volllstrecker meta
Mar. 29th, 2021 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iniquiticitythinking about vollstreckers from critical role, circa ep 120
look, i DO agree that it is COMPLETELY in the abuser’s handbook to take credit for the ways caleb has succeeded, and i ALSO get that of course if you’re ikithon you’re going to say “of course i freed you and let you wander around.” you’re obviously NOT going to say ‘that was a mistake.’ so i do agree that trent’s word is absolute GARBAGE here.
but i also find the non-destiny alternative fairly hard to grok.
1. why didn’t trent just dispatch of caleb at some point? 11 years is a long time to have dead weight on your resources! is caleb the only person who has ever failed The Test? this seems quite unlikely to me! this goes DOUBLE if there’s feebleminding involved. every month for 11 years you gotta re-feeblemind, and there’s no way he doesn’t succeed sometimes? and then you gotta do it again?
2. random raving woman randomly has powers of the archheart and then randomly cures caleb of his ailment, either feebleminded or otherwise
3. course there’s the destiny argument - like Caduceus had visions of Nine Eyes right before the Nein showed up, the archheart explicitly intervened to rescue Caleb to set him up for this journey. This feels a lot more thematically appropriate for Caduceus than Caleb honestly, but gods are real and certainly they do do stuff like this in exandria.
maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle?
1. caleb is/is not the only person to break as a vollstrecker, but trent dislikes waste, so he DOES keep him around to see what happens. and either trent lets him to go see what happens OR it’s not IDEAL that he escapes, but the best experiments get unexpected results, yeah? and even at the dinner things were interesting but only now they’ve gotten out of hand and the experiment should end.
2. maybe caleb is/was wrong that the archheart cleric was just another patient because he wasn’t sensible enough to reasonably identify them. imagine this: a secret organization from good-aligned gods that rescues people who have been unfairly imprisoned in the sanitarium. and maybe USUALLY they have a process for the people they rescue, but caleb fled too quick to go through it.
follow up musing withnnotcharlottee on this:
1. what if trent regularly actually “heals” his broken vollstreckers becuase maybe there’s some terrible re-vollstreckerization or other sort of re-traumatizing he does to them if they fuck up the first time. so it IS intentional that caleb was healed.
2. but sometimes this doesn’t work and he just leaves them there. maybe to try again in a year or something. so it is trent’s working-as-intended to heal caleb. but typically when he heals his broken vollstreckers they snap back immediately, and we know that caleb pretended to still be broken for weeks after. so trent heals caleb, and goes “oh, it didn’t work on this one,” and thus does not re-vollstrecker him.
3. caleb then escapes much later.
hrrmmmmmmmm.
note: this series of events very much reminded me of animorphs #33, the illusion (spoilers in link.)
while it’s vollstrecker hour here at iniquiticity, i just wanted to say that i have zero confidence that just becuase astrid SAYS no vollstrecker has ever escaped actually MEANS no vollstrecker has ever escaped.
1. if you’re trent you put probably HUGE effort into making sure no vollstrecker thinks there is any alternative, and ESPECIALLY not escape. there was a massive meta post on my dash (that i didn’t even read all the way through) that talks about just how thorough trent is and needs to be in his isolating of potential candidates. and obviously he needs to physically, mentally and psychologically seal off the escape routes. so even if there are escapes, he’s going to cover it up.
2. in our sample size of 1 escaped vollstrecker, caleb’s strategy of kill trent only really started to form in his brain LONG after we met him. caleb’s original post-escape plan has always been “fix MY mistake.” only recently, as we know, has he began to see trent liable for his parents, etc. and that was only becuase the nein helped him come around with that. if you’re an escaped vollstrecker maybe you never escape “it was my fault,” and thus “kill trent” never even occurs.
3. caleb’s fear of trent has been so all-consuming, and he’s long perceived trent as so powerful, that the idea of killing him has probably been out of reach until recently. so if you’re escaped, maybe that’s another reason “kill trent” and/or “kill the system” never happened or never did happen.
4. even if a vollstrecker finally gets to that “i’m going to kill trent,” zone, that’s probably handled with very delicate care! maybe trent makes sure that’s handled by the augen trust, the king’s spy network, saying that these attacks are serious government threats (which, technically, they also are), not actually abused folks trying to destroy their abuser. that takes it out of the hands of the vollstrecker entirely.
nnotcharlottee says:
Astrid made a good point about Caleb having the ear of both “King and Kryn”; if there are possibly more escapees like you’re saying, hard bet NONE of them ever had (/ could acquire, in Trent’s mind) the influence Caleb currently has, regardless even of arcane ability.
