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Post by saardvark on Jul 26, 2017 2:25:09 GMT
Gads, Ive babbled on an awful lot on this page's discussion; sorry everyone!... I will be quiet now.....  |
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Post by antiyonder on Jul 26, 2017 3:22:51 GMT
I don't see why everyone is so surprised by the self-sacrifice. Mothers used to routinely die during childbirth. Moreover, there are plenty of species who die in order to produce offspring. Not to mention that the whole self-sacrificing wife/mother thing has been an archetype for millennia. I don't see it as hard to believe that Surma would want to have a child at some point, even knowing the risk. People die all the time for all other sorts of reasons. Why not for something sort of noble like being a mom and creating life? I dunno. I might consider it, if there was a safe enough care plan for my child after I passed. I really do want kids someday (of course if you don't yourself I am fine with that, I am just reporting my own psychology here). This. I can appreciate that he shows off a more emotionally pleasant side with her, but that doesn't mean that he'll remain so with their daughter when she passes on. |
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Post by antiyonder on Jul 26, 2017 4:02:04 GMT
Now besides over estimating Tony, the only reason I can imagine Surma possibly not trying to prepare him for her passing is maybe her father was able to grieve when it was her own mother passing on, and she expected the same from her husband. I don't know, have we seen her parents in flashbacks or exposition?
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Post by aline on Jul 26, 2017 4:06:58 GMT
I don't think there was a good solution to the situation. Surma keeping Annie in the dark clearly had diaastrous consequences. But telling her, when she was a child, about how her birth had ensured her mother's death, that the Guides wouldn't come for her, etc., would probably have had just as unfortunate results. Perhaps the moral is that humans and fire elementals should never have children. (And maybe the Guides making Annie one of them isn't such a bad thing, if it brings the unhappy cycle to an end.) No, the moral is that you tell your kids the truth, even the uncomfortable ones. It's not even about "unfortunate consequences". Annie had a right to know these things, and nobody bothered telling her. |
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Post by antiyonder on Jul 26, 2017 4:23:22 GMT
I don't think there was a good solution to the situation. Surma keeping Annie in the dark clearly had diaastrous consequences. But telling her, when she was a child, about how her birth had ensured her mother's death, that the Guides wouldn't come for her, etc., would probably have had just as unfortunate results. Perhaps the moral is that humans and fire elementals should never have children. (And maybe the Guides making Annie one of them isn't such a bad thing, if it brings the unhappy cycle to an end.) No, the moral is that you tell your kids the truth, even the uncomfortable ones. It's not even about "unfortunate consequences". Annie had a right to know these things, and nobody bothered telling her. Yeah, I'm starting to see one thing Surma and Tony had in common. Neither of them are all that genre savy. |
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Post by Runningflame on Jul 26, 2017 6:03:45 GMT
Plenty of species do die to procreate, but humans typically don't. But as faiiry points out above (and I was not fully considering) we *are* talking about a hybrid here - not just a human. Right. It may not be normal for humans, but it is entirely normal for fire-elemental/humans. "Reproduce" doesn't feel like the right word here, since it's always a one-mother-one-daughter thing. (I may be mixing up "reproduce" with "multiply," though.) Come to think of it, from the fire elemental's perspective, this process is a lot like the phoenix's life cycle of dying and being reborn from the ashes. I wonder if that was an influence. |
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Post by pyradonis on Jul 26, 2017 13:15:44 GMT
I don't see why everyone is so surprised by the self-sacrifice. Mothers used to routinely die during childbirth. Moreover, there are plenty of species who die in order to produce offspring. Not to mention that the whole self-sacrificing wife/mother thing has been an archetype for millennia. I don't see it as hard to believe that Surma would want to have a child at some point, even knowing the risk. People die all the time for all other sorts of reasons. Why not for something sort of noble like being a mom and creating life? I dunno. I might consider it, if there was a safe enough care plan for my child after I passed. I really do want kids someday (of course if you don't yourself I am fine with that, I am just reporting my own psychology here). Wouldn't you consider adoption? I don't think there was a good solution to the situation. Surma keeping Annie in the dark clearly had diaastrous consequences. But telling her, when she was a child, about how her birth had ensured her mother's death, that the Guides wouldn't come for her, etc., would probably have had just as unfortunate results. Surma had a lot of time in that hospital thinking about how to tell Annie best. And if she thought Annie was still too young, she could have left a message, a video, anything. Annie would have died after having had a child, not even knowing why? Great. Maybe she trusted in someone else to tell Annie. But then obviously that someone didn't. Even though everyone knew. Especially her damn father. |
