Jade Empire

I got the impression that the most powerful gods (like the Water Dragon) are intrinsically connected to how the universe works. So while rebelling against them might be justified, it'll only result in humans killing themselves and their land in the long run. So humans are subject to gods because they're subject to nature.

When was it ever stated or implied that the Jade Empire was being ruled terribly prior to the Long Drought? At least, ruled any worse than any monarchy would be? The Mandate of Heaven is that an Emperor who is an oppressive tyrant (both must apply) loses Heaven's favor, and a dynasty that consistently produces such emperors deserves to be overthrown.

It's never really explored in detail the extent to which the gods are tied to how the universe works. If Kang was to die, for example, people wouldn't just stop inventing things. If the fox spirits all die, people wouldn't become incapable of trickery. At least, noting in the game indicates that this is the case. As for the Water Dragon, it's a matter of you being literally able to take over her powers and job due to being a Spirit Monk.

edited 17th Jan '18 1:32:34 PM by PRC4Eva

The problems with the incumbent Sun dynasty are implied by the Long Drought having happened in the first place, and frankly by the character of Sun Li and Sun Hai, having talked to them. If you think that requires a bit of a leap, I'll agree to that, but it's no more of a leap than assuming that the Sun brothers were perfect innocents beforehand and the gods passed judgment on them for no reason. We don't have all the facts either way.

edited 17th Jan '18 1:43:58 PM by Unsung

Well there's no evidence the dynasty was being ruled terribly but the simple fact is the Emperor and his brothers aren't implied to be tragic characters. They're ruthless evil dicks.

Take note your mentor uses the whole Spirit Monk massacre as an opportunity to murder his brother and take over the empire in a 20 year gambit. Also, he was the Darth Vader figure before so there was always a murderous secret police.

And when they DO resolve the water business, they rule the country terribly anyway.

1: Re: The Gods

Like in "Exalted" and actual Chinese mythology, the gods aren't anthropomorphic personifications of their portfolios but literally just the managers of their station. You or I, once we died, could be promoted to be gods of the Sun and we'd just have the job of making sure the hydrogen keeps burning.

Removing a god from a position means it's like the train station manager going missing. The trains are there but they no longer have someone coordinating them. In the case of the Water dragon, she has the job of running both water in the region as well as ferrying the souls of the dead.

edited 17th Jan '18 1:46:32 PM by CharlesPhipps

There is reason to believe the gods passed judgement on the Sun dynasty for no reason. The only reason the Water Dragon ever gives when you ask her why the Long Drought had to happen is "natural order" and "something had to fade for something else to take its place". If they were ruling badly enough to cause a Mandate of Heaven situation, she would have said something about it as that is the strongest justification for the Long Drought happening.

As for their personal faults, I find it quite obvious that while Li was probably resentful of Hai's place for quite some time prior to the attack on Dirge, Hai only became the way he was due to the Long Drought (Silk Fox certainly has fond memories of him, and even after Dirge everyone in the Jade Empire still presumes that he's a stand-up fellow, only receiving bad advice from Death's Hand; waifu also adamantly maintains that Sun Hai Did Nothing Wrong per her expert knowledge of 5000 years of Chinese history, and that any commonly recognized Good Emperor would have done the same thing). Not sure what Kin was thinking, though; as the littlest brother I'm not sure how he didn't realize that not only will he not inherit under this scheme, but there's a good chance Li will kill him and his entire family after he's done because that's just basic Game Of Thrones 101.

Also, the Lotus Assassins were only created after the attack on Dirge. Previously, they were the Order of the Lotus, which were more of a political and spiritual advisory body (albeit a powerful one that you wanted to be on the good side of, but such is life in any country with a government). Death's Hand armor was just Sun Li's regular armor that he discarded. Their presence cannot be held as evidence for an oppressive pre-Drought Sun Dynasty.

The salient point isn't whether Sun Hai presided over a period of unique prosperity, or whether he's a nice guy, but that burden of proof is on the affirmative, and if we are to invoke Mandate of Heaven to justify punishing the Jade Empire with the Long Drought, then we must prove that they did something wrong to deserve it. Being that it's never shown to be any worse than any other monarchy (and significantly better than many, being that they didn't actively try to expand their borders and run a meritocratic bureaucracy), it's a real hard sell that the right thing to do is to let the drought happen.

Also bears mentioning that A God Am I does not carry nearly the same amount of negative connotation in Chinese culture and mythology. Heck, most if not all of the gods there *were* humans who elevated themselves to godhood through self-cultivation. In the case of the Water Dragon, if we are actually dragging real life Chinese mythology into this, eating her soul and taking over would actually have no repercussions because there would be no reason you couldn't do her job for her.