Another good point! So much about power - and this is obviously is part of Beau/Cobalt Souls storyline - is about who’s telling the story. Beau (and many people including Marisha!) were blown away that Dairon heard Beau’s story (despite that Beau is not exactly an A+ student), investigated, and punished the person responsible regardless of Beau’s characterization, skill/tier, rank, etc - and also despite anything about Zeenoth! We’re so used to people in power using that power to not be punished for the harms they do to those they have power over, it’s (depressingly) such a surprise when it doesn’t shake out that way.
But if you are an abuser - say, a freaking Archmage of Civil Influence - literally it’s your job to say ‘They are wrong, and you should believe me, and here’s why.’ So let’s say that you DO escape being a vollstrecker and are recovered enough to plead your case to someone (man, that’s a big ‘do’). Who do you go to? Who will punish you and bring you back into the web? Who can you even reach? Terrifying questions for anyone who has been abused by someone in power. You’re a nobody in comparison to The Archmage of Civil Influence who has already super fucking damaged you. Who knows what he’d say against you. Think of what you already have to admit to to say Trent made you do it. The Assembly, I imagine, would go through great lengths to make sure your complaints don’t reach someone who 1) believes you 2) would make changes or 3) would report it to someone important.
Remember, vollstreckers are the bad stories parents tell their kids to make them to go sleep at night.
You’re an escaped vollstrecker. You’ve been systemically isolated. So you – what? Tell your teachers that you were pulled away from?
Certainly the Assembly would make sure teachers aren’t asking questions about that.
Tell Zivan (headmaster of soltryce) or Oremid (headmaster of zadash)? We don’t know if they’re complicit - we know that Oremid at least pretended to be friendly with Trent at Harvest Close.
Certainly people saying “i used to be a vollstrecker and trent ikithon made me kill my parents” isn’t something that gets you an audience with the king. You’d be dismissed as a madman (madperson).
You need to somehow unrelated get the king’s attention. Say breaking into a giant church and rescuing it from a horrible ritual, then asking for peace between two warring nations…. for example.
look, i DO agree that it is COMPLETELY in the abuser’s handbook to take credit for the ways caleb has succeeded, and i ALSO get that of course if you’re ikithon you’re going to say “of course i freed you and let you wander around.” you’re obviously NOT going to say ‘that was a mistake.’ so i do agree that trent’s word is absolute GARBAGE here.
but i also find the non-destiny alternative fairly hard to grok.
1. why didn’t trent just dispatch of caleb at some point? 11 years is a long time to have dead weight on your resources! is caleb the only person who has ever failed The Test? this seems quite unlikely to me! this goes DOUBLE if there’s feebleminding involved. every month for 11 years you gotta re-feeblemind, and there’s no way he doesn’t succeed sometimes? and then you gotta do it again?
2. random raving woman randomly has powers of the archheart and then randomly cures caleb of his ailment, either feebleminded or otherwise
3. course there’s the destiny argument - like Caduceus had visions of Nine Eyes right before the Nein showed up, the archheart explicitly intervened to rescue Caleb to set him up for this journey. This feels a lot more thematically appropriate for Caduceus than Caleb honestly, but gods are real and certainly they do do stuff like this in exandria.
maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle?
1. caleb is/is not the only person to break as a vollstrecker, but trent dislikes waste, so he DOES keep him around to see what happens. and either trent lets him to go see what happens OR it’s not IDEAL that he escapes, but the best experiments get unexpected results, yeah? and even at the dinner things were interesting but only now they’ve gotten out of hand and the experiment should end.
2. maybe caleb is/was wrong that the archheart cleric was just another patient because he wasn’t sensible enough to reasonably identify them. imagine this: a secret organization from good-aligned gods that rescues people who have been unfairly imprisoned in the sanitarium. and maybe USUALLY they have a process for the people they rescue, but caleb fled too quick to go through it.
follow up musing with
nnotcharlottee on this:1. what if trent regularly actually “heals” his broken vollstreckers becuase maybe there’s some terrible re-vollstreckerization or other sort of re-traumatizing he does to them if they fuck up the first time. so it IS intentional that caleb was healed.
