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Haba

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Vault Dweller said:
Grunker said:
That's the point where we not gonna agree then VD. If you're analysis of the people who threw a bomb at Nagasaki or the people who flew aircraft into WTC is just "they're evil lol".
Some people are just "evil lol". They care nothing for sufferings of others and can easily order thousands/hundreds of thousands to be killed, starved, tortured, imprisoned, etc.

[--]

You ruin a pretty big part of literature and film-history by concluding "all evil people know they are evil and have no conscience."
A person who is willing to kill all his people (or hundreds/thousands of others) for personal gain HAS. NO. FUCKING. CONSCIENCE.

Someone can be a loving father, a loyal friend and a mass-murdering fascist at the same time. One can be "good" and "evil" at the same time. r00fles!
 

VentilatorOfDoom

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Vault Dweller said:
Is that what I said?
You said:
A guy who was willing to drain the tree of life (wiki says "almost dooming the elves") isn't someone who can feel emotions
The robotic husk part was an attached metaphor of mine. Hopefully though you've been able to recognize the point I was trying to make. If not, again:
The presence of emotion has never managed to prevent the atrocities of man. Therefor I dare to infer that despite his crimes he was still able to feel the full array of emotions just fine. It was just that his lust for power took precedence over them.

Vault Dweller said:
Yet he was willing to let her die when he decided to drain the tree of life. You call that love?
Noticed the past tense when I said *he did love her, once upon a time" ?
As for whether he still loved her when he first attempted to drain the tree, who knows. I don't think it's stated anywhere. On the other hand it's also not stated that he didn't. Either way, there surely wasn't much reason to fear for the death of the offspring of this tree god that appeared in the temple.

Vault Dweller said:
Had he truly loved her, that would have been enough. Btw, where does it say that she was a demigod?
Then apparently it wasn't true love. *Not true love* is not an emotion I presume?
If we take Rillifanes word she was his offspring. It is nowhere stated what her divine status was, for all I know she could be a full god or none at all.

Vault Dweller said:
Owed him what? Their lives?
It is stated that only the *weak* were about to die, so the answer is yes.
Irenicus never showed much concern for the weak. Remember? I was trying to describe the situation from his point of view, I wasn't disputing that he was evil.

Vault Dweller said:
You're reaching. There is nothing that indicates that he was in danger of losing his memories. He merely was "no longer being able to feel with the same intensity as before." Hardly a cause for alarm for a power-hungry uber mage.
Right. Nothing indicates it. Except that it is stated otherwise.
That he's going to wither away and eventually die.

Vault Dweller said:
Pretty much. I'm glad you finally understand.
It certainly helped a lot to emphasize your point. I guess it's indicative of the intelligent discourse whose loss you mourn so passionately on the Codex.
 

visions

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Haba said:
Someone can be a loving father, a loyal friend and a mass-murdering fascist at the same time. One can be "good" and "evil" at the same time. r00fles!

Even though it should be fairly obvious, I think people forget this too often. For instance even though most people would regard Stalin as a fairly "evil" guy (which he most probably was), his granddaughter has said that she'd always remember him as a loving and tender grandfather, or something like that.
 

denizsi

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Vault Dweller said:
denizsi said:
Trying to tell VD that people in absolute power can be more complex than MuhahahaEVIL...
Cute. My point is that Irenicus is the stereotypical MwahahaEVIL guy who was willing to doom his people for his personal gain and that the half-assed attempt to make him human by telling us about his "tragic love" doesn't really work.

You are the one seeing "tragic love" association. I liken him more to a sociopath/psychopath, again, seeking the comfort of familiarity to fill the emptiness (a common trait in the mentioned type of people) which, for him, is most strongly associated to the love he once disregarded. Familiarity and reenacting memories can be more motivating in an OC way than actually feeling.

Anyway, I'm glad your world exists in moral extremes. Means what you project into AoD will be that much grimdark grittymature. I just hope that you didn't forget to tease us with the occasional positivist moments, only to crush them afterwards.
 
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herostratus said:
VD said:
The nukes were dropped for one reason: the military wanted to test them on live targets. Nuking one city would have been enough, btw, but two is obviously better than one, so...

All the justifications you cited make no sense:
That was not really the point... In fact I sort of worked with the assumption that the bombings *were* evil.

