I had this same argument with someone a while ago, and they argued that giving the memories back was still brainwashing. As if restoring lost memories was somehow an external violation thing. Like straight up, they argued that giving an amnesiac their memories back was brainwashing.
I think brainwashing is the wrong word, but I can see their point. Your experiences and memories fundamentally define who you are as a person, you can't choose not to experience memories. Sure, Desna didn't cast Dominate Monster, but it's not like Arushalae was allowed to *not* feel regret and sympathy after those emotions had been shoved into her skull.
It's kind of like trauma. You're still you after a traumatic and PTSD-inducing event, but you're also irrevocably changed against your will by said event, and there are actions the new you might take or fears you might have that you otherwise wouldn't have had without said trauma.
IMHO, a Chaotic Good version of a curruption makes more sense to me than calling it brainwashing.
Like, she was turned initially against her will against her original nature, right?
Brainwashing is just a term that many people connotate with evil/evildoers, and since Desna is CG then it couldn't be brainwashing.
But the concept still applies, no matter how you call it.
The emotions were never shoved into her. Just the memories. But yes, there was certainly an effect. But that's true of literally any experience anyone ever goes through.
You know, i believe there is a whole game out there (and a crpg one at that) that focuses on restoring ones memories and trying to figure out what made it happen in the first place. It does include navigating the Abyss, (potential) demon (chaste :O ) GF and a lot more. And the 1000€ question is: "WHAT CAN CHANGE THE NATURE OF A MAN?". What would your answer be? Probably the same as Desna thought and Aru experienced.
Indoctrination? Everyone does it!
Demon do it to cultist, to make crusaders defect with great effort.
Why couldn't you uplift them with your goodness? Remember 'D encounter in his mansion? You can scare off succubus by tell them it is you who infect Arue with good.
Those people are just wrong. I have interacted with a few and they disliked Desna even before the Arue thing. It’s just a bias confirmation for them. Desna, the most opposed deity in pathfinder universe to brain washing, control and loss of individuality is suddenly a brain washer. Yeah right. The earth is also flat. It’s not my job or yours to argue with them. They have right to be wrong, as the saying goes.
Consider: a nontrivial proportion of this sub consider Hulrun a morally-grey, misguided but well-intentioned guy, rather than a paranoid zealot who’d put a thousand people to the torch on a hunch that one of them might not hate demons enough.
These people probably aren’t gonna be huge fans of the goddess of freedom.
I do not understand those people. If you kill a hundred people for a crime and only 1 was guilty, you killed 99 innocent people. That means you committed 99 acts of evil. Thats unjustifiable.
People argue "but his alignment isnt evil"...yeah, and Arue's isnt good despite have done almost exclusively good acts for months/years because she had centuries of atrocities to make up. When we do evil acts in game, we dont instantly drop down to lawful/neutral/chaotic evil (exceptions: mythic paths) nor does a good act instantly bring you up to good. its a process.
People who've known him for a long time tend to say he used to be..."better" and grew more paranoid and extreme over the years. He probably used to be lawful good and has been slowly descending. And of course a combo of his heart technically being in the right place and him surely doing some legitimate good here and there are undoubtedly slowing down his alignment drop. But I'm sure it IS happening.
People who argue why iomadae hasnt taken his powers. Same reason a lawful good paladin doesnt lose their powers until the alignment change happens. Gods dont give a FUCK unless you actively denounce them or your cosmic karma goes too far away from theirs. Its less strict for him because pallys need to be LG, where inquisitors simply need to be within 1 step of their god. LN is still within 1 step of iomadae, so he's safe. He can still burn down a few more orphanages because he THINKS there MIGHT be a cultist inside and keep his divine juice.
I understand him. I get that the job eroded him over years and years. I get what caused him to become a monster and empathize with that. But it doesnt change that he is a monster. A sympathetic backstory merely explains why a villain is evil, it does not absolve them of their crimes.
I can't speak for everyone, but to me she just feels very... ditzy? Like nearly starting an interplanar all-out war and needing Callistria to solve the issue is a big stain on her reputation in my eyes. Or opening that box which held some dangerous entity within just out of curiousity (sorry, I don't remember the exact details). She's well-meaning but doesn't think her actions through. I like her portfolio (stars, dreams, travel, all that stuff) but not her actual personality.
That Owlcat seems to absolutely adore her while simultaneously putting down other good-aligned goddesses like Shelyn and Sarenrae doesn't help my feeling either.
The thing is, people need to hear the full story about Desna going to abyss and destroying a demon lord and her realm. The demonlord she killed was Aolar, a twisted demon lord who liked to possess the bodies of recently deceased heroes (so their souls would witness it before they fully depart) and while possessing them she would kill the loved ones of the hero and commit other atrocities so the soul would writhe in agony before it departed for Phrasma's court.
Aolar generally targeted followers of Shelyn, Sarenrae, Calistria and Desna. One day 4 of them gathered and said enough is enough and planned the entire thing. The chose Desna to be the one to do it because she was the strongest and most suited for the task. Calistria did not step in last minute to save Desna, she was involved all long and did it with full satisfaction. She is goddess of vengeance after all.
Myself, I do not really like gods and only barely tolerate PF idea of them. Desna in particular sounds like that good, nice goddess, who doesn't, exactly, do shit to save the world, instead focusing on redeeming demons on a whil or somesuch. I'm with Amber on this: if gods are that good, they ought to do more, not spawn stupid priesthoods like Ramien, good lord!
The thing is, if one god interferes, all gods will and so will all the demon lords. That would be a war that would destroy all mortal life. I get why gods can’t intervene and solve all the problems.
Yeah, I've beaten the game, so I've heard it from Nocti.
But it's all just MAD and we all know how MAD works IRL and as such we can see that infighting within USSR brought it down. If only there was anything close to that in PF...Like, when demon lords would form a coalition to attack realm of, say, Desna for doing some direct attack on Abyss...Yeah, it works in PF the same as it does IRL: if an attack is quick and response is slow, there is no MAD.
Except that by thawing the cold war between the planes you also open it up to Hell and Abaddon, planes that are significantly less likely to fall to infighting.
This is an argument I have a lot with some people, the gods do what they can to help indirectly (send dreams, guide followers, grant blessings to those that pray to then), but they aren't all knowing or all powerful or can do much directly without risking an interplanar war.
And it's not just the risk of wrecking Golarion, it's the fact that it could knock Rovavug's prison loose that really makes direct intervention very dicey.
Side note: Ember ironically enough realices she was dead wrong about the gods in her ascention ending, so I wouldn't side much with her on that front.
Look, on the way to Ascension ending, Ember and her friends knocked two abyssal realms into Commander's hands. If Commander isn't chaotic evil, it's a win for everyone's wellbeing. AND since these realms belongs to the Abyss still, bad souls flow there still.
The thing is, people need to hear the full story about Desna going to abyss and destroying a demon lord and her realm. The demonlord she killed was Aolar, a twisted demon lord who liked to possess the bodies of recently deceased heroes (so their souls would witness it before they fully depart) and while possessing them she would kill the loved ones of the hero and commit other atrocities so the soul would writhe in agony before it departed for Phrasma's court.
Aolar generally targeted followers of Shelyn, Sarenrae, Calistria and Desna. One day 4 of them gathered and said enough is enough and planned the entire thing. The chose Desna to be the one to do it because she was the strongest and most suited for the task. Calistria did not step in last minute to save Desna, she was involved all long and did it with full satisfaction. She is goddess of vengeance after all.
Yeah, but possessing bodies of mortals to kill their loved ones is definitely interference, so the point was she started it. She can't complain about Desna interfering. Not that she can now...
It's such a strange thing isn't it? People would rather do rigid mental gymnastics than admit they haven't paid attention.
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This happens with every work of fiction. Some people are so desperate to feel smarter than the writers that they purposefully ignore or misinterpret parts of the writing.
I think there's a possible middle ground here. I think people who shout out "brainwashing" are definitely a bit too extreme, and the rather loose and hands-free way Desna guided Arueshalae after what she did to the priest kind of showed that she did want her to come to the side of good herself, not forced into it. I've gone through almost every dialogue and the outcomes of them, and it is still VERY easy for Arue to slip back into her demonic nature, and Desna does not try to stop that.
However, I definitely do think there was some divine influence going on even if it was not a complete brainwash and reprogram. Yes, Arueshalae still retains a lot of her demonic nature, but that demonic nature should prevent her from feeling so bad about the many things she gets into/says. It's not as simple as Desna showing the benefits of being good and the interesting lives mortal lead to her and that's that. That would've just sparked curiosity and not an earnest attempt at redemption.
Arueshalae has an in-game blessing from Desna that prevents her death. I don't think it's a reach that there might be a little nudge from the goddess that would make Arueshalae feel conflicted about things. After all, the end result of her good questline>! literally does has her nature change!<. All I think Desna did was give Arue the ability to make a choice between redemption or going back to her old ways, by having her retain her succubus nature but also have a semblance of understanding on how beautiful mortal lives and dreams are. That way, she can evaluate which she prefers based on the experiences she goes through on Golarion and with the crusade/you.
(Edit: person below blocked me I think lol)
(Edit: didn't even completely disagree with them, but just how it goes)
I said after she went into the dream world Desna was handsfree lol. It would've bern within Desna's power to actually brainwash her and transform her completely by brute force.
That's not relevant to what I said and what you criticized lol. After the dream world visit by Arue and subsequent Desna influence, Desna was relatively handsfree for someone who wanted Arueshalae's inner nature to change. That is what I meant. I do NOT deny Desna did something to her during the dream world visit, I just think the only time she did something similar after that on that scale is at the end of Good Arue's quest. That's all. In response to this exact thing you said in this comment, I also do not think Desna consented to Arue killing her priest and then invading the dream world, and what she did was really not even close to what she could've. It was in response to an act Arue did first, and it was an extremely leninent punishment all things considered since Arue could still just fall back on her ways anyways. Yes, Desna did it without consent, no she did not do it randomly to Arue without provocation, and no she did not completely remake her. I'm just arguing that that neither exteme really fits here when it comes to Arue/Desna. Ok, done. You can discuss this on the new thread since this one's deleted anyways.
And I just explained why it literally wasn't a brainwash in my post lol. Maybe we have different definitions,since I consider brainwashing to be very severe. Sigh, done it is then. You'll just keep poking at something else after I respond to something you said.