2. but sometimes this doesn’t work and he just leaves them there. maybe to try again in a year or something. so it is trent’s working-as-intended to heal caleb. but typically when he heals his broken vollstreckers they snap back immediately, and we know that caleb pretended to still be broken for weeks after. so trent heals caleb, and goes “oh, it didn’t work on this one,” and thus does not re-vollstrecker him.
3. caleb then escapes much later.
hrrmmmmmmmm.
note: this series of events very much reminded me of animorphs #33, the illusion (spoilers in link.)
while it’s vollstrecker hour here at iniquiticity, i just wanted to say that i have zero confidence that just becuase astrid SAYS no vollstrecker has ever escaped actually MEANS no vollstrecker has ever escaped.
1. if you’re trent you put probably HUGE effort into making sure no vollstrecker thinks there is any alternative, and ESPECIALLY not escape. there was a massive meta post on my dash (that i didn’t even read all the way through) that talks about just how thorough trent is and needs to be in his isolating of potential candidates. and obviously he needs to physically, mentally and psychologically seal off the escape routes. so even if there are escapes, he’s going to cover it up.
2. in our sample size of 1 escaped vollstrecker, caleb’s strategy of kill trent only really started to form in his brain LONG after we met him. caleb’s original post-escape plan has always been “fix MY mistake.” only recently, as we know, has he began to see trent liable for his parents, etc. and that was only becuase the nein helped him come around with that. if you’re an escaped vollstrecker maybe you never escape “it was my fault,” and thus “kill trent” never even occurs.
3. caleb’s fear of trent has been so all-consuming, and he’s long perceived trent as so powerful, that the idea of killing him has probably been out of reach until recently. so if you’re escaped, maybe that’s another reason “kill trent” and/or “kill the system” never happened or never did happen.
4. even if a vollstrecker finally gets to that “i’m going to kill trent,” zone, that’s probably handled with very delicate care! maybe trent makes sure that’s handled by the augen trust, the king’s spy network, saying that these attacks are serious government threats (which, technically, they also are), not actually abused folks trying to destroy their abuser. that takes it out of the hands of the vollstrecker entirely.
nnotcharlottee says:Astrid made a good point about Caleb having the ear of both “King and Kryn”; if there are possibly more escapees like you’re saying, hard bet NONE of them ever had (/ could acquire, in Trent’s mind) the influence Caleb currently has, regardless even of arcane ability.
Another good point! So much about power - and this is obviously is part of Beau/Cobalt Souls storyline - is about who’s telling the story. Beau (and many people including Marisha!) were blown away that Dairon heard Beau’s story (despite that Beau is not exactly an A+ student), investigated, and punished the person responsible regardless of Beau’s characterization, skill/tier, rank, etc - and also despite anything about Zeenoth! We’re so used to people in power using that power to not be punished for the harms they do to those they have power over, it’s (depressingly) such a surprise when it doesn’t shake out that way.
But if you are an abuser - say, a freaking Archmage of Civil Influence - literally it’s your job to say ‘They are wrong, and you should believe me, and here’s why.’ So let’s say that you DO escape being a vollstrecker and are recovered enough to plead your case to someone (man, that’s a big ‘do’). Who do you go to? Who will punish you and bring you back into the web? Who can you even reach? Terrifying questions for anyone who has been abused by someone in power. You’re a nobody in comparison to The Archmage of Civil Influence who has already super fucking damaged you. Who knows what he’d say against you. Think of what you already have to admit to to say Trent made you do it. The Assembly, I imagine, would go through great lengths to make sure your complaints don’t reach someone who 1) believes you 2) would make changes or 3) would report it to someone important.
Remember, vollstreckers are the bad stories parents tell their kids to make them to go sleep at night.
You’re an escaped vollstrecker. You’ve been systemically isolated. So you – what? Tell your teachers that you were pulled away from?
Certainly the Assembly would make sure teachers aren’t asking questions about that.
Tell Zivan (headmaster of soltryce) or Oremid (headmaster of zadash)? We don’t know if they’re complicit - we know that Oremid at least pretended to be friendly with Trent at Harvest Close.
Certainly people saying “i used to be a vollstrecker and trent ikithon made me kill my parents” isn’t something that gets you an audience with the king. You’d be dismissed as a madman (madperson).
You need to somehow unrelated get the king’s attention. Say breaking into a giant church and rescuing it from a horrible ritual, then asking for peace between two warring nations…. for example.