How do we feel about Therkla?

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Originally Posted by Fyraltari

As for the ninja graduate she killed I think I remember the Giant stating that that’s just how ninja school rolls and both of them knew that when they enrolled.

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You remember correctly:

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Originally Posted by The Giant

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Originally Posted by Mike Havran

Thanks a lot for this. But one character I don't understand is Therkla. How could she be a right hand to a guy like Kubota for all those years, kill a colleague on ninja university just to get ahead, plan an assasination of a paladin and a legitimate leader and genuinely liking it, and yet keep a True Neutral alignment? Or did she become TN during her last evening?

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First, Ninja School is kill-or-be-killed. That guy knew the score when he enrolled and probably did it to the guy ahead of him.

Second, I'm more concerned with her activity in the comic than an implied history that I haven't bothered to work out. Kubota was teaching her to be a villain, implying that it didn't come naturally to her.

And third, being a paid ninja for hire is not as Evil as killing for the joy of killing (i.e. Crystal again). Therkla had a job, she did it. She didn't ask questions about who Kubota marked.

Maybe it's a borderline case, but it's how I wrote her reactions.

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To clarify what I said earlier about Rigoletto:

I don’t think Therkla’s arc is badly written, inasmuch as the dialogue or the plotting or the characterization goes. I just don’t think the character conveys a good message for the comic overall, or says much of value about female characters (of which, at the time, there were precious few good ones).

Think of the known-to-be female characters at the time:
Haley (Elan’s girlfriend and main character)
Sabine (Nale’s evil girlfriend)
Hilgya (Durkon’s evil kind-of girlfriend)
Samantha (Elan’s evil kind-of-ex-girlfriend)
Miko (Roy’s kind-of-evil sorta-ex would-be girlfriend)
Celia (Roy’s girlfriend)
Julia (Roy’s sister)
Tsukiko (Xykon’s wanna-be evil girlfriend)
Lien
The pregnant Azure Guard woman I can’t remember the name of
A witch that hexes Vaarsuvius
Assorted shopkeepers, victims, and bystanders
Mentioned and barely seen: Lirian, Roy’s mom, Serini

...and Therkla. Another female character whose arc revolves around her attraction to and/or relationship with one of the main male characters.

Had Therkla been an evil ninja assassin, and the group had killed her, it would have allowed her more independent agency and depth. Instead, she was an appendix to Elan’s tale.

Back to Rigoletto:

Gilda is the daughter of the court jester, Rigoletto. He forbids her to leave the house, in an attempt to protect her from the prying eyes of the Duke (a notorious womanizer) and his equally unruly courtiers. But the Duke has been secretly posing as a poor student so he can woo her, not knowing her identity. The courtiers abduct Gilda (and presumably assault her), delivering her to the Duke as a prize. Rigoletto is heartbroken and humiliated and vows revenge, hiring an assassin to kill the Duke. Gilda is still somehow in love with the Duke and sacrifices herself so the Duke can live.

That’s messed up. Tragic a little, sure, but more than a little messed up.

What’s worse: the Duke gets a famously catchy song (seriously, you’ll know it and hum it: La donna è mobile) about how much he loves women. Rigoletto gets a song about how depressed he is than an old man cursed him. And he gets a song about how he can’t find his daughter. And a song about how terrible it is for him that his daughter was abducted. And a song about how sad it is that she’s dead. Gilda gets one good aria about how she’s in love with the man who’s lying to her, and another about how she still loves him so much that she’ll die for him.

Don’t get me wrong. Rigoletto is well-written and has beautiful tunes. It’s just got a very antiquated look at female agency. Therkla is cut from a similar cloth; a little more modern, but not much.

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Originally Posted by Doug Lampert

And note that Hamlet is CORRECT to waffle. His only initial evidence is what he's been told by something that admits to being a phantom sent up from Hell. That the phantom claims to be the ghost of his father out for revenge for a murder is something. But as far as Hamlet knows up to that moment, his father died of natural causes. Then the first really good chance he has to kill Claudius is while Claudius (his uncle, king, and foster-father) is praying, in a church, by stabbing him in the back, in front of witnesses.