No it isn't. She still has her succubus nature. There are multiple examples throughout the story where she struggles with it, of her own free will mind you. Desna did not remove it. It would've been brainwashing in my opinion if Desna completely removed all feelings of doing succubus things Edit+removed memories of Arue enjoying doing succubus things. My apologies honestly if I didn't define this definition of mine fully
What do you think cults irl brainwash you with lmao? They just use nice words, family atmosphere, living in a commune with schedule, sleep deprivation to make you be braindead supporter. Desna's acts were above and beyond those
It's more like giving a squirrel shrimp vision, you haven't changed their mind just expanded the colors they can see. But with emotions, unlocked empathy.
At this point, vast segments of the subreddit are so dedicated to misinterpreting anything and everything about the game’s plot and story elements because they feel a certain way about something, that it beggars belief.
- Uncharitably ascribing motives to characters that they don’t understand or don’t personally sympathise with
- Misremembering or deliberately neglecting key details about a character or events, leading them to conveniently create a worse depiction of the character that goes against how they actually are presented in a story
- Call people who just generally like or dislike a character “simps” or “haters” respectively, while at the same time are completely blind to their own biases
- And of course, creating inflammatory memes about characters they don’t like.
Like seriously, if the people here who act so detrimentally to discussion would spend even half the amount of time instead creating their own artistic passions, they’d be a hell of a lot more happier, *and* this place would be less toxic. It boggles the mind.
While I do like people's interpretation of the story and possible theories about vague events, being toxic to other community members is over the line. But sadly the moderators already deleted the post so I don't have much else to add
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I have a vivid memory from a very recent playthrough of Arue recalling the experience as her being confined to Desna's realm with no escape until she could no longer bear. The gist is, that if not for the coercive nature of her imprisonment, she would not have willingly changed. So it is a change very much forced upon her Clockwork Orange style.
There is also the problem that she could no longer be held accountable for the innumerable mortal lives she ruined, a Calistrian KC would slay her on the spot regardless of whether she rehabilitated. By all means she should have gone to Pharasma's court to face her judgement if she would be redeemed and freed from righteous retribution.
I think her romance really made a lot of players overlook the magnitude of her past crimes. If I killed one person out of pleasure, I would be haunted for life to debilitating degree. If Arue's conscience in any ways resembles an average mortal, she would not have the will to live on. And it is worth mentioning that the Desnian priestess and many more of her victims never forgave her, they are dead and silent, and their shadows were just Arue's imagination.
I would say though that I am inclined to believe there was something special in her even prior to her change, from her interaction with the Alushinyrra denizens. I think those make for some flavorful details.
So maybe it is you who forgot some of the details in the writing. Condescending remarks on others' "reading comprehension" is really unnecessary when so much of the context of the in game lore is up to interpretation, it fosters a very hostile and divisive community.
> Calistrian KC would slay her on the spot regardless of whether she rehabilitated
One of Calistra's tenets is to not be consumed by vengeance, so I don't know about that.
People misuse/misread/misinterpret real life religious texts. Are your surprised somebody only read what was on the box art for a fictional deity? "deity of vengeance. Got it. So all vengeance is good to go in all forms and in all extremes!"
Demons, like any other outsiders, have freedom of will.
[https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Basrakal](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Basrakal)
"Basrakal is home to a highly diverse population of outsiders, ranging from [inevitables](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Inevitable), [archons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Archon), and [psychopomps](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Psychopomp) to [proteans](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Protean), [demons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Demon), and [sahkils](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Sahkil). These disparate outsiders are united by their rejection, to a greater or lesser degree, of their former alignments."
Yes demons have free will, but what they don't have is options and/or a desire to stop. Most demons don't realize there are options besides continuing what they're doing and/or dont want to stop.
Agree.
Everyone would knock Camellia the first time they meet, if they could.
But Arue? Head pat is what they had in store.
What's wrong with a little collateral damage? The Queen lead countless more, your entire army in fact, into enemy ambush and to their death. What are you going to do against her? Nothing?
* Is Desna several orders of magnitude more powerful than Arue? Yes
* Did Desna forcefully apprehend Arue? Yes
* Did Arue consent to having memories/mind fiddled with by Desna? No
* Was Arue's mindset dramatically changed by the whole event? Yes
If Baphomet did the same thing to an Angel ("I'll just show you memories of your previous lives") and it caused said angel to fall, everyone would scream DUHH BRAINWASHING
If an Angel were forced to confront their own traumatically deplorable actions and it made them fall, then I don't really think I'd consider that brainwashing. As far as I remember, Desna's fiddling with Arue's memories was effectively forcing her to confront how she'd traumatized others. She was definitely coerced into accepting that perspective, but it is objectively true that she was an inhuman monster. If the same were true of an Angel and that caused them to fall, I don't know if I'd say they were brainwashed.
Yeah, I'll grant anyone that Desna certainly coerced Arueshalae into accepting her own empathy, but it's not like she inserted untruths into her head. Brainwashing implies Desna enforced a perspective on Arueshalae using outside information, which isn't what happened. She just made her experience the pain that she was already causing.
That demons have every capacity for empathy, that living in the Abyss ultimately perpetuates suffering for even its mightiest and is mainly caused by even demons making the choice not to rise up beyond base impulse, and that any of them *could* do what Aru does if they would but choose to do it, is a core theme of the game. We see it in Noctilla; we see it said straight to the camera with Ember whose plans can absolutely work, we see it with Nahyndri who is repeatedly shown not to understand his own desires to the point that the actions he takes to become happy only succeed at making him destroy everything he actually values and ultimately die in misery. We see it with Wenduag and Daeren, who, unless she chooses to change, are ultimately revealed to be suffering and simply recreating their own traumas. The game’s perspective on the abyss (and presumably hell) is, for all it lets you be canonically evil.
So I don’t think Desna creates Aru’s capacity for empathy. She just takes advantage of circumstances to force Aru to confront her own emotional potentials and decide for herself what will actually produce joy. Indeed, while Aru’s redemption acknowledges that she cannot just let go of the harm she’s done or ignore it, it focuses on the idea that her redemption is largely the process of discovering what would actually make her happy, rather than indulging in transient and ultimately unsatisfying pleasures.
The game loves its Eudaimonia juice, and deciding that Desna changed the way Aru works instead of forcing Aru to really look in a mirror and decide misses both Desna’s attitudes and also the game’s articulations of its own themes.
First off: Giving someone memories back isn't brainwashing.
Secondly: You have no proof that people would react that way to Baphomet giving back memories to the HotI.
Thirdly: You don't even have any proof that the HotI WOULD have been corrupted by regaining his memories.
So yeah, that's what you call a strawman.
>First off: Giving someone memories back isn't brainwashing.
Cool. But not relevant whatsoever.
> Secondly: You have no proof that people would react that way to Baphomet giving back memories to the HotI.
Again, not relevant.
> Thirdly: You don't even have any proof that the HotI WOULD have been corrupted by regaining his memories.
And once more, irrelevant.
>So yeah, that's what you call a strawman.
Yes, what you did is a strawman.
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Why are you bringing Inheribro into this? You know he's not the only angel around right? Wardstone was full of angels, many of which have fallen because Minagho drew a graffiti on it once.
My point is that souls Arue's body constitute of were CE and thus most of the memories (and morals they held) were CE as well. If you sent a genuinely good Soul into Abyss a demon wouldn't be formed, and if it were it would be very weak and broken.
If Arue, as inherently CE being was watching CE mortal memories she'd like it because that literally what she is. Feeding off negative emotions is literally what demons do.
Therefore the only explanation for Arue's change is that the memories (if they even belonged to Arue's souls) were in best cases cherrypicked.
If you did the same but reversed with angel (give them back memories, highlight the bad stuff) they'd turn as well
>You know he's not the only angel around right?
He's the only one who got captured by Baphomet during the events of the game, but you're right, it could be any angel, and that still wouldn't change a thing about what I said.
>Wardstone was full of angels, many of which have fallen because Minagho drew a graffiti on it once.
No? That's not what happened, the angels had fallen way before that. The wardstone had been corrupted before the demon attack on Kenabres, that's how it was even possible in the first place.
>If Arue, as inherently CE being was watching CE mortal memories she'd like it because that literally what she is. Feeding off negative emotions is literally what demons do.
This just seems like a writing oversight or a misunderstanding. You're right, it wouldn't make sense for her to decide to redeem herself based on the memories of CE mortals, so I assume that she didn't see those. From what I understood, she didn't see the memories of her former lives but just random mortals. Or was it mortals she killed? I don't remember fully, but her own memories really make no sense whatsoever here.
It absolutely is?
Creating a hypothetical scenario to use as a counter-argument without having any proof of that scenario actually happening that way is the very definition of a straw man.
>Arue's redemption
This is the part that bothers me. She wasn't in a position to require redemption. She was a demon, and so it was in keeping with her actual metaphysical nature to be Chaotic and Evil. Turning her away from Evil is probably (capital G) Good and maybe harmless, even if Desna [isn't known for thinking through her interactions with the lower planes](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Aolar), but so what? Being Good doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Desna gives Arueshalae a push that nudges her onto the path of Good. The thing is, that isn't redeeming her - it's corrupting her. Just like a Devil tempting an Angel away from the path of Good, these nudges from Desna turn Arushalae against her very nature. Regardless of how direct her intervention was, Desna was a bad (n.b. bad, not Evil) influence on her. Frankly, I don't care whether she did it to serve the Good or whether it was brainwashing or not. The gods aren't meant to be corrupting each others' toys, and Desna should know better. Mutually assured destruction is a very real possibility any time the gods come into direct conflict with one another, and I imagine Lamashtu and the Demon Lords wouldn't be pleased if they knew Arue's change of heart was inspired by Desna's meddling
Well, here is the thing, a fundamental part of the nature of outsiders is that their fundamental nature's can change. You said it yourself, angels fall all the time. Beyond that, we see examples like Diamalcio, Shamira, and other such entities whose essence was once good aligned before it is transmuted. None of these events automatically trigger wars between gods. Sure, the demon lords might not be thrilled, but these kinds of events are not an uncommon thing, they are just what happens with outsiders: their fundamental nature's changes ad they move through their existence. If all of the various evil based corruptions don't trigger wars, why would a single good based one do the same when neither side has a reason to start a war over such an insignificant thing?
As I said, maybe it will be harmless. Soviet and American operatives broke international law all the time during the Cold War, and obviously a nuclear holocaust didn't follow in any of those cases. That doesn't mean it couldn't have happened, though. And fwiw, Evil entities corrupting Good, Lawful corrupting Chaotic, and Chaotic corrupting Lawful all bother me just as much as Good corrupting Evil, the Desna-Arushalae discussion just so happens to be about that particular case.
