DC

Kindness Kills and Cruelty Saves
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Hate festers. It twists people into mockeries of themselves, it tears them apart, remakes them for its own purpose. But sometimes, other emotions can be far more insidious than hate.

DC wasn't that hateful, really. He put on a show of it, but it was only a mask of hate. An image hiding the true nature of his personal demons.

No, the real monster was guilt.

Lapsed out of common memory is the fact that DC of Watchtower and Evolution Industries, considered trigger-happy by many, was once the Vice President of the Good League of Good, and was as merciful as any from that organization. Indeed, he seemed like a poster boy for the League's mission of redemption, but that redemption ultimately proved the undoing of his stability.

Because once, when an enemy of reality was dead, contained, DC freed him. That enemy went on to commit yet more atrocities, attempting to destroy the universe again. But the League tried again. This time, he shifted his goals, instead becoming corrupted by another and committing a far more personally horrific act by stripping many of his prior victims of their sapience and reducing them to base, feral animals.

And that was the day the Vice President of the League began to die, because you see, it was his fault.

Kindness kills

Because he was wrong.

Because of him, unknowable numbers of people died and suffered horribly.

It didn't hit immediately, oh no. Because at least the monster was dead, and it couldn't go on anymore. But then he returned, and the League made the same choice, and it kept on and on no matter what DC or anyone else said.

They were making the same mistake he did again, and for all the need to keep everything stable, no one could do a thing about it. And so nothing was done.

But guilt festers as much as hate. Normally, this is not necessarily bad: It is a motivator to better oneself, to do good rather than evil. Yet, when the guilt is over mercy, it can be just as terrible a thing as hatred. Worse, even, because the 'right' path actively looks to be morally wrong.

Mercy slipped from his mind.

and cruelty saves

Whenever he saw an enemy, he did not see the life that could be spared, the person that could be changed, rehabilitated. He saw only the death that enemy could bring. Only the suffering that life would cause. Only the lives that could be snuffed out if this one was spared. He never liked it, of course, despite all one might accuse him of. But one life, one that has already crossed lines, to him, is a small price to pay for the lives of gods know how many others.

He has been a roiling cauldron of guilt and hate built from that guilt for years, the blood of untold numbers of people on his hands.

And then, in the course of a battle over AMEN, someone made what may very well have been a terrible mistake. The curse inflicted on him in the battle over the mountain included a portion that causes emotional amplification. This would not be that bad in and of itself, considering it had to be specifically triggered, but then, in an attempt at removing the curse, DC instead scrambled and destabilized it.

The mask over the built-up guilt and fury shattered in that instant, for good or ill. The only certainty is that one should probably not be comfortable with a questionably-stable super-scientist whose veneer of sanity has had a gigantic hole punched in it...


Written primarily as an explanation, as the motivations behind some recent developments go back years and memories can be pretty short, so I decided to preempt being questioned/accused of anything about it. [/paranoia]