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tacogoats · 6 months

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Thinking about a Durge who has rejected Bhaal, and whatever person they used to be, but still secretly longs for their lost memories. A Durge that, despite the answers the man could give them, would never re-ignite that strange passion they were shown they once had for Gortash. A Durge that has, for all purposes to the others in their party, moved on. A Durge that, six months after that day atop the Netherbrain, at a party celebrating their new life, receives a strange letter with an even stranger gadget hidden inside.

The meeting at the inauguration was a strange one. Despite Gortash's very obvious elation at seeing what he'd called his 'dearest friend', the man had no hesitation very proudly detailing the Dark Urge's grand scheme; their grand design for the world to be.

In front of all their friends and 'new' lover, of course.

They were furious, and rightly so. Gortash must have known what he was doing. To isolate them, to bring them back to him. The person who accepted them for all they were, all they are, and all they could be - together.

It wasn't enough to win the Dark Urge back to him, and although they'd tentatively teamed up in the end - he had died. Not by the Urge's hand, but in some ways, his own. The group had left Gortash's body within the Prism, and simply moved on. There were bigger problems, and no one really was sad to see him go. Right?

The Urge remembers a letter found in Moonrise Towers. Gortash liked gadgets, according to Ketheric. Evidence was abundant enough with the Steel Watchers, among other things. The item is strangely shaped, entirely too small, and with a simple touch, comes to life.

It reminds them of the strange picture they had seen at the Iron Throne. Gortash's visage shone through a glass, moving, talking - warning them to leave. Answering them, praising them for listening.

What a strange contraption, they'd thought all those months ago.

And then, now, there he was again. A picture, in their hand. A moving picture. Speaking with his voice, wearing his weary face - so, so weary - but not the same as before.

This had passed already. The voice did not answer them this time. It was simply impossible - the man was dead, but not quite gone in this moment.

He speaks of the inauguration like it had just happened. His joy at seeing his favourite 'assassin' again, which he says with a sad smile and a moment of silence. A heavy sigh follows, rubbing at his eyes - which they can see are so much darker than they last remember.

He is tired.

Gortash speaks of their time together, before Orin - and how Orin torments him day and night now that they had both confirmed the Urge's return. She appears with their face, taunting him some days. Other days she sends assassins that wear the same, and he simply cannot let his guard down anymore. But he knew it was them that day.

They can see the exhaustion that pulls down his features, makes his words heavier. This is not the Archduke speaking to him in this moment - it is a tired, broken down man that has just seen a ghost.

Yet they cling to every word anyway, because even though this is a broken down man who is terrified of the ghost - the man still hopes the ghost will remember him, too.

They don't. But he doesn't know that, not this little picture of him, anyway.

The picture says that if they are seeing this recording, it means he is already dead - and although he had planned to sway them back to his side, he may not have been given the chance, and refuses to allow the opportunity to share what the two of them once had slip away.

He would gift unto them the memories that he could, even beyond death. The bloody ones, the happy ones, the painful ones.

And he talks, he smiles, he even cries.

And so do they.

#durgetash #dark urge x gortash #i dont usually write gushy things but i am trying to write fic of this i need to yell a bit #this has been sitting in my drafts i release it to the world now #dont look at me im cringe #i just think that my own dark urge would always long for their memories despite withers's warnings and #knows that gortash is the only person who could give it to them and selfishly sides with him because of it #and when gortash dies he knows all is lost. and accepts it. he has a new life now. its okay. (its not okay)#and when they see that funky lil thing in the letter They Know. They KNOW it's from That man #and there's a moment of hesitation as those words from withers flash in their mind again but nope fuck it. selfishness wins.#and even though the man was a monster - they were once eachother's monsters and - there are his answers. some of them anyway.#and he can finally let go of that : )#i dont have a writing tag nor do i want one rn this is a rarity for me #bg3 epilogue spoilers #minor spoilers but still

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sisterdivinium · 1 year

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It might appear somewhat essentialist at first if used to examine real, breathing human beings, but Carol Gilligan's "Images of relationship" can provide an interesting framework with which to understand certain facets of Warrior Nun. More so when coupled with David Hayter's comment on how the show's "women are always right and the men are always kind of screwing things up," for her article, dealing in systems of moral understanding, might point us towards the reasons behind this openly admitted narrative "bias".