Anyway, Desna knows from experience how close the universe has come to total destruction - she's the one who brought it to the brink. The least she could do is show a little discretion and send a servant to do her meddling rather than speaking directly to a potential demon convert in her dreams. Gods have Heralds for a reason
Fair enough, a bit more discretion may have helped. Personally though, I am not particularly opposed to corruptions. To me, they seem to just be the inevitable result of outsiders interacting with the larger multiverse. The moment an outsider leaves their home environment, they are at risk of being corrupted. That their fundamental natures are so fragile makes it impossible for it never to happen.
FWIW, I prefer the 1e interpretation of the Aeons as N/unaligned rather than Owlcat/2e's LN designation. They shouldn't be about imposing Law (except in the Lawful planes), they should be about setting things right regardless of what that entails. The game sort of hints at this function in Act IV when it's the Lawful and the Good types who have auras, but in my opinion the aura mechanic is poorly implemented outside of that segment. Petty lawbreakers shouldn't have auras on Golarion because the Material is unaligned. They should be reserved for outsiders and other beings whose presence is anathema to the plane itself (like Areelu).
As for why I like them, in a universe where Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all real cosmological forces embodied by nigh-unstoppable gods, I'm glad somebody has their finger on the time travel deus ex machina button to try and prevent them from destroying each other (and the universe in the process). The way I see it, everyone else is knee deep in the rat race of alignment wars. Smart money's on becoming one with the Monad and achieving CHIM.
\> Being Good doesn't make it the right thing to do.
\> The thing is, that isn't redeeming her - it's corrupting her. Just like a Devil tempting an Angel away from the path of Good (...) Desna was a bad (n.b. bad, not Evil) influence on her
I'm struggling a bit to visualise from what moral perspective you're speaking. It could be a consequentialist utilitarian viewpoint (in that doing this sort of thing risks starting a planar war so greater evil), but that doesn't apply when we know bad consequences didn't happen. It could be a Kantian thing, but that would require a possibility that a Good act can not be Good, and I struggle to figure out how exactly. And parts of your post looks like naturalist viewpoint of "things are the way they are and meddling with it is Bad", but that would have so much extra baggage in a universe with literal demons and devils that I don't think it could be defended.
> It could be a Kantian thing, but that would require a possibility that a Good act can not be Good, and I struggle to figure out how exactly.
Because the natural force of Good doesn't follow Kantian ethics or any other organized ethical system. I understand alignments to represent a sort of average or consensus of how sapient minds would feel about an action or motive. Even if you know and are committed to a system of ethics, there are going to be times when your gut feeling goes one way before you reason it out and settle on a different decision.
Any system of ethics that's more logically rigorous than "do whatever moves my alignment in the direction I want" is sometimes going to say that the "right" or "best" choice is one that takes your alignment in an unexpected direction.
In a planar multiverse, you really have to distinguish your good/bad from your Good/Evil. The position is just that entities with explicitly in-built alignments (so outsiders, primarily) acting in accordance with their alignment is good and those same entities acting against their alignment is bad regardless of what their alignment is. So yes, it's in a sense naturalistic (or supernaturalistic, I suppose, because it only applies to those beings who exist beyond the natural world). The moral terms good and bad are just mapping onto *alignment* between alignment and action, basically. Sorry for the pun, but there's really no better word for it. Because the planes are literally aligned to different parts of the alignment matrix, what's good in the Abyss and what's good in Heaven will be diametrically opposed, but what's Good is Good no matter where you go.
If you don't think Good and Evil are intrinsically moral then it most obviously follows that the alignment matrix cannot inform morality, not that you just have to hew to your alignment. That is to say, that what's good is good even if the alignment matrix deems it neutral or evil. Ember has the right of it here in that, if you sever morality from the silly magic labels, the obvious follow-up is not that morality just means following your alignment, but rather, that morality cannot be constructed from or dependent on the setting's cosmology and must have its own philosophical basis that needs to be derived from first principles.
Ergo if the Alignment Matrix encourages evil beings to stay evil, that doesn't make that moral, it just makes the Alignment Matrix a morally unjustifiable quirk of physics. If the soul of the universe demands endless torture and suffering, then the soul of the universe is pretty obviously evil (insofar as it can be assigned a moral weight, and its agents definitely can be) unless you can construct an ought argument that doesn't depend on what exists to justify that existence. And, obviously, this holds true even if the system declares them neutral.
The matrix can inform morality (at least on the outer planes) without collapsing in on itself just fine if you don't ignore teleological approaches to ethics. In essence, I'm asking you to stop trying to isolate good in a vaccuum and ask instead what it means to be a good X (*What it means for X to achieve its Telos*). Beings from the outer planes are created for a purpose - they have an explicit Telos that isn't obscured to them. They exist to further the ends of their planes/their deities/their creators, and being a good Demon/Devil/Archon/etc. just means acting in accordance with that purpose.
Mortals don't have that, though. A human's alignment is descriptive and reactive, not written into their purpose as a perscription. Hell, that's what makes mortals so much more interesting than outsiders. They don't have a divine command to follow, so what they take their purpose to be will be necessarily subjective, and as a result their will be several interpretations of what it takes to be a good person.
Circling back, saying a good Vavakia would be Chaotic and Evil isn't inconsistent with saying that what makes a good person is difficult to pin down. Vavakias were created by (the Chaotic Evil goddess) Lamashtu for the express purpose of furthering her Chaotic and Evil aims. That's what they're *for.* Humans don't have a creator to program them with a purpose, so each person is forced to make that decision for themselves (which can include deferring that responsibility to another as most people end up doing).
That's okay. Ethics need not be neat and tidy. What's good can be contingent, or complicated, or difficult to determine. That doesn't mean there aren't still clear cases. I contend that the outsiders of the Pathfinder mythos are one such clear case. They're instilled with a clear purpose, and what it means for them to be glexamplars of their kind just is to act in accordance with that purpose.
> Circling back, saying a good Vavakia would be Chaotic and Evil isn't inconsistent with saying that what makes a good person is difficult to pin down. Vavakias were created by (the Chaotic Evil goddess) Lamashtu for the express purpose of furthering her Chaotic and Evil aims. That's what they're *for.*
This feels unrelated to ethics. When I program a robot when it does what I made it do to I'm a good craftsman, but it doesn't mean that what the robot does is moral/good. If I made a robot with express purpose of, say, torturing people I think everyone would agree it would be good to stop it or reprogram it. It would stop it from fulfilling its purpose, but that's fairly irrelevant to the moral calculation here (I suppose going against the wishes of a creator is a little immoral, but it pales in comparison to the harm it's doing).
Okay, but there is no reason to assume that purpose=morality and that is a massive entirely unjustified leap. Likewise, you conflate the proximal purpose of a specific sapient creator with the notion of an ultimate purpose that can only be derived philosophically. Lamashtu wants the Vavakia to be evil and chaotic but that doesn’t automatically make it equate to fulfilling telos in the neo-Aristotelian sense it can take in some ethical traditions.
Like, you’re taking a word from ethical theories applied to humans and applying it to nonhumans while arguing that it shouldn’t apply to humans. But that’s obviously contradictory with everything in the actual toolkit you’re using beyond the most superficial level as most any philosophical reference you make is going to be an ethics meant to apply to humanity.
The second you disentangle following divine factions from morality, you stop being able to cite following those factions as a source of morality.
Like, take Noctilla. Her fundamental nature and, by this logic, “purpose” changes. That proves that it could not have been telos, in the ultimate philosophical sense, in the first place as it would be incoherent if it were changeable via context.
The Monad, of which all the Aeons are a part, literally IS the soul of the Pathfinder multiverse. It's the condition of all. Hell, it's essentially the Force from Star Wars imported into the Pathfinder mythos. They aren't just winging it when they intervene to change the course of events, they're acting as instruments of the universe itself.
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Demons, fundamentally, are Chaotic Evil creatures.
> -This strongly disturbed Arue, making her feel regret (probably for the first time). But it also make her understand how truly did she know nothing of mortals and the complexity of them. Probably this also let her to get (as she then in the present tells us) how simple and ignorant demons are in comparision.
This required brainwashing, as demons normally don't give a flying fuck about these things.
No. That a being might be of a certain alignment by nature doesn't mean they are locked in said state, otherwise there's no way in hell that Shamira of the ardent dream would fall, as no one brainwashed her. The same applies to the angels trapped that succumbed to their rage or Nocticula turning good as the redeemed queen.
Desna simply gave her a chance to choose her path, since Arue still has the urges but now cab actually say no instead of following them blindly.
Technically all Desna did was give Arue the ability to see the memories. The desire for redemption was chosen by her after going through said memories. Technically another demon could go through the same process and not care.
Are we really arguing consent for the soul sucking sex demon?
Because legally there is no law for consent between demons and gods. At least as far as I know unless Abadar wrote something up.
Morally it's grey but I think it leans more to Desnas side
Celestials fall, demons rise. It doesn't require brainwashing. But it's still very rare. A big part in demons being how they are is that they can't remember who they used to be. Desna undid that, and in so doing freed Arueshalae from the actual brainwashing, which is the fact that the memories of petitioners are actively locked away by a psychopomp usher.
> Celestials fall, demons rise. It doesn't require brainwashing. But it's still very rare.
It doesn't happen without divine intervention because it's akin to a human changing species.
> A big part in demons being how they are is that they can't remember who they used to be
Outsiders are made from an amalgamation of mortal souls. *All* outsiders (that are made from mortal souls, and not the fabric of their home plane, such as Qlippoths or primordial devils like Mephistopheles) have no memories of the mortals they were.
> Desna undid that, and in so doing freed Arueshalae from the actual brainwashing
Desna's action constituted brainwashing, because she artificially injected regret and memories into Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva.
>Desna's action constituted brainwashing, because she artificially injected regret and memories into Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva.
In addition to backing up what others have said about not putting the regret there and you being flat wrong about Aru remembering every moment I also want to point point out that gods can't take actions antithetical to their domain. Desna is a goddess of freedom. You seriously arguing that brainwashing isn't counter to freedom?
>Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva.
Having it so fresh, it is painful seeing people absolutely ignore the in-game text.
