#and likewise i think i'm getting better at understanding what he wants pretty consistently...?

[merrilark]

I!!! Am so happy that it seems me and my kitten have begun to understand how to communicate with each other. It feels so good to finally reach these milestones; I was so nervous that I was doing something wrong and that we’d just keep frustrating each other forever lol but!! It’s getting better.

Owning a cat is such a good lesson in consent, patience, and respect.

[greypetrel]

Always happy to aid in procrastination c: Likewise, as many or few as you'd like!

Essentials 4 for each of them

Codex 8 for Alyra

Party 1 and 4 for Raina

DA:I 3 and 8 for Aisling

DA:I 11 for Radha

*Procrastinator highfive*

I did every of them, they were very interesting! And got me thinking quite a lot, thank you very much!!

I'll cut it down at some point because it's very long, but...

Tis the prompt list!

Essentials:

4. What is their moral alignment?

Alyra: True Neutral. Raina: Chaotic Dumbass Good. Aisling: Neutral Good Radha: True Neutral

Codex:

8. How do they feel about the Deep Roads?

Alyra: Seen them, done that, fare them well. She did what she had to do. She thinks it's a horrible place, why dwarves loves to live underground and so close to the Deep Roads is completely beyond her. Yes, yes, it's defensible, but what about: what happens if you get snowed in, uh? She's not easy to upset, but the Brood Mother creeped her out like few things ever could. She started cursing like the worst of the sailors when they found another in Amaranthine. Another who can talk. Justice stares in shock.

Party:

1. Who does their preferred party consist of?

Fenris, Isabela/Varric, Merrill. Anders used to be a part of it as well but… Next question.

4. Are there any companions (or advisors) they don’t get along with? Have any of them ever left the party?

She tried to like Sebastian. She really, really did. She's a pretty chill person, if you're not a horrible human being or hurt her loved ones with no reason, she'll be ok with you even if there are disagreements. What she can't stand are people shying away from responsibilities and looking at problems without doing nothing about it. She has a hard time understanding him or agreeing with him. Beside the fact that Raina has no love and very little respect for Elthina, she sees her as an ostrich with her head under the sand and that's everything she hates in a political figure. It's… She'd like him better if he was sure he didn't want the throne and fought to stay there. The constant indecision grates on her nerves. And when he threatened to move war to Kirkwall if she didn't kill Anders… That was it for her. (She never condone Anders' action, but sieging a city? How many casualties for one men that she also EXILED? "Dude, congratulations for having finally taken your head out of the gutter, but what the actual fuck." cit as an answer to the threat) So: Sebastian left the party.

Anders was shown the door after the Chantry. They started by getting along so well! They laughed and joked together, they were friends. And then, Anders fell, she turned him down because "…Dude… I'm a lesbian…" (read as: I accidentally triggered his romance. Don't ask me how, I did it with Alistair -yes.- and I did it with Anders). Things started to crack between them. Add Merrill. Add the fact that she made friend with Fenris. That Garrett learnt blood magic from Merrill and got with Fenris. Raina tried to stay friend with him because she genuinely see him as a lonely person who doesn't really deserve loneliness (if he just could be a little less of a dick towards Merrill and Fenris maybe…). But, not telling her what did he need the weird ingredients for, involving her nonetheless and killing innocents… She couldn't bring herself to kill him, but she showed him the door to exit the city and not come back.

DA:I

Aisling:

3. How do they feel about bearing the Anchor? For what did they declare the Inquisition stood for?

She feels it as a responsibility. It's not pleasant, it itches and hurt and yes, it's useful in battle, but it also trapped her into responsibilities she would have liked to choose. What's done is done, tho, no matter crying over it. It's her duty and Deshanna didn't raise a coward. Better in her hands than in others', anyway, she never complained. She told the Inquisition stood for its Inquisitor, declared herself an elf standing for Thedas, made the Inquisition a place for inclusion, all under one flag and purpose. She broke her head over this in the next years, oftentime thinking it was an egotistical choice dictated more by emotion than reasoning, and overall a poor political declaration: thinking about it better, without the surprise of being chosen as Inquisitor even being an Elven Mage, she'd probably get back and say the Inquisition stood for Order. Because the Inquisition was never about her, it was for peace and it was, for her, an orchestrated work. During the Exalted Council, tho, she rethought about it and thought that it would have maybe have been worse. Declaring the Inquisition stood for Order, potentially, could have made it harder to disband it all just because the Inquisitor left. If the Inquisitor is the centre of the organisation, tho...

