Going back to my thoughts wrt Bastion, when I say the place is a cult, I don’t think their work per se is bad or that the Kyrian are evil; I’m talking more about the inherent lack of choice in the realm, and the blanket application of their techniques to remove all memories of their past lives and the majority of their identities.
Whilst yes, the reasoning given is that it’s to remove biases that might impair their function as soul-carriers; I don’t see why you’d have to wipe the entire slate clean in order to face those. Those biases are things that could be worked through on an individual level, the preconceptions challenged and the reasoning to their biases worked at - after all, Revendreth’s function is to show people who have cocked up why and how they cocked up, and prompt them to change for the better, and it does that without blanket memory wipes. As such, Bastion’s approach feels more heavy handed and significantly less therapeutic.
The other thing is that what gets you into Bastion isn’t a tendency towards self-abnegation, but having lived a life defined by the desire to help others. There’s a high chance that there are memories and traits that would encourage a Kyrian to do their duty properly that end up being scraped away. And it wouldn’t help deal with trauma either; in fact, trauma is more difficult to treat when you don’t really know what caused it, as treatments for PTSD and similar disorders involve gradual and supervised exposure to both triggers and memories so you can process what happened. (Avoidance is a symptom, not the solution)
Yes, there may be people who are willing to leave their pasts behind completely and start with a clean slate, but there are just as likely people who would like to retain some recollection of their pasts, even as they move on into a new home - which is where my point about choice comes in. It’s also why the Forsworn go too far - because rather than broadening the Path to accommodate different people, they’d force all Kyrian to remember, regardless of whether they want to or not.
The other reason I call Bastion a cult is in how the Archon is expected to be obeyed and never questioned. She refused to address the matter brought to her by Devos with the news that a mawforged weapon was out in the cosmos, outright refusing to believe the news until everything had gone to shit. She also refused to admit that there was anything potentially wrong with the path of the Kyrian until things had progressed to the point where the Forsworn were attacking. And the overall dogma in the place is that the path is right, the path must be trusted - even though it’s a blanket one-size-fits-all approach that you don’t get any choice in.
I’ve seen Uther pointed at as a reason why the Kyrian path is fine as it is, and I disagree. Yes I think that he was ascended far too early - but I don’t think that he’d have to forget everything in order to ferry souls. Address his trauma, address the wound in his soul, and perhaps even assign him to one of the many other worlds in existence. Bam. Sorted. Because when it comes to him, it was Devos who pushed him to toss Arthas into the Maw - partly because again, the Archon refused to acknowledge that there was a problem to deal with in the first place.
That being said, I don’t think the Archon is evil either; she’s set in her ways and has been a cog in the machine of death for so long that something going wrong was unthinkable. It’s the same attitude that we see amongst the attendants in Oribos - they don’t stop and think about why the anima draught is happening, instead chalking it up to another grand mystery in their Purpose. It also doesn’t help that neither the Archon or attendants really seem to get much feedback either.
TL:DR, something being broken or unhealthy doesn’t mean that there’s a hard good-evil axis involved.
dededos
annaxmalina
titsay
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