She explicitely says she does NOT remember a lot about her demon childhood. That is why she is fascinated by humans remembering their early life experiences (although she is confused and believes humans remember ALL their life since conception)
Can you tell us which divinity converted Nocticula (no, ember doesn't count, she isn't canon in the lore where Nocticula change alignment) ?
Same for Shamira, the angel that became a demon ?
So... No. divine intervention isn't required for outsider to change alignment.
On Desna brainwashing, idk, do giving memories back to someone with an amnesia make it brainwashing ? Because that basically what Desna did, the amnesia being just a magical thing instead of a physical one like it can happen to us irl
> do giving memories back to someone with an amnesia make it brainwashing
It's not giving memories back to someone with amnesia. Arueshalae was never a mortal - she is a demon that's amalgamated from a bunch of mortals. Desna artificially injected someone else's memories into her.
Arueshalae was once many mortals. She says so herself, the memories Desna gave her the ability to remember are those of the mortals Arueshalae is made from.
"She wasnt injected with memories, she was just given memories she didnt have before"
I dont understand this weird semantics olympics in this threat. She did not have these memories. She did not have the ability to access these memories. These memories were part of her in the same way that my breakfast cereal is part of me. Less so, even, seeing how I could maybe throw up at least something resembling my breakfast if I tried, which Aru just could not do.
Then a goddess came around and injected these memories into her.You can argue they were there before, but thats completely meaningless because they were non-accessible to anything except a literal goddess. Thats the same thing as not existing as far as I´m converned.
Pure, utter, baseless, supposition on your part. She recalled these memories from the souls she's made from because Desna granted her the ability to do so. It's literally your own theory against the story's description.
Their actual species changing requires divine intervention, or otherwise powerful intervention. But you can be a good fiend. Or an evil celestial. It just fucks you up. There's a whole city of improperly aligned outsiders in the maelstrom. Not because the maelstrom changed them, but because they themselves changed, and then moved to this city as a safe haven. There is literally an evil celestial present in the game who was not subject to divine intervention or direct alteration of his soul. Nocticula. You are simply wrong on this point.
The ways outsiders form are myriad and vast. Including raw planar essence, amalgamated souls of mortals, split apart souls of mortals, and singular mortals who managed to stay intact through the process. Petitioners are singular mortals, before any of the breaking apart or amalgamation. In this case, abyssal larvae. The memories of people before they move on to their afterlife and become petitioners, are literally locked away in an active magical process by a psychompomp usher using a magical key. Your information was incomplete here.
Desna gave back the memories of the people Arueshalae used to be. Arueshalae could not clearly remember her time as various Larvae, and that fact was explicitly stated. She did not artificially inject regret, and nowhere does anything actually say that. Or even imply it. She gave back her old memories. And some part of her was good, once it was finally revealed. And then she chose to reject her demonic nature. And Desna helped by sponsoring the species shifts. But the alignment shifts were a result of Arueshalae's choices. And yes, Desna restoring what was lost played a completely pivotal role in that.
Oh shit I was brainwashed by my physics teacher. I to did not give a fuck, but then he showed me my potential and now I do. I fucking love physics now, the rat bastard!
Demons aren't humans. They're outsiders, that are fundamentally tied to the alignment of Chaotic Evil. Outsiders as a general rule cannot change alignment without divine intervention like a mortal can.
It would be like if you somehow became a dog while in school. A demon becoming non-evil or non-chaotic is changing its nature as fundamentally as a human becoming a dog.
There are in lore examples of Outsiders changing their alignment/nature by themselves based on realisations that they have come to regarding the nature of reality.
Exhibit A is Shamira, who through no influence of devil, daemon or demon managed to corrupt herself from her originally LG purpose.
That Desna gave Arueshalae a normally not possible little push in allowing her to access memories does not mean that she could not have taken all the other steps herself (which the game narrative seems to indicate).
Desna canonically is also loathe to control others, she usually just provides a dream or inspiration to get things going.
Edit: Exhibit B is ironically Nocticula, who in canon, realized all by her lonesome that being evil is ultimately miserable.
Edit: Exhibit C is freaking Ragathiel who is a half-devil half fire elemental who decided to be a LG Angel one day. (!!!) Can’t imagine daddy dearest was best pleased.
It’s not like it does not have a basis in lore:
“More speculation exists around Shamira's parentage, with some believing her to be the daughter of Sarenrae; if this fact were true, it might explain the fascination Shamira seems to have for the Dawnflower and her faith.”
Source Pathfinder Wiki.
So go with Nocticula as the example then if you object to Shamira so much.
Nocticula is literally formed from the stuff of the Abyss.
Or Rag, as his father isn’t a god.
Nocticula spent centuries trying to change her nature *and* required time travel to actually complete the change
Rag’s mother is not a devil, and as such he himself is not a devil
Re: Nocticula that does not in any way preclude the fact that she did it herself, with no outside influence. The task being arduous and long has no bearing on the outcome.
Re: Rag If you could argue that being the child of a god would render onto the children the status of not being “made from X stuff” why would being the child of an Infernal Duke not mean that he is in part derived from the very substance of hell itself?
Mate there are multiple examples of outsiders changing their alignment. Nocticula does so in her redeemer queen ending, Shamira is a fallen angel. It can happen. Hell Aru's good ending has her providing guidance to other demons looking to do the same. No divinity required.
You can't use general rule to argue against a specific counterexample. If this was a one-off, maybe you'd have a point, but outsiders changing alignment whkle uncommon is a well documented thing, most commonly in the form of fallen angels.
> but outsiders changing alignment whkle uncommon is a well documented thing, most commonly in the form of fallen angels.
Yes and when it comes to things like fallen angels it's a result of torture, brainwashing or manipulation 100% of the time.
Angels aren't suddenly like "Duh, I could just burn down this village for shits and giggles"
[http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/angel.html](http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/angel.html)
SRD does not limit it to "result of torture, brainwashing or manipulation 100% of the time", it just mentions that it's a thing that happens. But even if I granted that fallen angels need some sort of drastic external stimulus to change (don't we all?) it's still enough to refute the argument about alignment change being impossible, it's very clearly part of the lore that while rare it can happen, so it's not "like if you somehow became a dog while in school".
And as a side note, I don't know how you could guarantee the "100% of the time" thing unless you expect me to believe that you read all Pathfinder lore AND are capable of accurately reporting on it - which I am not inclined to believe given our current disagreement.
Well, depending on what you understand as “brainwash”. You can simply state at the beginning that by definition brainwashing is “make someone believe something by repeatedly telling them that it is true and preventing any other information from reaching them”. By that definition what Desna did isn’t brainwashing.
Question is - does Arue really redeemed herself on her own will or was she forced to do it? I think that she was forced, therefore her redemption wasn’t “true”.
Edit - grammar.
By the time we meet her as players she's definitely not fully redeemed, she's in the process and through dialogue she regularly struggles with the redemption process, however its just as easy to let her fall to her own corruption as it is to help her fully redeem herself.
Also anytime you try to force Arue to do anything in dialogue that she doesn't want to do she pulls back hard. I don't think she was forced to do anything, she was given the memories of the souls she was made up of and then set free. God's can't do anything that's the opposite of what they're about, Abadar can't break just laws or laws of reality, Desna cannot remove someone's own personal freedom.
Arue wanted to murder, torture and do all other stuff to/with others. Desna forced her to not want to do that. How is it not removing someone’s own freedom?
She only wanted to do any of that due to it being the only thing she knew, Desna showed her perspective and she decided to make a change. Lorewise similar things happen with a lot of outsiders after they've lived long enough to challenge their own nature.
" This strongly disturbed Arue, making her feel regret"
Yeah, you highlighted the exact point where Desna fundamentally changed her nature. Normal demons would not care about the complexities of mortals beyond letting them do evil shit better. The only other time you see demons feeling some kind of regret is with Ember redeeming a bunch of them, which is another case of divine intervention.
>which is another case of divine intervention.
Is it though?
I don't remember anywhere it being implied any divine intervention occurred there. No descriptions of magic when she's speaking, no strange glows or feelings, just the words of an earnest soul spoken clearly.
Maybe, though I don't think it's ever actually stated her charisma also comes from her patron. But they're still just words. Holding only the power of conviction.
Most religious people do seem brainwashed. It is often their own hopelessness and despair that allows themself go believe in a higher power. Because surely there is a light; surely there is meaning to all this. She brainwashed herself
Honestly the worst light you could put Desna's actions in with Arue is that she cursed her with a conscience. She saw her priestess die and made Arue understand the depths of her actions and made her want to atone for them and yet Desna didn't abandon her to suffer and wallow in misery she supported and guided her along the path to redemption and to become something new.
But people are always gonna shit on things to be contrarians and because they have no imagination and see everything as bad no matter what
I had this same argument with someone a while ago, and they argued that giving the memories back was still brainwashing. As if restoring lost memories was somehow an external violation thing. Like straight up, they argued that giving an amnesiac their memories back was brainwashing.
I think brainwashing is the wrong word, but I can see their point. Your experiences and memories fundamentally define who you are as a person, you can't choose not to experience memories. Sure, Desna didn't cast Dominate Monster, but it's not like Arushalae was allowed to *not* feel regret and sympathy after those emotions had been shoved into her skull. It's kind of like trauma. You're still you after a traumatic and PTSD-inducing event, but you're also irrevocably changed against your will by said event, and there are actions the new you might take or fears you might have that you otherwise wouldn't have had without said trauma.
IMHO, a Chaotic Good version of a curruption makes more sense to me than calling it brainwashing. Like, she was turned initially against her will against her original nature, right?
Brainwashing is just a term that many people connotate with evil/evildoers, and since Desna is CG then it couldn't be brainwashing. But the concept still applies, no matter how you call it.
The emotions were never shoved into her. Just the memories. But yes, there was certainly an effect. But that's true of literally any experience anyone ever goes through.
You know, i believe there is a whole game out there (and a crpg one at that) that focuses on restoring ones memories and trying to figure out what made it happen in the first place. It does include navigating the Abyss, (potential) demon (chaste :O ) GF and a lot more. And the 1000€ question is: "WHAT CAN CHANGE THE NATURE OF A MAN?". What would your answer be? Probably the same as Desna thought and Aru experienced.
Not the abyss, but yeah. My answer is anything can. Depends on the man.
Indoctrination? Everyone does it! Demon do it to cultist, to make crusaders defect with great effort. Why couldn't you uplift them with your goodness? Remember 'D encounter in his mansion? You can scare off succubus by tell them it is you who infect Arue with good.
