[Spoiler] Who else knew about Nimue? Title is not a spoiler

DMcCunney wrote:The big question, given Langhorne's subsequent actions, is how he got the nod to be Administrator. You would think "Can be trusted to carry out the orders they were given and not pee in the soup to suit themselves" would have been a checkbox in the process.
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Dennis

I have also been puzzled by this question, including the remainder of the civilian command team, but wrote off the answer in the terms, if he hadn't, we wouldn't have a story. In other words, to quote my wife when I asked why someone in a film did something stupid, she replied, "It's a movie".

Krenn wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:But given how Langhorne ignored his original orders, and Chihiro was apparently even more radical then Langhorne in that respect, I wonder how the setup on Safehold post the War Against the Fallen differed from what Langhorne intended, since Chihiro's fingerprints would be all over the end product.

I'm not entirely convinced that Chihiro's goals were necessarily the same as Langhorne's at all.

We don't really know what Chihiro's goals were. We have hints in TextEv like Seijin Kohdy's diary where he talks about the Fallen who defeated him presenting evidence Chihiro was significantly modifying Langhorne's plan, and Langhorne had already departed from Operation Ark's original plan.

For all I know, Chihiro just wanted the chance to author and enforce a book of worldwide scripture. ANY worldwide scripture. Langhorne's policy of technology suppression may just have been a convenient excuse.

Well, Chihiro was the principal editor of the Writ, combining the theology with the various Archangel's practical handbooks. We don't have a clear idea of how he changed the original draft Langhorne had approved, beyond the addition of his and Schueler's books.

(And I wondered previously how big the Writ was, and speculated there was a breviary with just the theology that people normally used and referred to. That's apparently the case, with the books of Langhorne, Bedard, Chihiro, and Schueler comprising it. Merlin stated a pre-AR copy of the Writ in Commodore Pei's download didn't have the books of Chihiro and Schueler, and those where post War Against the Fallen additions.)

So a lot of what we see on Safehold was Chihiro's work, since he wrote the history and was largely responsible for the final form of the Writ and the Testimonies.

I suspect another take on this will be in the testimony of Schueler. His visitation accused Chihiro of lying. His Testimony should have details on what Schueler says he lied about.
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Dennis

Keith_w wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:The big question, given Langhorne's subsequent actions, is how he got the nod to be Administrator. You would think "Can be trusted to carry out the orders they were given and not pee in the soup to suit themselves" would have been a checkbox in the process.

I have also been puzzled by this question, including the remainder of the civilian command team, but wrote off the answer in the terms, if he hadn't, we wouldn't have a story. In other words, to quote my wife when I asked why someone in a film did something stupid, she replied, "It's a movie".

And their character was stupid, or the screenwriter was.

I was actually musing on the selection process that determined who got posted to OA at all (and I suspect Chihiro leaned on his senior government position to get a slot.)

It wouldn't surprise me if whoever drafted OA's mission plan knew it was likely to be modified. Oversight from home wouldn't exist, and the colonists would be who knows where facing who knew what. The planners simply crossed appendages that the mission would find a suitable world and plant a colony where humanity survived. Anything beyond that was gravy.

And I rather doubt OA's original plan included things like the Writ. It did specify abjuring technology for 300 years to give the Gbaba time to decide they'd successfully exterminated humanity, but likely didn't try to say how that would be handled.

The problem would be that if the colonists remembered who they were and where they came from, they'd be aware of technology, and the difficulties of colonizing the planet from the original enclaves using only wind, water, and muscle power when they knew alternatives existed might be irresistible. How do you prevent people from doing things that have obvious short term benefits but create longer term problems that aren't apparent when you do them? "Because God said not to!" is one way.
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Dennis

As I recall, the original Ark plan involved some memory modifications to the colonists to help them accept that they needed to stick to muscle, wind, and water power. Bedard and Langhorne just went way past what the colonists had agreed to.

DMcCunney wrote:And their character was stupid, or the screenwriter was.

I was actually musing on the selection process that determined who got posted to OA at all (and I suspect Chihiro leaned on his senior government position to get a slot.)

It wouldn't surprise me if whoever drafted OA's mission plan knew it was likely to be modified. Oversight from home wouldn't exist, and the colonists would be who knows where facing who knew what. The planners simply crossed appendages that the mission would find a suitable world and plant a colony where humanity survived. Anything beyond that was gravy.

And I rather doubt OA's original plan included things like the Writ. It did specify abjuring technology for 300 years to give the Gbaba time to decide they'd successfully exterminated humanity, but likely didn't try to say how that would be handled.

The problem would be that if the colonists remembered who they were and where they came from, they'd be aware of technology, and the difficulties of colonizing the planet from the original enclaves using only wind, water, and muscle power when they knew alternatives existed might be irresistible. How do you prevent people from doing things that have obvious short term benefits but create longer term problems that aren't apparent when you do them? "Because God said not to!" is one way.
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Dennis

Frankly, I suspect that the criteria for selecting command staff was something along the lines of:

"Ok, every last one of the experienced and plausible candidates are some type of crazy, suicidal, depressed, OCD, delusional, or otherwise suffering from the extreme long-term stress of being a senior leader on the losing side of inevitable genocide..."

"Which of the candidates is the right KIND of crazy, that they might actually remain stable and consistent for the next 300 years of managing a brainwashed low-tech colony?"

"Yeah, Langhorne's megalomania and blame-human-technology mindset can probably last 300 years without undergoing major personality changes or suicide. He can be in charge."