History Headscratchers / LegacyOfKain

[[folder: The Hylden Lord's machinations]]* Here's the big issue. Hylden General/Sarafan Lord is the same character who was possessing Mortainus/Janos in Defiance. He was able to set his plans into motion by manipulating Raziel into tearing the heart of darkness out of the Scion of Balance-- Kain-- and putting it back into Janos. He presumably knew that Kain was the Scion(He knew Mortainus put the heart into a vampire he believed to be the scion, which was Kain), and he believed that by tearing the heart out of the Elder Kain, Raziel had killed him. So, while leading his army against the Younger Kain's vampire army, how is it that he thought he could actually win? Kain has to survive to become the elder Kain that Raziel takes the heart from, which is how his plan gets put into motion. For Kain to survive, that means the Hylden General can't kill the younger version. Yet he has complete confidence his plan will succeed inspite of coming into conflict with Young Kain, he is surprised that Young Kain survived their first battle, and has complete confidence he'll kill Kain in their final showdown.

[[folder: Possible Raziel SR1 Plan B]]* Here's a thought, Raziel. You were told to kill off your brothers. Why not raise up an army of humans and take them over? Here's a better thought: Don't. Do. Anything. Just go back to your clan territory and hold up in there because, every move you make? Makes everything WORSE.

** Actually i believe that they are more like Well Intensioned Extremists if we consider that the wiping of all living creatures in Nosgoth as a safe way to ensure that the Elder God died and doesn't manipulate anyone forever. The problem with this idea is that i don't know how the Hylden knew that the Elder God isn't a god per se but a creature acting like one to the Ancient Vampires or how they do EVEN know if this plan is going to work. Sure, all creatures will be dead but i am sure that after many millennia the world eventually will have life again or at least the Hylden will become the dominant race that after a bunch of time they will evolve in different races that will replenish the planet.[[/folder]]

** Humor aside, Raziel is a supernatural creature, so his ability to speak is due to magic.[[/folder]]

** The reason the hylden were able to attack so directly was because humans were too weak to keep the seal, if vampires were still guarding they would not have even managed that let alone getting completely free later on. the trouble is that humans are much younger than the other races of nosgoth and just follow whoever tricks them first. You claim things were going fine until the hylden started their plot? well thats the point, the fact that the hylden returned shows how badly humans screwed up, vampires are needed to keep the hylden out and the humans were fucking things up for them and in the long run for themselves.[[/folder]]

** It's Blood Omen 2 - a lot of things don't make sense. There are vampires (somehow), Vorador has a head (somehow), the Hylden managed to capture or create (it's never revealed) an enormous ''thing'' that can kill stuff with but a though (somehow), the Eternal Prison has a literal self-destruct switch (somehow), a guardian of the Eternal Prison wants you to leave and yet for him it makes sense to teleport you ''further in the prison'' (somehow), the mythical Soul Reaver which is a literally unclassed weapon in the entire world suddenly has a weakness to some cousin of kryptonite (somehow), apparently the people in Meridian (I'd like to think it's not spread elsewhere in Nosgoth) build levers that '''BLOW YOU UP WHEN YOU PULL THEM''' and that's a wide spread practice (somehow), bog standard normal people are all sturdy enough to take a long sword pushed to the hilt in their stomach and then just walk it off (somehow), and so on and so forth. Frankly, the Hylden Lord thing can be waived off as "eh, something something mind control or something" and it would make more sense than most of the rest of the game.

** Letting this paradox mull around in my head brought it to a sort of stunning finality. Kain's own phrasing "History abhors a paradox" fully explains not WHAT he is doing but WHY he is doing it. With absolutely no paradox involved, Kain obtains the physical reaver for the absolute first time, yada yada yada, the events of the series, and he therefore continues to use the reaver in his possession REVELING in what he assumes is the abhorrence of history. He thinks he is fulfilling his role as Nosgoth's destroyer in totality this way. It's almost as if only the spark of the idea in his head to lure someone back in time to put something substantial enough in the reaver to cause a paradox from later on from that point through actions he has already taken in the future. He assumes history abhors a paradox because he went back in time to create a greater significance within actions he already knew he would take in that timeline's future, but ultimately there was no paradox. When he first struck to kill wraith Raziel with the physical reaver before ever time-traveling, assuming the idea for his plan had already occurred in his mind, the events of SR2 came raging forth simultaneously to destroy the physical reaver in the form of simple causality because he knew Raziel would be within sufficient parameters to retrieve the result of a physical object being destroyed in this way, plain and simple. From Raziel's point of view history didn't correct itself by leaving him a spirit reaver, Kain had PLANNED to forge the first spirit reaver in exactly this way, and "continued" to do so until he gained the ability to manifest himself amidst events of SR2 and "save" Raziel, thereby drawing him too "outside" of the cycle, appearing (to Raziel) to be his masochist saviour, and giving him the further option to continue enchancing the weapon . . . perhaps.

* OP [[drthabbrz]] here. I think I can further cement my explanation to stay out of the WMG. If the Blood Reaver truly possessed Raziel's soul because it was the same blade which did so in the future (but already), I suggest this is NO SUBSTANTIAL BASIS for the Reaver to then appear in any form in the Spectral realm for Raziel to then interact. with.[[/folder]]

*** And Moebius and Mortanius (go team M&M?) the guardians still wouldn't know how to "guard" properly without some tutoring. Even if Kain somehow restores the Pillars and new guardians were called at the end of [=BO1=] ''and'' they were turned into vampires, they would have probably only delayed the Hylden invasion a bit. Hence, they'd need Vorador or somebody else to at least give them a PowerPoint presentation of their duties. That is, ensuring the bitter, hateful, vengeful, murderous, immortal demons to stay locked up.

