MS Paint Adventures 7: At the Price of Oblivion

[Fan]

"Smart" does not always mean "Not Evil", it just means that you achieved your goal in the best way.

If her Goal was to create a race of killers to serve as an army of galactic conquest, then yes, it was very smart.

Okay, I'm going to step in and just stop this here.

As a medical student, who has studied genetics, and examples of eugenics in history.

It does not work, it does not help anyone, it does not help those who passed the standards, it does not create or direct society in anyway aside from towards killing itself, you do not gain anything aside from a sense of self superiority from doing as such, and you gain no superior populace from it because IT DOES NOT WORK. By killing the psychic power houses, and removing at least 20% of the populace, at a bare minimal number, she has cut down her man power, removed entire fleets of ships that could've been manufactured, crippled technological development, and in effect made them worse at killing in every way.

If she had not done this, and directed them towards violence in ANY OTHER WAY she would've done a better job.


It is not smart, it's stupid, it's been stupid since it was brought up and it was stupid then, and everyone hated it then aside from racists who believe in some sort of genetic purity that exists in themselves. No, it does not work with trolls because each blood color has different advantages, and even small shades can create entirely new lines of behavior, and power. There is no obvious singular superior blood color, and thus Eugenics involving trolls are as stupid as they are with people.

Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, sir your opinion is bad, and you should feel bad. I am in fact saying this as a fact, I do not care about what you have to say on this matter because your opinions are that bad. That is how much I disagree with everything you are, I am not here to argue with you, I am here to tell you that you are bad. There is no debate on this point, you have advocated Eugenics, and everyone in here who has is a BAD PERSON, and I do not care what they have to say in their defense.

If Vriska gets to be unredeemable to a large chunk of the fandom, and to you, because of her actions, you do not get to play the hypocrite card here and hope for redemption of the Empress and play off her actions when she is in excess of billions of times worse than her in every way.

[AgentPaper]

Fan, I think you're getting confused with the difference between a Devil's Advocate and a Devil. Nobody here is advocating eugenics.

[Fan]

Fan, I think you're getting confused with the difference between a Devil's Advocate and a Devil. Nobody here is advocating eugenics.

You are advocating a character that actively practices Eugenics.

By extension, you are advocating Eugenics by arguing it's effectiveness.

[Jayngfet]

Fan, I think you're getting confused with the difference between a Devil's Advocate and a Devil. Nobody here is advocating eugenics.

You're playing devils advocate with eugenics. There is no reason to play devils advocate for or do anything approaching defend this subject. It's something that's wrong. If someone even remotely suggests otherwise then their opinion is wrong. This isn't just me talking, this is papers, books, articles, and a wealth of scientific evidence saying it's wrong. Every conceivable thing about Eugenics is wrong. Anyone saying that genocide is and torture are ok because eugenics and dictatorship is involved is double wrong and should seek some form of help for reasons I shouldn't even need to explain.

[PhantomFox]

Seriousness aside, we may want to tone this down a bit before we get in trouble over this.

[Fan]

Seriousness aside, we may want to tone this down a bit before we get in trouble over this.

I have to agree with Jayng here, if we get censored for this then the rules have clearly defeated their own purpose.

[Scowling Dragon]

Hey but its ALIEN eugenics, so it doesn't have to make sense to us.

It makes sense in alieneese.

[Androgeus]

Hey but its ALIEN eugenics, so it doesn't have to make sense to us.

It makes sense in alieneese.

Alien eugenics makes complete sense when the mating process involves a guy coming round to your house to take a bucket of fluid from your soul mate and another from the person you hate the most yet don't want to kill.

[Draconi Redfir]

Not to mention these aliens and alien eugenics we are being devils advocate's to are

A. Fictional

and B. Not the same kind of Eugenics as here on earth.

Grubs who posses harmful mutations or do not pass a test are culled.

Young trolls who do not survive X amount of sweeps on Alternia are dead.