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Well, I'd say Hamlet is reasonable to waffle, not correct. In the same sense that Walter White was reasonable (at first) to cook meth to pay for his cancer treatment, if not exactly right.
Hamlet isn't Kill Bill where the correct answer is just to kill them; and it isn't Law and Order where the answer is just to find (and prove) who dunnit. Hamlet doesn't know what genre he's in; he's in a legitimately complicated situation where a normal person would struggle deciding how to act.

Also, there are no witnesses. Shakespeare's plays were explicit about minor characters/extras and there were only two people in the Church at that time.

Also, you've left out an important piece of the story. Hamlet enlisted the Players to act out a murder similar to his father's, and Claudius ran away in fright, confirming his guilt. The scene in the church is immediately after this.

Loved her as a character. Wouldn't want to know her in real life.

One of my favorite supporting characters.

As for Elan's thoughts on her - she would have made a pretty cool girlfriend, too.

Maybe some of that is guilt - but it does appear that if Haley wasn't in the picture, Elan would have been open to it.

I liked her in DSTP and I like her better after the short story “Spoiler Alert” (which shows her being a decent person, and also shows the romanticism that made her fall for Elan and the social isolation that drover her attachment to both Kubota and Elan). It retroactively improves her DSTP characterization.

However, I do disagree with Rich’s view that Evil done “as a day job” is fundamentally less bad (or less Evil) than Evil done for other motivations.

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Originally Posted by LadyEowyn

However, I do disagree with Rich’s view that Evil done “as a day job” is fundamentally less bad (or less Evil) than Evil done for other motivations.

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Mr. speaker, I would like to second that motion on the strongest possible terms.

To be fair, at least when it comes to Tarquin, "doing evil at work" is stated to spread into the rest of his life:

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Originally Posted by The Giant

You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence. It's who you are. This idea that Tarquin was this perfectly rational actor despite being a complete monster at his Day Job is a pipe dream. Tarquin wants you (and Elan) to think that what he does is separate from who he is—that he's a fundamentally decent man who just so happens to murder a bunch of people here and there—because that's how he tricks you into slowly accepting his blatant Evil as a valid life choice that needs to be respected. Which it is not.

Some people want to love the villain without having to face the fact that villains are largely terrible people who do horrific things with deficient reasoning. Not on my watch.

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Originally Posted by LadyEowyn

I liked her in DSTP and I like her better after the short story “Spoiler Alert” (which shows her being a decent person, and also shows the romanticism that made her fall for Elan and the social isolation that drover her attachment to both Kubota and Elan). It retroactively improves her DSTP characterization.

However, I do disagree with Rich’s view that Evil done “as a day job” is fundamentally less bad (or less Evil) than Evil done for other motivations.

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The way I've sort of seen it is, I don't think the Evil done is less Evil, but Neutral characters tend to be more molded by their circumstances than the other way around. (Given that Rich has said, when he describes a character's alignment, he describes the perspective he wrote them from, not the evaluation of the actions they took during life.) If Therkla had found a Good mentor, she probably would have been acting on the side of Good.

It's worth noting that Therkla presumably saw herself as Evil. We know self-evaluation can be wrong and in this case it was, but it says something about her moral compass, I think. It's consistent with alignment being used by the Giant more as a descriptor of a synchronic moral outlook and a predictor of future actions and attitudes, rather than as judgment for past actions, just like in the case of V.

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Originally Posted by Fyraltari

As for the ninja graduate she killed I think I remember the Giant stating that that’s just how ninja school rolls and both of them knew that when they enrolled.

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The interesting question would be:
Do *You* agree that this makes both of them non-evil?

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

The interesting question would be:
Do *You* agree that this makes both of them non-evil?

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That’s literally one singular thing of both of their lives, how would that be enough to make them evil or not? I think it’s been well established that evil characters are entirely capable of doing some good and vice-versa.
We also don’t know what their relationship was like. Did he try to kill her before or did she spent the entire curriculum faking friendship so that she could kill him at the last second?

In any case I don’t consider fighting to the death within a school for professional killers any more evil than joining one in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Fyraltari

That’s literally one singular thing of both of their lives, how would that be enough to make them evil or not? I think it’s been well established that evil characters are entirely capable of doing some good and vice-versa.
We also don’t know what their relationship was like. Did he try to kill her before or did she spent the entire curriculum faking friendship so that she could kill him at the last second?

