[UA] Archetype complexes (Was: Kevin Matchstick)

[Bryant Durrell]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 01:43:53PM -0400, Peter Hindman wrote:
>    What I want to say here is vague; I've been thinking about this issue
> for a long time but haven't come up with any good ideas...but it might be
> interesting to compare the way archetypes work in UA with the way
> characters can embody Heroes in Hero Wars/Glorantha.  There are a lot of
> similarities, but Glorantha also contains, for instance, 'archetypes' of
> myths (Heroquests) and 'archetypes' of associations (e.g. Orlanth's Ring).
> I know that UA deliberately and forcefully rejects modernist forms of
> occultism and fantasy, and the UA cosmology is sharply individualist, but
> I'm still interested in trying to construct analogues of myths-as-rituals
> and archetypal groups.
> 
>    Okay, to be more concrete, there are already elements of these ideas in
> the setting.  For instance, charging up, for a Pornomancer, amounts in
> Hero Wars terms to a minor Heroquest.

The UA cosmology may be individualist for adepts, but it's communitarian
as all hell for avatars, no?  There is no avatar without a group
perception.  And while we may theorize that it is possible to Ascend
without group participation, I think it's significant that all the
documented Ascensions we've seen in the literature explicitly involve
group perceptions.  Abel nearly ascended by virtue of his activities vis
a vis society, and TWECHBY obviously did.  Arkane is trying to Ascend
with group support.  The would-be Terrorist needs the group activity in
order to get his final push.  

Part of the dynamic of UA, for me, is the way adepts push against
avatars.  Adepts are such independent spirits, while avatars are such
slaves to their archetype (at least until they Ascend...)

-- 
  Bryant Durrell [] durrell at innocence.com [] http://www.innocence.com/~durrell
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         "To be great is to be misunderstood."  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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