This leaves only the strongest and smartest trolls alive, and when your entire species revolved around waging war on OTHER species, that's a pretty good thing from your point of view.


Friggin e'll people i never said it was OKAY! Nor was i actually referring to real-life human eugenics, just the fake-fake nonexistent Troll version which focuses only on enhancing the phrase "reproduction of the fittest". That's it!


Now if everyone could please calm down, maybe we ought to change the topic or something as evidently telling fiction apart from reality is difficult for some, and as such discussing the fictional alien overlord which takes place in said nonexistant universe is a bad idea.

[Friv]

Not going to discuss the applicability of trollgenics to Earth, because that is a hornets' nest, but...

Grubs who posses harmful mutations or do not pass a test are culled.

Not just harmful mutations. Karkat would have been culled for possessing an uncommon blood type, and he's totes fine. Tavros would have been culled "on account of his physical deformity, or for any reason at all really".

All of the limebloods were culled because they were too powerful.

Young trolls who do not survive X amount of sweeps on Alternia are dead.

This leaves only the strongest and smartest trolls alive, and when your entire species revolved around waging war on OTHER species, that's a pretty good thing from your point of view.

The only purpose of the Empress's mad culling program is to create a balance between a troll population strong enough to conquer the galaxy, and weak enough to not overthrow the Empress and the Subjuggalators. There is nothing about her system that is meant to be beneficial to trolls as a whole. Heck, the only reason that trolls revolve entirely around waging war on other species is that the Empress sent them off to do that to prevent revolts.

[BRC]

Okay, I'm going to step in and just stop this here.

As a medical student, who has studied genetics, and examples of eugenics in history.

It does not work, it does not help anyone, it does not help those who passed the standards, it does not create or direct society in anyway aside from towards killing itself, you do not gain anything aside from a sense of self superiority from doing as such, and you gain no superior populace from it because IT DOES NOT WORK. By killing the psychic power houses, and removing at least 20% of the populace, at a bare minimal number, she has cut down her man power, removed entire fleets of ships that could've been manufactured, crippled technological development, and in effect made them worse at killing in every way.

If she had not done this, and directed them towards violence in ANY OTHER WAY she would've done a better job.


It is not smart, it's stupid, it's been stupid since it was brought up and it was stupid then, and everyone hated it then aside from racists who believe in some sort of genetic purity that exists in themselves. No, it does not work with trolls because each blood color has different advantages, and even small shades can create entirely new lines of behavior, and power. There is no obvious singular superior blood color, and thus Eugenics involving trolls are as stupid as they are with people.

Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, sir your opinion is bad, and you should feel bad. I am in fact saying this as a fact, I do not care about what you have to say on this matter because your opinions are that bad. That is how much I disagree with everything you are, I am not here to argue with you, I am here to tell you that you are bad. There is no debate on this point, you have advocated Eugenics, and everyone in here who has is a BAD PERSON, and I do not care what they have to say in their defense.

If Vriska gets to be unredeemable to a large chunk of the fandom, and to you, because of her actions, you do not get to play the hypocrite card here and hope for redemption of the Empress and play off her actions when she is in excess of billions of times worse than her in every way.

The Eugenics is stupid. Never intended to say that. (Though I guess I kind of did. Open mouth insert foot). Besides, what the Trolls do seems less like Eugenics, and more like wholesale, only slightly discriminate Slaughter, considering the wide variety of reasons one can get Culled.

The Encouraging Murder is smart if your goal is to create a culture of Murderers.

If her goal was to create a race of Vicious, Brutal Murderers to serve as an army of galactic conquest, the Empress was Smart.

THAT her goal was to create a race of vicious, brutal murderers to serve as an army of galactic conquest makes her Evil. It's not like she even really benefits from these conquests, since it's implied she spends all her time flying ahead, scouting out future targets rather than enjoying the spoils of war. This is just Slaughter for Slaughter's sake.
If her goal was, say, to advance the good of the Trolls, she was an idiot. If her goal was to make the Trolls into a powerful army, she is also an idiot. Provided Trolls are roughly similar to Humans, it's possible to get a perfectly effective army without having half your children kill the other half, and doing so means you get more foot soldiers. Plus no army can run without a sizable support staff that never sees frontline combat, so the whole "Mass-producing murderers" thing does not even count towards that. Plus, children grow up fighting other trolls, which means that they're more likely to channel their aggression towards each other and their officers than towards the enemy.