8. What did their Nightmare appear as in the Fade? What was on their gravestone?

Her gravestone had one single word etched on it: "Adandonment". It was a very plain gravestone with no flowers or mementos on it, dirty and overgrown, one of those you can see of unidentified soldiers. The ones nobody recognised and nobody can remember with their names. Forgotten. It could have been anyone's, one could tell it was hers out of exclusion. Her Nightmare appeared as corpses of people she knows, died very gruesomely, wounds and blood still fresh and gushing right after death.

Radha:

11. How do they feel about Morrigan?

She doesn't trust her. Well, ok, Radha is very slow to trust. She relies in knowledge and learning things, and is… Suspicious as a precaution. Will smell a lie from a miles away. And Morrigan is fairly evident, to her, that hides more than she says. But like, clear as day. She won't trust her for this, because ok, Aisling likes her and likes Kieran. Her affection for her son seems genuine and if she lets Aisling close to the boy, chances are that she's safe. She doesn't really like her passion for elven culture and mystery about her sources on it: By all means, you have not one but two Dalish, one is a First and the other the daughter of a Keeper, why aren't you telling us more? Where did you find the informations? What else do you know? She… Doesn't hate her, she doesn't think she's a bad nor evil person. She doesn't really like how reticent she is. The Well for her was a big NOPE, for her it wasn't a choice and she drank, as Inquisitor, Morrigan lost the chance to gain her trust there and then.

[autokratorissa]

Considering that civilizational collapse may happen within 100 years, do you think people can justify having children? I've seen some people get upset and call anti-natalists 'post-modern christians' but they never clearly answer why we should keep having children. Never mind that "be fruitful and multiply" is a central tenet of Christianity. Anyways, I'm curious about your thoughts on this matter.

While procreation is obviously very proactively encouraged—arguably even demanded depending on the denomination and period one’s talking about—in Christianity, it’s not exactly unique in that regard; all religions tend to have a pro-reproduction (a ‘natalist,’ you could say) message somewhere in their canon. Many early Christian heresies, though, especially those influenced by the Gnostics and Hellenistic schools like the Platonists and Pythagoreans, did ascribe some kind of negative value to birth owing to their identification of God/Yahweh as the demiurge, and so his creation—the world—being inherently imperfect and flawed, so, even though Gnosticism can hardly be considered the flourishing worldview it once was, “be fruitful and multiply” cannot, in good faith, be considered the final word in Christian attitudes to reproduction. And antinatalists are not ‘post-modern Christians’ (what would that even mean? It’s a patently ridiculous term); anyone saying that is operating under precisely the kind of Christian-dominated thinking they’re accusing antinatalists of. Early manifestations of philosophical antinatalism were predominantly Buddhist (in India and China) and secular (in the Hellenistic world), and from a time before Christianity existed at all, all of which clearly refutes that kind of criticism, at the very least in a strictly historical sense. We should always be mindful of the cultures we exist within, however, and certainly for those in Europe and the Americas, the hegemonic power of the Church and Christian ideology cannot be ignored, even if it is seemingly less powerful and all-encompassing now than it once was.

