What Canticle teaches us about Scadrial

[A Simple Pilgrim he/him]

I have just finished reading both The Lost Metal, and Sunlit Man over the last week, and one thing stood out to me. 

The Elendel Basin has apparently never had a major military conflict in the last 350 years. There of course has been fighting, even surprisingly large fights, between law enforcement and organized bandit groups, but there's never been a conflict between 2 government entities. The Basin apparently lacked even an official military of any sort until the 'discovery' of the Malwish, after which Elendel set up its own army. That army has never even been in a single fight. 

Despite that Scadrians have seem to adapt to combat extremely quickly. Once they saw the necessity they quickly developed such things as machine guns, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, and presumably artillery*. None of these things were even influenced by autonomy, though her agents contributed to an unknown degree to the development of dreadnought style battleships and rocketry. The Set also apparently had little trouble training soldiers by the hundreds, with developed tactics that threatened experienced metalborn. Even Elendel apparently had a plan prepared to enact conscription and stage some sort of attack on the outer cities if it came to that.

Contrast that with Canticle- who despite having actually been fighting an actual war of some size over a decent period of time never seemed to have developed anything beyond improvised bombs. No new guns, no real sense of tactics or training. While their smaller population and limitations due to the sun are an excuse, the fact the Chorus can craft advanced weaponry easily means it was certainly within their ability. The only innovation was given to them by Scadrians in the form of Cinderhearts. The charred themselves were then used abysmally for what they are capable of- though that's understandable due to the flower-war like nature of combat which sought to capture rather than kill. 

Canticle was implied to have been settled by spaceship, and as those are relatively new, it seems unlikely that they have been there a thousand years. Perhaps between 100-200. They came from Threnody, having left due to 'politics' and presumably conflict, as we do know Threnody develops impressive weaponry (see shade gun from the newspaper in bands of mourning, and the Night Brigade itself), which presumably gets used to some degree.

So despite being less removed from conflict than the people of Scadrial, those of Canticle seem to be far less capable of it. 

That, I think, shows an aspect of Scadrial that is rarely thought about. Its people did not arrive there naturally, but were instead created by Ruin and Preservation. Its people are well aware of this and know that every person carries a piece of preservation in them, but perhaps they underestimate how much Ruin they carry as well. Wax alludes to this in the climax of TLM, when he says to worship Harmony is to also worship Ruin, with all that implies. 

 

TL;DR: The difference in military capacity between Scadrial and Canticle, despite similar starting situations, show the influence that Ruin has on Scadrians even in the modern era, and that part of them will probably have major implications for the future.

 

*Mayor of Elendel says they can deal with it if Bilming only sends a single ship, which implies they have some way to fight it off- presumably coastal artillery. 

[NameIess]

I would like to point out that Scadrial and Canticle have many differences between each other beyond a piece of Ruin in their souls. North Scadrial has had centuries of peace and comfort living in a utopic area designed by Harmony to be perfect for supporting life. No struggles for food, perfect weather, plenty of rivers to move stuff easily, the Basin is basically the perfect place to build a stable, advanced society. Beyond that, they were also given help in the development of science by the Words of Founding. Canticle, on the other hand, is completely different. As you mentioned they have to constantly run from the sun and were until recently made up of a bunch of splintered societies. Also, they have been on Canticle for much longer than you assume. It's so long ago that no one really remembers how they got there. 100-200 years isn't long enough for that, particularly considering that the Greater good is somewhere around 80 years old. They would have been alive when the children or grandchildren of the original inhabitants were. It's also strongly implied that they fled shortly after the Evil first appeared, which puts their arrival on Canticle at 1000+ years ago.

Another factor that's influenced Canticle is the complete lack of wars there. They fled to Canticle in order to get away from fighting, and they succeeded for thousands of years. The Cinder King is the first one to instigate real conflict, and from what we know he's only really been "at war" with the Beaconites, who haven't even tried to fight him because of their extremely peaceful culture. And that culture isn't due to lacking a piece of Ruin. One need look only at the Night Brigade to see a technologically advanced, militarized society of Threnodites.

TLDR: Canticle's relative lack of technological advancement and militarization isn't because of a lack of Ruin in their souls, but instead a combination of their peaceful culture and constant struggle to survive compared to the Scadrians, who received help from a god and have a culture that has seen and fought wars in the past, if not in the present.