** With the surviving vampires like Vorador in hiding and the common people suffering under the Sarafan's brutal regime, it's likely that Moebius simply decided that the Sarafan had simply had lived their usefulness over trying to keep ongoing.

[[folder: Fate of the Sarafan]]* So what eventually happened to the Sarafan? I get that they took some serious blows at the end of ''Soul Reaver 2,'' what with Vorador massacring most of their leadership and Raziel killing their best warriors, but they're still a large organisation and there's still vampires left alive. Indeed one might expect them to be very motivated to find and kill Vorador and the unknown weird-looking vampire/demon thing that killed their best and then vanished, similarly to what happened when Kain killed William the Just. So why did they go away?

** Obviously Vorador made more, hence why there's a viable population to be victimised by the ''Blood Omen'' era. But he has stated that the process of doing so is difficult, time-consuming and tiring. He's not going to be able to whip up an army in the time it'd take the Sarafan to restructure their leadership. Even the few he could create would be fledglings, unlikely to handle the army that already managed to wipe out the vampire's best. Besides, they didn't lose all their leadership; Moebius is still around.[[/folder]]

*** Exactly. The Elder Gods was annoyed that Raziel escaped while still defying him, hence the BigNo, as Raziel under his control would have been preferable, but he has justified faith in his and his servants' ability to manipulate Raziel into doing what he wants anyway.[[/folder]]

*** Wasn't the wraith Raziel's soul different from human Raziel's soul though? It was bound up by the portion of Kain's soul that had resurrected him. I think THAT is where the paradox lies. When Kain attempted to strike down Raziel, the Blood Reaver couldn't contend with whatever magics Kain had used to include his own soul in binding Raziel's for resurrection. I would assume as the Blood Reaver attempted to connect with Raziel's physical form to drain his blood (as it would blindly and mechanically do) it encountered an aspect of it's weilder's essence and THEN therefore shattered. On a personal note, I have always been of a mind that the Reaver's spectral existence was it's echo of residual soul energy that it had built up during it's existence, and it simply RESONATED with Raziel's threadbare existence energies and did not dissapate as it might have if simply shattered physically. To address paradox identified by OP, I think Raziel is the only one to speak that the wraith blade was his own soul by his own actions, and then everybody else jumps on, so, no paradox, not Raziel's soul on the main tip. In defense of further confusions, I don't think Kain's method of vampire creating was common knowledge at the time. AW! And to think, what if, by residual build up, the Blood Reaver was destined to become a Soul Reaver ANYWAY!?!?! What if no one could risk simply breaking the thing, and the residual energies becoming some random issue? By this thinking I pose Raziel was intended to guard, weild, hone, and otherwise contain the volatile magics to prevent such catastrophe and anomaly.[[/folder]]

** Sadly, Nuprator never comes into contact with the Soul Reaver on his own. We never see what happens when you try to alter history without a Reaver Paradox, but Kain implies that it would simply have found a different way for Ariel to die and thus Nupraptor to go mad with grief. Raziel's efforts would be nothing more than the proverbial stone in the river.[[/folder]]

*** Also note, the OG ancient vampires were pretty benevolent

*** Regarding any potential tampering by Moebius, that is unlikely. From what we know, what you see in time itself is what will happen, and Moebius has no power over it. All of the cutscenes in the Chronoplast Chamber can be explained: Raziel confronting Kain happens several more times in the story (not in Kain's retreat for sure, but they do confront again, such as in William's chapel), Raziel does end up absorbing Ariel's soul in Defiance (again, the circumstances may be different, but what matters from destiny's standpoint is that he gets the purified reaver), and as for the shot of Raziel standing with the red reaver, some fans believe that a cutscene in Soul Reaver 2 where Raziel is seen leaving Janos' Retreat with the fire reaver in hand, was specifically staged to look like the Chronoplast vision, as the developers' way to "correct" the continuity.[[/folder]]

*** We tend to side with humans in fictional setting because, well, we are humans but in Nosgoth, CrapsackWorld that it is, there are no "good races" and precious few innocent individuals among the existing races. Vampires, Hylden and humans all have their deep moral failings and some can blamed on the Elder God and/or each other but by this point the Hylden have become monsters and the humans are not up to keeping them out so yes, Vampire control is the lesser of many evils.[[/folder]]

** Maybe Ariel at that point in the game doesn't actually know where Moebius is. The other members had stable lairs, but what abut him? We can assume he left the Oracle's caves after doing his part and is nowhere to be found by then, and that's assuming that she even knew Moebius was the Oracle (maybe Ariel simply never saw the Oracle, after all she wasn't around when Kain visited him, so it's well possible that she is clueless otherwise). At this point she's taking a guess: her mention that William was a just and kind ruler before eventually changing, was perhaps meant to indicate that Ariel realized that he must have been manipulated by someone. And she clearly knew that Moebius was the sort of guy who'd do something like that. So perhaps she thought that sending Kain against the Nemesis would eventually reveal Moebius' location. Obviously she couldn't have expected the whole vampire genocide thing that he had planned.

*** Regarding any potential tampering by Moebius, that is unlikely. From what we know, what you see in time itself is what will happen, and Moebius has no power over it. All of the cutscenes in the Chronoplast Chamber can be explained: Raziel confronting Kain happens several more times in the story (the architecture is indistinct enough that it could be in William's chapel from Soul Reaver 2, for example), Raziel does end up absorbing Ariel's soul in Defiance (the circumstances may be a little different, but what matters from destiny's standpoint is that he gets the purified reaver), and as for the shot of Raziel standing with the red reaver, some fans believe that a cutscene in Soul Reaver 2 where Raziel is seen leaving Janos' Retreat with the fire reaver in hand, was specifically staged to look like the Chronoplast vision, as the developers' way to "correct" the continuity.[[/folder]]