[Dragaera] Paarfi's Whitewash of Adron

[Philip Hart]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2011, Jerry Friedman wrote:

>> It seems to me simpler to think that the Orb believes Adron is emperor, but
>> he's not.
>
> It's simpler in one way, but it requires the additional assumptions that 
> there's a distinction between the Orb's belief and the fact of who is 
> Emperor, and that Adron's spell depends crucially on its belief, and 
> that he doesn't realize this (or, for unreliable-narrator fans, that 
> Paarfi doesn't).

Adron may well know of a putative orb/cycle emperor distinction, but 
either not care (that is, not care enough), or sensibly think the 
likelihood of running into a situation causing a bug is small.  Really the 
great cycle point should have come up more in Aerich's conversation with 
him.

> [Orb in the Cycle]

The Cycle as I understand it is something the gods consult, not something 
they program - it does something so complex (control the forces of history 
of two complex nations) that it can only be considered as divine in a much 
deeper sense than say Veera.


>> Paarfi might not want to discuss bugs in the orb if the Paarfiad is, as I've
>> speculated, written as a Dragaeran Aeneid, a work of propaganda or anyway
>> state-building.
>
> I can see why you've speculated that, though there's a fine line between 
> a work of state-building and one that panders to patriotism.
>
> But everybody now knows there's a bug in the system.  I'm not sure it 
> matters much whether the bug is in the Orb, in some sense.


Here's what I think about the problem: the Cycle engineered Adron's 
Disaster, as a way of upgrading the Orb and accelerating Dragaeran culture 
(perhpas to better defend against the J).  Paarfi can't say that and 
state-build (incidentally I came across the Hebrew word "hasbara" 
recently, 'a cross between "explanation" and "propaganda"') in a society 
racially based on the Cycle.  [Here I should note that Paarfi does 
everything he can to undermine that racial structure.] It's as if one 
tried to proselytize for a religion that held God caused Stalin's Terror 
and the Holocaust and etc. in order to make the US build a large nuclear 
arsenal to defend against aliens.  Paarfi (assuming this hasbara take, 
which I only entertain) has a difficult task - he must balance the 
representation of the Cycle, the gods, and the empire.  That he's writing 
political and not religious or mystical advocacy is shown by the dramatic 
scene where Zerika refuses to be bullied by the gods.