In any case I don’t consider fighting to the death within a school for professional killers any more evil than joining one in the first place.

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Sorta dodging what I intend to know here....

So, regardless whether one act condemns the whole character or not, is joining the school (with full knowledge what the training, and more importantly, the Profession means) evil in your book or not?

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

Sorta dodging what I intend to know here....

So, regardless whether one act condemns the whole character or not, is joining the school (with full knowledge what the training, and more importantly, the Profession means) evil in your book or not?

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More likely than not. Professional killers are generally not a good thing.

Edit: there are a lot of things we don't know about them, why did they join? How much of choice did they have? How old were they? How many options did they have?

Bon


(filler for message length filler for message length filler for message length)

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Originally Posted by HorizonWalker

Honestly, I don't have much to say. I'm just impressed. That's beautifully, creatively, utterly batspit. I love it.

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May I sig this quote?

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Originally Posted by 137ben

May I sig this quote?

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Sure, go ahead.

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

Sorta dodging what I intend to know here....

So, regardless whether one act condemns the whole character or not, is joining the school (with full knowledge what the training, and more importantly, the Profession means) evil in your book or not?

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There's still a lot of context that your question assumes. "Ninja school is kill-or-be-killed, so you may have to kill other students (who also signed up for this)" is very different from having full, complete knowledge of what the profession means.

Like, hypothetically, if she thinks that that's just the way the world works and that she'll be working with someone who, if not good, is at least reasonable and won't be killing people indiscriminately, I could see it as neutral. There's a huge difference between signing up for kill-or-be-killed training-from-hell in order to eventually serve as a soldier or enforcer for someone you respect (which can, in some situations, be neutral) and signing up to be a blank-check murderer-for-hire (which we can gather in retrospect was what actually happened, but which may not be how she saw it at the time.)

Remember that D&D morality is intentionally designed to make killing somewhat more acceptable than in real life (because it's a game with a lot of killing and you're not supposed to have to enter a full moral decision point for every enemy you fight just to avoid being Evil.) Killing people who are clearly willing combatants - and even intentionally entering a situation with a bunch of willing combatants and then killing them - isn't evil. Murdering noncombatants for Kubota is more evil, but, again, she could reasonably have been under the impression that this was part of a larger game where everyone she went after was trying to murder her and Kubota, too.

(And given the Deadly Decadent Court nature of Azure City society, this was probably not always wrong.)

I mean, remember, Enor and Gannji are neutral, too, and they're basically killers-for-hire (well, kidnappers for hire, but they seem willing to kill) along the same lines. And I'd read their outlook the same way - eg. as far as they know, the OOTS are just another group of criminals and killers. The game is designed to let you play Boba Fett without having him be evil.

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Originally Posted by Aquillion

There's still a lot of context that your question assumes. "Ninja school is kill-or-be-killed, so you may have to kill other students (who also signed up for this)" is very different from having full, complete knowledge of what the profession means.

Like, hypothetically, if she thinks that that's just the way the world works and that she'll be working with someone who, if not good, is at least reasonable and won't be killing people indiscriminately, I could see it as neutral. There's a huge difference between signing up for kill-or-be-killed training-from-hell in order to eventually serve as a soldier or enforcer for someone you respect (which can, in some situations, be neutral) and signing up to be a blank-check murderer-for-hire (which we can gather in retrospect was what actually happened, but which may not be how she saw it at the time.)

Remember that D&D morality is intentionally designed to make killing somewhat more acceptable than in real life (because it's a game with a lot of killing and you're not supposed to have to enter a full moral decision point for every enemy you fight just to avoid being Evil.) Killing people who are clearly willing combatants - and even intentionally entering a situation with a bunch of willing combatants and then killing them - isn't evil. Murdering noncombatants for Kubota is more evil, but, again, she could reasonably have been under the impression that this was part of a larger game where everyone she went after was trying to murder her and Kubota, too.

(And given the Deadly Decadent Court nature of Azure City society, this was probably not always wrong.)

