What do female readers think of Hilgya Firehelm?

[The Aboleth]

And now I'm reporting you for bringing RL politics into this. I'm sure you'll take the moral position.

You are the worst kind of troll.

You, by your own admission, deliberately changed the subject of an argument to take a worse stance because you did not like the point some people were making. Then when people try to have an honest debate with you, you either ignore entire posts because they don't fit your arguments or you continue to cling to your strawman.

On top of that, when someone dares to commit what can barely even be considered a minor transgression of the Forum rules, you shut them down and report them for their actions.

If anyone should be reported, it should be you.

[The_Weirdo]

You are the worst kind of troll.

You, by your own admission, deliberately changed the subject of an argument to take a worse stance because you did not like the point some people were making. Then when people try to have an honest debate with you, you either ignore entire posts because they don't fit your arguments or you continue to cling to your strawman.

On top of that, when someone dares to commit what can barely even be considered a minor transgression of the Forum rules, you shut them down and report them for their actions.

If anyone should be reported, it should be you.

If they didn't want me to do this, why did they keep coming up with reasons why somehow Hilgya deserved to be married off against her will? Why did they keep arguing that "oh, the only moral course of action is to follow the unjust law"? Why did they keep making claims that are INSANELY immoral and outdated? This is what happens.

I don't want to have to argue for genocide, but if that keeps me from having to argue against forced marriage for the thousandth time, I will. I was nice and polite throughout this whole sorry affair, and all I got for it was people whining that, "oh, my position is immoral" and, in some cases, outright insulting me. And I didn't report even the insults (indeed, I won't report yours, if only because you weren't waxing lyrical about the importance of following the rules). Well, I was pushed too far and, now, people in a thread that had what-was-she-wearing-grade misogyny well before I argued for even killing off only the clans (I'm merciful like that) are telling me about what an eeeeeeeeeeevil troll I am.

And if he didn't want to be reported, he shouldn't have made a big deal about how it's oh-so-important to follow the rules WHILE BREAKING THEM.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Why are people seriously engaging with the guy who's blatantly repeatedly said he's just trolling?

[The_Weirdo]

Why are people seriously engaging with the guy who's blatantly repeatedly said he's just trolling?

I'm not trolling. I'm preventing a debate on whether or not women should be treated like chattel.

They should not. That is the absolute truth. That is the only thing that matters here.

If people don't want me to make a debate into "Genocide: Good or Bad?", they shouldn't have started a debate on "Forced Marriage: Wrong or Meh?".

[georgie_leech]

I'm not trolling. I'm preventing a debate on whether or not women should be treated like chattel.

They should not. That is the absolute truth. That is the only thing that matters here.

Women can and should be killed en masse for being born into a society that treats them like chattel, but god forbid they be treated like chattel.

[The_Weirdo]

Women can and should be killed en masse for being born into a society that treats them like chattel, but god forbid they be treated like chattel.

Freedom or death, my friend.

[georgie_leech]

Freedom or death, my friend.

Pretty sure "Liberty or Death" wasn't a call for killing your neighbors.

[Fyraltari]

I'm not trolling. I'm preventing a debate on whether or not women should be treated like chattel.

They should not. That is the absolute truth. That is the only thing that matters here.

If people don't want me to make a debate into "Genocide: Good or Bad?", they shouldn't have started a debate on "Forced Marriage: Wrong or Meh?".

Yeah that's trolling.

Derailing a debate because you don't like it is trolling.

And that debate wasn't really happening, anyways.

[The_Weirdo]

Pretty sure "Liberty or Death" wasn't a call for killing your neighbors.

It can be if you want to make sure liberty is the only option.

[georgie_leech]

It can be if you want to make sure liberty is the only option.

Remember that that call was for death (for the speaker), not death (in general).

[The_Weirdo]

Remember that that call was for death (for the speaker), not death (in general).

Hmm. Fair enough.

I suppose I can change my motto, then, to "Give me liberty, or else."