That's a good Alternate Character Interpretation but all indications to me are the Royal Family is a bunch of assholes and the best person to judge the character of the God Killing Emperor is perhaps not his spoiled but goodhearted daughter.

Still, I think it's a good thing you can judge the Heavens as corrupt because, again, Chinese mythology is full of stories of gods who have gone rogue or abused their station the same way as mortals.

edited 19th Jan '18 11:53:57 AM by CharlesPhipps

Odd that it has that stuff when the Chinese pantheon is called the Celestial Bureaucracy.

The material presented as the game shows Li and Hai as assholes post-Dirge, and Kin...well, Kin realized he backed the wrong pony, although it sure would be nice if he could have realized that before.

It shows nothing about what Sun Hai's reign was like before, but if it was bad, surely you would have met someone who remotely implied it, someone who blamed the Emperor himself rather than Death's Hand for the Lotus Assassins running rampant, and even the Water Dragon can only offer "natural order" as the reason why the drought had to happen as opposed to anything bad that Sun Hai had done to deserve it. We have to headcanon that Hai's reign must have been bad to justify the Drought (although killing off hundreds of thousands of Jade Empire civilians is kinda hard to justify). We do not need to headcanon that Hai's reign was, if not good, then acceptable and at least no more assholeish than any royal family would be.

I don't think that's alternate character definition so much as there's literally no proof Hai's reign was bad enough to have his Mandate of Heaven revoked.

edited 19th Jan '18 1:08:38 PM by PRC4Eva

Well we have the fact they literally condemned millions of people to become undead abominations for all eternity and the Strategist was fully content to let them be that way for all eternity as an example of their morality.

I also think we're meant to assume Death's Head was always the guy in charge.

Either way, the Natural Order argument holds weight with 20th century values versus Chinese. Being that, "the weather systems say water isn't going to be here"

I've already said that there's no proof in either direction, and that's as far as I'm willing to let it go. We don't know enough about the Suns' past reign to say they were good, bad, or indifferent, but there's ample proof that letting them stop the Drought and assume control over the Great Wheel was as bad or worse— it's gone for longer, certainly. We do know that Sun Hai uses propaganda and assassins in the present day, and whatever the past was like, it's not all that surprising nobody's talking about it now. They've either got worse problems— like being assassinated— or they've been taken in. So I don't think that weighs much, as an argument.

edited 22nd Jan '18 9:50:46 AM by Unsung

The morality meter has flaws...

... but the plot twist, and how carefully crafted it was...

Like the entire reason Li put you in the cave, saying it'll take a few days. He was intending you to come out of the caves to find the village destroyed, and wanted you out of harm's way.

This is really a game which needed a franchise.

I'd like to point out that whenever we say "well the Sun brothers were bad because look what they did", all events being referred to is post-Long-Drought and post-Dirge. They cannot be evidence that Sun Hai lost the Mandate of Heaven and thus brought the Long Drought on to himself; moreover, the gods could have chosen any method of revoking Sun's mandate, but they chose the one that was the most pointlessly harmful to a lot of people who didn't deserve it.

If anything, "natural order" is the one backed by half of 21st century values, fighting the drought and other such natural disasters by any means necessary is the one backed by Chinese values.

Ah, but that final twist...waifu suspected something about Master Li as soon as I told her we were close to a twist, and had her suspicions deepened once she saw that Li wasn't dead, but held inside the palace with the Emperor personally interrogating him. Didn't expect all the foreshadowing to come into play, though.

In both cases, I enjoyed shooting both Suns to near death with Mirabelle, then transforming into the Jade Golem to finish them off as a simultaneous "defeated by the power you do not understand" and "hoist by your own petard" kind of thing.

The Jade Golem alone is the "I win" button for bosses.

You keep making the same point, and I'll keep saying the same thing I've been saying: you can't use the lack of evidence to prove that the Sun brothers' rule beforehand was just and wise any more than I can use the lack of evidence to prove it wasn't. We just don't know.

I will say that 'Chinese values' are not a complete monolith, but if you're going to argue that the proof of a great dynasty is being able to battle back against the elements, then the Drought itself might have been the Sun dynasty's test in itself. Did they have the tools or didn't they? Maybe that's less than clear. But Yu the Great built dams and irrigation systems— rain might not have been falling on most of the Jade Empire, but water didn't simply cease to exist, and we're talking about a nation that's already invented planes and dirigibles, here. I do wonder if it was in the Empire's power to resolve this situation without massacring the Spirit Monks and holding the whole afterlife hostage.