However, considering Meenah, having an army of galactic conquest was probably just a happy side-effect of making an entire race of vicious bloodthirsty murderers. She didn't do it for power, or out of some idea that this was necessary. I don't even think she did it out of some misguided idea of extreme social Darwinism (though that would fit). I think she just did it for the lulz.

If her goal was to maintain her power...well...she got lucky there, since she has a literal "Kill the Lower Classes" button in the form of her lusus. She could do basically nothing and keep her power just fine.

[Jayngfet]

However, considering Meenah, having an army of galactic conquest was probably just a happy side-effect of making an entire race of vicious bloodthirsty murderers. She didn't do it for power, or out of some idea that this was necessary. I don't even think she did it out of some misguided idea of extreme social Darwinism (though that would fit). I think she just did it for the lulz.

Boom. Nail on the head. The idea that she has some kind of grand design is completley contradictory to literally everything we've seen about either iteration of this character. There is no social Darwinism and there certainly isn't idiotic talk of eugenics coming from her because that's just Redfir projecting his badly thought out ideas about right and wrong and society.

She has no problem with doing any number of stupid things for her amusement, or letting others do stupid things for their amusement, or running an entire society with this as the base. It isn't a question about the (wrong) opinion that eugenics is a good thing. It's a question of "does someone willing to replace a planets water supply with Faygo seem like a good or responsible person to you?"

She isn't good, she isn't likable, she certainly isn't reasonable or logical. She's a psychotic child who refused to give up given a weapon so powerful she never needed to. The fact that she's capable of talking has at no point mitigated this fact.

[Scowling Dragon]

She is simply a monster. And by far the most interesting villain.

For how insane she is, she has had the most understandable, scary and interesting motivation of all the major villains this far.

And we don't even know what her motive is.

[Jayngfet]

She is simply a monster. And by far the most interesting villain.

For how insane she is, she has had the most understandable, scary and interesting motivation of all the major villains this far.

She's interesting BECAUSE she's a monster in her own specific way. Jack just goes around randomly stabbing people, English is a shallow plot device attached to a petty brat, and the black royalty hasn't actually done all that much in the grand scheme of things(dying doesn't count as doing somthing).

She's a tyrannical, crude, self absorbed, awful, two faced monster. These are all human traits. She's awful and sociopathic in a human way, even if only in a shallow sense of the word. She isn't just stabbing people for the lulz. She's killing people horribly for the lulz in a number of awful ways.

Anyone who defends her as a person should be called into question, but as a character she's been a decent villain because her plans aren't just "pull out weapon, stab enemy, repeat".

[Ninja Dragon]

Just finished act 5.

Let's just say... this is by far the most complicated story I've ever seen. I've lost the count of how many times I got angry because I wasn't understanding anything, and had to resist the temptation to look into the wikia (I failed sometimes, but didn't get major spoilers). I can't imagine how a story could be any less linear than this, any if there was one, it would either be a bad story, or one written by Andrew Hussie, because only he could write something so convoluted and still make it good.

I'm taking a break before reading act 6 (by break, I mean not reading at right now), because this thing is killing me. I've done nothing on the past week besides reading homestuck, I've even lost track of my other 5 mangas and 8 webcomics because of it (and this had never happened before). My right arms hurts and every time I'm not at the computer I'm thinking about Homestuck. Thank god I'm on vacation, or I would surely screw up at college.