My point was that someone that interprets reality only very slightly different than you might very well reach conclusions that might be grossly murderous (such as nuclear bombings). All the "excuses" for the bombing, even if some technicality involved in them are wrong, are views that could be held - and are held by - otherwise well functioning and reasonable people.

Which again means that there is no reason to assume evil people works on an "evil lol" basis, but rather that they view the world slightly different than you do.

Well, irrespective of the actual reasons for bombing Hiro and Nagasaki, I would have made the same decision. What's more, even knowing what we know today, if I had the power to change history I STILL would choose to bomb Hiroshima.

You know why?:
- the biggest tragedy: the civillian death toll, was (even if you include the subsequent generations exposed to radiation-induced cancers and so on) significantly less than several 'conventional' bombing raids in the assault on Germany. The fire-bombing of Dresden comes to mind. That isn't down-playing the horror of nuclear war - it's that most folk have no concept of the scale of civillian deaths caused by conventional invasions of a well-defended state. On every measure: allied deaths, total deaths, Japanese civillian deaths, Japanese total deaths - whatever measure you want to take of how the tragedy of mass loss of life should be measured - a conventional invasion would have been worse.
- the only plausible argument against the nuclear bombing is the idea that it may have significantly increased the race to nuclear armament, and hence made the Cold War and modern war a lot more dangerous. I find that utterly implausible. Research on weapons of mass destruction was neither confined to nuclear war nor to the post-Hiroshima environment. The world was well on track to the development of nuclear weapons, and the main powers were well and truly focussed around aquiring weapons of mass destructions, whether nuclear, biological or chemical. At most, a 10-20 year delay in mass nuclear armament (which I find, in itself, implausible) would have caused the Cold War to revolve around biological or chemical warfare that would be equally destructive, if not more so due to their potential to spread and cross into larger environmental systems.

Yes, I would stop the bombing of Nagasaki, knowing as we do today that the Hiroshima bombing would almost certainly have been sufficient to prevent a conventional invasion of Japan by the US. But it wasn't unreasonable at that time to believe that more than one bombing of mid-sized cities would be required. Why? Again, look at how the invasion of Germany played out. Despite horrific civillian death tolls in the bombings of Dresden and Munich, and an absolute guarantee of horrific deaths if any serious defence of Berlin was mounted, Hitler insisted in fighting all the way to Berlin. Again, these were bombings with greater death tolls than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's easy to look back in hindsight and judge that Hirohito would not have supported a fight-to-the-last-civillian strategy, but at that time you had the kamikaze bombings and seemingly inexplicable Japanese decisions to defend low-importance pacific islands to the death. I can see how someone would think that a 2nd bombing would be required to make a continued war untenable (i.e. to put the Japanese leadership in a position of either surrendering or being overthrown by their people).

Now, whether you agree with me or not, my motivation here is purely altruistic - I want to minimise the number of Japanese civillian deaths. To the extent that you believe nuclear bombing was an entirely immoral and murderous act, you'd have to concede that it is possible for someone - me, in fact - to completely support an act you find murderous and immoral, for essentially altruistic reasons.

Oh, and re: that picture of Africa. If you'd spent more than an hour or two studying the problems of African kleptocracies you'd realise there's a lot more than person egotism going on there (though personal greed is certainly a part). In fact, there's plenty of personal greed in first world nations, so the 'greed' issue is more a structural problem of how a society manages that greed - in functional societies they harness it in a way that will bring employment and prosperity, while in dysfunctional societies they allow more direct kleptocracy. There's actually been a fair body of work compiled from interviews and biographies of African dictators and their families, asking how they justify their positions. Some of it comes across as thinly veiled greed with no other motivation. But more often it's a mix of old tribal differences (i.e. not 'gold urinals for me', but rather 'gold for my family, my allies and my friends...and a gold urinal for me while I'm at it') and a warped perception of justice. They aren't people who 'just don't care' about morality. Rather, they believe that they have a moral entitlement to be treated as royalty, and that often goes through family lines and cultural traditions.