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Spoiler

Show

Didn't she try to not kill people who she was sent after in Spoiler Alert? Showing that generally she tries to avoid murdering her targets if she can, which strikes me as a Neutral attitude, I'll kill people I'm sent after if I have to, but I'll try to avoid doing it.

That, too. Generally speaking "I work for the highest bidder" or "my master, right or wrong" characters with occasional hints of conscience and some sort of implicit code that places limits on what they'll do (even if it doesn't often come up) are characterized as True Neutral (or Lawful Neutral, sometimes, for the ones heavily devoted to serving someone.) I'd put Thurka, Enor and Gannji into that category.

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Originally Posted by Aquillion

There's still a lot of context that your question assumes. "Ninja school is kill-or-be-killed, so you may have to kill other students (who also signed up for this)" is very different from having full, complete knowledge of what the profession means.

Like, hypothetically, if she thinks that that's just the way the world works and that she'll be working with someone who, if not good, is at least reasonable and won't be killing people indiscriminately, I could see it as neutral. There's a huge difference between signing up for kill-or-be-killed training-from-hell in order to eventually serve as a soldier or enforcer for someone you respect (which can, in some situations, be neutral) and signing up to be a blank-check murderer-for-hire (which we can gather in retrospect was what actually happened, but which may not be how she saw it at the time.)

Remember that D&D morality is intentionally designed to make killing somewhat more acceptable than in real life (because it's a game with a lot of killing and you're not supposed to have to enter a full moral decision point for every enemy you fight just to avoid being Evil.) Killing people who are clearly willing combatants - and even intentionally entering a situation with a bunch of willing combatants and then killing them - isn't evil. Murdering noncombatants for Kubota is more evil, but, again, she could reasonably have been under the impression that this was part of a larger game where everyone she went after was trying to murder her and Kubota, too.

(And given the Deadly Decadent Court nature of Azure City society, this was probably not always wrong.)

I mean, remember, Enor and Gannji are neutral, too, and they're basically killers-for-hire (well, kidnappers for hire, but they seem willing to kill) along the same lines. And I'd read their outlook the same way - eg. as far as they know, the OOTS are just another group of criminals and killers. The game is designed to let you play Boba Fett without having him be evil.

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1. Note I was asking whether Fyra agreed, specifically.
I don't care whether the game thinks therkla, enor and ganji are evil or neutral.

2. But I can tell you that: if the game says Boba Fett is neutral, the game is wrong.

3. Likewise, if The Giant says Enor and Ganji are neutral, he is wrong as well.
Wrong in the sense of real world definitions, I mean. Maybe he is right in D&D terms, but then I would hope he is aware of the discrepancy and is trying to make a point with his comic how much the alignment system sucks.

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Originally Posted by Aquillion

Murdering noncombatants for Kubota is more evil, but, again, she could reasonably have been under the impression that this was part of a larger game where everyone she went after was trying to murder her and Kubota, too.

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She helped orchestrate monster attacks on the fleet that wiped out entire civilian ships. Rationalize that.
Oh and she was willing to let Shaman Vrukle sacrifice her love interest’s friends too.

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And given the Deadly Decadent Court nature of Azure City society, this was probably not always wrong.

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Azure city nobility. The commoners (and even the paladins (with one notable exception) after a while) are decent.

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

1. Note I was asking whether Fyra agreed, specifically.
I don't care whether the game thinks therkla, enor and ganji are evil or neutral.

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Still unsure why my opinion matters, frankly.

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2. But I can tell you that: if the game says Boba Fett is neutral, the game is wrong.

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Which Boba Fett? I think his characterization wasn’t very consistent in the old EU (especially once he became ‘the best bounty hunter in the galaxy’) and in ESB and ROTJ it was simply ‘cool-looking mercenary’.

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3. Likewise, if The Giant says Enor and Ganji are neutral, he is wrong as well.
Wrong in the sense of real world definitions, I mean. Maybe he is right in D&D terms, but then I would hope he is aware of the discrepancy and is trying to make a point with his comic how much the alignment system sucks.

