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I want to discuss the Pathfinder fanfic "in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die". I'm going to start by copy-pasting the submission statement I gave it on /r/rational and then I will dive deeper into the culture war aspects of the work:
Now, as I said, Iomedae is from medieval fantasyland, and her writer does a good job portraying her someone who has different values and ideas from a modern American. I particularly liked the way she reacted to the modern concept of rape:
I found this extremely refreshing. The central example of rape is "woman was minding her own business when someone broke into her house and forced her". It is incredible how little of what gets called "rape" actually fits that category, and can be better described as "woman cruising for a dicking regrets the dicking come next morning". It is the worst argument in the world, enshrined into our legal code.
Or consider how she deals with the stifling secularism of progressive society:
I imagine more than one red triber has felt something similar upon going to college. But it goes further than that; Iomedae really believes in hell, the way she believes in the grocery store around the corner, and that is obviously going to have a huge effect on the way she lives her life.
And just so I don't get accused of only liking this story because it confirms all my biases, Iomedae also has words for modern immigration enforcement:
So, overall, I highly recommend this fic. It will make you think, and it will give you a great outside look at the assumptions we take for granted living in modernity. If you have never played Pathfinder, don't worry; neither have I. As long as you know about paladins and wizards from reading The Order of the Stick or similar you know everything you need to know to enjoy the narrative. Iomedae may have ascended to godhood in canon, but in this story that is just her awesome destiny.
Iomedae sounds like an idiot on the subject of immigration, because she's very clearly being an author-mouthpiece. Does she have an opinion on whether or not Cheliax, if they found a way to replicate her journey, should be able to start sending evangelists of Asmodeus over en masse? Or is the point that because she has access to at-will detect evil, she doesn't understand how when dealing with mere mortals, we can't just march her in front of every immigrant and have her decapitate the evil ones, and let the rest pass on through? I wonder what she'd think of a cabal of mortal wizards who started mass-binding souls in order to shove them into whatever Pathfinder's version of Mount Celestia is. Or the Worldwound, for that matter.
Actually, there are a bunch of things I'd want her to run into. In Pathfinder (and in almost every edition of D&D), humans are not sexual dimorphic in ability spread; men are taller and heavier than women in nearly every race, but this does not affect their attribute spread. So, does she have a low-level melee-combatant attribute spread or an actual teenage girl attribute spread? And how does she react to, in the first case, learning that compared to what she's used to, men and women might as well be half-orcs and halflings when it comes to their distributions of upper body strength? If we assume that she has Str 16 (since she's a legendary hero before level-up bonuses and, as a paladin, suffers from Multiple Attribute Dependency) and we use the rather generous PF carrying capacity table, she can lift 460 lbs off the ground, which (as I understand from a casual google) would smash the world record for people in the average teenage girl weight class.
It also sounds like the religion thing is nuanced at least, but I feel like that the world of Pathfinder is ontologically different enough that I don't see her views on religion mapping well enough to ours to have a strong opinion on Jesus as an actual historical figure or actual Outsider with a divine rank. Maybe he was a guy who rose from the dead; that happens more often than not if you die around powerful users of divine magic. Maybe he's a god or a demigod or a name given to another god; the world is aggresively syncretic and no god created the universe, nor actually defines it in any meaningful way; important things like Good and Evil predate the gods and will outlive them, and while gods, even Iomedae's own patron deity, might be deeply important to her, she should know that being a paladin demands that she follow Good first and her god's commandments second, if the two ever collide.
Honestly, I am a little melancholy about the fact that I'm deep enough to the weeds of Pathfinder to find the premise of this story really interesting, but that I also know just from the summary I was given that I'm going to be running heavily into places where the story either warps to progressive shibboleths and loses me as a result. Which is a shame, because I feel like a based author that was willing to respond to questions about America's policy on immigration and secularism by sending a paladin to a cartel-controlled town in Mexico or a fundamentalist-Islam-controlled stronghold in Afganistan would be really narratively interesting.
I also feel like there's a much more hilarious story about weird-ass Underdark radiation fucking up and dropping good ol' Drizzt Do'urden into our world as opposed to Icewind Dale, and have him have to undergo a whole lot of different learning experiences.
ETA: Fucking hell, didn't make it off the first page before getting pissed off again. You know what also doesn't exist in Pathfinder? Acquired immunity. People don't get resistant to filth fever by hanging around in a dungeon repeatedly, because pathogens are not germ-based in Iomeade's world. The correct response to "Let me give you a little bit of unclean taint to make you stronger and teach you to fight it off." is "Back the fuck off, spawn of Lamashtu and Apollyon, I know how potions that heal the sick work and that is not it, you lying bastard." There are also a lot fewer lethal diseases unless you use the optional rules to make diseases extra-lethal, and there's low-level divine magic to help with sick people, and if Iomeade has hit third level herself than she's entirely immune, and that should be part of her understanding of the world.
