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ro-botany · 1 year ago

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Firstly… replying to a public post is not butting into a private discussion.

Its fine to express your opinion, but you can do that in a polite way and without strawmanning by assuming their real world political viewpoints based on their opinion of a video game.

But again; when Grima stops acting how they believe he should act (see: everything he does as Robin),

I don't believe Robin is Grima, but I don't think us talking will do anything to convince either of us on the other's position, so may as well skip this.

There is no gentle way to say this: In trying to explain why you think Grima worship is folly, the argument you are making is that the most logical choice for victims of repeated genocide attempts is to stop having the culture that people want to genocide them over.

You are doing the strawman treat again.

I'm well aware of religious and cultural genocide, its actually a part of my heritage.

The thing is that people withstand that kind of persecution and stick with their culture and beliefs is a showcase of their bravery, loyalty and faith.

Grima says in Heroes: They have no qualms asking for divine assistance when it meets their fickle needs... But how quick they are to shun their benefactors once they get what they desire.

The Grimleal do not do any of that, for all their flaws and how much the story wants us to hate them, their loyalty towards Grima is true and they stick with their god through thick and thin. If they weren't truly loyal to Grima they would've abandoned through all the suffering, but they never did.

Hence my opinion that Grima dialogue in Heroes doesn't match up with the game showing that his worshippers continue to worship him despite people like Emmeryn's father, Walhart and Frederick despising or even persecuting them for their faith.

I reiterate: not all of Plegia is grimleal. They don't all follow the grimleal or subscribe to grimleal beliefs. We have dialogue from Plegian citizens and soldiers expressing distaste and fear of the grimleal. The majority of Plegians who are victims of the religious genocides other world powers keep launching at them are not grimleal members and probably have a culture that they would like to continue having.

You are again assuming my position, I have played Awakening and I am well aware that, early as chapter 8, it is established that the ordinary citizens of Plegia are persecuted by the Grimleal and side with Chrom.

That bit has nothing to do with my point that evil as the Grimleal are. For all of the Grimleal's flaws, they are extremely loyal to Grima and never make any sort of demands of their god that we see; they don't even ask to be spared and there's no mention of them believing any sort of reward in the afterlife.

Now this! This is what I've been hoping for!

If what I've been saying has come across as strawmanning, you have my sincere apologies, anon. That wasn't my intent.

I took this the direction I did because... well, your initial statement smelled like something ignorant to me, and through multiple clarifications it retained that meaning. And since I don't know you beyond these asks, and can only take you at your word, when you repeat something like that I kind of have to make an assumption and go from there.

But you've clarified yourself in a way that I understand now. Thank you for that! Genuinely! Because now that I know the chain of logic you're following, now that I know how the comments about the grimleal are intended to connect to your larger argument, I can talk about that!

(Below the cut though, because the ask length has made this long already.)

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So you don't believe Robin is Grima; I do think there's some very compelling evidence for that, which I could link to if you're curious. But if you aren't interested in that then you're right, best not beleaguer the point. So let's discard Robin and their actions for now.

The thing you're saying that kept getting lost, paraphrased:

Grima in Heroes accuses humans of being fickle. But the grimleal are unfailingly loyal to him. So what gives? What he's saying and what the people around him do don't match up.

Now I still think that the addendum about the genocide is sideways to the point and bad phrasing besides, but...

You are correct that the modern day grimleal are very loyal to Grima! So where would his apparent insistence otherwise come from?

A mutual of mine, in a separate meta post, recently brought up a point that I promise will be relevant: Tiki and Grima are narrative mirrors. They both are dragons revered as gods. They've both been slumbering and not interacting with humanity for centuries.

One thing that's curious about Tiki, and easy to miss if you didn't play Awakening's DLCs (which I didn't, whoops), is that Tiki is honestly pretty pessimistic about humanity. Her first conversation with Nah in Harvest Scramble opens thusly:

"People are scarcely different, whatever realm they inhabit. They pray for bounty, then despair when those prayers go unanswered. At times that despair gives way to war… Alas, festivals are but man placating his gods only to selfishly curse them later."

Sounds pretty familiar! In fact that's almost the exact same sentiment that Grima's Heroes dialogue expresses, and it's coming from Tiki, the Voice of Naga and a very well-loved god in her own right. Where the hell is she getting that?