Well, I can't say this is the best webcomic I've ever read, because it's clearly not a webcomic. It's its own genre. It's part comic, part book, part animation and part game. So comparing it to any webcomic would be unfair, because no webcomic has nearly as much content as Homestuck. But if I had to compare, I'd say this is the best comic ever. The music is awesome, the art is awesome, the characters (including, and specially, the trolls) are awesome, the plot is awesome and the humor is awesome.

End of Act...3? *goes archive trawling* Oh. OH. Rose just entered the Medium, and John just went through the first gate. You wonderfully lucky man. I know it seems like you've fallen so far down the rabbit hole, but you've got no idea just how much farther it is to the bottom. You have been reading the pesterlogs, right? They help you understand oh so very much.

Fair warning, the next part of the story can get a little hard to follow. Hussie was experimenting with integrating time travel into a coherent narrative. It's quite entertaining, and the Intermission is canonical, even if it doesn't seem like it at first. Plummet as slowly as you like, savor the trip, stop and smell the subtext. You only fall in love with Homestuck once.

Apologies for rambling on like that, I haven't slept in like a day and a half.

Yep, I've read pretty much all the pesterlogs. I hate skipping anything, since I feel like it's coming back to bite me in the future. Except for the Dave/Tavros/Ganzee rap battles, because I find them to be annoying.

[tyckspoon]

Yep, I've read pretty much all the pesterlogs. I hate skipping anything, since I feel like it's coming back to bite me in the future. Except for the Dave/Tavros/Ganzee rap battles, because I find them to be annoying.

I wouldn't say those are especially high points, but I always enjoyed those.. in fact, most times where a character is making an honest effort at something they aren't actually any good at are entertaining and/or endearing moments (Tavros being assertive, Karkat being polite and nice, Clubs Deuce doing anything at all.) Although there's a few that are just tragic instead.

Spoiler

Show

This is probably why I kind of like Caliborn, now that I think about it? He's despicable, but "trying hard at things he's awful at" is basically his entire character.

[Fan]

Not to mention these aliens and alien eugenics we are being devils advocate's to are

A. Fictional

and B. Not the same kind of Eugenics as here on earth.

Grubs who posses harmful mutations or do not pass a test are culled.

Young trolls who do not survive X amount of sweeps on Alternia are dead.

This leaves only the strongest and smartest trolls alive, and when your entire species revolved around waging war on OTHER species, that's a pretty good thing from your point of view.


Friggin e'll people i never said it was OKAY! Nor was i actually referring to real-life human eugenics, just the fake-fake nonexistent Troll version which focuses only on enhancing the phrase "reproduction of the fittest". That's it!


Now if everyone could please calm down, maybe we ought to change the topic or something as evidently telling fiction apart from reality is difficult for some, and as such discussing the fictional alien overlord which takes place in said nonexistant universe is a bad idea.

Except it's not what they do at all, they kill their most powerful psychics off ALL THE TIME, are you forgetting The Psiioniic? The most powerful psychic in the history of Trolldom? He was literally killed for no reason, and he was THE MOST POWERFUL, and given Sollux can blast apart buildings with mind honey, that's a pretty big deal.

They are actively removing their most powerful, and best killers, from society.

There is no "Leaving the smartest, and strongest" in this equation, they are doing the opposite by removing free thinkers, and using psychics as ship batteries that die unless they are unlucky enough to be the Empresses Helmsman.

This isn't even politics, it's common sense. As easy as looking forward and breathing at the same time.

[Jayngfet]

Except it's not what they do at all, they kill their most powerful psychics off ALL THE TIME, are you forgetting The Psiioniic? The most powerful psychic in the history of Trolldom? He was literally killed for no reason, and he was THE MOST POWERFUL, and given Sollux can blast apart buildings with mind honey, that's a pretty big deal.

They are actively removing their most powerful, and best killers, from society.

There is no "Leaving the smartest, and strongest" in this equation, they are doing the opposite by removing free thinkers, and using psychics as ship batteries that die unless they are unlucky enough to be the Empresses Helmsman.

This isn't even politics, it's common sense. As easy as looking forward and breathing at the same time.