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Post by fia on Jul 26, 2017 16:38:24 GMT
I don't see why everyone is so surprised by the self-sacrifice. Mothers used to routinely die during childbirth. Moreover, there are plenty of species who die in order to produce offspring. Not to mention that the whole self-sacrificing wife/mother thing has been an archetype for millennia. I don't see it as hard to believe that Surma would want to have a child at some point, even knowing the risk. People die all the time for all other sorts of reasons. Why not for something sort of noble like being a mom and creating life? I dunno. I might consider it, if there was a safe enough care plan for my child after I passed. I really do want kids someday (of course if you don't yourself I am fine with that, I am just reporting my own psychology here). Wouldn't you consider adoption? Yeah sure, but I guess I don't see those impulses as mutually exclusive. I'm hoping one day to be both a birth mom and an adoptive/foster mom; but a lot of it depends on your partner and what your financial options are (adoption is expensive stuff). I think everyone's got the right questions in mind though, which is why Surma and Tony didn't prepare Annie better, and why Tony has reacted the way he did. Some people are just bad at handling the grieving process, I suppose? But that's an unfair thing to say, who knows whether there is a "right" way to grieve. I suppose Tony always held on fiercely to hope he could 'cure' Surma, but maybe she was open to the truth sooner than he was. Possibly she was supposed to have died much sooner after giving birth? There is still a lot we don't know. My thought is, why go straight to "there's no sense to be made of her wanting to have Annie"? |
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Post by warrl on Jul 29, 2017 4:58:14 GMT
and the fire elemental *must* die to reproduce. If that is true, and they most-commonly only have one child, and there is any other way for a fire elemental to die or be killed, then the species is doomed to extinction after not many generations. (Unless maybe there is some way they are spontaneously and commonly created without the involvement of an existing fire elemental.) However, hybrids are a different matter. Quite a lot of cross-species hybrids have no chance of surviving even to birth, let alone to adulthood; many that can survive to adulthood are normally sterile. A hybrid that will have one child and then die, when reproduction is not normally fatal in either parent species - I don't know of any such case in the real world, but it's certainly plausible. Particularly if some sort of magic is involved. Of course, the "species" is not viable in the long term, for the same reason that a true species with the same characteristic is not; but there is a way to produce new hybrids without the involvement of an existing hybrid - it's inherent in the definition of the word "hybrid" - as long as both parent species exist. |
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Post by The Anarch on Jul 29, 2017 7:33:16 GMT
(Unless maybe there is some way they are spontaneously and commonly created without the involvement of an existing fire elemental.) Or they are either truly immortal or at least functionally immortal like a phoenix. I believe others have put this idea forth before, actually, that the fire elementals that Annie is decended from are like the phoenix, and it's because they began reproducing with the involvment of humans that they regenerate as new offspring instead of rising up as the exact same individual every single time. |
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Post by pyradonis on Jul 29, 2017 18:03:57 GMT
I just imagined it to be a bit like in the D&D cosmology. Elementals rise from the material of their elemental planes and go back there when they die, only through the union with a human and "hiding" in an organic body the fire elemental soul was able to escape this cycle.
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Post by saardvark on Jul 29, 2017 23:46:10 GMT
and the fire elemental *must* die to reproduce. If that is true, and they most-commonly only have one child, and there is any other way for a fire elemental to die or be killed, then the species is doomed to extinction after not many generations. (Unless maybe there is some way they are spontaneously and commonly created without the involvement of an existing fire elemental.) However, hybrids are a different matter. Quite a lot of cross-species hybrids have no chance of surviving even to birth, let alone to adulthood; many that can survive to adulthood are normally sterile. A hybrid that will have one child and then die, when reproduction is not normally fatal in either parent species - I don't know of any such case in the real world, but it's certainly plausible. Particularly if some sort of magic is involved. Of course, the "species" is not viable in the long term, for the same reason that a true species with the same characteristic is not; but there is a way to produce new hybrids without the involvement of an existing hybrid - it's inherent in the definition of the word "hybrid" - as long as both parent species exist. yeah, I didn't phrase that very accurately; I meant fire elemental *hybrid* (eg, Surma, Annie) must die to reproduce. We don't know enough about true full elementals in Gunner-world to know how they work.... |
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