In a nutshell, Gilligan observes the different strategies by which boys and girls seem to resolve moral dilemmas, deviating from traditional interpretation. This is because, Rosemarie Tong reminds us, "Gilligan challenged the Freudian notion that men have a well-developed sense of justice — a sense of morality — whereas women do not". By looking beyond these hurried and prejudiced conclusions of (male) researchers before her, she "argued instead that men and women have different conceptions of morality, each equally coherent and developed and equally valid". She bases this idea, then, on those resolution strategies that were found to consist of, for boys, a tendency to see the moral dilemma as "sort of like a math problem with humans", while the girls were more inclined to view it as "a narrative of relationships that extends over time" — so if boys seemed "logical" through their impersonal abstraction of a situation, invoking concepts similar to those of law and justice, the girls were more likely to follow a different, "personal" logic, through "an awareness of the connections between people", identifying "a web of relationships that is sustained by a process of communication".

Where this all intersects with Warrior Nun is that the male and female characters seemingly display these same propensities of moral judgment.

If we start with the men, we will quickly see that they are all caught up in their own abstract systems, prone to grand ideas and concepts while detached from the world and the valuable human bonds that make it up, just as Vincent sees the quest for a hypothetical "better world" as more important than the life of a very real, concrete woman he claims to love. Mr. Hayter himself, in the same interview conceded during the OCS Conclave of June 3rd, mentions how father Vincent and cardinal William are irresistibly attracted to the notion of power: "here's this guy who can do godlike things, so why wouldn't I follow him, you know? ... We gotta have some power ... that we bow down to or whatever". This is how he transmits a glimpse into these characters' psyches and we could safely argue that this behaviour and thought pattern extends to the rest of the men in the show, including Duretti, Kristian, Adriel and even Michael Salvius.

Whether these men mask their fascination with power through other words or not, theirs is a cause which easily calls for violence and a willingness to kill or die for it.

Earthly power inspires Francesco Duretti to have the current halo bearer killed if need be as he attempts to consolidate his bid on the Holy See; Kristian Schaefer would sacrifice the world as readily as he does his old acquaintance Duretti in the name of this power that lay entombed for a thousand years but communicated through the voice of a sick little boy; cardinal William Foster is inebriated with the idea of being a new god's right-hand man, so he brutally slaughters his colleagues to buy himself a place at Adriel's table, even if that means getting no more than his master's crumbs; father Vincent is so eager to find someone or something powerful enough to take the burden of "his darkness" from atop his shoulders that he convinces himself of there being divinity in the parlour tricks of a manipulator, killing a symbolic daughter in this trickster's name; Adriel would bleed humanity dry without a second thought all the while claiming to save it in draining its belief for the benefit of his own megalomania; finally, Michael subjects himself to the will and authority of Reya, whom he claims to be "unimaginably powerful".

Of course the women of Warrior Nun are mostly all ready to lay down their lives for their own cause as well, or else we wouldn't have their iconic motto of "in this life or the next", but the motivation behind it is what sets the men and the women wholly apart here. If the former are intoxicated by the concept of power, the latter are embedded in a family of sorts, in a dense network of relationships that they can identify with some ease, and which informs their decisions and actions more than just dogma or theory.

Most if not all of the female characters struggle between two different stances: one is an offshoot of the males' abstract organisation of the world, while the other is a more "hands-on", "organic" order; between "duty", or what is said to be their duty, and that which their own perception reveals, their "personal" logic by which the "self [is] delineated through connection", seeing one another as actual sisters instead of mere pieces upon the church's chess board. We see the dilemma take place within Beatrice, Camila, Lilith and Mother Superion, who are all faced with a choice of sticking to their place in a well-defined (artificial, abstract) structure or valuing instead the human connections all around them and that stand in opposition to this man-made categorisation of life.

