How is Aurelion Sol ontologically incoherent. [Thoughts open to Riot and community]
Hi Riot, hi buddies,
First of all, i'm going to talk about something I study in my native language (french) and which is quite hard to transcribe in english but I'll do my best efforts at being understandable. I've been attentive to all Riot efforts in building a coherent story about Mount Targon and I welcomed it with a real joy. I also saw that some mates did some great work (I found it here : http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/story-art/JPc1qxs7-where-are-my-science-fiction-and-science-people-at-lets-talk-about-aurelion-sol) to give feedback about it's physics coherence. But beyond the φύσις (read it phusis) comes the μεταφύσις, metaphysics. And that's a really interesting point, in Aurelion Sol lore, Riot offers us the hardest point to conceptualize as a lore : the cosmogony, the ontological foundations of Runeterra.
The analysis will be working on 2 axis :
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Ontological Analysis
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Emotional impact of the ontological analysis
- Ontological Analysis
The obvious reference Riot made in its lore seems to be made to Greece and pre-socratism. If Socrates represents the moment philosophy becomes rational and gives up all its poetical axis, we must admit philosophy existed in other aspects before Socrates.
Flattered by this audience of countless worlds, he became fascinated by their fledgling civilizations, who crafted amusingly self-centered philosophies on the nature of his stars.
Those "self-centered philosophies on the nature of his stars" may possibly make reference to two philosophies : either Zoroastrianism or the proto-philosophy. The remaining text, the litteral iconography used by the author seems to make Aurelion Sol more a reference to greek system than a zoroastrianism mystical thing. (We will develop it later)
Why would it refer to proto-philosophy ? (What we called before pre-socratism)
We have to understand that before being anything, before being a quest of wisdom, philosophy was an analysis of the world. It was absolutely not distinguishable with biology, arithmetics, physics or anything. It was just a long meditation on the world. However, it had a caracteristic : tame the laws of nature.
The fracture between pre-philosophy and birth of occidental philosophy is the moment Greeks stopped to look to the sky in a worshiping way but analyzed the phenomenons and found their regularities. The art of fouding laws to the world is philosophy. This story of looking to the sky to find a regularity in stars movement is related in the conception of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl, a major figure of german philosophy in XXth century for the curious people. This analyze of phenomenons is what nowadays a lot of people are trying to call the purest, the most authentic philosophy.
To come back to Aurelion Sol, that's PRECISELY what he's talking about, those "philosophies" human theorized on the nature of his stars are basically the description by Aurelion Sol of the birth philosophy from his "goddish" point of view. However (there's always a "however"), the question is about this "self-centered", aren't those philosophies looking to the sky and therefore looking for alterity, for "something else", something "bigger" than them ?
The answer is in Emmanuel Levinas word in his 1961 book "Totalité et Infini" : "Philosophy [author's note, in a greek way] is an egology." What Levinas is telling us there is that philosophy is just the gesture of bringing alterity (stars in our question) to the same we are. It's an assimilation movement. In other words, those philosophies are just a negation of an objective analysis of world's laws.
So here we can understand how Aurelion Sol is working, he's a being able to see humans without failing in their methodologics issues. He avoids their reefs because he's something else, something bigger. All this analytic moment leads us to understand why Riot wanted to make Aurelion Sol falling under the Targonians control. But Riot, you didn't explained it at all, sorry but a "crown" (symbol of majesty, k) manipulating such a god is a pure non-sens if we don't look to the symbolic masturbation you're gifting us here. There's another incoherence about that but we will come back on it later.
The question I wanna ask now is : **What's Aurelion Sol ? **
I mean, is it a god ?
_ I’ve heard the names they call me: prophet, comet, monster, god, demon… So many names, all missing the mark._
So god is missing the mark right ? Well I think it's right. In fact, the answer is in the suspension points, yea, all of those names are missing the mark but the "name" of Aurelion Sol is given in his champion insights :
I think the french translation was more precise in a conceptual way (yea i dare say it) because they called it "Demiurge" and that's exactly the stuff we're talking about here, Aurelion Sol is a demiurge, a star-forger, a black-smith. Aurelion Sol is NOT a Creator in a classic meaning.
Now we're entering into the tight spot of our discussion. Before going deeper I seriously need to finish to prove that Aurelion Sol is really inspired by greek tradition. Well, add to all we said before that when Riot talks about "arrogance" in it's lore, it's an obvious reference to hybris, the arrogance toward Gods. I know i'm going really fast on this point but it's because we will analyze it deeper in our emotional analysis of the champion.
First of all, i'm going to expose the real theory of the greek Demiurge and then I'll compare it as much as I can to Riot's conception of a Demiurge with all the incoherenes it does presents.
There's two main theories of the Creation (in a metaphysic perspective), the first one is the most common right now and is creationism. God is the only being existing and creates the materia ex nihilo, from nowhere, he just creates materia because he's god and he doesn't give a shit about rationality, he's omnipotent. That's the monotheistic theory and that's what Aurelion Sol is NOT.
The other one (the good one in Aure's case) is the "blacksmithing" theory, God is not a God in a monotheistic way because he's not omnipotent, materia was just here and we have no fucking idea why because greeks never asked themselves why. He's a Demiurge. Here I have a methodologic issue because in french we have the word "finitude" which is the caracteristic of being end and which doesn't exists (at my modest knowledge) in english so i will call it "endness" (yea i can't do something else sorry). So yea the word has an "endness" and is limited, at the beginning it's like a canvas.
And wait, wait, wait :
_he roamed the vast nothingness, seeking to fill a canvas of incalculable breadth _
Yea c'mon Riot, that's cool, you did it. This perspective is totally demiurgic. So basically, the theory of the Demiurge explains us the Demiurge has (in a very artistic way) all the materials pre-existing like the painter and just used it to make its work. That's the MAIN Aurelion Sol theme. Basically, Aurelion Sol is a guy who was here with elements to forge the world.
