Ep 37 of The Letters Page! Discussion - Fanatic

Figure I'll get this out of the way:

Like the episode, this is probably not a good thread to be in if you care about the nature of Fanatic's powers and the spoilers behind their reveal. Spoilers or no, you've been warned.

 Might be worthwhile to just put spoiler in the thread title.  

 Then this thread doesn't have much point since if you listened to it you know this and if you skipped it there is no reason to visit this thread.  This is different than other weeks because a majority of the episode is considered a spoiler instead of just a few minutes discussing the future. 

Well once I listen to the episode and can comment further I will not be avoiding posting spoilers.  

The one where Christopher almost died. Or, well, revealed that he almost died earlier this week. Man, people would really get mad about Oblivaeon then. :V (I apologize for the tasteless joke.) Unrelated, I spent most of this episode singing the M.A.S.K. -- err, sorry, S.H.M.A.S.K. -- theme song with Lazer Ryderz-related lyrics. :B

I gotta say, the big reveal doesn't diminish her character at all. It's a cool twist, it's a cool state for things to be in, and most importantly, it lets Christopher and Adam, as storytellers, make a statement about the nature of faith in a non-religious context. It's not a subject I really have any experience with, but I think, by the end of the podcast, they made their point really clear. It makes me wish more people understood that concept in the real world.

#NotAllBloodMages

So, Plantverse vs. Animalverse Crossover Spectacular when? :V

I must humbly dissent with Christopher in that not all of us have faith in anything at all, even in a non-deity sense.

As such, it was kinda weird listening to this episode as a result because it inhabits a space that ends up being completely nonsensical to how I intrinsically think. (I won't say it's wrong to how I think because being different doesn't make something inherently wrong, but it definitely inhabits a space of "does not compute".)

I liked this episode and her motives make a lot more sense to me.  She reminds me of Justice and Anders from the Dragon Age series.  

I think C and A managed to somehow square the circle with the reveal about her origin. They left enough holes for someone to ignore the official story.

As for the idea of faith, I agree with Jeysie in that I don't consider myself to believe in anything, not even my own abilities. I don't think I lack self confidence but rather I have made an accurate assessment of my abilities. So I find the idea of a character like Helena very strange, a person who when shown the flaws in their logic who just then doubles down in their logic is anathema to me. 

edited to add I just remembered that my question was asked, that was sent Thursday after I had listened to the interlude so I guess it's never too late

Yeah, my stance is pretty much that reality exists independent of what I think is true or what I want to be true, so I should try as much as possible to ensure my notions of what I think is true are based on what is indeed actually true. I can never have faith in anything, because the mere fact that I'm resorting to faith to determine whether or not something is true makes me feel an intrinsic need to now go and check to make sure the thing actually really is true before I continue believing it is.

So my reaction to finding out an unpleasant truth would instead be something like "well OK I really hate that this is true, but that obviously doesn't make it stop being true, so I need to instead see if there's any way I can salvage something good out of it".

I mean like you, it's not even a self-confidence thing, it's just the way I'm wired. I remember being confused as a kid in church because while I actually rather liked going to church and Bible study and agreed with many of the ethical teachings (since we were more of the "love and charity and affirming life and being good to each other" type than the "fire and brimstone to sinners" type), I never once managed to understand the actual "talking with God/Jesus" part. It was kind of a "well OK I'm praying and listening but nothing is actually happening really so I don't really understand what people get out of this".

So characters, and people in general who do get something out of it and do have that faith approach to their perspective of truth, end up just eliciting a sort of "well OK you do you I guess" kind of reaction out of me if they're being benign in the way they go about it because I have no real frame of reference with which to relate to or understand it.

I am by nature a skeptic, but I have too much evidence to not believe in my religion.  At some point I had to accept that not understanding was fine, but ignoring what was happening wasn't.

That evidence isn't transferable though, asking someone to believe something based on experiences they didn't have and I can't prove happenned would be ridiculous.

As for the Fanatic podcast, I loved it.  It wasn't so much the source of her powers being known was problematic for me, but the idea that her super powers were based on her faith (they aren't) and then removing the question of Faith from her (they didn't) that would have been the problem.

Growing up a conservative protestant and being drawn to philosophy and theology, I always had to deal with the "Faith is better when it is ignorant" crowd.  By that I mean the people who tell you to believe and not think about it, and certainly don't question it.  And yet Every faith has a rich history of people asking those questions and becoming better people for it.  Which is one reason I ended up Catholic, was because for all the churches I attended that wanted to "get back to the early church," not one of them wanted to actually read the writings of the early church and discuss the questions raised by them.

Anyway, Loved all of the episode, esp. the impact of Ra believing in her.  That would be one badass scene, I really want to watch that movie.  Also love that her personality was exactly what I expected it to be, and now I'm really looking forward to Apostate.