You may well curse the gods and call them dicks, because they almost inevitably are for reasons I've already mentioned (problem of evil, butterfly effect, and so on and so forth), but I think they're the lesser dicks in this situation. I don't really like the idea of immortal overseers dictating the course of human events, but if they are relatively well-intentioned, as the Spirit Dragon honestly does seem to be, then I'm not really persuaded that most humans, given that almost unassailable power, wouldn't be a whole lot worse.

edited 23rd Jan '18 1:03:05 AM by Unsung

I added this to Jade Empire's YMMV:

• Alternate Character Interpretation: There's a big one with the issue of the Emperor, Sun Li, and the gods as relating to the drought which afflicted the kingdom. We only know the actions of the Emperor and Sun Li after the drought, which include massacring the Spirit Monks as well as enslaving the Water Dragon but some fans believe their behavior may have been bad beforehand and resulted in the gods sending the drought to punish them. Others believe they may have been motivated by I Did What I Had to Do and Rage Against the Heavens to save their Empire against a horrific curse. Others may note the gods may simply have been maintaining the natural order that would have caused the drought in the first place while others believe that's yet another reason for the Sun family's actions. In the end, the game gives no clue to the moral character of either man before they ended up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.

Lacking evidence either way I'm inclined to believe Sun Li and the Emperor were probably bad guys in the Lawful Evil Doctor Doom sense in the fact their moral character was probably not particularly changed by the events which happened but they were not likely inclined to BREAK REALITY until it personally effected them. They were, however, both extremely competent and probably ran their kingdom extremely well but in an autocratic efficient manner by the skill we see Sun Li displaying.

I.e. Tywin Lannister.

That isn't that exceptional by Chinese standards and is actually probably better than middle of the road but if this WERE a Chinese myth, it'd probably have a Stable Time Loop element like the gods sending the destructive drought to destroy them because of what Sun Li and the Emperor WOULD do in the future (which we saw with the actions they did end up taking). The gods don't have omniscience but there's plenty of stories ala Oedipus where the future brings bad and good based on portents that bring things about.

It's as good a theory as any, at least for me.

edited 23rd Jan '18 1:07:41 AM by CharlesPhipps

@Unsung: not so, lack of evidence can be a defense against an accusation, but never support for a one. If Bob is on trial for murder, the lack of evidence is a reason why he is not guilty, not why he is not innocent. Here, if we invoke Mandate of Heaven, we must hold that Sun Hai's rule was bad, and there is no evidence of this, thus either Sun Hai's rule wasn't bad, or Mandate of Heaven wasn't in play or doesn't exist in this setting or the writers just didn't really get what it meant. Similarly, if I am to accuse the gods of being dicks, I use as my evidence that they could have chosen any method to "end" the Jade Empire, but they picked the one that gets a lot of innocent people killed, and the Water Dragon herself doesn't care if you bind your followers, and only frees them if you choose to taint her body.

I don't believe "Sun Hai became a dick in response to Heaven proving to be dicks" as evidence that Sun Hai was a bigger dick. Sun Hai's rule pre-drought doesn't have to be just and wise to not deserve the drought, just ordinary.

In all cases, "it is the natural order, and thus not mere mortals' station to change" has pretty much never been part of the Chinese culture. It's more of a Western New Age one than anything. I think Prince Nezha would probably look at the deference Dawn Star had for the Water Dragon and find it quaint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0SKGg8xOPs

@Phipps: cool, I caused a change in a tvtropes article! Chinese culture does also have preference for Tywin Lannister types, thus why Mao, Deng, and Qin Shihuangdi are still seen so favorably. If JE was more of a Chinese story...well, it would depend if we're going for wuxia or xianxia, here. Xianxia we'd certainly just be fighting the "unknown evil" in Dirge and getting the Emperor himself to acknowledge that he made a mistake. Wuxia we'd probably just not have the fantasy gods/spirits shenanigans and be a pretty straightforward "you killed my family" or "you betrayed me".

@Anotherguy: sometimes Jade Golem can still be damaged. I remember the first time I used it for like everything but it's still risky (as the tvt page notes) against mobs of weapon wielding mooks. That, and I think the Red Minister and ghosts can still damage it for some reason despite golems being immune to magic.

Problem of evil, etc. There are limits to these gods' powers, if mortals can fight them and bind them. You're attributing a lot to malice, but I think impotence is just as likely. You're assuming that the Drought was something the Celestial Bureaucracy 'chose', but it could just as easily be something they didn't stop, which perhaps couldn't be prevented without considerable harm elsewhere. Considerable harm which did come to pass, whether or not the gods foresaw it.