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Don’t try to separate real people along such poorly defined and emotionally charged lines as good, evil or neutral (what’s that even supposed to mean). That way lies madness.
Actions are good, evil or without consequences. People are not. How would you even determine that? You cannot know who anybody that isn’t you (and even then...) truly is, you don’t know what they do 99% of the time. I mean you lack any way to measure the evilness or the goodness of an action (is killing two adults worse than killing one child? Is adopting an orphan better than digging wells in water-deprived areas? How do you weight intent against consequences? The **** if I know, and I don’t care) and the necessary threshold below which one counts as evil. Much less ones that would be objectively viable or generally agreed upon.


But more importantly: what does it matter if this person or that person are evil or not? What are you gonna do about it?
In a game like D&D that’s a quick and dirty guide to the actions of a particular character (wether player or not) and in works of fiction where characters’ personalities are simpler and less contradictory than real-life people (not to mention, they only exist when we see them) it can make sense to call them evil or good (and even then there are still disagreements). But don’t talk to me about someone being good or evil ‘by real world definitions’.

Edit: [/rant] :smalltongue:

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

2. But I can tell you that: if the game says Boba Fett is neutral, the game is wrong.

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To be fair, Complete Scoundrel does list Boba as a good example of an LE scoundrel.

If we’re gonna discuss Fett’s alignment, I’ll throw my hat in the ring as “ignore the movies because the man has no character there”, and say based solely on the LotF series I found him to be LN, albeit significantly closer to Evil than Good.

Also I feel like leaving a few of Rich’s thoughts on alignments here, as an explanation for some thought processes:

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Originally Posted by The Giant

I wrote a very long post defending Therkla's Neutrality, but I decided to delete it. It doesn't matter if anyone else agrees, and I doubt anyone will ever be convinced anyway. The characters in the comic are not meant to be examples or guides on what is or is not such-and-such alignment. As I've said before:

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Originally Posted by The Giant

In the end, alignment is a murky cocktail of temperament, goals, actions, and results. There is no clearly defined formula for which of those counts the most. But self-image certainly matters

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So when I say, "This character has this alignment," just read it as, "This character was written with this point of view in mind, and if you could see their entire life rather than this small sliver, that would be more obvious."

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So maybe look at it this way: Throughout their life Therkla, Gannji and Enor have more (or about equal) situations where they convinced their target to flee, or avoided killing them and instead captured them, or even broke a contract every once and awhile, than just came in and killed them to death. Also Gannji and Enor are currently working to overthrow an Evil Empire for free, their reasoning isn’t perfect but it definitely isn’t Evil.

And one final quote from a TN character we haven’t argued about but I think gave a good understanding of how most TN people we’ve seen see killing

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Originally Posted by Hank

I mean, I'd prefer nobody get killed here, but what can you do? The Guild needs to keep its reputation.

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As presented in the comic and without using GDGU, I found her somewhere between a tad meh and okay. I enjoyed her interactions with the Imp the best; the combination of unconvincing lies and even more unconvincing acceptances she had with Elan*/Kubota weren't my cup of tea. I felt sad that she wasn't emotionally healthy enough to make good decisions about her position in life and that the one time she didn't try to compromise was her death, but also exasperated at how long it went on. Also, not that it hugely bothers me, but I think if the Giant was aiming to satirise any elements of the weird romance subplots we see in fiction, he sailed a little too close to being than to satirising.

As a person... I'd feel some sorrow for her, because she went through traumatic experiences with nobody good to help her put herself back together, but its difficult to feel that sorry for someone who's so casual over killing people just to fit in/be popular.

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Originally Posted by Aquillion

I mean, remember, Enor and Gannji are neutral, too, and they're basically killers-for-hire (well, kidnappers for hire, but they seem willing to kill) along the same lines. And I'd read their outlook the same way - eg. as far as they know, the OOTS are just another group of criminals and killers. The game is designed to let you play Boba Fett without having him be evil.

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And unfortunately, I think sometimes the game being a game is overlooked.

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Originally Posted by Mightymosy

Wrong in the sense of real world definitions, I mean. Maybe he is right in D&D terms, but then I would hope he is aware of the discrepancy and is trying to make a point with his comic how much the alignment system sucks.

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Ehhh.