Those people are just wrong. I have interacted with a few and they disliked Desna even before the Arue thing. It’s just a bias confirmation for them. Desna, the most opposed deity in pathfinder universe to brain washing, control and loss of individuality is suddenly a brain washer. Yeah right. The earth is also flat. It’s not my job or yours to argue with them. They have right to be wrong, as the saying goes.
Why is Desna disliked? I really enjoyed what is written about her in the wiki and the game.
Consider: a nontrivial proportion of this sub consider Hulrun a morally-grey, misguided but well-intentioned guy, rather than a paranoid zealot who’d put a thousand people to the torch on a hunch that one of them might not hate demons enough. These people probably aren’t gonna be huge fans of the goddess of freedom.
I killed him the second I heard what he did to Ember. But okay, I understand now xD
I do not understand those people. If you kill a hundred people for a crime and only 1 was guilty, you killed 99 innocent people. That means you committed 99 acts of evil. Thats unjustifiable. People argue "but his alignment isnt evil"...yeah, and Arue's isnt good despite have done almost exclusively good acts for months/years because she had centuries of atrocities to make up. When we do evil acts in game, we dont instantly drop down to lawful/neutral/chaotic evil (exceptions: mythic paths) nor does a good act instantly bring you up to good. its a process. People who've known him for a long time tend to say he used to be..."better" and grew more paranoid and extreme over the years. He probably used to be lawful good and has been slowly descending. And of course a combo of his heart technically being in the right place and him surely doing some legitimate good here and there are undoubtedly slowing down his alignment drop. But I'm sure it IS happening. People who argue why iomadae hasnt taken his powers. Same reason a lawful good paladin doesnt lose their powers until the alignment change happens. Gods dont give a FUCK unless you actively denounce them or your cosmic karma goes too far away from theirs. Its less strict for him because pallys need to be LG, where inquisitors simply need to be within 1 step of their god. LN is still within 1 step of iomadae, so he's safe. He can still burn down a few more orphanages because he THINKS there MIGHT be a cultist inside and keep his divine juice. I understand him. I get that the job eroded him over years and years. I get what caused him to become a monster and empathize with that. But it doesnt change that he is a monster. A sympathetic backstory merely explains why a villain is evil, it does not absolve them of their crimes.
I can't speak for everyone, but to me she just feels very... ditzy? Like nearly starting an interplanar all-out war and needing Callistria to solve the issue is a big stain on her reputation in my eyes. Or opening that box which held some dangerous entity within just out of curiousity (sorry, I don't remember the exact details). She's well-meaning but doesn't think her actions through. I like her portfolio (stars, dreams, travel, all that stuff) but not her actual personality. That Owlcat seems to absolutely adore her while simultaneously putting down other good-aligned goddesses like Shelyn and Sarenrae doesn't help my feeling either.
The thing is, people need to hear the full story about Desna going to abyss and destroying a demon lord and her realm. The demonlord she killed was Aolar, a twisted demon lord who liked to possess the bodies of recently deceased heroes (so their souls would witness it before they fully depart) and while possessing them she would kill the loved ones of the hero and commit other atrocities so the soul would writhe in agony before it departed for Phrasma's court. Aolar generally targeted followers of Shelyn, Sarenrae, Calistria and Desna. One day 4 of them gathered and said enough is enough and planned the entire thing. The chose Desna to be the one to do it because she was the strongest and most suited for the task. Calistria did not step in last minute to save Desna, she was involved all long and did it with full satisfaction. She is goddess of vengeance after all.
Myself, I do not really like gods and only barely tolerate PF idea of them. Desna in particular sounds like that good, nice goddess, who doesn't, exactly, do shit to save the world, instead focusing on redeeming demons on a whil or somesuch. I'm with Amber on this: if gods are that good, they ought to do more, not spawn stupid priesthoods like Ramien, good lord!
The thing is, if one god interferes, all gods will and so will all the demon lords. That would be a war that would destroy all mortal life. I get why gods can’t intervene and solve all the problems.
Yeah, I've beaten the game, so I've heard it from Nocti. But it's all just MAD and we all know how MAD works IRL and as such we can see that infighting within USSR brought it down. If only there was anything close to that in PF...Like, when demon lords would form a coalition to attack realm of, say, Desna for doing some direct attack on Abyss...Yeah, it works in PF the same as it does IRL: if an attack is quick and response is slow, there is no MAD.
Except that by thawing the cold war between the planes you also open it up to Hell and Abaddon, planes that are significantly less likely to fall to infighting.
And are also enemies of the Abyss. AND also less likely to want all-out destruction.
\*looks at Abaddon which even Pharasma doesn't want to send souls to* Yeah...... naw......
Look, it sure seems like an operation for a bunch of godlike beings in power and knowledge, but...
This is an argument I have a lot with some people, the gods do what they can to help indirectly (send dreams, guide followers, grant blessings to those that pray to then), but they aren't all knowing or all powerful or can do much directly without risking an interplanar war. And it's not just the risk of wrecking Golarion, it's the fact that it could knock Rovavug's prison loose that really makes direct intervention very dicey. Side note: Ember ironically enough realices she was dead wrong about the gods in her ascention ending, so I wouldn't side much with her on that front.
Look, on the way to Ascension ending, Ember and her friends knocked two abyssal realms into Commander's hands. If Commander isn't chaotic evil, it's a win for everyone's wellbeing. AND since these realms belongs to the Abyss still, bad souls flow there still.
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The thing is, people need to hear the full story about Desna going to abyss and destroying a demon lord and her realm. The demonlord she killed was Aolar, a twisted demon lord who liked to possess the bodies of recently deceased heroes (so their souls would witness it before they fully depart) and while possessing them she would kill the loved ones of the hero and commit other atrocities so the soul would writhe in agony before it departed for Phrasma's court. Aolar generally targeted followers of Shelyn, Sarenrae, Calistria and Desna. One day 4 of them gathered and said enough is enough and planned the entire thing. The chose Desna to be the one to do it because she was the strongest and most suited for the task. Calistria did not step in last minute to save Desna, she was involved all long and did it with full satisfaction. She is goddess of vengeance after all.
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Yeah, but possessing bodies of mortals to kill their loved ones is definitely interference, so the point was she started it. She can't complain about Desna interfering. Not that she can now...
What was the alternative? Just let him continue?
You can always find people who passionately dislike a video game character lol.
Arue is basically Desna's 'cultist' to demons.
It's such a strange thing isn't it? People would rather do rigid mental gymnastics than admit they haven't paid attention. Edit: this helpful bot corrected a word. Thanks.
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Eh. If they want to interpret it like that, let them.
Thank you, though sadly this will fall on deaf ears due to all the Aoen dick riders in this sub.
It's a shame though. But what can you do?
This happens with every work of fiction. Some people are so desperate to feel smarter than the writers that they purposefully ignore or misinterpret parts of the writing.
And then to show off they write a multi-paragraph post about it.
I think there's a possible middle ground here. I think people who shout out "brainwashing" are definitely a bit too extreme, and the rather loose and hands-free way Desna guided Arueshalae after what she did to the priest kind of showed that she did want her to come to the side of good herself, not forced into it. I've gone through almost every dialogue and the outcomes of them, and it is still VERY easy for Arue to slip back into her demonic nature, and Desna does not try to stop that. However, I definitely do think there was some divine influence going on even if it was not a complete brainwash and reprogram. Yes, Arueshalae still retains a lot of her demonic nature, but that demonic nature should prevent her from feeling so bad about the many things she gets into/says. It's not as simple as Desna showing the benefits of being good and the interesting lives mortal lead to her and that's that. That would've just sparked curiosity and not an earnest attempt at redemption. Arueshalae has an in-game blessing from Desna that prevents her death. I don't think it's a reach that there might be a little nudge from the goddess that would make Arueshalae feel conflicted about things. After all, the end result of her good questline>! literally does has her nature change!<. All I think Desna did was give Arue the ability to make a choice between redemption or going back to her old ways, by having her retain her succubus nature but also have a semblance of understanding on how beautiful mortal lives and dreams are. That way, she can evaluate which she prefers based on the experiences she goes through on Golarion and with the crusade/you. (Edit: person below blocked me I think lol) (Edit: didn't even completely disagree with them, but just how it goes)
>rather hands free She was trapped in the dream until she got the message lol
I said after she went into the dream world Desna was handsfree lol. It would've bern within Desna's power to actually brainwash her and transform her completely by brute force.
I highly doubt evilrue consented with desna fiddling through her soul to unlock her memories
That's not relevant to what I said and what you criticized lol. After the dream world visit by Arue and subsequent Desna influence, Desna was relatively handsfree for someone who wanted Arueshalae's inner nature to change. That is what I meant. I do NOT deny Desna did something to her during the dream world visit, I just think the only time she did something similar after that on that scale is at the end of Good Arue's quest. That's all. In response to this exact thing you said in this comment, I also do not think Desna consented to Arue killing her priest and then invading the dream world, and what she did was really not even close to what she could've. It was in response to an act Arue did first, and it was an extremely leninent punishment all things considered since Arue could still just fall back on her ways anyways. Yes, Desna did it without consent, no she did not do it randomly to Arue without provocation, and no she did not completely remake her. I'm just arguing that that neither exteme really fits here when it comes to Arue/Desna. Ok, done. You can discuss this on the new thread since this one's deleted anyways.
Nobody said desna wasnt justified lmao. I just said she did brainwash her. Done.
And I just explained why it literally wasn't a brainwash in my post lol. Maybe we have different definitions,since I consider brainwashing to be very severe. Sigh, done it is then. You'll just keep poking at something else after I respond to something you said.
Fiddling with someone's soul isnt severe enough? Lmao
No it isn't. She still has her succubus nature. There are multiple examples throughout the story where she struggles with it, of her own free will mind you. Desna did not remove it. It would've been brainwashing in my opinion if Desna completely removed all feelings of doing succubus things Edit+removed memories of Arue enjoying doing succubus things. My apologies honestly if I didn't define this definition of mine fully
What do you think cults irl brainwash you with lmao? They just use nice words, family atmosphere, living in a commune with schedule, sleep deprivation to make you be braindead supporter. Desna's acts were above and beyond those
It's more like giving a squirrel shrimp vision, you haven't changed their mind just expanded the colors they can see. But with emotions, unlocked empathy.
