#catch a train rowan
The “Necromancy is evil“ we see in most fantasy worlds stems from a christian view of having to honor the body after death in a certain way to ensure the soul’s safety in the afterlife. And while I encourage you to explore societies that don’t see necromancy as evil, I also encourage you to explore societies that see necromancy as evil for different reasons.
Drow might believe that after death, your body belongs to Lolth and must be fed to spiders. Reanimating a body means stealing from Lolth and must therefore be punished.
A Zoroastrian inspired society might believe that with death, evil starts infesting the body, so dead bodies must be kept away from the community, and reanimating them keeps them in the community and is therefore bad.
Ooh, sounds fun! Let me come up with some more.
- necromancy is associated with the culture’s traditional enemies, and is the same level of frowned-upon as using certain symbology or weapons or languages etc which are also linked to those enemies
- once someone has died, it is severely disrespectful to look upon their corpse, so anything which is VISIBLE as being an undead is Very Bad, because it means you can see that person’s dead body
- the reanimated dead have historically been used to spread plague and do other biological warfare type stuff; if you create something like that, a) gross b) unsanitary c) this is interpreted as the intent to commit war crimes
- A society of druids that uses the dead to grow sacred gardens, and reanimation deprives the dead of their part in the cycle
- A society where each plot in the cemetery is used to grow vegetables/herbs for community use, to ensure that everyone is fed and the dead are visited/remembered. Necromancy deprives the community of the food that person would have grown and disconnects the dead person from their community
- A society obsessed with history/recordskeeping/memory, and necromancy prevents the dead from being properly catalogued
- A totalitarian society wherein the citizens are property of the state and necromancy is stealing
- Death is nirvana and reanimation deprives the dead of this experience
- The dead are ritually eaten by friends/family to allow them to live on, and reanimation ends their time prematurely
- The finest jewelry is made of the bones of the dead, so there’s a lucrative trade in grave robbing, and the bone jewelry lobby has convinced the public that necromancy is worse than the expensive jewelry made from the bones
- when someone dies, their death is considered a “sacrifice” to the deity who presides over their cause of death; how exactly you deal with the body, that doesn’t matter so much, but USING the body to your OWN benefit, that’s an insult to the god of warfare / disease / ocean / etc. Like stealing the offerings from a shrine.
~~a culture that recognizes the effort and emotional strain their people go through in life, and when someone dies they throw a huge wake and celebrate their break from life before joining their god/reincarnating/guarding something/etc. Reanimating someone or trying to bring them back to life is seen as a huge taboo because it’s like asking someone who constantly works and finally gets a time of rest to go straight back to work before they’ve recovered. Except it’s the hardest job/adventure ever. For the same reason, motherhood, illness, leadership, recreation, personal growth, and winter are all highly venerated concepts/times in the culture, as times of rest or things in need of a period of rest eventually. To honor these times as sabbats is commanded by one of their gods after a great catastrophe. The whole community is involved with these things, and so too are is the whole community involved with death and picking up the physical or emotional slack of the person who died. If permission is given from the person who is being reanimated, then maybe maaaaaybe it’s ok, but that’s only happened once when a guardian was once needed, and it’s pretty hard to verify if it really was the person.
- reanimation is seen as asserting “ownership” over that being; so while it’s okay to have an undead animal (so long as it wasn’t someone ELSE’S animal, as that would be theft), reanimating a HUMAN counts as “slavery”
- necromancy is considered “lazy”; like, dude, do the work yourself, or pay/convince someone else to do it, what kind of loser has to resort to CORPSES
- only the divine can raise the dead; reanimating the dead is a poor mockery of the gods’ ability, and you are liable to be punished for your hubris, and that kind of punishment tends to have a lot of collateral damage so it’s best for mortals to solve the problem before the gods take notice
This is a good follow up to the post about necromancy and enchantment a few days ago.
Bringing the dead back to fight for you acts as several war crimes at once according to the fantasy Geneva convention:
1. Unwilling compulsion
2. Psychological warfare
3. Disrespecting the dead
And as such is not seen as following the rules of engagement.
Pan vs. bi discourse is so stupid just let people have their labels. I’m transandbi and my sister is pan and we buy each other, each other’s respective flags and cute pride gifts and there’s literally no problem stop telling people what their own label means or that their label isn’t ‘inclusive’ enough when it is and always has been or that their label is too new and is trying to replace things that already exist just stop. Just let people use the labels they are comfortable with. Please. It’s not that hard.
We already have homophobes/transphobes who hate every single one of us despite which LGBTQIA+ members you may personally think are legit or not. They hate us all. So can we please come together as a community instead of fighting amongst ourselves? This goes for terfs, aro/ace spec exclusionists, and enby exclusionists as well. Just stop. It’s not getting you anywhere. The homophobes and transphobes still hate you even if you hate us with them. We need to show strength and unity. Stop hurting people and especially kids in your own community.
Randomly super fuckin horny for a verbal and physical beating
