honestly i love the symbolism and metaphors in Fallen London, specifically around the nature of free will, the divine, and the self.
you come across a young woman, in the process of being petrified by her lover(?), a golem of living clay. her eyes, the only organic thing left of her, say she is terrified, but the Clay Man says she asked him to do this. do you free her, and in the event she does want it, deal with her anger, or leave her to her fate that she may or may not want?
if the stars and their light are actively malevolent, is darkness more moral than their tyranny? is utter chaos, lit only by impossible colors and prowled by things that should not exist, preferable to an oppressive, but orderly, comfortable, and relatively safe rule by spiteful gods, eventually damned to have your soul consumed by the stars? is either preferable?
you are twisted into uncountable variations of yourself, a hundred thousand million possible futures. in one, you are immolated by the raging death throes of a god. in another, you survive eternity, becoming the final Law, that No Thing Shall Be. another, you are the captain of a vessel that sails to the resting place of a sealed god, to be consumed by it. yet another, you march an army to the gates of the Garden of Eden, and batter down the walls to secure the secret of immortality to do with what you will. are all these myriad, infinite futures you? do you want them to be? do you want to be a conqueror, a saviour, a nobody? do you really have a choice?
you learn that the divine is not untouchable. the gods are awful, vulnerable to slights, wars, and petty jealousy. and they can be killed. both the highest gods of the Wilderness and the minor gods of the Zee. does that bring them down to the level of mortal, or elevate the mortal to the divine?
do you ever really have a choice?
if given the opportunity to wrench free from your shackles, would you take it, no matter how terrible the consequences, the pain it would take to be free?
