not a complete mystery. The sort of analysis that Raptor began about Tolwyn’s mental health would be improper. And so on. Canon would stagnate into the preparation of cut-and-dried alphabetical/numerical lists of Origin’s “pronouncements” to date, with no particular promise that any more would be coming our way any time soon.
In addition, because graphics could never be taken as representational or symbolic, the WC universe would become an absurd place, with people who can change their identities and features over time, as well as alternate between two-dimensional cartoon and three-dimensional flesh-and-blood forms, the latter being perfect “copies” of our own world’s actors (Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson, etc.) Yes, the so-called Pilgrim power would pale by comparison.
Finally, there are the experiences of other belief systems to consider. In the case of Tolwyn and Origin’s use of the word “deranged” (and “crazy” and “madness” too), you are proposing to characterize a
complex issue on the literal meaning of one or a few words. History shows that that’s just too much of a burden for this linguistic unit to bear. Two examples–
“. . . and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Evening came, and morning came,
the sixth day."
Revised English Bible
“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of
speech . . .”
Bill of Rights
In sum, forbidding
any interpretation of Origin’s “statements” would place canon in a most unnatural straitjacket.
.
. However, your argument (that we must provide canon, ie., inviolable sources, but that some inviolable sources are less inviolable than others) is not in agreement with itself, which is what I'm going to try to demonstrate.
My claim was that events of war was responible for Tolwyn's break-down, which was pretty succintly covered by that advert. "Fuelled by the horrors of war, a deranged human mind..." Similarly, even you seem to be conceding that the canon statement in the advert Tolwyn's mental health is somewhere in the range between mental health and all-out insanity, which is what I've been saying all along.
But in the public interest, could you only post abridged and/or condensed versions? EEK! LOL.
