Quote Originally Posted by Emanick View Post
I think the argument is that there are few things more evil than killing innocent people. In general, unless there are significant extenuating circumstances (and I can't think of any), if you're killing innocent people willfully, without being coerced to do so, on a regular basis, and are somehow not Evil under an alignment system, then that alignment system is broken. If that's not Evil, what is?
True enough, although from a storyteller's point of view, the caveats "innocent" and "coerced" in your statement leave a lot of room to play around. If Therkla was non-evil throughout her seven years of working under Kubota, then it was doubtless because of the interpretation of one of these two words.

(To explain the "coerced" one more carefully: this could apply if she was brainwashed into being obedient to Kubota, or if she was brainwashed into believing in an honor system that made her uphold an oath of loyalty to Kubota. These are hypothetical examples -- I don't think either of them was actually the case. But it explains why I think, for example, that Szeth in The Way of Kings should be considered Neutral.)

Mind you, I'm perfectly willing to believe that Therkla was Evil throughout most of the seven years -- although not a particularly malevolent Evil -- and that she only shifted to Neutral near the end, once she started letting Elan's example influence her behavior. In fact, I think this is quite likely -- but her being Neutral all along isn't impossible. And the reason why is based on the other caveat word, "innocent":

Quote Originally Posted by bguy View Post
(Now maybe Kubota only had her targetting rival evil aristocrats and crime bosses and the like and never had her target any innocent people, though given what we know of the man that seems unlikely.)
... I don't have a hard time believing that at all. Shojo paints the Azure nobility as a hive of reprehensible, slimy, backstabbing (literally) politicians. And the people in that community that Kubota was most likely to want killed off are the ones who were at the top of the power structure, or those who were most ruthless (and therefore likely to get him killed off). And Shojo's senility act shut down the first category. So I imagine most of the targets Therkla killed over the years weren't "innocent" by any stretch of the imagination.