Hey ya! Hi! I liked your thoughts on RW, which is a rarity for me.
And I'd love to ask you, what ARE karma gates? What's your interpretation?
Like really, besides gameplay, why Ancients made them? How do those things scan your karma meter? Why didn't they make it so that you could pass through other gates like the Metropolis gates, with a special pass? I understand why there's special gates in Metropolis, bc I don't think they would be happy with lizards, scugs and other creatures roaming freely through their streets.
But what if something breaks in other regions? Like void fluid pipes, and engineers had not enough karma? Even significant people had no max karma for ascension, so we can meet them as echos, and what we could say about just regular techical guys and girls??
hello!!!! I have thoughts on Karma Gates for SHURE
I've been under the impression that they're meant to clense you and prevent potential contamination (likely spiritual), especially with the way they're spoken about when Joar was talking about them
You can read my essay on impurity in RW for reference on what I meant on that further
As for the functioning of them, it's probably to prevent random creatures from introducing their spiritual FILTH into these areas, especially areas like Industrial Complex where the holy stones imbuing their... ??? into the products was an important step
I think the karma gates are also indicative of... class divide. A caste system was mentioned before in one of the pearls
"The portrait is likely a fake, as this style was quite fashionable for aspirational lower caste aristocrats to impress each-other with."
And karma is lost through dying (or likely other troublesome events), which might not have happened to most the ancients who lived high and luxurious where they were able to focus on their spiritual purity, and same with some middle-caste ancients. But, the gates were just downright inaccessible to lower-caste individuals. That was the point of them
If an engineer didn't have enough karma, then womp womp I guess. Anybody who had a job is expected to have at least 5 karma at every moment
Plus another detail is that I don't actually have any ideas for how karma is dectable and measured in an individual, and tbh I don't even really... like the idea of karma being measurable like that in another individual. At least not in "steps" like you experience ingame, but more akin to a gradient. IDK. It is just very very weird to me. Joar tried his very best to make these elements incorporate into the lore and natural gameplay as he possibly could, and I think this was just a bit of a clunky way to do that
Something else I believe about the lore and glimpses we see of the ancients is based off some real world phenomenon, whereas higher class people like royalty often documented their bullshit way more often, since a good chunk of people were illiterate, or preferred oral tradition. So we don't actually get to see the experiences of people that might have been oppressed to just lived in poverty
Why doesn't Moon ever mention it then? Well, by the time of the iterator era, there was no reason to really attend to anything down below, and honestly the ancients probably just bypassed the gates themselves and didn't bother, since it was a waste of time
And for Metropolis? Probably just their version of TSA. You need a passport to get through, ECT ECT
