LoK Meta: Kain's Guardianship of the Balance Pillar

[razielim]

Wait wait wait wait, I literally cannot believe I’m asking this question for the first time in my life, but I was listening to the SR2 dialogue before bed, as you do, and it just fucking hit me -

If the Pillar Guardians relinquish their role as guardian at the moment of their death, as we saw happen when Ariel was murdered and Kain immediately inherited the role as a baby, then why did Kain retain guardianship when he was murdered? Like you could say that Ariel was left to natural forces when she died while Mortanius had basically god-like powers over Death with which he pulled Kain back from death and he might have restored Kain to guardianship at that same time, but Mortanius wasn’t the one who killed him or even present when Kain was killed. Kain literally woke up in a crypt when he was resurrected and has memories of an afterlife, so more than sufficient time had elapsed between his death and reanimation for a new Balance guardian to be born.

And yes, yes, blah blah, Kain is also the Scion of Balance, so you could handwave and say he’s More Special-er than the other guardians, but like, that title’s more of a byproduct of his actions not actual plot-armor, it does nothing to guarantee he won’t lose his guardianship. I’m not saying he couldn’t have still been guardian upon returning as a vampire, I’m saying there should have been some Buffy-style divergence where a second guardian would have been chosen in his absence.

Unless, I guess, you could make the argument that the pillars are sentient to a degree and literally the Balance pillar stubbornly refused to choose a next guardian because... Scion?

Anyway I’m going to try to go get some sleep and not lie awake all night long consumed with questions. PLEASE HELP if you remember some puzzle piece of the conundrum that I’ve forgotten.

I can’t believe I’ve gotten to the bottom and sorted out all the timelines and even hypothesized about the nature of Timeline-0 but never fucking examined that particular moment in history. You know. It’s the moment you as the player believe sets the whole adventure in motion until you know better. The really important and glaringly obvious moment.

(Ok wait I’m not going to bed.)

If the Buffy-style thing happened, the guardian would have been immortal, even if they weren’t any more aware of their role and powers than Kain had been as a human.
Did Kain simply murder them during either his quest to purge the Circle
or his later conquest of Nosgoth, knowingly or otherwise? Did Mortanius
do cleanup, murdering the child himself once Kain was reinstated? Or, due to the corruption of the pillars shortly after Kain’s birth, was the Balance pillar unable to choose a new guardian? I assumed that the other guardians were not reborn after Kain wiped them out because the pillars were waiting for Kain’s re-death to complete the purge, but I suppose that’s all the more proof that Kain’s death wouldn’t have cleansed them and he made the right choice staying alive. They stayed standing while he was dead because the other eight guardians were alive, and then they stayed standing when the others died because he refused to sacrifice himself, which had been Mortanius’s gambit.

Ok okay ok crisis averted, no replacement guardian was chosen because pillars were in a corrupted state at the time of his death, it’s literally that simple.

That was the whole entire point of “expertly calculating” a plot that would corrupt them - causing this impotence to choose new guardians. The plot was not hatched to simply have Kain seek revenge or anything like that. He would have been coerced to kill the other guardians even if he’d remained human. Moebius is a master at the whole gaslight gatekeep girlboss thing, and it would have been just as easy for him. Which is partly why Mortanius kind of just didn’t bother trying to set him on a different path. His stroke of genius was only that he made sure Kain was a vampire before he killed everyone.

Which brings me to a new question I’ve never asked before. How the hell did EG/Moebius/the Hylden orchestrate T1 and was Mortanius’s conterstrike by murdering Kain something they foresaw happening beforehand or something they responded to once the T0 was killed and they saw it play out? I’ve made the argument before that Ariel’s death itself was not a paradox and therefore could not reroute history. It had to have been the result of an off-screen paradox. So a follow-up question is, was that paradox Soul Reaver-anchored, or do other unstoppable forces/immovable objects exist? And more to the point, if the Soul Reaver really is the only artifact which can derail history, then how fucking old is it by now, after all machinations are said and done?

I FUCKING HATE THIS SERIES.