#war and genocide had been edited and had figures changed. /that/ fast. And I had to go find new ones. which is surreal and kind of terrifyin

[ziracona]

So it looks like the wiki has Philip's full Tome online now. I know the Archives have been a bit of a mixed bag, but what do you think of how they portrayed our favorite Bing-Bong-Boy? /Tome_IV_-_Conviction#Philip_Ojomo:_The_Algebra_of_Infinite_Night

I read this through the leaks like a bad child back when the tomes first dropped, so I actually answered this like the night I read them. To be honest, though, I’m not entirely sure even still what I thought. It’s super fucked up and upsetting. I’m really glad they chose to talk about the Nigerian Civil War and the Igbo genocide, because people barely seem to know about it even though it happened within current living memory, and it was horrific. I wish they’d actually named the conflict at least once though, instead of hinting at it so anyone who wanted to fact-check references would know, and no one else would have to. I really don’t know how I feel about them choosing to focus on a forgiveness-based angle for him. I mean, I am very glad they at least weren’t pushy about it, but they still had that conflict be the carrying theme for his entire archives, and I don’t think that’s a very good narrative baseline for any story where the people to be forgiven are people committing genocide, and the person the narrative is gently suggesting would be better off forgiving them than harboring a desire for vengeance is a survivor and victim of that genocide? I pretty firmly believe that if anyone is ever going to try to advocate for offering forgiveness instead of justice to the enactors of genocide, it had better goddamn well be a survivor of that genocide advocating for it, because no one else has the right to even suggest that opinion. No one else is in a place to. Only someone who’s lived through that amount of hell has the right to offer any alternative but justice. No one else is literally capable of making what that choice actually looks like, because they just aren’t. You can’t empathize your way into that headspace. 

It was an incredibly moving and upsetting story. I know this isn’t a very good answer, but I truly don’t know how I feel about it. Every time I think about The Algebra of Infinite Night, I just remember everything I know about the actual historic atrocities these people went through, and that they fought for freedom and survival and tried to succeed to get away, and were chased down, and they lost, and basically everyone was lost. Somewhere between a million and a million and a half people died. Because Britain wanted oil and money. And everybody knows what happened, and there are still people alive who did this, and no one is being punished, and they won’t be. And I just get really upset and kind of sick about my personal inability to change that, and how awful it is. It’s hard for me to move past my knowledge of the history itself to the fictionalized account.

Philip was right though. His family deserved an angel of death to avenge them, not an angel of mercy. Just it shouldn’t ever have fallen on a child to know that, or have to enact it himself. The world’s brutal, and you can’t protect kids from it forever, but it should never be able to get them that fast. It’s horrific. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer this question very well--I’m sorry. I just get very messed up every time I think about it. It’s been like this since I did research for ILM when I did my own timeline for Philip. I can’t give a very good answer, but it’s beyond fucked up and upsetting whether I liked it or not, which I’ll apparently never completely know. We all knew the Entity was a fucked up bastard, but the fact it forces Philip to be an angel of death--fuck, his name basically means that even, and ring the bell his dad made that they used to ring to warn death squads were coming, to announce his own presence arriving to kill others in trials now, is the most twisted and warped and awful thing I’ve ever seen. It also makes him suffer lightburn, any time someone hits him while invisible. It burns him. And it’s just so beyond awful that it’s forcing this poor man who just wanted to be left alone and to be okay to hunt people down, which is the last thing he’d have ever wanted to do, basically has twisted into the very thing he wanted so desperately to kill as a child and couldn’t even understand. Forces him to announce his presence like he’s a death squad. And calls him more or less ‘angel of death’. It’s unforgivable, and really fucked. Actually, I think I do have an opinion. It’s a compelling narrative, and I don’t think it would always be a bad one--serious topics are really important to cover. But given the paragraph and thoroughly un-indepth way DbD does all its storytelling, I think if you take this as its complete picture version, given not only Philip’s history, but the way they twisted his personal history into his current life in the realm, which has never been touched on narratively and probably never will be, I think it was a bad choice, because god it’s such a heavy subject, I think if you tell it, you have to tell the other half too, and all of it with proper weight and respect. It’s just not right otherwise. And you can’t do that right this piecemeal. But I don’t know how to really answer this--I don’t really know what to say. I’m super depressed again now--sorry I’m sure this is a really annoying response to asking, it’s not you, and I love answering this kind of stuff. Just this one really fucked me up.