ohhh wow i love the Eirynna soft power talk in the latest fireside. this is so fucking juicy. quoting brennan from the ep (emphasis mine):
I always think there's a little sinister moment whenever XL-ZL shows that technological flair. It's just not sinister from a place where you have to question XL-ZL's personal motives because the gambit, the play is very out in the open. Aren't I useful? Isn't this helpful? Don't you want to keep me around?... Is there something sinister about moral behavior, about goodness and helpfulness and kindness if you understand it adaptively?... I use the word sinister, but really it's just this thing of like being really helpful and kind is a survival strategy... like, oh, that's how you guys win. Like, you're Team Helpful. If we were playing a big board game, your win condition is “be the most helpful until everyone loves your help and never wants you to go away.”... The thing that makes it not an ulterior motive is there's no “and then we kill everybody.” There's none of that. It's just full saturation throughout the cosmos and everybody loves to have us around and we're super helpful, right?
this is what i've been trying to get at with the Eirynna!!! like, they're hungry for power and influence just like the rest of the factions, but they're playing the game from a completely different angle! it's not that their service and helpfulness hides an ulterior motive or agenda- the helpfulness openly forwards their own agenda towards power and success, which just happens to look different from other factions' more feudal-style strategies and motives. the fact that the Eirynna’s sweetness isn’t hiding something is somehow even freakier than if it were actually hiding something, and it rules.
i also really loved the bit talking about sweetie-pie-ness vs. naïveté, quoting again:
there's a lot of XL-ZL being naïve coded where he's like very, he's a sweetie pie, right?... One of the things I try to play with XL-ZL a lot is never having an anticipation that other people are doing utilitarian calculus or that other people are engaging in supreme acts of selflessness. Like that's something he's doing and it's not an expectation he has of other people to do that.
he's not a sweetie pie because he's ignorant of the cruelty of the world, of how other people act towards each other in this setting. he's a sweetie pie On Purpose and For Reasons (see above), and incredibly destructive when the calculus on those reasons falls the other way!!! it's so fucking cool as a character choice. what a brilliant little holy machine.