#ctd sidhe

*There's some text that mentions other possibilities, but I never got the impression they were meant to be taken very seriously. Like the idea of them reincarnating as commoner fae just doesn't mesh with the rest of the metaphysics.

Now, this bit of lore is inspired by the Christian folk belief that fae and similar creatures don't have immortal souls. (It notably pops up in The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen.) It wasn't limited to just one kind of being; it was essentially a way of reconciling a belief in other-than-human people with the human exceptionalism that Christianity promoted.

IMO, this makes it a little strange that the sidhe have been singled out as the kith that doesn't reincarnate. Like I understand that they wanted to give them Extra Angst, but I think it creates a bit of worldbuilding weirdness when you think it through. (Also, I think they have enough to feel sorry for themselves about already.)

I could imagine the sidhe coming up with something like James Cameron's Avatar. Something that's very pretty and evokes awe, but doesn't give people anything that genuinely challenges their white western assumptions, nor offers them anything they can use to change things. Something that seems deep on the surface, but is actually incredibly chauvinistic and backhanded. Something that romanticizes toxic and entitled behaviors. Something that's very, very good for making lots of merchandise that will one day land in a dump.

I can also imagine them promoting a lot of toxic beauty trends in the belief that they're helping people improve their prospects. The text tells us that sidhe embody beauty, and we can see from descriptions and illustrations that the beauty they embody is actually western white beauty standards - tall, thin, pointy-featured. The sidhe don't seem to have much interest in self-reflection or questioning their assumptions, so it's easy to see them becoming influencers who think that encouraging people to imitate these specific beauty standards is going to create Glamour.

(I maintain that the sidhe's beauty shouldn't work on everyone. Some people should find them uncanny. What's "terrifyingly beautiful" to one person can just be terrifying to another. And perhaps the sidhe would evoke distrust in those who are aware of how disingenuous perfect-looking social media influencers tend to be.)

The sidhe's fixation on an idealized past that never existed (if Dark Ages: Fae is anything to go by, very little fae history presented in CTD can be trusted) could make them extremely vulnerable to internalizing and replicating the viewpoints of far right movements that also rely on myths of idealized pasts. There's a lot in these movements that would stroke their egos, and might even be Glamourous to the sidhe. Thus the sidhe would go on to replicate the parts they found appealing, little realizing that they're only creating short-term gains for themselves and a few people while sowing the seeds for an extremely Banal world not too far down the line.

so my interpretation is that house balor are a fascist colonizers that use the fact that 1000s of years ago that the people that there were a part of were forcibly merged into the colonizing people and then started to perpetuate the the cycle of as members of the group oppression that happened to them by colonising the commoners during the acordance war

something else noteing here is that balor as a house and the what ill call the balorians as in the half sidhe half firbolg aren't actually oppressed in modern day in fact since there a noble house there the ones actively oppressing people the only ways other changelings treat them different is because there very fucking evil most of the time

but don't realise that the original people they were part of hate them and will probably kill them since there founder lugh killed balor

so to re farces this i think of the balor like people who descend from the celtics and slaves who hate rome for destroying their culture but are part of the culture and actively continuing the oppression of other groups

there are problems with this line of thinking like mainly the fact that balorians and fomorians are like as close to objectively evil as is possible and the blood of blaor corrupting them with evil thing is pretty problmatic with some of the interptaion here

but i think there's a colonel of something here worth thinking about

So there's a couple of things in this message that I'm struggling to understand. I can't tell what "re farces" is supposed to mean, and I'm not sure what you mean by "slaves".

To address the rest of the message, my first thought is that they sound like pretty much every other noble house in Concordia. All the Concordian nobles are colonizers, because Concordia is on stolen Native land and none of them are going to go in for Landback anytime soon. (And let's not forget that most of the commoners are also colonizers, being European fae living on stolen Native land.) They pretty much all have beef against people who did them real harm at some point - for example, mortals who used Christianity to demonize them. And when it comes right down to it, all of the noble houses running Concordia have a fascist streak to some extent. The sidhe literally believe they have a natural right to rule. They waged war and dishonorably murdered commoner leaders with cold iron to seize power. They've targeted redcaps for extermination. They're literally trying to recreate an idealized past and force "traditional" (read: beneficial to their kyriarchy) roles on everyone.

Basically, from your description it sounds like they just have the same issues as everyone else, but moreso. IMO that's not very compelling. A bad faction should be more than just generically bad; it should also fill a niche that sets it apart from other factions.

Furthermore, I wonder whether you're accounting for the fact that full-on fascists are typically in favor of murdering the disabled and disfigured, and that depicting fascists as disabled or disfigured does actual disabled and disfigured people a disservice while also obfuscating what fascists really stand for.

I'd try and offer some of my own suggestions for fixing House Balor up, but in everything I've read about them they're basically a bunch of mustache-twirling cartoon villains, so I don't really know what to do with them. But I do know that if you want to explore full-on fascist antagonists, House Aesin is a really good choice as they are literally based on Folkish heathens. House Gwydion isn't a bad choice, either - they're so vain and arrogant that a fall into proper fascism is practically inevitable.

If you want to explore the evils of colonialism, you have to reckon with the fact that pretty much everybody is a colonizer, from the proudest sidhe to the humblest boggan. I personally think there's a lot of potential here if colonizer fae have to confront the harm that certain stories colonizers tell themselves do to Native people. (Glamour might come out of the myth of Thanksgiving, but that doesn't mean it's benign!) This might also be a good opportunity to explore how some people perpetuate colonialism through explicitly violent rhetoric, and how some people perpetuate the same thing through language so polite and genteel it takes a few seconds to realize they've actually said something despicable. (I can easily imagine that House Eiluned are masters of this.)