It's like the UK royal family living as billionaires despite all but the queen having no real job, and the queen's job being easily replaceable with a modestly paid bureaucrat (heck, if you like constitutional monarchy, keep the royal family but cut their earnings down to a middle-class pay-packet). Yes it's an immoral practice. But they aren't necessarily people who don't care about morality. Rather, they have moral systems that are warped in order to justify their own fortune, so that if it was taken off them they'd react with 'moral' outrage.

Humans have a very deeply engrained tendency to dress apparently selfish desires in terms of moral entitlement. It's part of how we combine conflicting individualistic and social evolutionary instincts. That doesn't make it right - what we call morality today is what we get by taking a step back from all that and considering how we 'should' behave. But it means that the 'herp derp evil lol' character is pretty rare and usually a sign of some mental deficiency.
 
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Azrael the cat said:
herostratus said:
VD said:
The nukes were dropped for one reason: the military wanted to test them on live targets. Nuking one city would have been enough, btw, but two is obviously better than one, so...

All the justifications you cited make no sense:
That was not really the point... In fact I sort of worked with the assumption that the bombings *were* evil.

My point was that someone that interprets reality only very slightly different than you might very well reach conclusions that might be grossly murderous (such as nuclear bombings). All the "excuses" for the bombing, even if some technicality involved in them are wrong, are views that could be held - and are held by - otherwise well functioning and reasonable people.

Which again means that there is no reason to assume evil people works on an "evil lol" basis, but rather that they view the world slightly different than you do.

Well, irrespective of the actual reasons for bombing Hiro and Nagasaki, I would have made the same decision. What's more, even knowing what we know today, if I had the power to change history I STILL would choose to bomb Hiroshima.

You know why?:
You're a dumb manboon who likes to serial suck the cocks of his sociopathic "leaders" and court historians. That's why.

Azrael the cat said:
- the biggest tragedy: the civillian death toll, was (even if you include the subsequent generations exposed to radiation-induced cancers and so on) significantly less than several 'conventional' bombing raids in the assault on Germany. The fire-bombing of Dresden comes to mind. That isn't down-playing the horror of nuclear war - it's that most folk have no concept of the scale of civillian deaths caused by conventional invasions of a well-defended state. On every measure: allied deaths, total deaths, Japanese civillian deaths, Japanese total deaths - whatever measure you want to take of how the tragedy of mass loss of life should be measured - a conventional invasion would have been worse.
- the only plausible argument against the nuclear bombing is the idea that it may have significantly increased the race to nuclear armament, and hence made the Cold War and modern war a lot more dangerous. I find that utterly implausible. Research on weapons of mass destruction was neither confined to nuclear war nor to the post-Hiroshima environment. The world was well on track to the development of nuclear weapons, and the main powers were well and truly focussed around aquiring weapons of mass destructions, whether nuclear, biological or chemical. At most, a 10-20 year delay in mass nuclear armament (which I find, in itself, implausible) would have caused the Cold War to revolve around biological or chemical warfare that would be equally destructive, if not more so due to their potential to spread and cross into larger environmental systems.

Yes, I would stop the bombing of Nagasaki, knowing as we do today that the Hiroshima bombing would almost certainly have been sufficient to prevent a conventional invasion of Japan by the US. But it wasn't unreasonable at that time to believe that more than one bombing of mid-sized cities would be required. Why? Again, look at how the invasion of Germany played out. Despite horrific civillian death tolls in the bombings of Dresden and Munich
The fire-bombings of civilian targets were just as pointless and psychopathic as the use of nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone here wrote otherwise. The Allies were the only ones purposefully slaughtering civilians to test their new bombing techniques, how quickly they could burn down a city, etc., (remember, this was the first time in history that bombs were much used). They ordered pilots to gun down fleeing columns of civilians so that there would be no witnesses left. For decades afterwards, even historians in Britain hadn't heard of the Dresden atrocities. David Irving was the first person to bring it to public attention in 1963.

I guess your brilliant "gotcha!" argument wasn't so brilliant after all.
 
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denizsi said:
You are the one seeing "tragic love" association. I liken him more to a sociopath/psychopath, again, seeking the comfort of familiarity to fill the emptiness (a common trait in the mentioned type of people) which, for him, is most strongly associated to the love he once disregarded. Familiarity and reenacting memories can be more motivating in an OC way than actually feeling.