The game, like I said, has to allow you to play sword-swinging adventurer types who often cleave first and ask questions later, without having the typical adventuring party be evil. Some people want deep moral questions to come up constantly in their games! But many people do not; I've totally seen eye-rolling at the table when one player wants to talk to the enemies and find out their motivations, and another just wants a cool fight scene. Tying "wants a cool fight scene" to "whelp, you're evil" is a problem, especially in editions where many classes are locked by alignment. (One of the reasons they eliminated such mechanics in 5e, I think, is because of the dissonance it created when players wanted different things out of the game.)

And OOTS is partially a game with a D&D setting. I think Rich often wants us to view characters through tabletop morality more than real-world morality. (eg. Roy's explanations for keeping Belkar on the team don't hold real-world water; they're handwaves for the fact that everyone knows the party must stick together.)

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Originally Posted by Schroeswald

If we’re gonna discuss Fett’s alignment, I’ll throw my hat in the ring as “ignore the movies because the man has no character there”, and say based solely on the LotF series I found him to be LN, albeit significantly closer to Evil than Good.

Also I feel like leaving a few of Rich’s thoughts on alignments here, as an explanation for some thought processes:

So maybe look at it this way: Throughout their life Therkla, Gannji and Enor have more (or about equal) situations where they convinced their target to flee, or avoided killing them and instead captured them, or even broke a contract every once and awhile, than just came in and killed them to death. Also Gannji and Enor are currently working to overthrow an Evil Empire for free, their reasoning isn’t perfect but it definitely isn’t Evil.

And one final quote from a TN character we haven’t argued about but I think gave a good understanding of how most TN people we’ve seen see killing

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I think Rich's comment is instructive because his concept of alignment when he talks about his characters is prescriptive, not descriptive. That's the perspective they are coming from, not the sum total of the evaluations of their lives. If Therkla had been born into a different society, or taken in by someone Good instead of Evil, the distinction might be clearer. Similarly, if Enor and Gannji found themselves in a Good country and were used to hunt down violent criminals and others who caused genuine harm.

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Originally Posted by Fyraltari

She helped orchestrate monster attacks on the fleet that wiped out entire civilian ships. Rationalize that.
Oh and she was willing to let Shaman Vrukle sacrifice her love interest’s friends too.

Azure city nobility. The commoners (and even the paladins (with one notable exception) after a while) are decent.




Still unsure why my opinion matters, frankly.


Which Boba Fett? I think his characterization wasn’t very consistent in the old EU (especially once he became ‘the best bounty hunter in the galaxy’) and in ESB and ROTJ it was simply ‘cool-looking mercenary’.


Don’t try to separate real people along such poorly defined and emotionally charged lines as good, evil or neutral (what’s that even supposed to mean). That way lies madness.
Actions are good, evil or without consequences. People are not. How would you even determine that? You cannot know who anybody that isn’t you (and even then...) truly is, you don’t know what they do 99% of the time. I mean you lack any way to measure the evilness or the goodness of an action (is killing two adults worse than killing one child? Is adopting an orphan better than digging wells in water-deprived areas? How do you weight intent against consequences? The **** if I know, and I don’t care) and the necessary threshold below which one counts as evil. Much less ones that would be objectively viable or generally agreed upon.


But more importantly: what does it matter if this person or that person are evil or not? What are you gonna do about it?
In a game like D&D that’s a quick and dirty guide to the actions of a particular character (wether player or not) and in works of fiction where characters’ personalities are simpler and less contradictory than real-life people (not to mention, they only exist when we see them) it can make sense to call them evil or good (and even then there are still disagreements). But don’t talk to me about someone being good or evil ‘by real world definitions’.

Edit: [/rant] :smalltongue:

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1. Why you matter
Look around you (or rather above and below, in this case :-))
Sometimes I just need to sooth my sorrow with this world and the crap that is humanity.
Specifically, sometimes I need to assure myself that out there there ARE still people who *get* ethics. In the way you do. Thank you for living.
2. I don't know much Star Wars EU. For me Boba is a guy who willingly delivers people to the evil empire. Like Enor & Ganji. As long as I don't have more information, I judge them (as literary characters) by this information I have. And that's solidly evil in my book.
3. Yes actions are evil. But thoughts can be as well (although not quite as harmful in a direct way).