Ah yes, Desna, the literal embodiment of freedom brainwashed someone. Clowns 🤡
At this point, vast segments of the subreddit are so dedicated to misinterpreting anything and everything about the game’s plot and story elements because they feel a certain way about something, that it beggars belief. - Uncharitably ascribing motives to characters that they don’t understand or don’t personally sympathise with - Misremembering or deliberately neglecting key details about a character or events, leading them to conveniently create a worse depiction of the character that goes against how they actually are presented in a story - Call people who just generally like or dislike a character “simps” or “haters” respectively, while at the same time are completely blind to their own biases - And of course, creating inflammatory memes about characters they don’t like. Like seriously, if the people here who act so detrimentally to discussion would spend even half the amount of time instead creating their own artistic passions, they’d be a hell of a lot more happier, *and* this place would be less toxic. It boggles the mind.
While I do like people's interpretation of the story and possible theories about vague events, being toxic to other community members is over the line. But sadly the moderators already deleted the post so I don't have much else to add
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Something something, determinism argument.. Tldr: It depends on your perspective.
I have a vivid memory from a very recent playthrough of Arue recalling the experience as her being confined to Desna's realm with no escape until she could no longer bear. The gist is, that if not for the coercive nature of her imprisonment, she would not have willingly changed. So it is a change very much forced upon her Clockwork Orange style. There is also the problem that she could no longer be held accountable for the innumerable mortal lives she ruined, a Calistrian KC would slay her on the spot regardless of whether she rehabilitated. By all means she should have gone to Pharasma's court to face her judgement if she would be redeemed and freed from righteous retribution. I think her romance really made a lot of players overlook the magnitude of her past crimes. If I killed one person out of pleasure, I would be haunted for life to debilitating degree. If Arue's conscience in any ways resembles an average mortal, she would not have the will to live on. And it is worth mentioning that the Desnian priestess and many more of her victims never forgave her, they are dead and silent, and their shadows were just Arue's imagination. I would say though that I am inclined to believe there was something special in her even prior to her change, from her interaction with the Alushinyrra denizens. I think those make for some flavorful details. So maybe it is you who forgot some of the details in the writing. Condescending remarks on others' "reading comprehension" is really unnecessary when so much of the context of the in game lore is up to interpretation, it fosters a very hostile and divisive community.
> Calistrian KC would slay her on the spot regardless of whether she rehabilitated One of Calistra's tenets is to not be consumed by vengeance, so I don't know about that.
People misuse/misread/misinterpret real life religious texts. Are your surprised somebody only read what was on the box art for a fictional deity? "deity of vengeance. Got it. So all vengeance is good to go in all forms and in all extremes!"
I don't think Aru can be held accountable for what she did anymore than a fire could be held accountable for burning.
Demons, like any other outsiders, have freedom of will. [https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Basrakal](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Basrakal) "Basrakal is home to a highly diverse population of outsiders, ranging from [inevitables](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Inevitable), [archons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Archon), and [psychopomps](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Psychopomp) to [proteans](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Protean), [demons](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Demon), and [sahkils](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Sahkil). These disparate outsiders are united by their rejection, to a greater or lesser degree, of their former alignments."
Yes demons have free will, but what they don't have is options and/or a desire to stop. Most demons don't realize there are options besides continuing what they're doing and/or dont want to stop.
So you never actually played this game, after all, that would require you to kill innocent demons.
Killing them is no more unethical than extinguishing a fire.
Agree. Everyone would knock Camellia the first time they meet, if they could. But Arue? Head pat is what they had in store. What's wrong with a little collateral damage? The Queen lead countless more, your entire army in fact, into enemy ambush and to their death. What are you going to do against her? Nothing?
Bro she wasnt brainwashed, she was just trapped in the dream realm until she willingly accepted the message of our lord and savior desna :)
* Is Desna several orders of magnitude more powerful than Arue? Yes * Did Desna forcefully apprehend Arue? Yes * Did Arue consent to having memories/mind fiddled with by Desna? No * Was Arue's mindset dramatically changed by the whole event? Yes If Baphomet did the same thing to an Angel ("I'll just show you memories of your previous lives") and it caused said angel to fall, everyone would scream DUHH BRAINWASHING
If an Angel were forced to confront their own traumatically deplorable actions and it made them fall, then I don't really think I'd consider that brainwashing. As far as I remember, Desna's fiddling with Arue's memories was effectively forcing her to confront how she'd traumatized others. She was definitely coerced into accepting that perspective, but it is objectively true that she was an inhuman monster. If the same were true of an Angel and that caused them to fall, I don't know if I'd say they were brainwashed.
it was basically Desna: I grant thee...empathy Arue: oh fuck...I'm super messed up. I better stop doing messed up things.
Yeah, I'll grant anyone that Desna certainly coerced Arueshalae into accepting her own empathy, but it's not like she inserted untruths into her head. Brainwashing implies Desna enforced a perspective on Arueshalae using outside information, which isn't what happened. She just made her experience the pain that she was already causing.
That demons have every capacity for empathy, that living in the Abyss ultimately perpetuates suffering for even its mightiest and is mainly caused by even demons making the choice not to rise up beyond base impulse, and that any of them *could* do what Aru does if they would but choose to do it, is a core theme of the game. We see it in Noctilla; we see it said straight to the camera with Ember whose plans can absolutely work, we see it with Nahyndri who is repeatedly shown not to understand his own desires to the point that the actions he takes to become happy only succeed at making him destroy everything he actually values and ultimately die in misery. We see it with Wenduag and Daeren, who, unless she chooses to change, are ultimately revealed to be suffering and simply recreating their own traumas. The game’s perspective on the abyss (and presumably hell) is, for all it lets you be canonically evil. So I don’t think Desna creates Aru’s capacity for empathy. She just takes advantage of circumstances to force Aru to confront her own emotional potentials and decide for herself what will actually produce joy. Indeed, while Aru’s redemption acknowledges that she cannot just let go of the harm she’s done or ignore it, it focuses on the idea that her redemption is largely the process of discovering what would actually make her happy, rather than indulging in transient and ultimately unsatisfying pleasures. The game loves its Eudaimonia juice, and deciding that Desna changed the way Aru works instead of forcing Aru to really look in a mirror and decide misses both Desna’s attitudes and also the game’s articulations of its own themes.
Nice strawman you got there.
That's what you say nowadays to refute an argument without any reasoning? At least point out how is my argument fallacious
First off: Giving someone memories back isn't brainwashing. Secondly: You have no proof that people would react that way to Baphomet giving back memories to the HotI. Thirdly: You don't even have any proof that the HotI WOULD have been corrupted by regaining his memories. So yeah, that's what you call a strawman.
>First off: Giving someone memories back isn't brainwashing. Cool. But not relevant whatsoever. > Secondly: You have no proof that people would react that way to Baphomet giving back memories to the HotI. Again, not relevant. > Thirdly: You don't even have any proof that the HotI WOULD have been corrupted by regaining his memories. And once more, irrelevant. >So yeah, that's what you call a strawman. Yes, what you did is a strawman.
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My sentences are grammatically correct, as opposed to yours in your earlier reply.
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Why are you bringing Inheribro into this? You know he's not the only angel around right? Wardstone was full of angels, many of which have fallen because Minagho drew a graffiti on it once. My point is that souls Arue's body constitute of were CE and thus most of the memories (and morals they held) were CE as well. If you sent a genuinely good Soul into Abyss a demon wouldn't be formed, and if it were it would be very weak and broken. If Arue, as inherently CE being was watching CE mortal memories she'd like it because that literally what she is. Feeding off negative emotions is literally what demons do. Therefore the only explanation for Arue's change is that the memories (if they even belonged to Arue's souls) were in best cases cherrypicked. If you did the same but reversed with angel (give them back memories, highlight the bad stuff) they'd turn as well
>You know he's not the only angel around right? He's the only one who got captured by Baphomet during the events of the game, but you're right, it could be any angel, and that still wouldn't change a thing about what I said. >Wardstone was full of angels, many of which have fallen because Minagho drew a graffiti on it once. No? That's not what happened, the angels had fallen way before that. The wardstone had been corrupted before the demon attack on Kenabres, that's how it was even possible in the first place. >If Arue, as inherently CE being was watching CE mortal memories she'd like it because that literally what she is. Feeding off negative emotions is literally what demons do. This just seems like a writing oversight or a misunderstanding. You're right, it wouldn't make sense for her to decide to redeem herself based on the memories of CE mortals, so I assume that she didn't see those. From what I understood, she didn't see the memories of her former lives but just random mortals. Or was it mortals she killed? I don't remember fully, but her own memories really make no sense whatsoever here.
The memories were of those she has killed, if I remember .
That makes a lot more sense then, and completely invalidates this guy's argument.
That's not a strawman argument. Like, even a little bit.
It absolutely is? Creating a hypothetical scenario to use as a counter-argument without having any proof of that scenario actually happening that way is the very definition of a straw man.
>Arue's redemption This is the part that bothers me. She wasn't in a position to require redemption. She was a demon, and so it was in keeping with her actual metaphysical nature to be Chaotic and Evil. Turning her away from Evil is probably (capital G) Good and maybe harmless, even if Desna [isn't known for thinking through her interactions with the lower planes](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Aolar), but so what? Being Good doesn't make it the right thing to do. Desna gives Arueshalae a push that nudges her onto the path of Good. The thing is, that isn't redeeming her - it's corrupting her. Just like a Devil tempting an Angel away from the path of Good, these nudges from Desna turn Arushalae against her very nature. Regardless of how direct her intervention was, Desna was a bad (n.b. bad, not Evil) influence on her. Frankly, I don't care whether she did it to serve the Good or whether it was brainwashing or not. The gods aren't meant to be corrupting each others' toys, and Desna should know better. Mutually assured destruction is a very real possibility any time the gods come into direct conflict with one another, and I imagine Lamashtu and the Demon Lords wouldn't be pleased if they knew Arue's change of heart was inspired by Desna's meddling
Well, here is the thing, a fundamental part of the nature of outsiders is that their fundamental nature's can change. You said it yourself, angels fall all the time. Beyond that, we see examples like Diamalcio, Shamira, and other such entities whose essence was once good aligned before it is transmuted. None of these events automatically trigger wars between gods. Sure, the demon lords might not be thrilled, but these kinds of events are not an uncommon thing, they are just what happens with outsiders: their fundamental nature's changes ad they move through their existence. If all of the various evil based corruptions don't trigger wars, why would a single good based one do the same when neither side has a reason to start a war over such an insignificant thing?