Given that the character is pretty much ripping of MacBeth it's kind of hard to argue that it's absurd as a character template. MacBeth is anything but 'evil lol' when he murders the king out of greed and a desire to fulfil his wife's ambitions. Lady Mac might initially be seen as 'pure evil', but he does a pretty convincing job of making it plausible that she underestimated the amount of killings that would be needed to make the coup 'stick', and its effect on her own self-perception: obviously culminating in the infamous handwashing 'out out damn spot' scene.

I say it's a MacBeth ripoff because it (a) has a villain who has committed an unquestionably evil act (and keeps on doing evil in order to cover his tracks), (b) tries to make that villain somewhat sympathetic by contrasting the evil with an authentic love for his partner, (c) the villain's early 'great evil' was motivated by an emotional greed for power, (d) as a consequence of the 'great evil', the villain gradually loses the ability to feel emotions, and ultimately becomes aware of and utterly haunted by that loss, (e) that loss of emotion (even the emotions that drove his original crime) makes him a ruthless killer but also (is intended to make him) a tragic figure, IN PARTICULAR through (f) the story focussing upon the loss of his ability to feel love for his wife. For the cliff notes, just turn to Macbeth's monologue in the last Act, where he's watching the approaching allied English/rebel-Scottish armies - he hears the news that his wife has killed herself and regrets not that she is dead, but the fact he can no longer 'feel' enough to be sad because of her death. Gee, that remind you of a certain Irenicus monlogue about trying to hold on to 'the memory, then the memory of the memory'?

A bad ripoff, perhaps? Well, in terms of character quality, Irenicus is no MacBeth, and the Bioware writing team is no Shakespeare. But regardless of whether Irenicus was a good villain, I just don't think you can scrap him at a character template level. After all, he's basically the same template as one of the greatest characters ever written.
 
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Paula Tormeson IV said:
Azrael the cat said:
herostratus said:
VD said:
The nukes were dropped for one reason: the military wanted to test them on live targets. Nuking one city would have been enough, btw, but two is obviously better than one, so...

All the justifications you cited make no sense:
That was not really the point... In fact I sort of worked with the assumption that the bombings *were* evil.

My point was that someone that interprets reality only very slightly different than you might very well reach conclusions that might be grossly murderous (such as nuclear bombings). All the "excuses" for the bombing, even if some technicality involved in them are wrong, are views that could be held - and are held by - otherwise well functioning and reasonable people.

Which again means that there is no reason to assume evil people works on an "evil lol" basis, but rather that they view the world slightly different than you do.

Well, irrespective of the actual reasons for bombing Hiro and Nagasaki, I would have made the same decision. What's more, even knowing what we know today, if I had the power to change history I STILL would choose to bomb Hiroshima.

You know why?:
You're a dumb manboon who likes to serial suck the cocks of his sociopathic "leaders" and court historians. That's why.

Azrael the cat said:
- the biggest tragedy: the civillian death toll, was (even if you include the subsequent generations exposed to radiation-induced cancers and so on) significantly less than several 'conventional' bombing raids in the assault on Germany. The fire-bombing of Dresden comes to mind. That isn't down-playing the horror of nuclear war - it's that most folk have no concept of the scale of civillian deaths caused by conventional invasions of a well-defended state. On every measure: allied deaths, total deaths, Japanese civillian deaths, Japanese total deaths - whatever measure you want to take of how the tragedy of mass loss of life should be measured - a conventional invasion would have been worse.
- the only plausible argument against the nuclear bombing is the idea that it may have significantly increased the race to nuclear armament, and hence made the Cold War and modern war a lot more dangerous. I find that utterly implausible. Research on weapons of mass destruction was neither confined to nuclear war nor to the post-Hiroshima environment. The world was well on track to the development of nuclear weapons, and the main powers were well and truly focussed around aquiring weapons of mass destructions, whether nuclear, biological or chemical. At most, a 10-20 year delay in mass nuclear armament (which I find, in itself, implausible) would have caused the Cold War to revolve around biological or chemical warfare that would be equally destructive, if not more so due to their potential to spread and cross into larger environmental systems.

