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The Archives' Disorganization Is a Deliberate Effort to Hide Forbidden Knowledge

plausible motive · popularity 52 · 1 source thread

The Archives is kept a chaotic mess on purpose so dangerous truths about the Chandrian and Amyr cannot be found, altered, or destroyed.

About: The Archives

Also involves: The Chandrian, The Amyr, The University, Master Lorren, The Creation War, Caluptena

The theory§

The Archives at the University are perpetually reorganized, with each new Master Archivist imposing a fresh cataloguing scheme on hundreds of thousands of volumes, so that no book can be reliably located. This theory holds that the chaos is not mere scrivener pride but a deliberate defense of dangerous knowledge: in a world where someone is quietly altering or erasing the record of the Chandrian and the Creation War, a library too disordered to search becomes impossible to censor or destroy wholesale. Any sensitive volume that does surface can be quietly removed to a private collection rather than reshelved, and the four-plate door may guard such a hoard. The pattern is read as part of a wider Temerant suppression of inconvenient history, evidenced by the burning of libraries such as Caluptena and the marginalization of oral-tradition peoples like the Ruh and Adem. A competing reading holds the disorder was engineered by the Chandrian without the Masters' knowledge, since the Masters already hold unilateral authority to pull books from the shelves and would not need so laborious a method.

Evidence§

  • in a world where there's a clandestine campaign to alter all recorded knowledge of the Chandrian, it might benefit the person in charge of the world's largest library to make books about the Chandrian and Amyr a little hard to find
    OP's core claim: disorder protects forbidden knowledge from a censorship campaign — u/bluesy22
  • the next Master Archivist decides to further frustrate the scrivs by ordering a few hundred thousand books to be reorganized. To the scrivs, it may appear as simple pridefulness, but I think there's a greater purpose (can't alter or destroy what ya can't find)
    Mechanism: serial reorganization disguised as pride; chaos foils destruction — u/bluesy22
  • They know they won't be able to find ALL of them, but any time they do, they sock them away in a private library. Maybe that's even what's behind the four plate door
    Surfacing books are hidden in a private collection, possibly the four-plate door — u/bluesy22
  • If you don't know what's in your collection or how to find content, how can you control access to it?
    Refinement: unsearchability itself prevents controlling/censoring access — u/nosaystupidthings
  • cultures with oral traditions are either hated and persecuted such as with the Ruh, or they are tight lipped and mute as with the Adem... both are self ostracizing.
    Wider pattern: oral-tradition peoples suppressed, supporting systemic concealment — u/Sandal-Hat
  • there is active understanding that libraries are targeted for arson and destruction in Temerant. Most notably with Caluptena … for thousands of years attempts to share information by oral song and tradition as well as by written word or tied knots has been stifled in Temerant
    Library burnings (Caluptena) show information has long been deliberately stifled — u/Sandal-Hat
  • Another popular theory is that Loren and Puppet are both in the Order Amyr and are actually working to remove Creation War information from the Archives.
    Context: a counter-reading where insiders remove information rather than protect it — u/EmeraldMother
  • I think it's more likely that the Chandrian orchestrated it without the knowledge of the masters at the time … If the University or any of the masters wanted to take things off the shelves, they have unilateral authority to do so.
    CounterCounter: masters could just pull books; chaos points to Chandrian, not Masters — u/iron_red

Book refs: WMF

Tier reasoning§

plausible: fits the wider information-suppression pattern in the text

Contributors§

Source threads§