WCV Theorising

[Falar]

So, anyway, ever since I've had the PDFs, I've been looking into how I would do my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia as a Dresdenverse city. Partially because, hey, that's all kinds of material there that I just grew up with and partially because there's a lot of stuff that I've seen that could be useful somewhere - like the trapdoor underneath the old college library that leads down into darkness or the strangely shaped standing stone with a hole through it in the park where LARPers congregate every weekend. All kinds of great stuff.

While I've been doing this, I've been thinking a lot about appearances of stuff. I've already figured out one of the major themes after moving back here a while ago. Which is that you're always one step away from the bad part of town. It used to be there were good neighborhoods that were pretty good all the way through when I was a kid. Now? Huh. It seems like everywhere's less than a block away from a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

However, on the flip side, Huntington was once in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most churches of any city. I can't recall if it was by block or per capita or just geographically, but there are heck of a lot of churches. This, of course, has to be important to the makeup of the city in Dresdenverse somehow, but I wasn't sure where I would go with it. There's always a threshold nearby seems like a copout and the city just doesn't feel like a bastion of holiness anymore - if it ever did.

Now, one of the overarching concepts I had was a large portion of despair in the town. Everyone smokes to get through the day, everyone drinks to get to sleep at night, everyone is doing drugs to just feel. This sounds ripe for a large Skavis presence, which has more or less always been a part of how I saw the city going down in the Dresdenverse. Sure, there's a club which practically screams Raith to me (and will be if I ever write this up), but the city as a whole has a dark taint of the Skavis to me. Of that deep despair.

And then last night I had a thought. What if the churches weren't the bastion of holiness? At least not all of them? What if some of them had been beaten away and worn down into the very place the Skavis make their thronghold? Think about it. It's insidious and it's horrible, but it works oh so well.

Of course, there are beacons in the night, churches who haven't fallen to their influence - but they're all falling, one by one. Those folks at City Hall keep raising taxes and the bus routes have to work around different ways and, heck, since the trolley stopped running, nobody can get here anymore ... It's just the growth of the city, right?

Well, last night, I had the thought that the best thing these vamps in the church would feed on wouldn't be the despair - it would be the guilt. You know the kind of preaching that I'm talking about. The stuff that rakes your soul over the hot fires of hell and makes you feel like a lowly, misbegotten worm. A vampire who fed on guilt would revel in that sermon - and be perfectly poised to make it so much more effective.

So, do people think that guilt and despair are far enough apart to make a whole new house of the White Court? Or do they think that it's really just another application of the same thing?

[Arandmoor]

I would think that guilt is just despair turned inward after you examine your own actions, but a strong case could be made to the contrary.

You might examine the Skavis faction with "Guilt = Despair" as if these Skavis were simply connoisseur's, or picky eaters so to speak. As if the various kinds of guilt, despair, and depression simply having different "flavors".

If you take that and look at a support group from the perspective of the Skavis, just imagine them like you would an all-you-can-eat buffet and things get...nasty. Especially if any of the characters are in, or have loved ones in a 12-step program of any kind.

...because, you know those programs never work right? ...but people go anyway (take the cynical view and realize the extreme would simply be a satisfying meal).

Top that off with the simple fact that people who die after meetings because of the same things they were going to meetings for (AA attendee drinks himself to death, DUA attendee ODs, etc...) would drive even more people to seek "help" with minimal prodding from the Skavis once word got around.

Kinda scary now that I think about it.

[Falar]

... That is something that I hadn't quite considered yet, but would also work very well. The important part of this as a theme for the city is that the churches are rotting from the inside. So while the support group idea would be great for another side of their insidious influence upon the city, it doesn't quite tie into what makes the city interesting - eg, the number of churches that there are.

I do like how you framed the flavors of Skavis. It would work for me although I still think the case could be made the other way. Although seeing as both in the real end would go towards something suicidal rather than literally being scared to death in the case of the Malvora or a death of ecstasy in the case of the Raith, it would make a certain amount of sense for it all to fall under the House of Skavis.

Amusingly, the first church I ever went to could probably be modeled as the beginnings of the Skavis - because it was a church that rented an activities building once a week to hold church in. The perfect example of a building without a threshold. If the threshold is even much of a hindrance for a White Court Vampire. And, of course, the pastor would be all about reaching out to other churches and building an interfaith organization - all the better to spread influence, yah?

[MFeeney]

really like this idea and agree it is scary  got an email this morning that reminded me of this thread posting it here

[MFeeney]

The Parson's Tale presents a theological treatise on repentance and how to overcome the "seven deadly sins" with the virtues of the spiritual life.  One of those virtues is magnanimity offered as the virtue to combat the sin of acedia.  Now, acedia was considered one of the most serious of sins.  It manifested itself in sloth or spiritual despair, but more significantly embodied the temptation to give up caring about anything truly important.  Acedia led to spiritual impotence and smallness of heart.  Spiritual impotence would allow vice to flourish and virtue to languish, not because vice was purposely chosen or intentionally entered into, but because spiritual lassitude desiccated one's concern to be virtuous. 

[Falar]

I actually had more thoughts about doing Huntington for the Dresdenverse and had an inkling of an area to go with the theme that the whole churches aspect would be a representative of - Brand New Parasites.

Another feature of downtown is that everything is getting run out by new things. The Ma and Pa stores of yesterday are being sucked dry by Walmart, giving room for yet another bar. The great old theatre is edged out by that brand new one just a block away. The best little old bookstore bows to the financial pressure of another carbon copy big chain bookstore.