Yes, I would stop the bombing of Nagasaki, knowing as we do today that the Hiroshima bombing would almost certainly have been sufficient to prevent a conventional invasion of Japan by the US. But it wasn't unreasonable at that time to believe that more than one bombing of mid-sized cities would be required. Why? Again, look at how the invasion of Germany played out. Despite horrific civillian death tolls in the bombings of Dresden and Munich
The fire-bombings of civilian targets were just as pointless and psychopathic as the use of nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone here wrote otherwise. The Allies were the only ones purposefully slaughtering civilians to test their new bombing techniques, how quickly they could burn down a city, etc., (remember, this was the first time in history that bombs were much used). They ordered pilots to gun down fleeing columns of civilians so that there would be no witnesses left. For decades afterwards, even historians in Britain hadn't heard of the Dresden atrocities. David Irving was the first person to bring it to public attention in 1963.

I guess your brilliant "gotcha!" argument wasn't so brilliant after all.

Wait...David IRVING is your source? You know, I'm going to just go out on a limb and suggest that you and I probably aren't likely to agree on this (or any) topic.

But my point wasn't to convince you that the nuclear bombings were morally correct. In fact, doing so would have undermined my main point. Which was to show that people can hold views that others (including you and/or VD) find murderous and immoral, without being 'lol evil' villains who don't care about morality.

Oh, and PT - given that your own ideology is one that most people consider the ultimate in murderous 'lol evil', to the point where Nazis are pretty much interchangeable with zombies as 'obviously evil villains who the hero can kill in swathes without losing audience sympathy' - I'd think that last point is one you might want to consider supporting.
 
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Azrael the cat said:
Wait...David IRVING is your source?
As Sir Arthur Harris said, after reading Irving's expose, Irving is the only historian worth trusting.

Sometimes you have to read beyond your comfort zone and above the court historians' flattering lies, which look like a consensus but are fleeting, to find uncomfortable, unpopular facts. Or to find facts to begin with.
 

random_encounter

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Vault Dweller said:
The nukes were dropped for one reason: the military wanted to test them on live targets. Nuking one city would have been enough, btw, but two is obviously better than one, so...
Are you being serious? I hope not.

This has been debated to death elsewhere, but suffice it to say that the reason for using the nukes is a lot more complicated than simply "two is better than one!".

Plans were drawn up for an invasion of Japan, but the human cost, as demonstrated repeatedly throughout the Pacific campaign whenever land forces would confront the Japanese, would have been consistently high. Ultimately (as a gross generalization here), it came down to: why waste conventional forces when you can remotely annihilate the enemy with something else?

Vault Dweller said:
1. The Soviets were already working on the bomb. Truman told Stalin that they have "a new weapon of unusual destructive force". Stalin definitely got the message as he immediately contacted his people telling them to hurry the fuck up. A bomb wouldn't have stopped Stalin if he wanted to continue expanding, as he was more than willing to sacrifice his soldiers to achieve his goals and nuking Russian forces in Europe would have caused a lot more damage to European cities and civilians than to Russians. Nuking a couple of Russian cities would have started a new world war.
No. Stalin already knew about the bomb thanks to inside leads within the Manhattan Project. The Soviets knew where the US stood in terms of nukes, but they certainly weren't being lazy about their own weapons program, either. That's what many believe is the reason for being so nonplussed at Truman's statement: he already knew what Truman's surprise was. He was probably chuckling to himself inside his head. It coudl be argued that was one reason he could play hardball with East Germany later on.

Vault Dweller said:
2. "The nuclear attacks forced Japan to surrender and thus saved many lives of innocent invading US soldiers." It's a popular but deeply flawed theory. First, mass murdering civilians to save soldiers' lives was always frowned upon.
Yes, it is, and has formed the core of the debate for many such decisions made.

But as I had noted already, playing Devil's Advocate here, the Japanese soldier had consistently demonstrated his ability to fight on in order to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers. That was a significant factor in their question in asking who do you want dying more: us or them?

And this isn't the first time that the Allies had terrorized "the enemy" in such a way, especially when the war had begun to drag on in later years.

See: February 13th, 1945 - Dresden.

Vault Dweller said:
Second, one bomb would have been enough.
To a degree, but you left out that the United States had hoped that the one bomb would have been enough to force the Japanese to the negotiating table following their silence on the Potsdam Declaration. It didn't thanks to hardline elements within the Japanese government. Even after the second bomb, there were still those that wanted to continue the war regardless.

