#this is a weird niche but. anyway everyone read the lathe of heaven. lelache wasn't super relevant to this but. she is great.

[utilitycaster]

not a Candela post but I was actually thinking about The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin w/r/t Liliana. Spoilers for a 50+ year old book, but it centers around a man who unwillingly has the power to alter reality to match his dreams and who retains the memory of the world before he changed it. He is required to see a psychiatrist due to his drug abuse, since that suppresses the ability, and the psychiatrist believes him - but uses him to try to fix the various ills of the world. This becomes a monkey's paw-like exploration of various dystopias - to solve overpopulation (really popular theme in the early 70s) his dreams create a world where most people died of a plague; racism is eliminated by the concept of race being eliminated thus eliminating a number of people and a good deal of art and history; world peace is achieved via an alien invasion that unites the people of the world against an external threat rather than each other (a la Watchmen). The man (Orr) who has the dreams becomes more and more insistent that this is wrong, but the psychiatrist does not listen, and things spiral out from there.

I really do think Liliana believes she is doing the right thing, but the fact is, waving away people's legitimate question of "what will happen if you get rid of the gods" - particularly since pretty much everyone not directly within the Ruby Vanguard, including one of the major representatives of planar stability from the natural side (Keyleth) and her wizard counterpart (Ryn) and like, every other wizard who isn't directly under Ludinus's sphere of influence is like "I think that ends in disaster" - is such a massive red flag. Treating geopolitical problems as neatly fixable by One Change that definitely won't make everything worse (source: trust me) is, even in fantasy, a fantasy.