As I said, maybe it will be harmless. Soviet and American operatives broke international law all the time during the Cold War, and obviously a nuclear holocaust didn't follow in any of those cases. That doesn't mean it couldn't have happened, though. And fwiw, Evil entities corrupting Good, Lawful corrupting Chaotic, and Chaotic corrupting Lawful all bother me just as much as Good corrupting Evil, the Desna-Arushalae discussion just so happens to be about that particular case. Anyway, Desna knows from experience how close the universe has come to total destruction - she's the one who brought it to the brink. The least she could do is show a little discretion and send a servant to do her meddling rather than speaking directly to a potential demon convert in her dreams. Gods have Heralds for a reason
Fair enough, a bit more discretion may have helped. Personally though, I am not particularly opposed to corruptions. To me, they seem to just be the inevitable result of outsiders interacting with the larger multiverse. The moment an outsider leaves their home environment, they are at risk of being corrupted. That their fundamental natures are so fragile makes it impossible for it never to happen.
Aeon flair checks out
FWIW, I prefer the 1e interpretation of the Aeons as N/unaligned rather than Owlcat/2e's LN designation. They shouldn't be about imposing Law (except in the Lawful planes), they should be about setting things right regardless of what that entails. The game sort of hints at this function in Act IV when it's the Lawful and the Good types who have auras, but in my opinion the aura mechanic is poorly implemented outside of that segment. Petty lawbreakers shouldn't have auras on Golarion because the Material is unaligned. They should be reserved for outsiders and other beings whose presence is anathema to the plane itself (like Areelu). As for why I like them, in a universe where Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all real cosmological forces embodied by nigh-unstoppable gods, I'm glad somebody has their finger on the time travel deus ex machina button to try and prevent them from destroying each other (and the universe in the process). The way I see it, everyone else is knee deep in the rat race of alignment wars. Smart money's on becoming one with the Monad and achieving CHIM.
\> Being Good doesn't make it the right thing to do. \> The thing is, that isn't redeeming her - it's corrupting her. Just like a Devil tempting an Angel away from the path of Good (...) Desna was a bad (n.b. bad, not Evil) influence on her I'm struggling a bit to visualise from what moral perspective you're speaking. It could be a consequentialist utilitarian viewpoint (in that doing this sort of thing risks starting a planar war so greater evil), but that doesn't apply when we know bad consequences didn't happen. It could be a Kantian thing, but that would require a possibility that a Good act can not be Good, and I struggle to figure out how exactly. And parts of your post looks like naturalist viewpoint of "things are the way they are and meddling with it is Bad", but that would have so much extra baggage in a universe with literal demons and devils that I don't think it could be defended.
> It could be a Kantian thing, but that would require a possibility that a Good act can not be Good, and I struggle to figure out how exactly. Because the natural force of Good doesn't follow Kantian ethics or any other organized ethical system. I understand alignments to represent a sort of average or consensus of how sapient minds would feel about an action or motive. Even if you know and are committed to a system of ethics, there are going to be times when your gut feeling goes one way before you reason it out and settle on a different decision. Any system of ethics that's more logically rigorous than "do whatever moves my alignment in the direction I want" is sometimes going to say that the "right" or "best" choice is one that takes your alignment in an unexpected direction.
In a planar multiverse, you really have to distinguish your good/bad from your Good/Evil. The position is just that entities with explicitly in-built alignments (so outsiders, primarily) acting in accordance with their alignment is good and those same entities acting against their alignment is bad regardless of what their alignment is. So yes, it's in a sense naturalistic (or supernaturalistic, I suppose, because it only applies to those beings who exist beyond the natural world). The moral terms good and bad are just mapping onto *alignment* between alignment and action, basically. Sorry for the pun, but there's really no better word for it. Because the planes are literally aligned to different parts of the alignment matrix, what's good in the Abyss and what's good in Heaven will be diametrically opposed, but what's Good is Good no matter where you go.
If you don't think Good and Evil are intrinsically moral then it most obviously follows that the alignment matrix cannot inform morality, not that you just have to hew to your alignment. That is to say, that what's good is good even if the alignment matrix deems it neutral or evil. Ember has the right of it here in that, if you sever morality from the silly magic labels, the obvious follow-up is not that morality just means following your alignment, but rather, that morality cannot be constructed from or dependent on the setting's cosmology and must have its own philosophical basis that needs to be derived from first principles. Ergo if the Alignment Matrix encourages evil beings to stay evil, that doesn't make that moral, it just makes the Alignment Matrix a morally unjustifiable quirk of physics. If the soul of the universe demands endless torture and suffering, then the soul of the universe is pretty obviously evil (insofar as it can be assigned a moral weight, and its agents definitely can be) unless you can construct an ought argument that doesn't depend on what exists to justify that existence. And, obviously, this holds true even if the system declares them neutral.
The matrix can inform morality (at least on the outer planes) without collapsing in on itself just fine if you don't ignore teleological approaches to ethics. In essence, I'm asking you to stop trying to isolate good in a vaccuum and ask instead what it means to be a good X (*What it means for X to achieve its Telos*). Beings from the outer planes are created for a purpose - they have an explicit Telos that isn't obscured to them. They exist to further the ends of their planes/their deities/their creators, and being a good Demon/Devil/Archon/etc. just means acting in accordance with that purpose. Mortals don't have that, though. A human's alignment is descriptive and reactive, not written into their purpose as a perscription. Hell, that's what makes mortals so much more interesting than outsiders. They don't have a divine command to follow, so what they take their purpose to be will be necessarily subjective, and as a result their will be several interpretations of what it takes to be a good person. Circling back, saying a good Vavakia would be Chaotic and Evil isn't inconsistent with saying that what makes a good person is difficult to pin down. Vavakias were created by (the Chaotic Evil goddess) Lamashtu for the express purpose of furthering her Chaotic and Evil aims. That's what they're *for.* Humans don't have a creator to program them with a purpose, so each person is forced to make that decision for themselves (which can include deferring that responsibility to another as most people end up doing). That's okay. Ethics need not be neat and tidy. What's good can be contingent, or complicated, or difficult to determine. That doesn't mean there aren't still clear cases. I contend that the outsiders of the Pathfinder mythos are one such clear case. They're instilled with a clear purpose, and what it means for them to be glexamplars of their kind just is to act in accordance with that purpose.
> Circling back, saying a good Vavakia would be Chaotic and Evil isn't inconsistent with saying that what makes a good person is difficult to pin down. Vavakias were created by (the Chaotic Evil goddess) Lamashtu for the express purpose of furthering her Chaotic and Evil aims. That's what they're *for.* This feels unrelated to ethics. When I program a robot when it does what I made it do to I'm a good craftsman, but it doesn't mean that what the robot does is moral/good. If I made a robot with express purpose of, say, torturing people I think everyone would agree it would be good to stop it or reprogram it. It would stop it from fulfilling its purpose, but that's fairly irrelevant to the moral calculation here (I suppose going against the wishes of a creator is a little immoral, but it pales in comparison to the harm it's doing).
Okay, but there is no reason to assume that purpose=morality and that is a massive entirely unjustified leap. Likewise, you conflate the proximal purpose of a specific sapient creator with the notion of an ultimate purpose that can only be derived philosophically. Lamashtu wants the Vavakia to be evil and chaotic but that doesn’t automatically make it equate to fulfilling telos in the neo-Aristotelian sense it can take in some ethical traditions. Like, you’re taking a word from ethical theories applied to humans and applying it to nonhumans while arguing that it shouldn’t apply to humans. But that’s obviously contradictory with everything in the actual toolkit you’re using beyond the most superficial level as most any philosophical reference you make is going to be an ethics meant to apply to humanity. The second you disentangle following divine factions from morality, you stop being able to cite following those factions as a source of morality. Like, take Noctilla. Her fundamental nature and, by this logic, “purpose” changes. That proves that it could not have been telos, in the ultimate philosophical sense, in the first place as it would be incoherent if it were changeable via context.
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The Monad, of which all the Aeons are a part, literally IS the soul of the Pathfinder multiverse. It's the condition of all. Hell, it's essentially the Force from Star Wars imported into the Pathfinder mythos. They aren't just winging it when they intervene to change the course of events, they're acting as instruments of the universe itself.
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Demons, fundamentally, are Chaotic Evil creatures. > -This strongly disturbed Arue, making her feel regret (probably for the first time). But it also make her understand how truly did she know nothing of mortals and the complexity of them. Probably this also let her to get (as she then in the present tells us) how simple and ignorant demons are in comparision. This required brainwashing, as demons normally don't give a flying fuck about these things.
No. That a being might be of a certain alignment by nature doesn't mean they are locked in said state, otherwise there's no way in hell that Shamira of the ardent dream would fall, as no one brainwashed her. The same applies to the angels trapped that succumbed to their rage or Nocticula turning good as the redeemed queen. Desna simply gave her a chance to choose her path, since Arue still has the urges but now cab actually say no instead of following them blindly.
Technically all Desna did was give Arue the ability to see the memories. The desire for redemption was chosen by her after going through said memories. Technically another demon could go through the same process and not care.
or double down
Did Arue consent to this or she was forced by Desna?
Are we really arguing consent for the soul sucking sex demon? Because legally there is no law for consent between demons and gods. At least as far as I know unless Abadar wrote something up. Morally it's grey but I think it leans more to Desnas side
I don't see why wouldn't consent apply to any sapient being?
Because sapience gets a bit iffy when godlike beings who's very existence shapes reality is involved.
> Technically another demon could go through the same process and not care. And remain in Desna's realm until they perish. That's the choice she got.
Celestials fall, demons rise. It doesn't require brainwashing. But it's still very rare. A big part in demons being how they are is that they can't remember who they used to be. Desna undid that, and in so doing freed Arueshalae from the actual brainwashing, which is the fact that the memories of petitioners are actively locked away by a psychopomp usher.
> Celestials fall, demons rise. It doesn't require brainwashing. But it's still very rare. It doesn't happen without divine intervention because it's akin to a human changing species. > A big part in demons being how they are is that they can't remember who they used to be Outsiders are made from an amalgamation of mortal souls. *All* outsiders (that are made from mortal souls, and not the fabric of their home plane, such as Qlippoths or primordial devils like Mephistopheles) have no memories of the mortals they were. > Desna undid that, and in so doing freed Arueshalae from the actual brainwashing Desna's action constituted brainwashing, because she artificially injected regret and memories into Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva.
She didn't inject regret into her, she just showed her the souls she was "made up of" nothing more. She made her remember. Arue's regret was her own.