 

[A Simple Pilgrim he/him]

2 hours ago, Nameless* said:

 Also, they have been on Canticle for much longer than you assume. It's so long ago that no one really remembers how they got there. 100-200 years isn't long enough for that, particularly considering that the Greater good is somewhere around 80 years old. They would have been alive when the children or grandchildren of the original inhabitants were. It's also strongly implied that they fled shortly after the Evil first appeared, which puts their arrival on Canticle at 1000+ years ago.

 

I don't think the line: "We fled the Evil. Then we fled Threnody." really says much about the timing of these events coming from the shades in the Chorus. 

 

More importantly, how do you reconcile that with the line from the chorus:

 

Quote

"We were the first who died on Canticle," a shade whispered to him. "The first to live in this land and devise the designs of flight-based on the ships that brought us here."

 

They say that they arrived on ships, and that they were able to (presumably within hours due to the sun) turn those ships into mobile cities. That is a level of sophistication that is far, far beyond any indication of the tech they had on Threnody pre-evil. We know in fact that they were using gunpowder at the time and it was considered advanced. And we know that the tech level of threnody declined after they fled to Hell, as things were lost, and then stuff couldn't be maintained while following the simple rules. The tech that they would need to leave the planet is totally incongruous with what we knew they had at the time. 

Finally, if the threnodies had ships capable of leaving the planet at the time the Evil came, why in the world would they choose to go to a continent they literally named 'Hell' instead of anywhere else? We should expect a vast Threnodite diaspora as they fled to literally anywhere else. There seems to be none of that until the modern age. 

 

About the Greater Good being 80 and thus would know more if the arrival to Canticle was recent, that's not necessarily true. They know plenty about Threnody, and they are the only ones who really got that Nomad could be from another planet. Why would they know the details of the ships that brought them to Canticle? Those were retrofitted and replaced into the modern ships that can run off sun hearts instead of whatever the Threnodites who arrived used for power. They had no intention of leaving the planet, even if they could, so why would they be asking about the details of interplanetary flight to their parents or grandparents?

[Treamayne]

Just food for thought / discussion

19 hours ago, Nameless* said:

It's also strongly implied that they fled shortly after the Evil first appeared, which puts their arrival on Canticle at 1000+ years ago.

I feel like this severly underestimates the timeline for the rise of Evil and fleeing to Hell. The Evil would likely have arisen at least 4000-6000 yrs ago, since it is implied to have been a result of the clash with Odium, Ambition and Mercy (My Thoughts) - The first clash was before the splintering of Devotion and Dominion and the final splintering was after that - all of which was before Odium became trapped in the Rosharan system which was 4500+ yrs before Way of Kings (and who knows how long between WoK and space travel).

On 10/22/2023 at 7:34 PM, A Simple Pilgrim said:

Canticle was implied to have been settled by spaceship, and as those are relatively new, it seems unlikely that they have been there a thousand years. Perhaps between 100-200.

Just because ships were implied, does not mean FTL Ships were implied - it could easily have been more than a couple centuries. There could even have been more than one generation of Threnodites on the ships if they used Generational Ships for Space travel pre-FTL. It could also be that the technology was not native to Threnody, since it was also implied that the original Zellion was an off-worlder and they were his ships. . .

[Koloss17 She/They]

From what I understand, Zellion mentioned that FTL travel, and space travel, for that matter, was a relatively recent thing. Now, we don’t know for sure how long he’s lived, so recently could mean dozens of years, but probably means at least a century or two. This is definitely much further ahead than we have seen before, other than maybe Sixth of Dusk, which seems to be taking place around the same time as this book. 
 

so my guess would be that Cantacle certainly wasn’t established much more than a thousand years ago, but likely something between 500 and 700 years ago.

now that does beg the question: how old is Zellion at this point?

[Treamayne]

4 hours ago, Koloss17 said:

From what I understand, Zellion mentioned that FTL travel, and space travel, for that matter, was a relatively recent thing. Now, we don’t know for sure how long he’s lived, so recently could mean dozens of years, but probably means at least a century or two. This is definitely much further ahead than we have seen before, other than maybe Sixth of Dusk, which seems to be taking place around the same time as this book. 

Right - in case I was unclear, my point was not "Canticle was settled long long ago" - my point was that "we can't rule out over two centuries just because FTL is new(ish)." We simply do not have enough information yet to determine how long the Threnodites have been on Canticle. Maybe he'll answer the question at the Con or on a stream.

[Rorzikel]

Despite how the traditional saying goes, what doesn't kill you does not always make you stronger. Struggle and suffering don't inherently improve you. Often times just the opposite in terms of depleted resources and capability.