Val Ritz

Had a bit of a shower thought when I was mulling over the Geneforge and the canisters: Defniel was right, damn the Geneforge! And Danette, while we're at it, for pushing for it so hard. When I think about the actual substance of the discoveries on Sucia and the ways they could be used if developed responsibly (read: the way Shapers usually do) it's kind of mind-blowing. They could have gone public with just the microscopes and genes alone and revolutionized the world. But no, the first thing they HAVE to do is make devices that give you the power to blow things up with your mind in exchange for your empathy. Danette's got to go on a power trip and make a pool of sludge that turns people into antisocial demigods. They could have cured diseases, taken quantum leaps in tool design, the sky's the limit. Instead, they turned people into monsters. But when I really think about it, Shaper society and practices set them up for failure. Traditional Shaper training on creations involves exact recipes for specific creation designs, with some mild leeway for changing large systems (e.g., fyora to cryoa, roamer to pyroroamer) or exaggerating traits (battle alpha to battle beta to battle gamma, etc.). The researchers literally didn't know how to make a canister that, say, only modified you enough to cure one disease. There's some basis in established theory for Shaping something to make it spit fire, or give it hulking muscles, or give it magical abilities. There's a very limited basis for precision modification. Add that to the Romanesque glory-hounding endemic to all research Shapers. Everybody's looking to make the biggest of all possible splashes, and Danette was too smart for her own good. If the research team had dropped the Geneforge idea, just stopped at canisters, there might have been room to walk the Council back from a total Barring. They might have Barred the use of canisters to grant Shaping abilities or magic spells, and focused on digging into the new field of gene-Shaping that they discovered. But when confronted by a literally completed Geneforge, ready to turn anyone into a god in a span of seconds, there was nothing else for them to do. It had already gone too far. Damn the Geneforge.

The main question you should be asking is if it would damage the Sholai. If they take Shaper powers home without the knowledge of how to use them, a LOT of people are going to get hurt.

That's kind of an oversimplification. Saving the serviles was always a means to an end, that much is true. They needed workers who had expertise in maintaining the old Shaper equipment of Sucia Island, and the serviles had developed those skills. Barzahl might never have been nice to them, but there was a time when he worked together with them and saw them as useful. He and the Takers developed the drakon together, his people made the plants that terraformed the Medab valley, etc. By the time we meet him, though, the canisters have stripped away everything but his core motivation, power through self-modification, but that's the endpoint. For a while he knew how to be diplomatic.

If I'm spitballing, I think any remaining serviles with strong Obeyer tendencies would have gone to the Barzite lands. It gives them the chance to admit that they're different from other serviles, while still directly serving a "real Shaper." Issue being, it didn't take much canister use for Barzahl and his buddies to discard their sympathies for the serviles. To pull a phrase from the G1 ending, they'd find themselves "ill-used," and ten years is plenty of time for the most loyal to die in lab accidents or gazer testing or what have you. Because we can always make more, right?

Yeah, it's one of the real tragedies of Sucia Island we don't get to see. The way events shook out, the Council wasn't interested in any intelligent, but compliant serviles. Final Sanction was invoked; everything on that island needed to burn. Dayna (formerly Learned Dayna) is the story that really breaks my heart. Her whole life, devoted to preserving what amounted to outdated and useless warehouse inventories, on the off-chance it might please the Shapers. Not only did she learn her purpose was a lie, but the ones she idolized saw her as anathema.

Exactly! And to contrast, it feels like Zensital is maybe a year ahead of where you are in G2. He's got the ornk-in-the-headlights vibe of someone whose life is no longer on degree program rails, but who hasn't been picked up to be part of a research team.

I love the addition of the "young, scrappy, and hungry" Shapers, specifically Thrackerzod and his triad in Mutagen, plus Zensital in Infestation. It bridges what has been an (up until now) kinda sparse step in the evolutionary cycle of a Shaper: that awkward, gawky, undergraduate period between being a wide-eyed apprentice and an overworked and undersupervised research fellow trying to design a new configuration for thahd glutes. Thrackerzod and Zensital in particular give us as players two great examples of how Shapers keep getting roped into shady situations. Thrackerzod is the classic legacy. Got through the Academy on a scholarship, father was the captain of the pyroroamerball team. Now he's trying to make a name for himself, not by any means necessary, but by any means flashy and daring enough for him to consider it "worthy" of him. Zensital is the undeclared major of Shapers. He's pleasant, eager to please, decently bright... but without any real ambition, he's kind of aimless. At least, he's aimless enough to ask a literal apprentice for a purpose in life. And bless us, we immediately make him fall in with the wrong crowd. The main thing I'm wondering is what this phase of training is like for Guardians and Agents. We know Thrackerzod brought one each along with him to Sucia Island, but his goals there are his own, his companions have their own business. The desire to find something with a 'wow' factor is something that really only a Shaper Shaper would have. We know Barzahl was a Guardian-in-training when he and Zakary went there, but he seems very much the exception, not a rule. He was able to comprehend the concepts, recognize their potential, and act on them, all without (presumably) the laboratory background a full Shaper would have. Do journeyman Guardians hold out hope for a sergeant posting in some fortress somewhere, and failing that turn to knight-errantry? Are Agents brought up shooting to be the rookie on an SCIS squad, only to wind up as dangerously bored secret agents in search of a good conspiracy?

