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reverancepavane) wrote2011-03-19 02:17 pm
noble sentiments
I will say this even though I fear the Devils and even though I fear the flames. I will say this even though I idolize Heaven and its given grace; even though there are times when I am angry, and more than angry, at what Hell has been and done. But the first work of Hell is to honor and bear witness to the things that would otherwise be entirely unloved. They will come and sit with you if you have to die alone. The Powers of Hell. The demons. The flames and rotten flowers, at least, if nothing else; maybe even a Devil. They won’t do it to hurt you, not even the Devils. They might hurt you, they might hurt you terribly, they might even steal your soul, because they’re just that broken. But it won’t be why they’re there. They’ll be there because if they were not there, you would suffer and die, alone, and with no witnesses; and for someone to die in such a fashion is anathema to Hell. They will come and visit you, now and then, if you live in the mountains, isolated, with no one else to know. They will come to watch you, to listen to you, to know you, if you are a thing so horrible and broken that no one else would dare. They love the evil things, maybe, best of all, because it’s evil that needs Hell most. If you want to know how the Devils have gone so horribly wrong, it may be that; that, as much as the corruption and their own suffering; that they spend all of their time in the company of the worst of us, and so they’ve come to exemplify that awfulness themselves. But to love the evil things is not their duty but its expression. The work of Hell is to love whatever needs them most; whatever would, without Hell, be alone. It's going to take me a few more weeks to fully digest the third edition of Nobilis, but it seems to be far more prosaic than the previous editions. Whether that is a good or bad thing I'm rather undecided at the moment, for the vast mythic sweep of the cosmology seems hidden from sight. But I am saddened that there are far fewer Flores. And Hell has become something small and personal, instead of being something vast enough to root the World Ash in, but then, it always was. We are just bigger than we normally imagine. |
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The art also is a bit off-putting. I am allergic to anime being added to things to make them more 'epic'.
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Well, you won't have to put up with all the art for a while, given the recent controversy. [Having seen both pieces of art I don't believe it was in fact traced, just identically posed in a fairly standard anime pose with an extremely standard anime genotype body. Unfortunately professional artists producing this stuff are trained/expected to produce it all the same way if they want to work with others in the anime industry. So correspondences happen because of their training. If you note, certain minor details are actually quite different.]
I really think it's the undue emphasis on humans becoming Nobilis that's wrong with this edition. It's essentially reduced things to the Mundane impinging on the Mystical/Majestic, whereas in the other editions it was very much the Mystical/Majestic swallowing the Mundane whole.
And smiling as it does so.
With a really toothy grin.
For me it was always the big cosmology that grabbed me (and the Flores, of course*). But then that's the way with most stuff I like. It did mean that I tended to actually focus more on the Imperators and Excrucions than the Nobilis and the Cammora (which, when you think about it, was what we were really supposed to focus on in both previous editions).
This is just a correction. But it was the sense of mythic that made Nobilis what it was methinks, and hiding it so that we can more properly emulate the Nobilis as the interface between the Imperators and the universe does the game a vast disservice. Makes it ... ordinary.
* The Flores were magnificent. Pretty word vignettes that portrayed the mythic nature of the universe so wonderfully.