I think at this point it's best to just ignore this person entirely. He said he'd support characters through anything so long as crocodile tears get cried. Including his non-homestuck examples he has said that he will think of a character as a good person even if they:

-Commit serial genocide
-Poison entire populations
-Pimp children(and probably a whole lot more, between horrible art and terrible writing I refused to go past the first bit of that particular webcomic)
-Stab people on a whim
-a whole bunch of other, equally sickening points.

There's no real argument here that literally everything Redfir has said over the last few threads is sickening to the very core of anyone with even the tiniest shred of humanity left in them. Before those pages he made some off color decisions in posts that've been called into question, but seriously, look at the things he is saying.

This is not a person you want to argue with simply because he's either trolling or sincerely believes that self serving genocidal tyranny is on some level ok.

[Oracle_Hunter]

I've done nothing on the past week besides reading homestuck, I've even lost track of my other 5 mangas and 8 webcomics because of it (and this had never happened before). My right arms hurts and every time I'm not at the computer I'm thinking about Homestuck. Thank god I'm on vacation, or I would surely screw up at college.

Welcome to Homestuck

Yeah, I started reading when I was supposed to be packing for a move. I did not so much packing but so much reading

Tell me, have you shouted HUSSIEEEEEEEEEEE! at your monitor yet? If so, when? If not, look forward to it

[Ninja Dragon]

Every forum I go there is always a guy rooting for the villains. That is pretty usual. Because, for every aspect of reality a work of fiction tries to portray, there is always is someone who favors it. Fascism? Lots of people think it is right. Genocide? Same thing. Torture? Many people favor it.

The only reason these things exist in real life is because there are people who agree with them, and those people will come into these threads and defend the characters who do them.

Welcome to Homestuck

Yeah, I started reading when I was supposed to be packing for a move. I did not so much packing but so much reading

Tell me, have you shouted HUSSIEEEEEEEEEEE! at your monitor yet? If so, when? If not, look forward to it

Not yet. But I came close to it when he started killing trolls.

I mean, I'm okay with some of them dieing, but why killing the comic relief ones? Like Nepeta and Feferi.

[Oracle_Hunter]

The only reason these things exist in real life is because there are people who agree with them, and those people who come into these threads and defend the characters who do them.

Counterpoint: Stanford Prison Experiment

Evil exists in real life even without "bad people."

* * *

Now, how about that Homestuck? Things sure suck for Jane but at least she's making the most of her sadness-fueled Arc

[Ninja Dragon]

Counterpoint: Stanford Prison Experiment

Evil exists in real life even without "bad people."

* * *

Now, how about that Homestuck? Things sure suck for Jane but at least she's making the most of her sadness-fueled Arc

What you mean is that people influence each other. While that's true, the only reason those beliefes exist is because there were people who held them in the first place.

And I don't mean those people are "bad", they just hold beliefs that most people think are ethically wrong. This is why those beliefs are usually held by villains in fiction.

Now, I'm not going to say I have the right to determine if something is good or evil, but in my opinion, if you are defending genocide, your opinion is wrong, and you are acting evil.

[Jayngfet]

Every forum I go there is always a guy rooting for the villains. That is pretty usual. Because, for every aspect of reality a work of fiction tries to portray, there is always is someone who favors it. Fascism? Lots of people think it is right. Genocide? Same thing. Torture? Many people favor it.

The only reason these things exist in real life is because there are people who agree with them, and those people will come into these threads and defend the characters who do them.

The problem isn't that he likes what's happening in the context of a story. The problem came in when he started waving his headcannon of her acting nicer and wanting to be motherly around. Then when somebody said that sounded a tad unrealistic given the number of other things this character has done, he went on to actually defend them by throwing out a bunch of other morally reprehensible things under the idea that they somehow justified his viewpoint.

The empress is an entertaining villain and the comic is better for having her in it. To defend the morality of what she does however is pure lunacy. To use eugenics as a moral defense when it's only tangentially involved at best, in such a casual way, is however something I shouldn't need to tell you is wrong. I can't even believe this is trolling, because no troll is that combination of casual and blatant.