What are my thoughts on the matter? I think people who don’t know better think antinatalism would consider them as somehow morally wrong—evil, even—for having children, but that this just isn’t true. Similar to a lot of the common responses to nihilism, these people have a knee-jerk reaction based on very little actual knowledge but plenty of emotional baggage, and in this case literally millions of years of biological and social pressures making them view childbirth positively. They think the antinatalist would consider them, individually and as a person, to be bad for having a child, and even that that child itself would represent a moral evil, and not that it is the act, the process, the socio-cultural and biological urge, that is being critiqued. There are also obviously degrees and variations to all things; antinatalism is not a position which can typically be considered to paint in absolutes and categorical imperatives for moral action. Antinatalism isn’t even a doctrine that necessarily seeks to stop all procreation; it simply applies negative value to the act of creating life. On one level, the consequences of such a philosophy are radical and perhaps difficult for many people to stomach, but more often than not it leads to undeniably rational ideas that benefit us all. A good example of this is the very simple and quite common (see, for example: Vetter, The production of children as a problem for utilitarian ethics, de Giraud, “Mobiles et Mécanismes réels de la Procréation,” c. Narcissisme, L’art de guillotinerles procréateurs: manifeste anti-nataliste, and Rulli, The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption) antinatalist observation that, while there exist children without parents but who do want them (those in foster care; orphans, those unwanted by their biological parents, etc.), for people to make the active decision to have a biological child of their own and not adopt is simply unjustifiable under any ethical framework: the act of adoption reduces the amount of misery in the world; childbirth, adds to it.

The creation of sentient, self-aware beings is cruel, unnecessary, and fundamentally and irrevocably based on a complete disregard for the interests and autonomy (see: Shiffrin, Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm, and Singh, “Shiffrin’s (Reluctant) “Anti-natalism”” and “Objections to Shiffrin,” Assessing anti-natalism: a philosophical examination of the morality of procreation)—which has often been considered the basis of all morality (cf. Christman, “Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)—of the hypothetical, unborn child. There is no way to avoid any of this. The world is a bad place, we know this to be so. By having children, we condemn them—by force, by an act of violence against them—to a life that knows some quantity of misery, suffering, angst, pain, and all the other things we think best to avoid. Therefore the unavoidable truth is that we are knowingly causing a suffering being to know misery and pain, when we very easily could have not. It’s extremely hard to even attempt to justify that kind of relationship and act.

As with pretty much anything in pessimist and other allied philosophies, I think Schopenhauer represents an excellent starting point—though by no means end point—for someone interested in antinatalism. It should be stressed that, as a Kantian (more specifically as a transcendental idealist), Schopenhauer thought that the creation and destruction of life was mere phenomena, not Ding-an-Sich [thing-in-itself; noumenon, that is, what exists independent of perception], and so did not place as much of an emphasis on actually avoiding and stopping procreation as an act as other, non-idealist antinatalists may advocate, but nevertheless I do think he does, in his typical style, express the kind of reserved whimper of philosophy that I can’t help but feel belongs to antinatalism:

“If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

[…]

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.”

Schopenhaur, qtd in “On the Sufferings of the World,” Studies in Pessimism

Schopenhauer saw procreation as a weakness; not an evil thing, it should be stressed, but a weakness, brought about by the cravings of the flesh. The urge to have children and likewise the way in which we all too easily create pregnancies without even planning them results from our being, in effect, tricked by the Wille zum Leben [will to life; the thing-in-itself]. As I say though, Schopenhauer was working in the Kantian tradition, and so all life as we understand it, in his philosophy, is simply appearance; true freedom, that is, the only escape from not just procreation but most suffering of any kind, can only come from a rejection and overcoming of the Will. Poetically beautiful as this line of thinking may be, suffice to say few of us are committed Kantians today.

To specifically answer your question about whether it’s possible to justify having children now, in 2019, as the very world burns around us, yes, of course it’s justifiable. We as a species can consistently find justifications to support whatever we want. Only rarely does justification proceed action. Personally, however, I cannot justify it. No amount of logical contortions or moral arguing seems to affect that. But will people have children, and not simply as sporadic accidents and in unavoidable situations, but by the millions and through predetermined planning? Of course they will. And would I give a different answer if I were alive at any other point in history? Unlikely. All we can do is try and make life as pleasant as possible for those of us that are here, and, yes, to try and stop those that come after us from making the same mistakes we have, the first and most significant of which always necessarily being our creation itself.