But there were other factors for the United States wishing to hurry things along. One big reason was the Soviet Union which had also declared war on Japan and was prepared to stage its own invasion of the home islands. After seeing Stalin gobble up Eastern Europe with his armies hanging around like house guests that will never leave, there was reason to believe that the US didn't want to see the same thing in Japan.

Vault Dweller said:
Third, a lesser target could have been produced the same result.
It could have, but according to their criteria for targets, they wanted something both military and urban so as to cause the psychological impact they needed.

You've already quoted Kyoto below. Tokyo was considered, but ultimately left out for the simple fact that the US needed someone on the other side of the negotiating table. That, and Tokyo wasn't a strategically important target.

Dropping a nuke on a tent is not quite as terrifying as a city with a military base. As cold as that might sound, that's basically the gist.

Vault Dweller said:
Fourth, Japan could have been warned that it's coming.
The same could have been said for Pearl Harbor, even without the delays experienced by its diplomatic corps in delivering the ultimatum.

The Potsdam Declaration had drawn the line on what the Allies expected from Japan. When Japan met it with silence, that's when they had to decide what to do to force their surrender. Either with an invasion, or with the bomb.

Yet many people would say that these bombings were legitimate.
Vault Dweller said:
Who? The military? The Japanese attacked the military targets in PH, which was a brilliant operation. The US got butthurt and started hitting civilian centers with incendiary bombs. Nice.
I doubt that the survivors of the Rape of Nanjing would shed as many tears over the incendiary attacks made on Tokyo.

Again, playing Devil's Advocate, the number of factors considered by the military and their civilian authority gravitated towards one conclusion that they thought was best at the time: expediency.

Was it the right call? Is it ethical? Is it as "legitimate" as those that support it say it is? That's going to be debated forever by people better versed in it than I. But you could have at least presented significantly stronger reasons than "butthurt US uzed noob nukes!!! FFS!".

The fuck...debating history over Irenicus. Who knew?

You might disagree with all of the above positions, but my point here is that what some people might call evil can be morally defensible from other points of view, and that these points of view might very well be held by sane people wanting the best.
Vault Dweller said:
Sometimes. Sometimes not. Like I said, Lucas at least provided some reason, some justification for Anakin's fall. Bioware created a cardboard cutout villain. All we know is that Irenicus was willing to let everyone die for his chance to become a god. That's not a lot to work with.
Often insanity doesn't need a reason to do what it damn well pleases. The person sitting next to you could be someone that goes out at night and kills whoever he's hired to, coming home before the kids wake up to cook them pancakes and squeeze fresh OJ from oranges bought on the way home before having sex with his wife.
 

Hamster

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Wow, i always liked Irenicus, but had no idea he is such a great character before this thread :wink:
 

Vault Dweller

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denizsi said:
Vault Dweller said:
denizsi said:
Trying to tell VD that people in absolute power can be more complex than MuhahahaEVIL...
Cute. My point is that Irenicus is the stereotypical MwahahaEVIL guy who was willing to doom his people for his personal gain and that the half-assed attempt to make him human by telling us about his "tragic love" doesn't really work.

You are the one seeing "tragic love" association.
That was Darth's association:

Darth Roxor said:
You haven't read a lot of tragedies or Romantic (as in, from the era of Romanticism, not Twilight) novels/poems, haven't you? The idea of exaggerated, 'torturing' love is found all over them. Now, I'm not saying BG2 is on the level of Byron, but it's basically the same idea.

Anyway, I'm glad your world exists in moral extremes.
It doesn't, but I doubt that I would be able to convince you otherwise, so why bother?
 

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Have any of you lot actually tried to read the books? Please do so before attaching all sorts of rationales to the story, the characters and their actions.

Let me give you a little hint. The books are shitty adolescent wankery, so what does that mean about the whole story in the game? Indeed.
 

Hamster

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random_encounter said:
One big reason was the Soviet Union which had also declared war on Japan and was prepared to stage its own invasion of the home islands. After seeing Stalin gobble up Eastern Europe with his armies hanging around like house guests that will never leave, there was reason to believe that the US didn't want to see the same thing in Japan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_inv ... uria_(1945)

USSR had 1,577,225 men, 26,137 artillery, 1,852 sup. artillery, 5,556 tanks and self-propelled artillery and 5,368 aircraft in the area and orders were already given to invade Hokkaido, but Japan surrendered before that can happen.
 