And, one by one, they take the side of that one character who seems to have kept her lucidity and fidelity to her own understanding through it all: Mary.

Mary never lost sight of her priorities. Her focus on friends and sisters illustrates Gilligan's point rather well when she is the only one who insists on understanding what happened to Shannon all the while the OCS is made to concentrate its energies on the halo instead. Of course it blinds her to Vincent's betrayal, but that is his fault more than it is hers; her moral compass points at the right direction for the most part.

And, each at their turn, the nuns adopt (rediscover?) this same mode of thought. Beatrice's efficient, obedient soldier façade crumbles beneath the urgency of siding with Mary rather than following the arbitrary decision of some man invested with the power of an institution; Camila outright admits wanting to be kicked out of the church just so she can stay near to the people who represent her allegiance more than liturgy itself ever could; Lilith literally travels to hell and back to rejoin her sisters, regardless of how her subsequent mutations upset her loyalty later on; Mother Superion sheds her prominence within hierarchy, risking it all, by standing with "her girls". Even Ava, an outsider with no ties to the church but who so desperately wanted to "live", trades a vague, abstract notion of what "life" and "freedom" entail for the very definite, tangible reality of the family this group of women becomes for her.

Another outsider equally stuck between "bodiless" logic and the reality of human connection around her, Jillian Salvius, too, falters before choosing her side when faced with these two points of view: that of "pure" reasoning and that informed by the consciousness of surrounding relationships. Her quest for "knowledge" is not sufficiently strong so as to potentially sacrifice someone in her inner circle. Season one has her holding young Michael back from stepping into the machine she herself had created for this purpose when concern overrides calculation; season two gives us a powerful scene where she is tempted by Kristian into joining Adriel's ranks as he claims she is already a part of it all and dangles before her the forbidden fruit of the world's hidden laws, the elusive answers the scientist in her has always searched for. He tries to hook her in by simultaneously appealing to her intellectual interests as well as her understanding of the web of relationships when he claims she is another link in the chain that leads to Adriel...

And Jillian refuses him.

Kristian would never convince her of already being within this specific network of relationships because he was the one to rupture it first.

To these women, unlike the men, it's not about ideas — or, rather, about rationalisations, given how their interpretation of what is logical or reasonable is more than open to inquiry. To these women, it's not about loud, large but empty words vulnerable to tampering and shifting meanings; it's not about power.

It's about people.

Rosemarie Tong says "Gilligan believed that women's moral development takes her from an egocentric, or selfish position to an overly altruistic, or self-sacrificing position and, finally, to a self-with-others position in which her interests count as much as anyone else's" — and this seems to describe perfectly well the inner trajectory that these characters follow. We see traces of the selfish in Ava, Jillian and Lilith, as well as of the self-sacrificial in Beatrice or Suzanne, but they all appear to converge on this path towards constructing a "self-with-others" whereby they are all individuals inextricably tied to one another — and aware of it, acting accordingly. A sisterhood, a direct sisterhood that supersedes the very church structure which facilitated it to begin with.

Of course Warrior Nun is too intricately built to allow itself to be so smoothly explained; if Carol Gilligan provides a framework that helps us to identify what is so positive and deserving of attention in the female characters' attitudes as championed by one of the show's own writers, it also falls short on other points and her propositions can then be questioned by the show in turn.

We need but a few examples.

If Jillian Salvius values the significance of association with others more than she does a cold, distant overview of things (the latter being the stereotypical scientist attitude), then how is it that she seems so prepared to immolate Lilith at the altar of curiosity? One relationship takes precedence over the other, yes, and we cannot compare the love for a son to whatever affection or respect there is for anyone else, but the nature of Jillian's experimentation with Lilith, had it gone forward, is quite brutal even for the sake of a debilitated child. Jillian's stance is understandable, but this "self-with-others" thing isn't as clear-cut as we might think.