So there we got two things to precise : Nope bro, Aurelion Sol didn't create anything in an "absolute" way so the word "nothingness" means NOTHING.To create from nothing like you described it above, he should be omnipotent (monotheistic way) but he's absolutely not. And from nothingness, nothing (no things, yea we love puns in philosophy) comes, that's the most absolute rule of Greek philosophy. (Check Parmenides' poem, positive gives positive, negative gives negative, bloody simple). But I know you Riot guys aren't that stupid and predicted it so you give us keys. In Aurelion Sol's battle, he finds elements to create mini-stars, another evidence is that all the star he forged contains some essence of himself :
_That’s how I know when even one of my darlings winks out from existence, ejecting jets of energy and, with it, the very substance of my own spirit. _
And also :
The result is a dwarf replica of one of my majestic glories burning in the depths of space.
Yo cool, Aurelion Sol doesn't create from nothing, so the nothingness word you used previously is an absolute NONSENSE. Aurelion Sol needs materia to create, he's a Demiurge. I think you're conceptually really obscure in your presentation of Aurelion Sol role in the creation. He didn't create everything obviously, he just forged the stars. In this reading gate, we can understand that Aurelion Sol is quite similar to the aristotelian demiurge of the Metaphysics (Lambda book) where Aristotle describes this First Being working with the prima materia but never going further, letting things go and develop itself to a telos, an End. This point too will be analyzed deeper in the second part.
Here comes the last point on this first part, Riot, you screwed yourself up :
Born in the first breath of creation
... I mean c'mon, do you even know why a demiurge is useful ? Are you aware that in its "Proslogion", Saint-Anselm uses polytheists arguments to prove that the unique christian God exists ? In other words, are you aware that this sentence totally RUINS the utility of all the things you're building up around ? The cosmological argument is that everything in this world has a cause. So everything is relative to a cause, but then if you go on and on from a cause to its anteriority we MUST find an absolute cause, something who was there and who caused all that, this cause IS God/Demiurge/Blacksmith/Creator, that's just the BASICS of ANY cosmology. And you Riot dare come and talk about a birth of Aurelion Sol and a "breath of creation". OK, the "breath" is an obvious reference to the greek πνεῦμα (pneuma) and all that shit but i mean couldn't you setup it in another way like in creating a real Pantheon and ontological authorities ? All the thing you're building is here to explain us why the world is this way, who's at the origin of the world, of those stars and you say that there is again something more anterior to Aurelion Sol.
But then, Aurelion Sol is just responsible of the stars and was born to "design" those stars. That would be coherent, however there's an incoherence again, because Aurelion Sol appears in the NOTHINGNESS. You used the word nothingness enough, compared the material world Aurelion Sol forged to the Void enough to make us understand that Aurelion Sol is ANTERIOR to all of this. Then we must admit it's just a plothole, in which way Aurelion Sol can be born if he created the most anterior creations of the world on an empty cavnas ?
So there, I feel you have some ideas but you exploit all of this in such a weird way, mixing a lot of pantheonic and ontologic amazing ideas into one entity, that's a reef.
- Emotional Aspect
Ok we're coming to the last section of this. I could sum up all of the things i'm going to talk in one sentence :
Why is Aurelion Sol so cocky ?
First of all, you have to understand that for your random reader (me), read that your demiurgic dragon was inspired by David Bowie can lead to dangerous shocks. (Cf. Champion Insights)
Then, I think everybody here understood why you made Aurelion Sol so cocky, it's because he loves to contemplate his work and is really proud of it. However, that's an error. A God (in its pantheonic way) can feel, Zeus loved, had sex with a lot of girls and had quite a cool human life. But the concept itself of creator, of demiurge is empty of those considerations. In other words, you anthropomorphized the being you couldn't make a human being. If we made an analysis of why we feel pride when achieving something, I think we will all end-up with the intersubjectivity theme in the head. Did Aurelion Sol had something to prove to his Dad ?
Pline the Younger wrote that we use art to devote a sort of immortality of the being. Jean-Paul Sartre (and Heidegger behind) saw in art a social exercise, a way to interact and show how we could be more than an animal, how we could live as a Dasein, german word meaning a Being-there, a being in question of himself. I think those two perspectives are enough to underline the theme of intersubjectivity in art. This is not a real critic but more a question : Who's the recipient of Aurelion Sol's art ? Inferior beings like humans ? The fascination of Aurelion Sol for humans is more the fascination of a human for the wildlife development more than an equal relation where he likes his partner. He likes to be sanctified but didn't create this humanity (if he did, that would be even more absurd), those massive humans shouldn't even call his eye in the servile way of the artist looking for compliments.
This incomprehension goes further, we said before that on of the main themes of the Aurelion Sol's lore is hybris. But shouldn't the hybris be univocal ? I don't get why Aurelion Sol recognizes humans as demigods.
_These obtuse demigods are my captors? _
I just don't get what's going on in the head of this entity. He's tortured between two sides, looking majestic and servile to the look of humans.
This servile conclusion is just logic, if you make an entity so cocky, he'll necessary look for the look of someone else and therefore will be relative to something else. But, be relative to something is incompatible with the role of the demiurge who's absolute, so is deeply incoherent.
TL;DR : Idc, don't read if you don't want to.
Don't hesistate to start the discussion on this basis, i'm seriously asking myself about the ontological coherence of this champion. I love the idea and seriously love that Riot implies themselves in the cosmogonic flap of Runeterra, but I think you Riot guys aren't aware of how hard it is to keep a serious consistency.
Thanks for reading :)