And we're not talking about trial law here, so you can't use that as a way of saying some information is more or less valid. You don't have to agree with me, but the point remains that saying that the Suns were probably alright dudes before the Drought is just your bias, as me believing that the pattern of ruling through fear and assassination and Master Li's twenty-year revenge plot was part of a larger pattern and not something that just blinked into existence the moment they entered the walls of Dirge. Until they make a new game, barring some bit of lore we both missed, it's a stalemate.

That being said, I'm not even condemning the brothers Sun based on anything they might have done. Their post-Dirge crimes are more than enough.

I dig that stable time loop idea.

edited 23rd Jan '18 11:38:10 AM by Unsung

Trial law is itself based on more basic principles of logic, namely the concept of burden of proof. Just because we are not formally placing this fictional character on trial does not mean the standards of burden of proof no longer apply. Moreover, if we are to claim Mandate of Heaven scenario, then by necessity we are putting the Suns, specifically Sun Hai, on trial; the only thing missing is the hundreds of thousands of dollars being paid to an actual licensed lawyer.

The game also explicitly tells you that the "rule through assassination and fear" bit only came after, and that prior to Dirge they were the Order of the Lotus who were spiritual advisors to the Emperor. Probably not incorruptible, but also nothing out of the ordinary for any monarchy. If we can justify Heaven's actions by future acts, we can justify pretty much anything.

And if Heaven is impotent to stop it, then by many many many Chinese stories, it is perfectly justified to take over for Heaven. That, too, is part of the whole Mandate of Heaven bit.

eh,

Then the problem isn't Sun Hai and the Emperor taking over Heaven, it's the fact they do it BADLY. They create a necromantic army of the dead of damned souls and humanity becomes a bunch of bald demon mutants.

Which is, again, also Chinese Mythology as the Bureaucracy of Heaven is flawed and doesn't work very well historically.

edited 23rd Jan '18 1:48:17 PM by CharlesPhipps

Trial law is based on an interpretation of philosophical logic, but 'burden of proof' being on the accuser's side is specifically a concept in trial law, not an assumption that can be applied to every argument. If you're choosing to interpret it as if this were a court case, and you see this as if we're putting the Sun brothers on trial for being unjustly ruled against by the Celestial Bureaucracy, then you're holding the Celestial Bureaucracy to account as well; you've assumed that the gods had no justification for their action and that the Drought was entirely their choice and their doing, but we have no direct evidence of that, either. So we don't have enough to go on, either way. We don't know.

edited 24th Jan '18 1:26:45 AM by Unsung

No, burden of proof can be applied and is an integral part of every argument. Otherwise you get a never-ending cycle of "well you can't prove it is" versus "well you can't prove it's not" in every case with mild ambiguity. I assert that Heaven put Sun Hai on trial, because that's what the Mandate of Heaven is, and point out that due to lack of evidence we cannot conclude that he deserved the Drought. I assert that Heaven was dicks to do this, and use as my prosecuting evidence that of all possible ways, they chose one that was the worst for hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I assert that Heaven had the power to choose, and use as my prosecuting evidence the fact that the Water Dragon only relies on a Appeal to Nature fallacy rather than citing this much better reason in explaining to you why it had to happen and why you shouldn't hold so big a grudge for it that you'd seriously contemplate eating her soul.

It appears (and here I admit that we don't have proof in the form of explicit text) that the golems were a temporary if imperfect fix for the ghosts. That is conjecture on my part, because there is no text to support this and everyone involved seems to treat the two as unrelated. Li, on the other hand, is quite confident that with Spirit Monk powers he could just do the Water Dragon's job manually.

That's the difference between something being just my opinion versus something with support from the work itself.

The burden of proof is on the person doing the asserting. I have not been pressing the point about what happened prior to Dirge, because I don't know. You have. That makes it *your* burden of proof. It doesn't exist in the legal sense of there being a presumption of innocence.

And it's still not the part of the problem I've been focused on, which is that taking over the Water Dragon's position— immortal power over the cycle of life and death— is pretty much guaranteed to make you a monster if you aren't impartial, which Master Li of all people decidedly is not.

edited 24th Jan '18 1:08:02 AM by Unsung

I dunno man, I thought I could trust him. But then he laughed at the end and I felt kinda dumb.

edited 24th Jan '18 12:58:28 AM by Nikkolas

Even his reaction was like, "Seriously?"