deep lore spoilers for fallen london ahead! also big spoilers for firmament ch 8
I periodically see people complaining about the direction the lore and writing surrounding the Judgements (basically the gods of the setting) and the celestial order have taken - namely, that it's become less dark, less eldritch, that the Judgements are no longer distant, alien, incomprehensible beings, but increasingly human (for lack of a better word) in their motivations and portrayal. and while I understand why people preferred it the other way around, and acknowledge that the setting loses some of its mystique in bringing the heavens closer, I also like this direction shift and think it works well with the underlying themes of the setting.
chances are that if you're a Tumblr user who's played Fallen London enough to get into the Deep Lore, you've recognized that the whole celestial order is an allegory for social mobility - or rather, the abject lack of it. you've probably seen parallels regarding race, gender, class, all sorts of real-world marginalizations in the way that beings in the Fallen London universe are stratified by species. if you're born a sun, you're a literal god with the power to enforce your will anywhere your light reaches, and if you're born as anything else, your entire role in life is to serve the suns - sometimes by being dinner! because if you're a human you are basically livestock! changing your species (and therefore your place in the Great Chain) is a crime, and punishable by smiting. being born as something outside the established order is also a crime, and also punishable by smiting. and this is only the tip of the iceberg - there's all sorts of rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do, including the ways you're allowed or not allowed to associate with others outside your class. it's a vicious and cruel system.
and, you see, the Judgements want to cover this up. they want everyone to believe that they, the literal stars, are beings beyond mortal reckoning or questioning. but they aren't. for all their power, they are intensely fallible. they are still alien in the sense that they operate on a timespan far beyond any human's and understand the world and its mechanisms in a fundamentally different way (given that they literally create natural law), but their motivations are, in the end, not that far removed from a human's. they have ambitions. they crave sustenance and power. they hold grudges over personal slights and differences in ideology. they fall in love, and they grieve those they've lost. this is the secret they try to conceal, to the point of smiting any humans who learn that the Judgements will murder each other over politics, because learning it shakes the whole foundation of the celestial hierarchy, of their right to rule. if the suns aren't infallible, if they aren't pure and superior in their motivations, then why should the rest of the universe be in thrall to them?
so, you can see how this works with the overall arc of the setting. but I'd argue that humanizing the Judgements does something I consider even more important: it adds culpability. it complicates things no matter where you fall on the in-universe political scale - and yes, that includes for the revolutionaries. when the beings responsible for making the world suck are distant, alien, incomprehensible, they are also other. it is easy to justify slaying them, the monsters, and to imagine that will be enough to fix things. but if those beings are not other, if we can recognize ourselves in their love and their grief, then we have to contend with the fact that we are struggling against people, that we would be slaying people. it places upon us an impetus to either find ways forward that don't involve slaying people, or to acknowledge the moral weight of doing so. and it makes us ask: if the people in charge are, fundamentally, not that different from us, then how can we avoid making their mistakes? what must we do to not only tear down the old world, but build a better one?
it's why, despite being ardently pro-Liberation of Night, I'm honestly quite excited to see stuff like the new Stone dream and the Tatterdemalion reveal, which gives us Light-and-Law aligned characters that one can't help but ache for, while also underscoring how cruel the celestial order is even to those born into its privileges, how capriciously it condemns you the moment you fall out of favor. (now I just want to see some Liberationist characters who are similarly Struggling... pls... give me more leftist infights and crises of conscience)
