I'm not looking to overturn a theme for Sodo that's already established, by any means; you're right, paranoia is already an excellent theme for Paridon, and for Sodo by extension. But there's no reason why the elder's corpse couldn't be a part of the larger theme of paranoia, maybe as a Dread Possibility. People who are raving paranoids generally get that way because have secrets they're frantic to hide, after all!Undead Cabbage wrote:It would add a neat dimension, though, for him to be consulting with the spirit of an elder doppler. I'm not so sure about this being the focus of his curse. Tobias broke the mold when he reccomended that Sodo's curse be his paranoia. It's a theme that works well both with the character's background, and the realm itself.
If Sodo'd initially started resurrecting his victim periodically, soon after he became a darklord -- probably to ensure he was impersonating the elder correctly, as dopps can't read each others' minds the way they can those of humans -- then he'd have been hiding the corpse, and his use of it, from others of his clan who still felt loyalty to the real elder. He'd be terrified that they'd discover the corpse and realize what he'd done, yet totally dependent on the elder's torture-compelled advice to maintain his own imposture as the "rightful clan leader". The fact he couldn't hold his own shape anymore would further feed his dread, as he'd become so very dependent on the rest of the clan's support: should they learn the truth, they could condemn Sodo to a fugitive's lonely death in the sewers merely by abandoning him, let alone actively trying to kill him! Not until the first-generation dopplegangers who'd known the real elder (who needs a name IMO) had all died off would this fear abate a little ... and by then, the Dark Powers had ensured he'd found even worse things to be paranoid over: traps, that he fears only the elder's advice can guide him around, even though keeping the body for perennial resurrection and interrogation remains a risk in itself.
And it's not the elder's spirit that I was thinking of, but the elder's actual body, restored to life, interrogated, and then murdered, over and over again, for generations. Even if it's loooong past the elder's natural lifespan, the DPs could ensure that Sodo's touch can always bring his former leader back, just as they keep Elise Mordenheim from dying and so forth. And if, as you say, it's critical that Sodo's "escape clause" be linked to his paranoia as well as his original crime, we could always say that the thing that scares him THE MOST -- more even than merely being murdered by his own clan -- is that his clan will find a way to not only oust him from power, but to restore the very elder he's been torturing for centuries to a position of leadership ... and then let the elder decide what's to be done with Sodo.
And incidentally, even if dopplegangers don't normally practice the same sorts of family lives as humanoids ... wouldn't it cap off the twisted nature of this Dread Possibility, and make it an ironic mirror-image to the Hive Queen's own circumstances to boot, if the elder in question just happened to be Sodo's father...?