Now, now. Lets be objective and reasonable. This is the forum - where the players behind the characters may speak frankly.
At the heart of the matter is a universal truth even the willfully ignorant cannot refute. As the saying goes,
"Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."
Since the dawn of Xavax, different characters (and players) have held views of what they believe Xavax was, is, should, and must be. As beliefs often go, contradiction and divergence fueled interesting events that evolved into the culture we came to love. Some nations/cultures choose to embrace change, while others choose to avoid it at all costs. In the beginning, Xavax was a place of change, of progress, of new frontiers. We were comprised of nobles from dozens of realms, each with their own uniqueness to offer. The shared desire to re-shape East Continent - to envelop our differences through the underlying threads that brought us together - these were the spark and tinder that formed our identity, our laws, and our faith.
Unfortunately, in an all-too-human response to betrayal and conflict, we lost sight of that objectiveness and doubled-down on what felt necessary at the time. Some of it was plain human nature, and some was Xerarch Selenia's particularly heavy-handed approach to power consolidation. In the interest of maintaining a solid grasp of power, much like Sirion has done [and been condemned for], Xavax curbed, ignored, or outright exterminated dissenting views by enforcing a strict set of rules that demonized anyone who broke from the mold. Like any foundation that refuses to bend the status-quo, it stagnated and inevitably failed because Xavax stopped reflecting the behaviors and beliefs that once made it prosper.
Diversity. Malleability. Progress. Opportunity. Evolution. Through the traumas of war, betrayal, and disorder, Xavax became the antithesis of everything it used to represent.
Rather than welcome the flexibility of diversity and multi-culturalism that made Xavax prosper, instead Xavax grew rigid - where one either adheres to the established template or faces widespread condemnation. We abandoned the all-inclusive attitude, the undercurrents of cultural progress, the passion for change embodied in the Phoenix archetype... We were designed to oppose the dogmatic and inflexible realms we viewed as culturally inferior, not because we held the supreme example of culture, but because we recognized that our differences gave us strength. We knew, then, that we could accomplish something truly beautiful by voicing our dissenting views and discovering the common threads that brought us to the once-frozen South. We created a counter-culture, both based on the old kingdoms and empires from which we had come, and in direct opposition of the flaws and mistakes we had seen them commit. We, as individuals and as a nation, vowed to do better than they did. We dreamed of becoming something this world had never seen before: a whole greater than the sum of its many parts, given strength through a cycle of rebirth from the ashes of the past unto the wings of a brighter future.
And yet... We became exactly the type of realm and culture we hated with a passion.
It is my [personal] belief that Xavax died the moment this came to pass. We all had great hopes for what Xavax could be. (Both IC and OOC.) It was, by all accounts, to embody precisely the spirit that birthed Xavax in the first place.
Yet here we are: a new realm played by old faces and the old rules that didn't even work the first time. If we see victim mentality for what it is: a convenient and childish deflection of responsibility for ones failures often developed in response to initial trauma - one might realize that Xavax exists in a state of denial, of victimism, in which we've been taught to avoid anything that threatens the belief that we had no part in the events that led to the collapse of Xavax. Its understandable to use this as an IC propaganda tactic against our rivals, but it seems many have been successfully brainwashed by the notion that Xavax victim mentality is anything but a clever ruse to avoid admission of our flagrant mistakes.
