Wisdom: The Sumeru Archon Quest
I’m back and instead of photos I want to gush about video game plots. I can do that sometimes, right?
I wrote this about three weeks ago intending to drop it before the final part of the quest came out, but I forgot about it and so instead I’m going to drop it after the quest comes out but before I actually do the quest (so if the last part turns the whole thing on its head and Nahida turns out to be a cackling sophist, that’s on me).
But hey, if you like rambling diatribes about the merits of scholarly integrity, here goes:
The super short version:
The Sumeru quest is freaking amazing, and I love the way it engages it’s overall theme - that is, the concept of wisdom and what it means to be wise in the pursuit of knowledge vs arrogant in the possession of knowledge.
Someone in Mihoyo’s writing staff must like philosophy, because the way the Sumeru arc explores wisdom is fantastic. None of the other regions’ archon quests really explore their supposed core ideology this well: Monstadt is an intro quest and while I suppose there’s a whole thing about freeing Dvalin the later event quests the region mostly explores what freedom means to its people in the later event quests, Liyue’s contracts were more of a plot device while the story felt more like it was about other things, and Inazuma’s concept of eternity was better, it had it’s... issues.
But this quest goes all in not just on wisdom as an idea, what it means to be intelligent vs wise, how each is useless unless you have both, and how the protagonists understand this difference while in contrast the antagonists fail to do so.
Nahida makes the point that despite her title neither she nor even Rukkedevata were the real gods where scholars were concerned: that the real guide to any scholar should be the truth.
But what does that mean, the truth. Isn’t what’s truth different depending on your perspective - how do you figure out what is true? Well, the arc explores that way more than I was expecting - but not through the protagonists, so much as through the antagonists and their actions.
The Sages are characterized as having little interest in the world as it truly exists outside of their perspective, as they are razor focused instead on the world as they (or their ancestors) knew it, wrapped up in dogma rather than doing what they're supposed to be doing, and so convinced of their own intellectual superiority that they instead dismiss any perspective that doesn't coddle their preconceived notion of how the world is supposed to work - to the point that the whole "make our own god" thing is just a big attempt to sacrifice everything else to create something that will reaffirm what they already know and the comfort in what they already have rather than ever risk changing and evolving their understanding. There’s another quote later about how the Sages don’t support anyone with a strong will that aren’t pliable enough to only study along the lines they deem acceptable and true (and worse, that they don’t allow knowledge to be shared, an instant sign they’re bad scholars): or in short, they are driven by a rigid adherence to tradition, dogma and elitism. Heck, their entire plan it based around literally removing any knowledge that doesn’t match their understanding from people’s brains and twisting it into something that supports their worldview, even though it leaves the people they do it to empty and ignorant forever.
They are, in short, more concerned with having knowledge than gaining knowledge.
And man, there’s that great contrast that the Sages dismissed Kusanali specifically because she wasn’t immediately intelligent by their standards, missing the fact that having the mind of a child means her mind is open for growth, a capacity for learning and understanding is exactly the quality that allows her to act and excel despite them, and eventually (presumably) supplant and replace them.
More on that later, but it's a nice note about how intelligence ceases to be intelligence when it's not tempered with wisdom, because getting so wrapped up in the safety and superiority of what you know that you don't accept it when what you know becomes obsolete is a classic problem.
Focusing on what rather than how is the big pitfall of the ego, both when it comes to study and when it comes to looking at study from the outside - heck, and it even happens to us non-scholars too: don’t let it be said that it’s a solely academic problem. Not to bring up a fresh wound for many, but you can see it IRL in those sensationalist reactions to scientists’ changing understanding of the COVID virus - every week you got someone insinuating that because what we thought we knew at one point turned out to be incorrect, that must mean that nobody knows anything and science is a crock. But study isn’t gratification, and science isn’t what you know. It’s how you come to know it.
Once you become more fixated on what you know and how it must be true, it invariably leads to ignorance and arrogance.
Meanwhile - because I made a point about it’s the contrast that’s the most important - Nahida maintains that she doesn't really know anything but is characterized by and endless desire to learn and improve herself, as well as respect for others who try to do the same, which... chefs kiss. She’s like a tiny little Socrates, but with the added benefit of perceptible compassion for other living beings. In this, the Sages do double duty characterizing Nahida, because it becomes extremely clear the kind of person she is because of how well we can see the kind of person she isn’t.
Then of course there’s things like the contrast between Cyno’s blunt need for as much clarity as he can get - which makes him the most open to learn, Ahlaitham’s cold understanding of human nature that makes him coarse but deductive, and Dehya’s coarse but perceptive common sense that she indicates is looked down upon but is in reality no less intelligent than the other two. And the fact that in the end, their biggest problem is that they can’t work together or take steps to understand each other - an unwise approach - until things have already gotten worse.
(This is probably the best arc the series has had so far. Great plot balance, great pacing, great characterization - something all of the other quests have had one or the other of in spades, while missing the rest)