One thing that's important to keep in mind with the dragons in this game is that they are not gods in the literal sense, only the cultural sense. Naga says as much in Chapter 24: "I am no god. [...] I possess not the powers of making or unmaking. And neither does Grima." And yet humanity certainly treats them like they're gods... This isn't an easy position to be in. To be placed on a high pedestal like that is to be put under a microscope. Your actions are under intense scrutiny. Your words and actions can snowball out of control as people take them too far or twist them. And you're alone up there on that pedestal, no matter how many people gather around the base.

The other thing about the dragons in this game is that they are incredibly long-lived. Tiki has had many lonely millennia to watch humans live, and she's seen them fall into war and tragedy so often it seems like the only thing they know how to do. And the gods are always to blame for their suffering, even when that suffering is self-inflicted or pure chance. Her friends were brilliant; but they're also dead, and all the evidence says they were rare exceptions anyway.

These things - the cons that come with being named a god, and the way that loneliness and longevity can combine to form bitterness - must logically also apply to Tiki's mirror character, Grima.

Like I brought up in the previous ask... We don't actually know what happened 1000 years ago, or before that. Our only source on that time is a single line from Frederick, a guy from a country literally founded on hating Grima recounting a history written by the victors of an ancient conflict. I am completely confident that the assertion that Grima tried to destroy the world 1000 years ago is at worst fabricating an event wholesale, and at best exaggeration and/or wilful misinterpretation of what actually happened. So it's not as though Grima has necessarily always been so jaded and evil as he is in the game's modern day.

To bring all these different points together... Consider this possible explanation for Grima's Heroes dialogue:

Grima, like Tiki, has had many centuries to observe humanity from his position as a god. On top of that he seems to take a more active role in human affairs than his divine counterparts do. And he sees the same things that Tiki does; humans inevitably placing all blame for their fortune and suffering on the gods, humans inevitably seeking grief and conflict.

But unlike Tiki, Grima doesn't have many outside perspectives to jostle him out of how jaded he's becoming. And on top of that, due to his origins he takes a different and aesthetically more sinister form than a typical divine dragon, and no matter his actions this primes people to expect monstrousness from him. So he just gets more jaded, and more pessimistic about humanity, and at some point half the damned continent turns against him and seals him away... And if Naga's current weird ghost existence is anything to go by, he may have even got to watch for a while longer as humans KEPT being just as terrible as he's come to expect. Hell, even his followers started losing hope in their own species.

Really, is it any wonder he would run out of faith in humanity at some point? Given the circumstances?

The modern grimleal are loyal, sure. But he's seen enough humans abandon their benefactors, and had enough humans turn on him and kill him enough times by now... Either the grimleal are an exception proving the rule, or more likely, he knows (believes) how conditional their loyalty is, and if his goals stop aligning with their wishes for a second they'll show their true colours.

Now I will concede that a lot of this is not explicitly stated in the text of the game. But taking into account the likely bias of Ylissean history, Grima's existing parallels with Tiki, and the uncanny similarity between Tiki's pessimism regarding humanity and Grima's Heroes dialogue, I feel confident extrapolating that Grima's pessimism and accusations of human fickleness come from a similar place of loneliness, scrutiny, and witnessing the cycle of war for several thousand years as Tiki's, and was likely boosted into outright hatred of humans in part by the way his physical form and powers interact with human beliefs on what good and evil look like.

...That sure was a run on sentence.

But there you have it. With what we can glean of Grima's potential history from Awakening's content and themes, I think his Heroes' dialogue is well-supported by his characterization in his debut game.

#robot's debate hour #still no reblogs or replies s'il vous plait!#genuinely i'm so happy we got here #this is the reason i have been continuing to answer and the reason i have been asking the mutuals to largely stay out of it #its very easy for a convo like this to become a dogpile and i did NOT want a dogpile #i wanted to pick your brain #and find out if i was wrong to assume you were just trying to make a grima fan mad (which i do seem to have been wrong about. yay!)#but of course you're on anon and i doubt you'd want to go off anon to talk to some random discourser you don't know in private #especially since we got hostile first impressions of each other #so this is what i could do #and i think it's turning out to be quite fruitful!

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