That's not belief, that's having a developed enough brain to understand the concept of object permanence.

Since you're not actually arguing that I really do have faith, you're instead trying to argue that I should have faith in solipsism as a philosophy. To which I should probably note that I don't "do" philosophy, either.

I think "No Particular Night or Morning" is a more relevant science fiction story to the specific concept you've raised.

Because I think Orson Scott Card's quote more just exemplifies that unsurprisingly people who have faith as an intrinsic part of their being have just as much of a hard time understanding people who don't, as I do the other way around. They have to reframe it as meaning those people have faith after all, because that's the only way they can compute it.

I mean, you don't have to be defensive. I'm not arguing against faith. Just pointing out that I don't have it, don't understand what it feels like to have it, don't understand what people feel when they say they talk or listen to God, don't understand how you can convince yourself to think something is true if you have no evidence that it is, etc.

I should note that this occasionally has its downsides, too. Like therapy for instance has always been a useless mess for me because virtually 100% of therapy revolves around trying to make you stop being depressed/anxious/etc. by making you believe feel-good things about yourself and the world even if they're not actually true (and maybe even especially if they're not actually true).

They keep saying that Citizen Dawn does radiant damage.

Where? She doesn't have any radiant damage in her deck. Her main card and Blinding Blast both do energy, not radiant.

Maybe they intended her to do so

One thing I find hilarious about this episode is how closely the concepts at work with The Host mirror the concepts of Spren from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.

It is so wierd how often something I just read comes out of nowhere to connect to other parts of my life, but I love those moments of "OH, it's like that" that tend to come with them

Also, I love the incredibly strange nature of her existence. A mortal body with an immensely powerful spirit, her whole being is a fascinating series of questions and possible answers. Had some follow up questions I already submitted, mostly about the moment she was "created".

Actually, for me, it helps that she is explicitly not human at her core, that helps square some of the things we know about her and why she has never had a proper answer to the "what does she do in her downtime". She isn't human, she doesn't do downtime.

Finally, to dip my toe into the current discussion on Faith and belief, I think it becomes a matter semantics and splitting hairs after a certain point. Dig down deep enough into the most fundamental aspects of humanity and we end up calling things by a bunch of different names, shaped by our subjective experiences. For me, the idea of knowledge or certainty canceling out Faith is weird and I've never quite accepted it no matter how it is explained to me. But then there is the difference between Faith, Belief, Assumption, and Hypothesis. Very similiar things that can diverge wildly. It... it isn't really that important though to our day to day functioning or understanding.

Still Fanatic is an amazing character and I'm really interested to see how her story continues to develop in the RPG

Faith is trust in those things unseen.  It doesn't have to be about a God or anything like that.  You can have faith in your friends, in your job, etc.

Faith about God or similar ideas usually comes from experiences people have in relation to them.  Just like trust, it usually has to be earned and can be lost in a similar fashion.

Philosophy is, to me, like science.  But instead of studying the physical, it studies the ethical.  What happens when people act this way vs. that way?  In most religions I have found the way they say we should treat each other is what they try to emphasise, but what often gets emphasized instead is the way to believe about life.  Ifyou study most religions, you'll find that they have a core about treating others as you would like to be treated.  And to me, the rest can be kept or thrown out, depending on the reader's preference.

I got more of a Cole vibe from Fanatic than Anders/Justice.

I honestly don't have faith in things like those either. Though that specifically is less of an intrinsic inability and more general learned attitude from life experiences of "any time I've ever tried to trust in anything or anyone they've just invariably let me down".

And ethics are an entirely different ball of wax from faith or spirtuality. Sometimes related, sure, but not the same thing.

Like, my ethics are definitely influenced by my Catholic upbringing, but it's because those specific things continued to make logical sense in relation to my life experiences even after I gave up on trying to believe in God. (In turn there are some aspects I felt didn't make logical sense and so I dropped them in favor of more congruent ideas.)

Scholar does radiant damage (plus everybody with “choose the type” effects), but I think it notable that it’s on a card referencing “grace”.

Edit: and in environments, the vampire hunter and The True Form do too. While not Dawn, radiant still isn’t solely a Fanatic thing.

No, but Progeny and (from what I've heard) Oblivaeon do.

So I guess Oblivaeon is God. :V The multiverse ends in a JRPG!

The Death of Ra was already an amazing bit, but hearing about it again this week almost brought me to tears.

All the info about Fanatic's origin doesn't really change my picture of her, but it's definitely interesting with regard to Apostate, and I'm going to have to send in a few questions about him before next week!

In the 'oh this is totally like' corner, the first thing I thought of was Demon: The Fallen, where all the pcs have basically the same origin as Fanatic, except that their version involves actual literal Hell.