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@ VentilatorOfDoom

Giovanni is kind of wimpy because the Diablerie does not involve only draining the vampire of blood but, once you drank all the blood there was to drink, to drink also the victim's soul. Don't ask me how it works but that's why a very powerful and old vampire being drank to death by a weak noob will just take control of the noob and be done with it, and a strong vampire drinking to death another strong vampire can suffer a personality shift or gain personality disorders that would make a Malkavian jealous but can also gain inherent power and learned knowledge from the vampire going down the drain. Like, just take a long look at Tremere being Saulot's meat puppet for not a small stretch of his career if you need an example of how it works and what can go wrong with it.

Cappadocious' soul escaped from Giovanni's Om Nom Nom, so while Giovanni certainly isn't a weakling when compared to most present day Vampires he is kind of in a disadvantage when compared to the really big and evil things with tentacles. But being a weakling and having to thread carefully also worked kind of to an advantage for his clan since other kind of supernatural powers do not take kindly to vampire gods awakening to ruin the party before time. Like Ravnos, who got a soul ravaging spirit nuke that as a side effect left half of india and most of the world of the dead as a smoking ruin and breached the walls of hell freeing the fallen to come visit, among other things, droped on him upon waking too early, poor thing.

It's important to note, though, that while being kind of wimpy Giovanni was far more succesful than, say, Tremere, who got played so bad it wasn't even funny. So what he lacked in raw power he somehow made up with guile and cool villain points.

On the topic of the Tremere i have to check my Dark Ages Tremere books so i will have to come back to this after i do so. Originally i thought it was because of Goratrix's potion, but i had kind of forgot Saulot got eaten after the Tremere became vampires (duh!) so i don't really remember. Given all the weird stuff the Tremere where involved in during the middle ages, though, a wizard did it seems like a good place to start. And that's a really bad joke, i know. T_T
 

denizsi

Arcane
Joined
Nov 24, 2005
Messages
9,927
Location
bosphorus
Wyrmlord Black Cat, why did you come back? And more importantly, why did you pretend to have left in the first place?

And just whose alt are you?

Vault Dweller said:
Anyway, I'm glad your world exists in moral extremes.
It doesn't, but I doubt that I would be able to convince you otherwise, so why bother?

As long as you'd be consistent, I wouldn't have any reason to second-guess what you're saying (unlike you second-guessing others I guess).

edit: I mean, Black Cat, not Wyrmlord.
 

Black Cat

Magister
Joined
Jun 1, 2009
Messages
1,997
Location
Skyrim .///.
@ Denizsi

Did i came back or was i just pretending i left? Make up your mind, i don't like paradoxes in my logic. And, naturally, I came back to agravate you. Because, you see, i'm Chefe's alt. No, wait, I'm Drog's alt. Or was i Annie's alt? Geez, sorry. I kind of forgot.
 

The Feral Kid

Prophet
Joined
May 30, 2007
Messages
1,189
Vault Dweller said:
So, when someone invites me to believe that one of the most powerful wizards in the world just wanted to be happy again and feel the joy he once felt, it's very fucking hard for me to accept it, because this is some seriously gay shit and because I'm no longer 14 and everything I've seen since then suggests that there is no fucking way this scenario is realistic.

If your experience is different, then I envy you.

Apparently, VD has never watched the "unrealistic" Citizen Kane, and is unfamiliar with the word "Rosebud".
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
You like movies? I like movies too! Wanna know what my favourite movies are? Scrooged - it's awesome because it has a really mean guy but then he is visited by 3 ghosts and he becomes really nice. The Family Man, because it has this super powerful executive who has lost his ability to feel but then a magical negro casts a spell - don't laugh, it can happen - and the guy is transported into an alternative dimension where he discovers that living in a shithole and having debts is way better than being a really powerful executive. I also like Commando, because it's really cool and there is that guy, who's, like, a super special forces guy and he kills an entire fucking army. I like this movie the most because sometimes I can close my eyes and imagine that the super commando guy is me and the island is the Codex and I go around and kill all of you motherfuckers. :oops:
 

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