#And yeah I know that rin’s legacy is her giving the country a new chance by destroying the broken system but I think shamanism was also-

[soliisx]

the aftermath of the burning god hurts in so many ways and the legacy of shamanism in nikan is just one of them. at the very start of the poppy war, jiang tells rin shamanism is a dying art and begs her to pledge lore to keep it alive. he warns her that the red emperor tried to eliminate it, and once the hesperians arrive they try to do the same. and gradually throughout the series, all the shamans rin meets up end up dying: altan, the cike, the trifecta. even the shamans rin trained, pipaji and dulin, end up dead. and when rin dies, she takes the history and knowledge of shamanism with her. 

There are a few shamans left, unegen and lianhua and changhan and nezha, but they’re in no position to challenge the hesperians and revive the shamanic arts. unegen had been burned by rin’s  power and if he’s still alive, would be too paranoid and fearful of repercussion. changhan told rin he wasn’t getting involved in nikara’s affairs and had the hundred clans to lead; he can’t afford for the hesperians to turn their wrath on his people instead. nezha already gave up his powers and submitted to the hesperians long ago. lianhua, personally trained by rin, might be the only one willing to defy the hesperians (but it would be incredibly dangerous) but she doesn’t have the knowledge or the training to pass on the the arts like her predecessors did.

 not only that, but the hesperians would’ve destroyed any knowledge of shamanism, burned all the books (as nezha had warned rin about), banned talk, and done their best to snuff out all traces of it and hunt the remaining shamans to extinction. And they would have history to prove their point: they, and their Maker had destroyed the Trifecta, the most legendary of Nikan’s shamans; they had killed Rin, the Phoenix’s vessel and the strongest shaman alive. And the last publicly known one, Nezha, had submitted and renounced his powers to them. Slowly but steadily, they’d erase Nikan’s history, two thousand years of the shamanic arts, intertwined with the very fabric of nikan itself, and the legacy of every shaman since then, from the textbooks and rewrite their own version. Those entombed in the Chuluu Korikh would be forever forgotten, with no one left alive to remember them or even know that they had once existed at all. The Cike wouldn’t even be a footnote. The Pantheon would fade. 

The Hesperians were never able to take rin’s powers away from her, but what they did was worse. They didn’t just take her country, they’d erase her culture, her gods, the very truth. Nezha may have killed rin, but the hesperians destroyed her legacy.

History is written by the victors and the hesperians will not be kind.