I was thinking DTC too but in that game the person remembers a lot about their host, like the English Angel of Death still loves her husband, and that gangster still loves his daughter. Fanatic has no connection to her previous life , she's like a changeling or ironically possession , where there is something new making the decision now

So, given the information from this episode, should we then consider Possession as a potential power source?  And, concurrent with that, what ramifications would possession have for the human/host body have in being possessed?

I LOVE that game. I didn't really connect the dots to it like you did, but I can see your reasoning.

It was interesting to hear about Fanatic's reaction to her sword being broken, and how it boiled down to "Aw man! Well, it IS just a sword made by humans... And hey, now it's an axe! I can use it to chop things!" :P

On a side-note, I think Adam and Christopher did a great job with that end explination, and it was a fantastic episode as always. :)

This made me smile. Because its true for so many JRPGs. Playing Breath of Fire now, I can't remember if the final boss is a god but the rest of the series you end up fighting a god or goddess of some kind.

I agree that they did a good job with her origin and the episode as a whole. They also did a great job not giving too much of future episodes away both for Apostate and the Prime Wardens.

Some of my questions that I don't believe were answered was does she have limits on her power? And what did Guise do to deserve being Final Dived, or maybe what didn't he do?

Where is my pre-show banter? They went straight to business. I feel a little off without them bantering for a bit.. . .

Also Fanatic is really cool. Now got to show my friend this episode so he can get into this.

I think we got the first "And then she died" that was both a lie and a truth.

I actually just submitted a question for the Apostate/The Host episode to ask just this sort of question and how such possession would interact with a living host--i.e. is there a fight for dominance vs. symbiosis.

Finally got through it. I'm thoroughly enjoying these...

I love what they did with her and how her story progresses. Definitely an example of a highly-powered individual, so the stories have to be more personal to really have any stakes. 

I'm not going to get into the belief discussion here, though. I think that belief is a very personal thing, and we all have to process it however we have to process it, and doing so sufficiently in post form is nearly impossible. It's definitely something I enjoy discussing in person, however... 

(I think I was not the "Russell" that asked that final question, but I suppose I might have asked it back when they first put out the form. Doesn't sound like something I would ask, though... )

I wonder how fanatic's situation differs from Ra ,was the first Ra a spirit of fire who thought he was the God of the Sun? If Fanatic dies does her sword turn into an artefact that turns the next wielded into an angel of the Lord ?

I would hesitate to call Posession a power source based off of Fanatic and Apostate.

To begin with, they aren't possessed, by which I mean the main entity driving the body does not have a second personality they are subsuming. Both the girl who was named Helena and whatever corpse Apostate pulled up were just bags of meat at the time. Technically a possession in terms of "the spirit is possessing the body" but not possession in terms of a situation like Dark Visionary which is a little more classical in its presentation.

Secondly, the possession of the body is not the source of the power. They both have power due to their nature as spirits, and all of their powers flow from their existence as spirits. Apostate possesses a body more because that is a more convienent way to interact with Fanatic than because he needed to possess a body to wield his power, at least in my interpretation of events. Fanatic's power is not because she has a mortal body, but because she is a Spirit of the Host.

Now, Idolater and The Seer interct with Host spirits in very different ways, so it is possible that the possession of a mortal body, with a mortal soul, by a spirit of the Host could lend power, but it is not something we have seen and itwould be just as unique as Fanatic becoming "Stuck" in her body like she did, since generally these spirits possess someone to incite an emotion and then leave, they don't tend to linger long.

Consider then, the following definition of 'possession':

3. the state of being controlled by a demon or spirit. "they prayed for protection against demonic possession"

• the state of being completely under the influence of an idea or emotion.
  "fear took possession of my soul"

Within this context, Fanatic's power comes entirely from the Host Spirit of Judgment overtaking her physical form, allowing that Host Spirit to manifest power on the physical plane.

Idolator, would work within the same context, though the form of "possession" comes from his imprisoned Host Spirit of Faith.  He's drawn a spirit here from The Host plane and utilizes its power which, in other forms, would be inaccessible.  His staff may be the thing that's possessed, instead of him, but he's wielding otherwise inaccessible power.

The thing is, there's not a person being possessed there. I believe Christopher and Adam said the spirit was entirely bound to the physical form, after pre-Helena died. So the power comes entirely from the spirit. Fanatic is its physical form.

Scholar also does some Radiant damage.

So, there's this great video out there of a meeting between Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama. Sagan asks (paraphrasing), "if there arose scientific evidence that reincarnation did not take place, what would your reaction be?"

The Dalai Lama's response was immediate: "Oh, then we would stop believing in reincarnation." His response was so sudden and so certain that Sagan looks visibly surprised.

