Inspiration of the Coil

Tenebrae wrote:The premise is roughly based on Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy, with a Sith Academy putting forward the notion that, yes, power is less fun shared, but that the Jedi have plenty of power left, so let's not give it to them by fighting amongst ourselves more than necessary. The heads of the academy are comparatively young by Sith standards, and each has the ability to effortlessly eliminate one rival Mother, while simultaneously extremely vulnerable to the other. Fortunately, each has their own goals, which do not come into conflict with the others. Informally, the

Lilith is taking the role of Mother of Tears (and, naturally, her own summary on this topic is more important than my own -- I'm going from memory here). The Mother of Tears is the most powerful of the three "Mothers" of the academy, and its public representative and face. Her students are typically the most outwardly ambitious, focusing on mastering their own abilities and pioneering new ones. Her house color is blue. Loosely based on Argento's "Mother of Tears."

I've called dibs on the character of Mother of Shadows, the cruelest of the three. Shadows is the more militant of the sisters, and the one most likely to directly take to the field against the hated Jedi. Due to her numerous wounds (or, some students whisper, her passions), Mater Tenebrarum has extensive cybernetic implants and replacement limbs and organs, to the point where she no longer remembers or cares of the original losses. Her students rarely volunteer for her house, but rather sent to her as punishment for making trouble. Tenebrarum drills her students mercilessly (and frequently literally -- she has a nest of torture tools embedded in her) to make them capable soldiers in the war. Those who survive her tutelage do not emerge unscarred, though some are fanatically loyal to her, claiming that while her punishments are terrible, her rewards are the greater for them. Her house color is yellow. Loosely based on Argento's "Inferno".

The Mother of Sighs is the wisest of the three, and the one who runs the school's day to day functions. The tenuous alliance with her "sisters" was her idea, and her sisters are fully aware that, left to her own devices and given reason, Sighs would likely claim the entire student body and oust her sisters. As such, the other two sisters typically keep close watch on her house and its immediate student allies. The house color is red, and the character is loosely based on Argento's "Suspiria". We don't have anyone in this position yet, but they would need to be active, and willing to leave the politics purely IC. >_>

The relationship between the sisters is not common knowledge among the student body. Some of them claim they were sisters in a religious order before joining the Dark Side. Others claim they are literal sisters. Some even believe the three are lovers. A few of the more daring students in the House of Sighs have gone so far as to suggest they are exactly as they appear, the titles and appellations used merely symbolic, and the stories circulated by the Mothers themselves to keep the students guessing.

Tenebrae wrote:Inspiration

The idea of "Three Mothers" comes from "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow", a section of Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis. The piece asserts that just as there are three Fates and Graces, there are also three Sorrows. They include Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs), and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness). The attribute of each woman (tears, sighs, shadows/darkness) is a direct translation of her name from Latin. (Mater being the Latin word for "mother".)

Suspiria clearly derives its title from the woman delineated in de Quincey's work. However, Inferno's title does not reference Mater Tenebrarum. Thus, Argento's 1982 film Tenebrae is sometimes mistaken as the second installment in the trilogy.

Coincidentally, Fritz Leiber published his novel Our Lady of Darkness in 1977, the same year that Suspiria came out. This novel also references De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis and quotes from it in its foreword. Just as in Argento's telling, the novel focusses on buildings and architecture, as the place where evil dwells. However the parallels end there. Leiber's novel pursues a more Lovecraftian mythos and the source of the malevolence comes from a male warlock rather than a female witch. Despite the lengthy introductory quotation from de Quincey, the three Ladies, or Mothers, make no appearance in Leiber's work.

Tenebrae wrote:Now, moving on... Lilith, as ever, turns out to be correct in that Mother of Darkness was supposed to be the baby in the family. There's also implication that the three are infertile, though that may simply be metaphor (the passage describes how they can't create, only destroy).

It's also implied that the three are functionally immortal, but distant from each other. In Suspiria, at least, the Mother of Sighs is physically present for perhaps ten (non-continuous) minutes, and on camera for less than five, with the rest of her coven being the more overt threats. There's even the possibility that virtually none of the rest of the coven had any magic -- they perform rites with no visible effects, and only one other witch is even shown to be present when anything magical occurs.

It's also implied that the three are pretty independent, with their domains in Freiberg, New York, and Rome, and while neither of the other two interfere with Sighs' death that I see, Mother of Tears does have a presence in Inferno, and indirectly attempts to cut off the Rome investigation into Darkness' activity in New York. And again, Inferno seems to focus primarily upon the Mother of Darkness' coven rather than the Mother herself, though she's got more of a presence than Sighs did.

My thought, then, is that the leadership in the coil is nominally the Mothers', but those characters are either inactive (and powerful to the point of godmoding if necessary) unless their presence is directly needed for story reasons, and/or (and possibly more fun) that the legends of the Three Mothers is all that anyone has to go on. Nobody has hard information that they still exist, if they ever did, and even should they believe, no direct way to identify them at the school. We could even go a step further, insinuating one in the faculty, one in the student body, and one outside the system to run interference with the Empire.

By all counts, the Mothers founded their individual homes, so I'm inclined to argue they founded the academy, too. I was struck by a line in Suspiria -- the school there assumed the dancers knew how to dance, the school was just to refine their technique, with one scene showing a teacher pushing a sick student to collapse simply to see how far she could go. Korriban may be the training academy, but we can be an elite finishing/graduate school.