Talk:Religion/@comment-26018514-20190513193528/@comment-35434444-20190514155024

@SpiritDreaming

I'm arguing for what nations the relics should correspond to if someone else was writing RWBY, not the ones that they do. Obviously it's already been laid out which nations gets what relic.

Giving the sceptre to Atlas still doesn't sit well with me. Yeah, dust mechs and technology are new innovations, but we've only ever seen them being used for waging war. Solaris is the most barren and empty continent on the planet and yet this is supposed to be the seat of preservation and renewal?

It is however interesting who the two largest repositories of dust in the world belong to Vacuo and Atlas, both comprising not only the creation-destruction dichotomy but the two most arid regions of Remnant, implying that dust is a double edged sword.

Mistral may be cultured and have more historical knowledge, but we're never shown any of it. There isn't even a World of Remnant that says, "Oh BTW, Mistral has way more history than the other countries."

Creativity is an expression of intelligence, but that only hints at how the four concepts the relics represent are all unified and fully interchangeable.

It only becomes possible to differentiate which country should get which relics if you start specifying what you mean by "knowledge" or "creation" to the point where the distinction becomes so arbitrary it's completely meaningless.

How are we supposed to kid ourselves into thinking that history -- a subjective account of past events -- counts as knowledge, but the objective natural sciences don't?

Mistral has a lamp as it's regalia and yet it's Atlas that goes around enlightening everyone about the applications of dust. (Whether they like it or not.) A sceptre would make far more sense for an agricultural society because whoever controlled the food, historically speaking, was the boss. That's why the dragon was a symbol of imperial power in China because eastern dragons call forth the rain.

The season most obviously aligned with creation would be spring, but Atlas is under wintery conditions all year round.

I'm not trying to be unfair. There are all kinds of different knowledge that might allow Mistral to better embody this idea than Atlas despite being less technologically developed, like mystical wisdom. But so far everything points to the contrary.

What about Vale? They're the ones who completely reorganized the political landscape at the end of the war and in effect "created the world" as it exists in the present day. Do we give them the sceptre now?

I guess if we've learned anything here, it's that the relationships between the relics and the nations are so tentative you make a case for pairing up any nation with any relic so it really isn't worth thinking about.