Anyway - I find that exchange provides an interesting window on the faith vs evidence issue. The way I see it, faith can fill in the gaps. But our inductive determination of what reality is does not change, no matter what we believe. Unless we're Fanatic! ;)

The difference is that she isn't being controlled by a demon of spirit. She is a Spirit of Judgement. Trapped inside a flesh shell, mixed with it somehow, but that is like saying your soul is currently posessing your body. It could be "technically" true, but it does not fall under what we generally consder possession because possession is generally done by something that does not intrinsically own the bdy. Helena/Fanatic is the only owner of that body.

I agree that her having a physical body definetly informs the way she uses her power and the types of things she can do, but the source of that power is still her very nature as a spirit, not the fact that she is flesh and blood.

Man, I love the Dalai Lama.

It wasn't Sagan I saw talking to him, but he's been having scientists teach his monks about the universe even to this day, and going on record to state that the evidence they find of the universe takes precedence over the ancient religious writings in terms of "truth of reality" is just mind blowing to me. He's willing to synthesize science and religion, and so very, very few major religious leaders are willing to do that. He is truly a great man.

That's just the God of the Gaps fallacy, though.

The stance from Catholicism, at least, is more like "God created the world, and this is how He did it and what rules He gave it". Evolution is part of Catholic doctrine, for instance, because it's basically like "this is God's manual for how He created life".

There's also an element of, science teaches us how the world works, but religion teaches us what to do with it. Science can show you how to harness the energy of the atom, but it doesn't tell you if you should build power plants or build nuclear bombs. Religion (or ethics, for non-spiritual people) is what addresses that part.

It's not a matter of nuance, though, "God of the Gaps" is flat out based on a lack of understanding how science and knowledge work.

Ironically I think your phrasing gets into the crux of the matter. You reject a source based on it being "anti-religion" because you are instead in favor of a statement about reality that is "nuanced" and "fair" to religion. When it's actually perfectly possible that the truth of reality could end up being anti-religion, because reality has no obligation to care about how well it matches any of our ideologies or what we want or don't want to be true. Reality is what it is whether you want it to be that way or not. Your choice is instead about what you want to do with that reality.

Fanatic's episode actually kind of gets into that, even. Instead of accepting what ironically were Apostate's truths and then making a choice to still find ways to do good with them, she blocks them out in favor of having faith in lies.

I wonder how Fanatic would react if it had been a benevolent Spirit that didn't insert lies into those truths instead of one of deceit.  Would that put her where the RPG timeline is heading much earlier?

TBH, I feel like on a purely literary level, "personification of judgment stuck in a mortal body tries to figure out what is the best way to translate the core of their being into mortal society and ethics systems" would be way more interesting to me than "character goes around figuring out what they want to believe is true and then how to really, really believe it's true in face of any and all possible contrary evidence".

Especially since we already have the Celestial Tribunal to showcase what "pure" judgment with no consideration of mortal society actually looks like, as a potential contrast.

I came away feeling the first statement you made is what Fanatic is.   That translation came in a form of their faith and not a set of programming like the Tribunal.   Redeemer Fanatic also makes more sense to me because she comes out being blind and Justice is supposed to be blind.   So despite seeming like she is ignoring what was said she is personifying Justice even more.  

Except the framing of the story isn't "Fanatic is struggling with squaring the core of who she is with the system of ethics she's developed" it's "how strongly can Fanatic blind herself to the truth of who she is in favor of still believing she's an angel".

As someone whose core revolves around facts, logic, and honesty rather than faith, the former to me is interesting: Since something being true doesn't automatically make it morally good or morally congruent, how do we deal with that possible dissonance as people? But the latter doesn't add anything interesting to me regards an exploration of ethics or human nature.

We will just have to disagree there as I didn't come away from the episode feeling that way.  

Except Apostate isn't telling her the facts. Apostate wasn't trying to convince her that the were both spirits of the host who exist as personified versions of emotions or concepts.

Apostate is using the fact that she doesn't know the truth to try & shape her perception of reality to his own ends. Apostate isn't presenting objective facts to her to help her know who she really is. He is presenting half of the facts to try and abuse the gaps in her knowlege for his advantage.

From my interpritation she isn't blinding herself to the truth of who she is. Becuase the Facts of who she is are that she has a calling to judge, punish the wicked and protect the innocent. Weather she is an angel or a spirit is irrelevant to that calling she feels from her core, which is a fact. The context that she recieves from worldly religions shape her perception as experience does to anyone. However, it does not clip her wings(sorry) in terms of making up her own mind. She feels that her role in judgement must be more active, so she leaves the convent and fights for what she believes. While what form she takes might have changed had that initial Christian context not been there, i doubt she would've been unrecognizable as the same "person".

Yeah, but she doesn't even try to find out the other half of the facts and incorporate that new knowledge into herself, she just goes lalalalalala and does her best to reconvince herself of her original beliefs.

It just pattern-matches too strongly to many bitter fights and other problems I've had in real life with people who stuck their fingers in their ears and clung to false narratives rather than deal with reality, for me to find the matter anything but headshake-worthy at best.