Kernel of Insight: The Wicked Priest

Hey, all...guess what?  That's right...revisions still haven't started on the next chapter.  Life is complicated right now and I am barely keeping up as is.  So, you'll just have to be satisfied with this bit.  One more look into my addled brain about the beginning of the series and how it has changed.

Promise, next week or the week after, my workload should be down significantly so writing can begin.  Still probably won't have anything till December, but I'll at least be working on it.  Hope you enjoy my look at how I adapted a mix of Judeo-Christian values and other religions into the dominant value system on the continent of Serano.  This is a look at how religion should not be defined.  About a scrapped idea that was scrapped not only because of the cliche, but because it did a disservice to religion in general.  It's not a bad thing...not always.  Anyway, give it a look

Kernel of Insight: The Wicked Priest

            Right now, part of the big thing about Chronicles of the Frozen Shade is the idea that the dark is not necessarily evil and the light is not necessarily good.  That's been a pervading theme in my work, as I think that the best way to describe something dark is not evil, but misunderstood or marginalized or even just different.  However, an amateur trope is to try to make one side sympathetic by making the other side almost completely corrupt, wicked, psychotic, or what have you.  When a religious organization is involved, this is very, VERY easy to do, as religion is a source of continuing debate and criticism the world over.  I believe Marx called it the opiate of the masses.

            Religion and...well...moderation is not always two things that can coexist.  That was a big hurdle for me in designing the world was the mythos building.  But, that's for another time.  Suffice it to say, I originally had the priests as only being good in the prologue, which I excised and reinvented into another chapter.  After that, they were going to be less community members and more...reluctant guardians, I guess?  I mean, when you see Angelo and his comrades now, they're...a tad dickish, maybe, but ultimately good people.  They helped out during the attack and while they may be strict with Daryl in her training, I wouldn't say they're evil.  However, at one point, we were going to have a straight up MUAHAHAHAHA evil priest.  Yeah...oy...

            The basic setup is you've got a priest who comes to Gesthal with his shadowy minions.  He takes an interest in Mina, as so many do, and is somehow able to discern that she's connected to Aeon and the others.  Being a poorly written stereotype, he believes any associated with Telnumbrans are evil, that he must purge the evil, that it's okay to act amoral for the purpose of achieving his ends, and does not hesitate to use coercion to suit his goals.  Pretty stock villain stuff, where even the reader goes "C'mon, villagers, how can you not see he is a bad guy?"  Yeah, subtlety is a pretty important thing to have when writing.

            Anyway, the priest comes in, acts like a slick car salesman where he wins you over with sly smiles, flattery, kind words, and the like, but secretly starts to watch Mina and her friends visit Acacia, which took place during the night hours in a previous draft rather than during the day.  One night, he follows them, gets them to open up the door, then straight up kidnaps them.  The idea being that Aeon tolerates the girls, therefore they have a connection and he will want to protect his own.  So, the priest and his minions basically stroll into Acacia using Mina and the others as their shields.

            Do I even need to go on?  What do you think happens?  Mina and the others manage to somehow get away from the priests, they do their posturing about how they're really the heroes and Mina and Aeon are the bad guys, Aeon and his comrades give them what they deserve, end of story.  Truth be told, this was meant to show how much Aeon cared for Mina and how integrated their lives had become, but ultimately, it didn't mesh well with the type of story I was writing, which was a mix between slice of life, coming of age, and dark drama with lots of fighting.  This was a turn that I didn't care for and it never survived the draft it had been incorporated in.

            However, it is noteworthy because it made me re-examine how I was handling the priests.  While the religions at play in Chronicles of the Frozen Shade are different in a number of aspects from Christianity, and actually might have more to do with a mix of Hindu and Buddhist ideals, there are some pretty heavy shades of Christianity throughout, which also is due to the fantasy tropes of the cleric, which I draw a lot of inspiration from in the designs of some characters.  Religion in and of itself isn't really evil.  It can be highly misguided, but it is meant to inspire hope in the masses, and to that end, it's practitioners, unless swayed by really bad teachers, tend to be decent, upstanding people.

            I wanted to get that across.  So, that went a long way into several future characters I'm writing, and even into Angelo a little, who became a bit of a jerk near the end of other drafts.  The religion at play here I DO hope to get a chance to explain at some point, because I think it's very interesting, with gods, the dragons, who don't act as gods do, an overriding goddess figure, and a human messianic figure, all interwoven into a similar pantheon, just interpreted differently by various cultures.

            While this is meant to be a pseudo commentary piece, it's above all else meant to be a fun story, Mina's story, so best not to resort to stereotypical religious stuffs that don't advance the plot and don't really make much sense from any perspective.  I mean, think about it...a guy like I was writing who was super amoral...in a religion that still holds sway over the populace, someone like that would be hard pressed to survive because at least a few of his superiors would be honorable people who'd boot his ass out in a second.

            I didn't want the religious figures here to become crusaders or Warhammer 40k fanatics.  It's been a while since I played Warhammer 40k, but I love the mythos and...their god/emperor is so highly venerated that anything in his name is okay.  And that kind of dystopian religion works for their universe at war setting, but not in something smaller in scope and scale.  Worse is that the emperor in 40k never wanted to be venerated to the point where thousands die each day to sustain him and millions die each day, branded heretics or traitors, with a legion of super soldiers to enforce the will of his proxies.

            I didn't want another Spanish Inquisition.