the ball is rolling flat

Particularly when you learn more about the artefact and learn that the suppression and torment inside is an active choice, when you watch the bodies waste away because the artefact doesn't see the point of feeding them or caring for them.

Do you think Thjazi ever looked at the victims left behind and saw the tortured bodies of Merzhad's rebellion that he was trying to save? Do you think he looked at those malnourished people, who had been living in an apartment filling with food that rotted whilst they were unable to reach it, and saw the shadow that hung over the city? Do you think he ever sat in one of Hal's theatres, looking at the stock characters of pantomime masks, and wondered whether the halflings had used the only thing their shaper would truly look at to kill her, her own reflection?

What an awful thing to happen in a city of free people, who have fought so hard for the freedoms they hold. What an awful thing to learn that the artefact has a consciousness too, and is also a free person, but only when subjugating and destroying another. What an anathema to the idea of liberty.

Bolaire is the death penalty given personality at worst, an out of body experience at best. So difficult a concept to chew on, especially for a man who believed that nobody should be owned or controlled against their will. They called the followers of Sylandri flower dolls - pretty things to be shaped and played with as they followed the lines she put in their mouths - it is not hard to see that Bolaire does the same, only no autonomy remains, even when he is being kind.

but i love love love the fact that they're called the shapers, thematically

because when we first got introduced to this world, the assumption in hearing the seven gods each shaped a race of people (as is the assumption of probably many people in-world, too), is that that god created those people, and by extention, this world. plenty of things in various earth mythologies and religions about gods creating people out of clay, giving them shape and then life, we're primed to assume it's a similar story

no one asks what the clay was, beforehand.

but the more we learn about this world, we learn that the shapers didn't make it, they found it. we learn there were beings on this world, and magic on this world, and culture on this world, prior to their arrival. they felt entitled to say that they owned this world, because they molded it in their image, but what did they actually bring to it? given that the inciting incident of the shapers war was them threatening to kill all the orcs and just make new orcs out of 1/7 of the other races, we don't even know that they created the seven races they take credit for. just molded them out of something else

what if you wanted your legacy to be a creation myth, but all you knew how to do was change things that were already there? what if the clay has opinions about what it was before, and what it wants to be in the future? what if the shape you found most beautiful didn't fit with this world, because this world never belonged to you?

It was going SO well until it wasn't lmao. Thanks for the prompt @just-a-funny-little-brain!