#gOD I COULD GO ON FOREVER about how our morals are human centric siince we are humans after all but once u bring in demigods all bets are o

[arcane-nari]

why are you trying to make nari evil she's the only good one in the arcane order?

(re: this post I’m assuming)

sorry anon you've unlocked my trap card. now i can draw infodumping from my hand and place it face up on the board

tl;dr: Nari isn't evil -- but neither is the arcane order. It's just that nari is the only one of the three who isn't okay with the suffering that would be caused by doing her job of maintaining the balance.

from what i can tell, the order's morality isn't Good or Evil in Tales of Arcadia: Wizards. (I do not see Rise of the Titans. I am not looking.) i've had this blog since wizards first came out, so my interpretation of nari is largely from there, with only some points here and there taken from Nari.

(aside: i feel so vindicated with how she acted in the police station. this bug is feral and i love her)

they're antagonists for sure, and they're rivals, but their morality isn't good. Instead, it's sort of more focussed on the good of the balance between magic and mortals and keeping that in check. there isn't much explanation as to what that means in canon, but I think it's sort of a chaos vs order thing -- too much of one and the world explodes. too much of the other and it's rendered inert.

before the battle of killahead, while each demigod has their own personality, they seem to be of the same mind when it comes to the end goal: protect the balance, no matter how many mortals get hurt along the way. (Mortals, in this case, meaning anyone who is not a primordial wizard.) It's a matter of good of the many (the balance) vs the goods of the few or the one (mortals).

Coupled with their duty to the balance, i have the interpretation that they're simply too disconnected from the world of mortals to understand what pain is -- skrael and bellroc moreso than nari, which i'll get to in a minute. But they're so powerful and ancient that it's easy for them to feel Apart from the mortals, because of how short their lives are and how small their magic is in comparison. Kind of like how most humans view squirrels -- they're creatures living their own lives and having their own drama, but, ultimately, we are far more advanced.

to continue the metaphor -- the world at the time of killahead is something along the lines of a tree that's overgrown the sidewalk and is causing problems, in my mind. Yes, squirrels have made their home in it, but it's causing too much trouble to the humans living in the area, so it has to be cut down. It's not done to cause direct harm to the squirrels. it's just that the action of cutting down the tree will cause direct or indirect harm to the squirrels.

(I've used this metaphor way too often with the order lol)

So they aren't remaking the world because they hate humans specifically. Most definitions of evil is someone who wants explicitly to do other's harm. In my mind, the order doesn't want explicitly to do people harm. They don't care about people. Well -- they don't like them, and perhaps they aren't happy about the amount of people who will die when they remake the world, but it's certainly more than justifiable in their mind considering the ends they're pursuing.

And that takes me to pain. Nari explicitly says she can sense all souls, but it's not clear whether she can sense their pain and suffering. Rather, she seems to be right on board with the order's methods all the way up until she sees Killahead directly. Once she sees the pain -- once it becomes real for her -- she can't dismiss it as a necessary evil that comes with keeping the balance in line. She can't depersonalize it or separate herself from it.

Sure, she's able to occasionally Look into the aether and see souls winking out here and there due to the destruction being caused, but it's different from seeing it up close. And she realizes what they're doing has real and tangible effects and she can't do her duty anymore. It's not that remaking the world is wrong. It's not that the demigods are misguided.

"It's not worth it."

Those are nari's words when she realizes what they've done. The cost is too high. They can't move forward.

I think, were this turned around and the order were to be shown as the protagonists, nari would be written to be a coward. It's all about doing your duty until you face the consequences of your actions, and you can't keep your word. Instead of trying to stop things, she runs. She hides. for nine centuries, she spends her life hidden in a castle away from the world.

We don't see what she does, but I think she learns. I think she asks questions and learns how people work, and how trolls work. I think, once she has the chance to be up close and personal to living people -- even if it's just galahad for the majority of the time -- she falls in love with them. it's hard not to. The way they change and grow and create. The idea of constellations is as much a wonder to her now as it had been the first time she heard about it.

And her desire to protect mortals grow with it. The more she learns, the more her heart becomes entangled with the very world she once wanted to remake. To hell with her orders and her duty -- she's doing what she thinks is right.

By hiding. By doing nothing. We see in Rott that it's probably the only thing for it, considering mind control, but i'm iffy on whether that's something that's canon for me or not. It feels a bit too convenient, considering we've seen such massive power on her end.

She's ancient, but she learns in a few short years what it means to have friends. Her love for humanity is what separates her from the order but, on an objective level, that doesn't make her good, or even Not Evil. Ultimately, it's a human thing to label her as good because her intentions align with protecting us, rather than protecting this vague, enigmatic concept of The Balance that we get so little understanding about. Maybe if we as an audience got more, we would understand why it mattered enough to destroy the entire world to repair it, but we don't, so it's easier to side with the tangible "protect humans at all costs" goal over the intangible "repair the balance at all costs" goal

And the order cares about each other. The way nari teases bellroc and skrael, the way bellroc snaps at skrael -- it feels like a band of siblings. It feels like a family. There's more to them than evil. (And rott did a disservice by trying to make them such. Even at the end, bellroc showed empathy. They could have killed jim when they were certain of their victory, but they told him to go to his family. There's a heart in there, however much it may be of blackened stone.)

(But that's another story entirely.)

There's stories about the fair folk that come to mind, with their strange morals and rules. A lot of stories paint these fairies as evil because their punishments seemed harsher than what humans would expect for certain infractions, while their games often included things that hurt humans. But it's not because they wanted to hurt humans directly. (Okay, a lot of them did, but many of them didn't). It's that what they consider good and bad is so far removed from humanity, because they are not and have never been human. They're simply existing alongside them in the same world.

In conclusion, the order isn't evil. But because their goals don't include the welfare of humans, it's easy to label them as such - and because nari's goals ultimately were protecting humanity, it's easy to label her as good. But the order themselves are too far removed from humanity for me, personally, to label them in terms of explicit morals.

Nari is kind. She is clever, and she's capable of learning, and she's curious. She is herself -- but if we call her good, that's on us, whatever comes of it. She may be capable of change, but she is only ever herself, whatever shape that takes

also veggie lady good character and i love her. grey morality and all.