Lilith herself oscillates between those three positions of moral development described by Gilligan, going from selfish to "connected" by the end of season one, but ending season two in almost complete isolation, with only a hint towards her previous place in a web of sisters as she aids Beatrice in getting Ava to the ark... Shortly after having dug her claws into the warrior nun's flesh.

But perhaps Lilith is a more special case than we realise at first. Our early childhood experiences define much of our character, after all, and the words we use have a bearing on how we view and reconstruct the world in our discourse; Lilith's understanding of the relationships between people, of "family", probably doesn't reflect that of her sisters given the ill-treatment she must have received from her relatives. If one's primary web of relationships is so tainted, what model can it ultimately provide for later connections? Just as Ava's mistrust for nuns is justified by her previous, negative experiences at their hands, Lilith's experience with intimate or familial bonds surely affects her maturing sense of being linked to other people. If family is a positive value for Ava and Mary, for example, it cannot boast of the same meaning for Lilith, whose family is a source of stress and misunderstanding rather than a harbour of love.

The treatment she has received might have corrupted her grounds for moral judgment by communal lenses in a way Beatrice's rejection by her own parents did not, leaving Lilith adrift as long as she does not somehow attempt to re-signify what human connection ultimately means. To Lilith, as of yet, the web of relationships she necessarily belongs to mirrors the initial disposition she was brought up in, as a hierarchical structure where every link is tainted by the stench of power and domination — the OCS is a family much like her own... Where orders are given and meant to be obeyed.

We cannot know for certain what it is that she sees or feels after Adriel "unlocks" her wraith-vision, but there is something peculiar in how, reflecting this idea of abstract versus material views of the world we've been discussing, Lilith claims to see reality when she casts her eyes upon the nebulous demonic figures only few others can see. In her opposing traits are mixed, delivering a strange synthesis we cannot quite make out yet and making Lilith a hybrid both in body and in thought.

And while this fact alone seems to interrogate David Hayter's comment about how the women in the show tend to be correct, we can further complicate the statement by glancing at Reya.

There is frightfully little we know of her, but a lot of the information we do have is conflicting: Reya is unimaginably powerful, yet needs to manipulate two young people to do her bidding for her in fighting Adriel; her predictions are "meant to be" yet do not manifest in the way they were said to; she is described as some sort of benefactor by taking Michael in, but she sticks a bomb into his chest and the very sight of her sends him reeling; she is, as far as we know, a woman, yet she might very well be at odds with the other women we see in the show. How, then, are the women always right?

Perhaps they are so when following their conscience as guided by their understanding of community and sisterhood, when belonging to a network of relationships and acknowledging it. That would exclude a murderous sister Frances, a confused Lilith and a mysterious, distant Reya from the definition.

In this sense, then, even if the characters are not static or simple, even if they waver between the moral positions suggested by Gilligan and which do not seem all that definite to begin with, her text is still enlightening as relates to why the women are, "word of God", the moral touchstone of Warrior Nun.

Having been robbed of further development of the story and universe for the time being, however, precisely because of an abstracting, impersonal corporate logic that sees only numbers where there should be people and the wonderful effect this show has had on them, there is only so much we can conjecture on this subject...

#warrior nun #analysis and similar #exercises in observation #i should tag all of the characters since they're all more or less discussed but i am too lazy for that sorry #i can't explain why i took so long to write this it's been in my essay list forever. then the david hayter revelations hit #and i knew i had to finally write it strengthened by his words #it's fair to tell you i have about a trillion reservations about psychoanalysis and psychology and whatever #but you also know by now i'm a pragmatist. if the theory helps me explain something i will use it.#then again i suppose i should have read gilligan's entire book lol but my eyes wouldn't have survived #i had read her text in january of last year i think because it's in a collection of feminist texts i own in print #so yeah. grain of salt etc #i'm not sure i've properly exposed what i wanted to say but i've had enough of this text and i'm releasing it into the world lol

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