[AgentPaper]

The problem isn't that he likes what's happening in the context of a story. The problem came in when he started waving his headcannon of her acting nicer and wanting to be motherly around. Then when somebody said that sounded a tad unrealistic given the number of other things this character has done, he went on to actually defend them by throwing out a bunch of other morally reprehensible things under the idea that they somehow justified his viewpoint.

Care to point out this statement specifically? I think we might be talking past each other here.

[BRC]

I was going to comment how people not immersed in Homestuck Culture outside the comic probably don't know what trickster mode is.

And then I remembered about this fandom.

Also, this is the song of madness

[Lord Raziere]

uuuuuh…..

whats trickster mode?

I'm not immersed.

[Jayngfet]

Care to point out this statement specifically? I think we might be talking past each other here.

So keeping her species strong and powerful via way of eugenics while ensuring her spot on the throne wasn't in danger.

seems smart to me.

It's not just this specific post, but all the posts leading up to it and the ones following it. Going by what he says, he's largely projecting his own values and ideas onto a fictional character. This is in a large part what I freely admit to mocking Vriska fans for doing far too often, so in and of itself I wasn't entirely happy with his statements.

Then he brought in eugenics of his own volition and said it seemed smart. Going by all the posts beforehand he also seems to think there's nothing morally wrong with it, nor the idea of killing an entire race of people just to keep power you never earned to begin with. He had a chance to correct himself and he blew it by once again misunderstanding how the story's system works and attributing values to it that it clearly does not have. He never even attempted to state that he didn't believe any of the things we're accusing him of believing.


Draconi Redfir presumably chose his words before posting, had his words called into question, never really faced the implications his words said about himself, as a person, but still attempted to defend them. Everyone else, including you(Agent Paper), has gone to lengths to make sure they didn't run into the same implications. Redfir has, even ignoring the morality issues, proven time and again in rapid succession that he isn't exactly seeing what Andrew has written and then drawn out and described and then reiterated and shown through repeated examples. He's seeing what he wants to see through his own lens. This is fine to a small degree, but by this point for all it relates to the characterization put forth of how things have gone through direct and indirect accounts, he's essentially saying the equivalent of "the sky is green with teal polka dots".

[Squark]

uuuuuh…..

whats trickster mode?

I'm not immersed.

Pressing Ctrl-T during most of the early flash games triggered an easter egg of various kinds- I think the last one was Equius: Seek the Highblood. Jane's outfit- And the uu's drawing of Roxy- Are both callbacks to the original trickster mode from the [s]YOU THERE. BOY. 2- Basically, pressing CTRL-T makes john walk around upside down on the floor, and makes a coloured version of him with a lolipop in his hair and a picture of hussie float around where he and the sprite were... Eh, just click the link. It'll make more sense.

[Jayngfet]

Pressing Ctrl-T during most of the early flash games triggered an easter egg of various kinds- I think the last one was Equius: Seek the Highblood.

Which was fun, as a thing that had nothing to do with what was going on and looked like it was a funny diversion that coudn't possibly have an effect.

Honestly including the easter eggs in the story never struck me as that great an idea.

[Draconi Redfir]

This is not a person you want to argue with simply because he's either trolling or sincerely believes that self serving genocidal tyranny is on some level ok.

For the record by that time the character in the comic in question had not even been introduced yet.


And for clarification, when did i say tyranny is okay? I said that from a specific point of veiw her actions can make sense given the circumstances.

Jegus chris guy I’m not saying these are awesome sunshine happy people who fart flowers and rainbows, I’m saying i still like them as characters DESPITE the fact that they do all of these horrible things.

why? because it is fiction and they are well written characters, sometimes with quirks or small things about them i find cute that add a fun contrast to their different personalities.


Sometimes people just like the villains, this doesn't make them horrible.

*casually points to all the Loki, Scar, Sepherph, and Discord fans*