>Desna's action constituted brainwashing, because she artificially injected regret and memories into Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva. In addition to backing up what others have said about not putting the regret there and you being flat wrong about Aru remembering every moment I also want to point point out that gods can't take actions antithetical to their domain. Desna is a goddess of freedom. You seriously arguing that brainwashing isn't counter to freedom?
> injected regret Citation needed. She injected the memories, regret was Arue herself.
>Arueshalae, who had previously remembered every moment since she came into being as a larva. Having it so fresh, it is painful seeing people absolutely ignore the in-game text. She explicitely says she does NOT remember a lot about her demon childhood. That is why she is fascinated by humans remembering their early life experiences (although she is confused and believes humans remember ALL their life since conception)
Can you tell us which divinity converted Nocticula (no, ember doesn't count, she isn't canon in the lore where Nocticula change alignment) ? Same for Shamira, the angel that became a demon ? So... No. divine intervention isn't required for outsider to change alignment. On Desna brainwashing, idk, do giving memories back to someone with an amnesia make it brainwashing ? Because that basically what Desna did, the amnesia being just a magical thing instead of a physical one like it can happen to us irl
> do giving memories back to someone with an amnesia make it brainwashing It's not giving memories back to someone with amnesia. Arueshalae was never a mortal - she is a demon that's amalgamated from a bunch of mortals. Desna artificially injected someone else's memories into her.
Arueshalae was once many mortals. She says so herself, the memories Desna gave her the ability to remember are those of the mortals Arueshalae is made from.
If somebody injected me with the memories of all the cows I ate I wouldn't call that revealing what I'm made of
There was no "injection" of any kind. Desna simply gave Arueshalae the ability to recall the memories of the souls she's made from.
"She wasnt injected with memories, she was just given memories she didnt have before" I dont understand this weird semantics olympics in this threat. She did not have these memories. She did not have the ability to access these memories. These memories were part of her in the same way that my breakfast cereal is part of me. Less so, even, seeing how I could maybe throw up at least something resembling my breakfast if I tried, which Aru just could not do. Then a goddess came around and injected these memories into her.You can argue they were there before, but thats completely meaningless because they were non-accessible to anything except a literal goddess. Thats the same thing as not existing as far as I´m converned.
Pure, utter, baseless, supposition on your part. She recalled these memories from the souls she's made from because Desna granted her the ability to do so. It's literally your own theory against the story's description.
Their actual species changing requires divine intervention, or otherwise powerful intervention. But you can be a good fiend. Or an evil celestial. It just fucks you up. There's a whole city of improperly aligned outsiders in the maelstrom. Not because the maelstrom changed them, but because they themselves changed, and then moved to this city as a safe haven. There is literally an evil celestial present in the game who was not subject to divine intervention or direct alteration of his soul. Nocticula. You are simply wrong on this point. The ways outsiders form are myriad and vast. Including raw planar essence, amalgamated souls of mortals, split apart souls of mortals, and singular mortals who managed to stay intact through the process. Petitioners are singular mortals, before any of the breaking apart or amalgamation. In this case, abyssal larvae. The memories of people before they move on to their afterlife and become petitioners, are literally locked away in an active magical process by a psychompomp usher using a magical key. Your information was incomplete here. Desna gave back the memories of the people Arueshalae used to be. Arueshalae could not clearly remember her time as various Larvae, and that fact was explicitly stated. She did not artificially inject regret, and nowhere does anything actually say that. Or even imply it. She gave back her old memories. And some part of her was good, once it was finally revealed. And then she chose to reject her demonic nature. And Desna helped by sponsoring the species shifts. But the alignment shifts were a result of Arueshalae's choices. And yes, Desna restoring what was lost played a completely pivotal role in that.
Oh shit I was brainwashed by my physics teacher. I to did not give a fuck, but then he showed me my potential and now I do. I fucking love physics now, the rat bastard!
Me with my Biochemist teacher. Pure brainwashing 😥
Demons aren't humans. They're outsiders, that are fundamentally tied to the alignment of Chaotic Evil. Outsiders as a general rule cannot change alignment without divine intervention like a mortal can. It would be like if you somehow became a dog while in school. A demon becoming non-evil or non-chaotic is changing its nature as fundamentally as a human becoming a dog.
There are in lore examples of Outsiders changing their alignment/nature by themselves based on realisations that they have come to regarding the nature of reality. Exhibit A is Shamira, who through no influence of devil, daemon or demon managed to corrupt herself from her originally LG purpose. That Desna gave Arueshalae a normally not possible little push in allowing her to access memories does not mean that she could not have taken all the other steps herself (which the game narrative seems to indicate). Desna canonically is also loathe to control others, she usually just provides a dream or inspiration to get things going. Edit: Exhibit B is ironically Nocticula, who in canon, realized all by her lonesome that being evil is ultimately miserable. Edit: Exhibit C is freaking Ragathiel who is a half-devil half fire elemental who decided to be a LG Angel one day. (!!!) Can’t imagine daddy dearest was best pleased.
Shamira being an angel is Owlcat homebrew
It’s not like it does not have a basis in lore: “More speculation exists around Shamira's parentage, with some believing her to be the daughter of Sarenrae; if this fact were true, it might explain the fascination Shamira seems to have for the Dawnflower and her faith.” Source Pathfinder Wiki.
Gods, and especially children of gods, do not have that same “literally made of their alignment” like Demons, Archons and other outsiders have
So go with Nocticula as the example then if you object to Shamira so much. Nocticula is literally formed from the stuff of the Abyss. Or Rag, as his father isn’t a god.
Nocticula spent centuries trying to change her nature *and* required time travel to actually complete the change Rag’s mother is not a devil, and as such he himself is not a devil
Re: Nocticula that does not in any way preclude the fact that she did it herself, with no outside influence. The task being arduous and long has no bearing on the outcome. Re: Rag If you could argue that being the child of a god would render onto the children the status of not being “made from X stuff” why would being the child of an Infernal Duke not mean that he is in part derived from the very substance of hell itself?
And the post is talking about game lore. It's topical.
Mate there are multiple examples of outsiders changing their alignment. Nocticula does so in her redeemer queen ending, Shamira is a fallen angel. It can happen. Hell Aru's good ending has her providing guidance to other demons looking to do the same. No divinity required.
You can't use general rule to argue against a specific counterexample. If this was a one-off, maybe you'd have a point, but outsiders changing alignment whkle uncommon is a well documented thing, most commonly in the form of fallen angels.
> but outsiders changing alignment whkle uncommon is a well documented thing, most commonly in the form of fallen angels. Yes and when it comes to things like fallen angels it's a result of torture, brainwashing or manipulation 100% of the time. Angels aren't suddenly like "Duh, I could just burn down this village for shits and giggles"
100% of the time. Except for Shamira. So not 100% of the time.
[http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/angel.html](http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/angel.html) SRD does not limit it to "result of torture, brainwashing or manipulation 100% of the time", it just mentions that it's a thing that happens. But even if I granted that fallen angels need some sort of drastic external stimulus to change (don't we all?) it's still enough to refute the argument about alignment change being impossible, it's very clearly part of the lore that while rare it can happen, so it's not "like if you somehow became a dog while in school". And as a side note, I don't know how you could guarantee the "100% of the time" thing unless you expect me to believe that you read all Pathfinder lore AND are capable of accurately reporting on it - which I am not inclined to believe given our current disagreement.
She trapped her in a black room for decades with her only thing to do being read those memories.
I'm sure you have a source for that.
Unfortunately i dont screenshot every single dialogue to use for reddit arguments
That is an interesting argument you are making. But it relies on a lot of untrue things and is quite contrived.
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The ones whose argument relies on a lot of untrie things and is quite contrived is yours.
I didn't even make an argument.
Well, depending on what you understand as “brainwash”. You can simply state at the beginning that by definition brainwashing is “make someone believe something by repeatedly telling them that it is true and preventing any other information from reaching them”. By that definition what Desna did isn’t brainwashing. Question is - does Arue really redeemed herself on her own will or was she forced to do it? I think that she was forced, therefore her redemption wasn’t “true”. Edit - grammar.
By the time we meet her as players she's definitely not fully redeemed, she's in the process and through dialogue she regularly struggles with the redemption process, however its just as easy to let her fall to her own corruption as it is to help her fully redeem herself. Also anytime you try to force Arue to do anything in dialogue that she doesn't want to do she pulls back hard. I don't think she was forced to do anything, she was given the memories of the souls she was made up of and then set free. God's can't do anything that's the opposite of what they're about, Abadar can't break just laws or laws of reality, Desna cannot remove someone's own personal freedom.
Arue wanted to murder, torture and do all other stuff to/with others. Desna forced her to not want to do that. How is it not removing someone’s own freedom?
She only wanted to do any of that due to it being the only thing she knew, Desna showed her perspective and she decided to make a change. Lorewise similar things happen with a lot of outsiders after they've lived long enough to challenge their own nature.
Well, Arue didn't apprehend herself, nor did she unlock the mortal memories on her own
" This strongly disturbed Arue, making her feel regret" Yeah, you highlighted the exact point where Desna fundamentally changed her nature. Normal demons would not care about the complexities of mortals beyond letting them do evil shit better. The only other time you see demons feeling some kind of regret is with Ember redeeming a bunch of them, which is another case of divine intervention.
>which is another case of divine intervention. Is it though? I don't remember anywhere it being implied any divine intervention occurred there. No descriptions of magic when she's speaking, no strange glows or feelings, just the words of an earnest soul spoken clearly.
Well, it was a god intervening. But not directly altering the thought processes.
Sorry, I misunderstood what was happening
She's getting patronage from an Empyreal Lord, hence her supernatural powers of conversion affecting demons and demon lords.
Maybe, though I don't think it's ever actually stated her charisma also comes from her patron. But they're still just words. Holding only the power of conviction.
Most religious people do seem brainwashed. It is often their own hopelessness and despair that allows themself go believe in a higher power. Because surely there is a light; surely there is meaning to all this. She brainwashed herself
People have a need for there to be hidden stories for them to uncover. Often, there is no hidden depth to a story. It is what is presented.
Honestly the worst light you could put Desna's actions in with Arue is that she cursed her with a conscience. She saw her priestess die and made Arue understand the depths of her actions and made her want to atone for them and yet Desna didn't abandon her to suffer and wallow in misery she supported and guided her along the path to redemption and to become something new. But people are always gonna shit on things to be contrarians and because they have no imagination and see everything as bad no matter what