Steering away from litigating the definition of genocide, if we take Shaper policy and Shaper law at its word, there is no such thing as a neutral Shaper. Every Shaper is expected and required to do whatever is necessary to eradicate rogue creations--whether that means feral fyora or intelligent serviles. Someone like Sharon, who just wants to live in peace without contributing to Shaper hegemony, is breaking the law by retiring. Once you learn the Shaping arts, you're in until you die. If you asked the Council, Khyryk's attitude constitutes possibly criminal negligence. One of the roots of the ideological difference between the Takers and the Awakened is this: the Takers are responding to the Shapers as they are, while the Awakened are dealing with them as they hope they could become.

The researchers on Sucia Island were big fans of the "indeterminate vat of glowing, swirling sludge" school of magic, as was the fashion at the time. Modern artifacts require modern solutions.

Yeah, the research staff at the Radiant College is also surprisingly thin, and even if you sabotage the facility instead of killing the head researchers, I don't know that they'd willingly subject themselves to Awakened rule, not in any kind of way you could trust. Now, the research into optics and targeted modifications would go a long way to solving the ecological problems that the Awakened have, since their valley is kind of awful for supporting a decent population. Maybe someone like Carnelian, working from first principles and using that research, could extrapolate out more effective Shaping techniques that could still be used responsibly in defense of the Drypeaks, then teach them to willing students. The main difficulty that I see is when you talk with servile mages, they appear to be committed to not learning or becoming capable of the Shaping arts at all, and that's going to introduce some hard limits on what Medab is capable of. They'd essentially be a rebellious common government with one big exception in the form of the Barrier of Winds.

Also very true! The Awakened especially put a lot of time and effort into thanking you for doing fairly minor favors. It also doesn't help that the qualification quests to join the Takers are intentionally unfair. I had a little bit of a chuckle when I took stock of who I felt I could realistically kill to satisfy Amena Blade's quest... and realized that the easiest option was Learned Pinner by a LONG shot. Great little gameplay and story resonance moment there, if you want to really do the most amount of good (or least amount of harm) you've got to bust your ass in a wretched boss fight to kill Barzahl. Plus in the Taker ending, you're not the Kwisatz Haderach, you're just someone who facilitated the revolution. That can kinda sting if you're looking for gamer back-pats, but I appreciate the bracing realism.

Since I very much grew up with these games, it's kind of funny to see how my viewpoints on the different factions have developed over time. It's even more interesting to see the bits of nuance and "humanization" that have been added to them in these remakes. When I was younger, there wasn't even a question, it was Awakened in both G1 and G2. And if it were just me, acting in my own self-interest and for my own moral comfort, it still probably would be the Awakened. The moderate viewpoint is appealing. But in G2 we start to see some systemic problems that are hampering their capabilities as a serious movement. For one thing, by committing themselves to never learning to Shape, they rely entirely on defectors for their research. The few we do see are either Tuldaric (a canister addict who is taking way too much on himself and going to burn out) or a handful of junior Shapers without the background experience to seriously spearhead the kind of research the Awakened would need to survive. Thankfully, we do see in the remakes that there's a general understanding that war will be necessary to achieve freedom, but they're still hamstringing themselves by intentionally fighting a defensive war against a continent-spanning superpower. We do see that the scope of the conflict is limited by their restraint in the endcards, and that's admirable. It's also going to be a long, grueling war of attrition they way they've set themselves up. A faction I've come really full circle on is the Takers. The remakes have added nuance to their viewpoints in a way that makes me think that there could be a road to a real society if they win. I know this series is a tragedy, and G3-G5 show how they go completely off the rails, so that version of the future is definitely not going to come to pass, but in talking with the Takers, especially their leadership, it feels much more like they're a fully realized philosophy with genuine merit instead of mindlessly rabid vengeance fetishists. They have a real relationship with the common humans of Terrestia, probably informed by their early contact with Trajkov. The bitterness and vitriol of the serviles, especially those from Sucia, is much more understandable now. When I was a kid, Toivo pissed me off. Now, especially knowing his studies into how the serviles were first created, I think his restraint in not immediately cutting our throats is admirable. Luckily, being older also means I can recognize a lot of the red flags hanging on everything any Barzite ever says ever. Boy howdy.

Oh definitely, it's just nice to have that detail included in the earlier games to provide depth to the experience right out of the gate.

The remakes do an excellent job refining and expanding on areas of the speculative fiction that the originals didn't, which is awesome. The switch to "common" from "outsiders," and exploring the perspectives of "common" cultures, is one of those great changes. When I look at how the Shapers are portrayed in the original 1 and 2, I think a lot of the details about their scope and influence were still in flux. In G1, describing them as "one of the oldest and most powerful of the magical sects" created this image of the Shapers as more like nation among many. G2 expanded on that somewhat, but it wasn't until G3 and beyond that we really started to see the geopolitics of Terrestia crystallize. Now, with a lot of those details set down and iterated on, the addition of the "old cultures" through the Turabi feels like a whole new worldspace to explore. If nothing else, it feels like writing experience from Avadon that's paying dividends for these remakes.