Part of rationalism is engaging with the world as it is, not as you've been told (or are being told) that it is. This would have been a perfect chance for Iomeade to have expressed a solid opinion and been given the chance to learn that this was not her world (and, as the other people dug deeper, to learn that she was not from their world), but there is no world in which being told about vaccines shouldn't map to one of the many plague cultists fucking with people. Hell, even if Iomeade had seen enough of this world to recognize that things were different here, this should still be a point in which she has opinions, beyond "Really? Cool!"
I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.
Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.
Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.
Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.
According to Iomedae, in a later thread following from the one being discussed where she is back in Golarion, germ theory is true in Golarion. Her basis is having learned about it in America, but nothing in the story implies that she is wrong.
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In a game, the rules are reflective of the players' shared understanding of the game world, and when the rules fail to reflect that understanding, they are bad rules.
And obviously the GM can decide things. The GM can decide that Iomedae is a foxgirl in a kinky BDSM relationship with Asmodeus. But that is not reflected in either the rules or the setting documents, and people are quite right to complain that referring to someone who was called Iomeade and differed significantly, and in unannounced and weird ways from what was established.
And, while I'll probably do a whole bit on this later, Iomedae comes from a world where the nation she is from (the Taldoran Empire) actually did mass emigration in an explicitly colonialist way. And, of course, they had to deal with foreign invaders entering their lands as well. I can absolutely buy an Iomedae that sympathizes with the plight both of specific illegal immigrants and of their host nation, and wishes there was a way to both fulfill the law and grant security to the immigrants. But describing border security as evil are not the words of any paladin anywhere, much less the words of a paladin otherwise-fated to be a god of paladins that worships a Lawful-Neutral god of human civilization.
The author could have picked a generic paladin from an unspecified setting, or even a generic paladin from Golarion. They did not. They chose a paladin with a history and her own views. Obviously, the author and the readers have the right to tell me and everyone else "Fuck you, I'm doing it my way, and I'm also making Aroden trans, cope and seethe.", and equally-obviously, I have the right to tell the author that she's doing it wrong, as I have above and probably will again.
And hey, if you want to get into a detailed dive on the established lore of Golarion and its gods and claim that I'm misrepresenting Aroden, Iomeade, paladins, or the Taldoran Empire, please feel free. Hell, if anyone knows if there are PF2e adventure paths or lore books that ret-con any of these topics, I'd be genuinely interested to hear about them.
Iomedae's first experience of Earth was living with illegal immigrant migrant workers, very poor people who treated her well. After she has been discovered by the authorities and made a foster child there is an INS raid on the immigrants and, from what she is told, the result is the adults being sent out of the country and the children being seized. I don't think that makes sense in terms of INS policy, but it is what happens in the story or at least what Iomedae believes happens. Prior to that, all she knows about immigration enforcement is that there is some evil thing called "La Migra" which the people she is living with are afraid of.
Aroden is not trans but Alfirin, in a later thread, very briefly is, using Alter Self to make herself male for a few minutes. For why she does so you will have to read the threads.
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Strictly she is a Paladin of Arazni, who is the herald of Aroden, but I think she might actually see immigration restrictions as evil on Earth for one reason, everyone there is human, and Aroden is essentially the god of human manifest destiny, and that humanity should be as one, she might feel that America as the most powerful nation should indeed be both spreading its influence in order to unite humanity and allowing any human who wishes to live there to do so. In otherwise she might well support America taking over Mexico AND prior to that allowing any Mexican who wants to live in the US to do so. She would probably feel differently about an orc nation for example. Remember at 15 she is just about to join the crusade against the undead hordes of the Whispering Tyrant, a nearly existential threat to human civilization itself. Making humanity strong by bringing as many people under one rule as possible is consistent with both the way Taldor spread and not having the kind of legal system where a human from outside Taldor who wants to live there is going to have many issues doing so.
Aroden is prophesied to (at the point this story is set at least) lead humanity into a golden age, united and strong. Paladins don't have to follow laws that they believe are not just or not good, if your god wants humanity united, any law that prevents humanity coalescing into a united group could well be seen as evil. From a certain point of view of course. America absorbing as much of humanity under its direct influence whether by conquest or immigration seems very much in line with Aroden.
"The Starfall Doctrine is a series of prophecies written in Azlanti that predicted that the god Aroden would return to Golarion in 4606 AR and lead the human race in a millennium of prosperity known as the Age of Glory. He was supposed to lead the world from Cheliax, which he would personally rule and which would also become the pre-eminent nation in the world"
That the human race should be united and not artificially fragmented into smaller nations is pretty on brand. Border security against orcs and undead Good, border security to prevent other humans swelling the ranks of your nation: Evil.
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