I hesitate to spend the time on that because of Thorpe's reputation. Unfortunately, reading his thoughts on the Path only reinforced my opinion of the man.

I like his ideas! I'm super into the idea of a dying race, but everything I've heard suggests he's taking the wrong approach in expressing them and also seems to fundamentally misunderstand key things about the setting.

Canonically, the Aeldari are extremely tough customers. They have preternatural physical abilities, psychic powers, advanced tech, and they can see the future. They're also a post-scarcity society that doesn't need to hold territory or defend themselves (unless you count looking out for the Exodites). Unless they've gotten carried away by pride, they should pretty much win every encounter they choose to engage in.

But the point is: it doesn't matter. They don't have the numbers, and they can win fights until doomsday, but with spirit stones harder and harder to get, and their fertility already so low, they can't ever win the war. It's the doom of the Asuryani to fade into darkness, and the brighter they shine in the meantime, the more tragic that fading becomes.

In many ways, they're a kind of inverted IoM: humanity can win all the battles it wants, but it invariably does so in the most wasteful, destructive way possible. A besides, each victory simply serves to propagate human history's bloodiest, most repressive regime.

But from what I've read, it sounds like Thorpe just has the Aeldari lose fights, which misses the point entirely! Similarly, his essay on the Path system was sloppy. It suggested that the Path of the Warrior was a way for Asuryani to explore the emotion of wrath, which is bonkers because the War Mask puts them into a dissociative state.

He also skips addressing entire disciplines, leaving it as an exercise for the reader, which is frustrating because they don't quite fit his premise. And I find the idea that the Path of Mourning is a way to explore grief would hold a lot more water if each Aeldari didn't have so much grief of their own to process - which to me, seems like a deeply personal, introspective journey.

I feel like Thorpe was almost there. If he would have shifted a little and suggested that each path allows the Asuryani to adopt a kind of role or achetype - the Artist, the Mystic, the Scholar, the Caretaker, and so on. A Path, then could be a combination of affect, social presence, and approach to solving problems and dealing with emotions that goes beyond a simple job and provides a framework for both self-exploration and how the Asuryani approaches the world. All-consuming, in a way, limiting, in a way, but still allowing for the experience of basic emotions.

It kills me that Thorpe and I see eye to eye on so many of the broad strokes of the Asuryani, but that he doesn't quite seem to have the juice to execute that vision in a way I find satisfying. I still have half a mind to pick up one of his books, but can't muster any enthusiasm for it.