¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

Fitz(Chivalry)

I'll be only what you've known of me 'til now

Do you think G1deon and Pyrrha got closer to a perfected form of lyctorhood than anyone else?

Hear me out, we have three known forms of lyctorhood, four if you count whatever the fuck Harrow’s got going on, five if you count whatever the fuck jod has going on, but for the sake of avoiding text walls, let’s stick with three.

Form 1: the standard. This kills cavalier entirely and absorbs their soul. This soul is thought to be dead and inert in this configuration, but as we see in The Unwanted Guest the cavalier is definitely NOT totally inert, and is seemingly aware of their state, judging by the banging coming from inside those coffins.

Form 2: Gideon the First, and his bodily timeshare with Pyrrha. Gideon is a little weird as lyctors go, but he IS a full lyctor, and, crucial to my theory, Pyrrha is not only still around, she’s still her own person, just without her own body. I don’t know how they managed this, I would be SO interested in knowing, but the fact that it’s possible is enough for this theory.

Form 3: Grand Lysis. This one is, to my eyes, Palamedes and Camilla looking at the slow, gradual merging of necromancer and cavalier via soul permeability and deciding to speedrun the process. Palamedes and Camilla are both destroyed, completely. Some memories make it through, perhaps even most memories, but they’re still neither Pal, or Cam. In a way, Paul is more similar to their child than a mix of the two as we’d normally think of it.

Now, in the circumstances they were in, I do think that Paul is the best outcome available to Pal and Cam, but, given our knowledge of moving souls around, keeping bodies alive, soul permeability, etc. I would like to propose one more, theoretical form.

Form 4: “Perfect” Lysis. We know from G1deon and Pyrrha that the lyctoral combination of souls doesn’t necessarily put one of them to sleep (at least not permanently). We also have reason to suspect, via whatever the fuck Jod has going on, that keeping the cavalier’s soul within you permanently isn’t entirely necessary. So, what if, rather than the necromancer eating and keeping their cavalier, they exchange soul parts, a la Paul’s combination, and both go back to their own bodies, keeping both necro and cav alive? I’m fairly certain, given what we know about the process, that this would still give the necromancer that unlimited battery and healing capabilities lyctors are famous for, and it could possibly even extend some of those effects to the cavalier! Now, this “perfect” lysis would still run into the soul permeability problem, but like… so what? We’ve seen what the endpoint of souls combining is, and Paul seems okay. A gradual combination of two souls, but when both are alive and communicating and cooperating doesn’t seem so bad to me.

Hell, live with some long enough even normally you’ll find yourselves rubbing off on each other in little ways over time. That’s not magic, that’s just being human.

"There is a perfect Lyctorhood...a perfect Lyctor process that preserves the cavalier, and you let us think there wasn't. You let us think we'd cracked it... You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer...but nobody had to die. ...You watched us kill our cavaliers in cold blood, and none of them had to die. You had already done it yourself. But you had done it perfectly!!" (HTN ch 51)

The idea of "perfect Lyctorhood" isn't some objective description the text neutrally puts out there. It's Mercy, whose grief for Cristabel has been a recurring feature in the story, imagining a form of Lyctorhood in which she could have survived and calling it "perfect."

But "perfect" isn't usually used particularly positively in HTN. Many things are "perfect" or "perfectly [x]", often because they seem like the sort of thing they ought to be, but with a sting in the tail. For example, Harrow's memory of Alecto in the Tomb itemises each part of her as "perfect", only for Alecto's own narration of her body in NTN to call each part uncomfortable and ugly. Augustine's affect is "perfectly painted...yet there was nothing inside him but an equally easy contempt".

"Perfect" is how John describes his silent corpses in NTN. How he describes the cow dome. How Nona describes the preserved corpse of Naberius Tern - and how Ianthe describes the fighting automaton that she understands to be all that's left of Babs, who she believes has "no more weaknesses. I took those away." Kiriona is "the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses."

I think a lot of how we read the term "perfect Lyctorhood" leans heavily on the genesis of Paul:

"We had something very nearly perfect...the perfect friendship, the perfect love... ...We are the love that is perfected by death."

To what extent are we to take that at face value? To what extent is this yet another attempt to imagine a good - a better - version of something, only for it to still be something terrible? Even Palamedes acknowledges that they are making the best of a bad hand: "I am not saying this was our inevitable end...I am saying we found the best and truest and kindest thing we can do in this moment." The moment in question involves Camilla bleeding out from a gut wound and Palamedes as a ghost in the shell of Ianthe's dead cavalier.

ehasz then went out to put out 'the dragon prince' for netflix which was not a show i was crazy about but i think i feel pretty confident in calling it better than legend of korra.

now what's also notable about this situation is that ehazs is a notorious enough misogynist to have a section of his wikipedia page devoted to his alleged professional mistreatment of women

elizabeth on the other hand has absolutely no presence online whatsoever. ATLA is her only writing credit. She wrote eight episodes of the show including Zuko Alone, The Avatar and the Fire Lord, and The Southern Raiders. She and aaron are now also divorced.

Now, if you know anything about how misogynist male creatives working in the same field as their wives operate, then you can probably reach the same conclusion I have. If a man is willing to treat female coworkers like his nanny and assistant as a baseline, imagine what he feels entitled to expect from a female coworker that is also his wife. I would not be surprised if much of the work on ATLA that ehasz was able to build his career off of would not have been nearly as good without a lot of behind the scenes assistance from elizabeth.

i didn't expect this post to get any traction and be seen by anyone other than my immediate followers who already know how i feel about this sort of stuff, so i didn't really Explain my point here. but i'm not arguing that bryke are responsible for mishandling the ATLA IP at all, i'm making the case that an IP-based system just does not facilitate good artmaking in general.

like it's not that i think elizabeth welch is The One True Genius Mind Behind Avatar and is the person who actually deserves the real credit/the one who could have Made The Franchise Good if they'd let her. but what i am trying to point out by bringing her up is that there are so many unsung people working on these sorts of projects who are critical to their execution (notably what ideas live and die by) but who don't get factored in to either the legal understanding of who has the right to produce More of it, or our cultural ideas about who gets to claim authority over a work.

like if you remember when the new netflix show was announced the whole big thing among the fanbase was Bryke Are Gonna Be In This One So It Could Be Good For Real! obviously they ended up leaving the project so we will never know if their version of that would have been good or not (i suspect not, personally) but. point being is there's a common conception that because bryke hold the status of Creator over this work, they have the capacity to imbue continued ventures in this IP space with legitimacy and quality in a way other people don't. and i feel like that's just been proven to be untrue based on how underwhelming and dissonant korra felt.

in a world where we had no real legal structures in place or deeply entrenched social ideas about who has Ownership over a fictional setting and it's characters, anyone would have the liberty to produce related works in a more legitimized context than fanfiction and contribute to a greater and richer collective body. we'd have the luxury of picking and choosing whose interpretations of these ideas and themes we like, as we currently do for public domain works and those based in fairytales/myth.

Because that makes sense. Anyway, this poison would submit me to its well-known and much-feared symptom: "17 Day Paralysis" in which you're paralyzed for exactly 17 days and you only chance of survival is to be on full machine support for 17 days.

Just before the medical team intubated me I remembered I have a Zoom meeting with my academic advisor today (I actually do in real life) and I needed to email him to let him know I was the victim of a mass-poisoning and would need to reschedule.

I kept trying to type the "□" symbol in my dream but could not figure out how and gave up.