[georgie_leech]

It actually was; it arose in the context of what was, among other things, a civil war that featured bitter internecine strife and recriminations between neighbors. And ended in not ethnic but political cleansing in the name of consolidating a new polity. A policy which the speaker's political party backed far more enthusiastically than their "loyal opposition" (which was actually in power at the time).

Mm, but the point was that the speaker and the group they stood for was saying they would rather die fighting than remain in bondage. They were very much not saying "set us free or we'll kill random bystanders that aren't contributing to the oppression."

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Mm, but the point was that the speaker and the group they stood for was saying they would rather die fighting than remain in bondage. They were very much not saying "set us free or we'll kill random bystanders that aren't contributing to the oppression."

Agreed. In fact, the statement was not "Liberty or death" but "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (emphasis mine, source), clearly indicating that said call for death was death for the speaker, and not for those around him.

Also, I disagree with zimmerwald's description of the result of the American war of independence, but I'm hardly an expert.

GW

[Jormengand]

It's good to see all the female readers are out giving their perspective on Hilgya.

[Kantaki]

I don't want to have to argue for genocide,

Then don't.

No one is forcing you.
You did have other options*.
Sure, some posts in this thread might've been somewhat... questionable- including some of your own -but arguing for genocide is far worse and doing so was your choice and yours alone.
So don't give me "You made me do this".

Unless some other playgrounder literally grabbed your hands and dragged them across the keyboard** they didn't force you.

*Maybe not good ones, but certainly better than what you did.
**Or mindcontrolled you.

[The Aboleth]

I'm not trolling. I'm preventing a debate on whether or not women should be treated like chattel.

They should not. That is the absolute truth. That is the only thing that matters here.

If people don't want me to make a debate into "Genocide: Good or Bad?", they shouldn't have started a debate on "Forced Marriage: Wrong or Meh?".

Show me a quote where someone in this thread suggested that women should be treated like chattel, or that Hilgya did something to deserve being forced into a marriage she did not want. I've read most of this thread, and the only person I have seen suggest this is you in order to justify your argument that genocide is a morally acceptable solution to such a scenario. Show me who is making this argument (again, other than you).

Also, "moving the goalposts" is not a tactic one should use in a debate, because it means you are not debating in good faith. "I don't like the debate on Topic X, so I'm going to start a debate on Topic Y to distract from Topic X!" does not serve to distract from Topic X and only undermines whatever point you were trying to make about Topic X, especially when Topic Y is "Genocide: Is it Morally OK?" and your stance is "Yes!" So stop doing that.

[martianmister]

It's good to see all the female readers are out giving their perspective on Hilgya.

At this point it's a clash of ideas between apologists of genocide and rape. Happy International Womens' Day!

[The Aboleth]

At this point it's a clash of ideas between apologists of genocide and rape. Happy International Womens' Day!

Nobody--far as I can see--is being a rape apologist. One person is being a genocide apologist and claiming without proof (as of this writing) that others are being rape apologists.

[eilandesq]

Given that your view is spousing genocide, yeah, I think you are still well ahead of all those strawmen even if they were true, which, being strawmen, are not.

GW

Hey now, even genocide doesn't deserve to be forced into marriage against its will.

[zimmerwald1915]

Hey now, even genocide doesn't deserve to be forced into marriage against its will.

The crime of genocide is not a natural or a legal person and cannot marry in any case

[eilandesq]

The crime of genocide is not a natural or a legal person and cannot marry in any case

Sounds like a rampant violation of genocide's rights by genocide society. You know what it must do now!

*divides by zero*

Well, there goes *that* unpleasant concept forever.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Hey now, even genocide doesn't deserve to be forced into marriage against its will.

Fixed. I hate the English inconsistent use of 'e' before s at word start. Especially when it comes to remembering where specially can and cannot be used.

GW

[The_Weirdo]

Sounds like a rampant violation of genocide's rights by genocide society. You know what it must do now!

*divides by zero*

Well, there goes *that* unpleasant concept forever.

Anyways, if people here keep defending forced marriage, I'll keep defending... Uhm... There... There was a word for it... It was something... Uhm... Help me out here...

[The Aboleth]

Anyways, if people here keep defending forced marriage, I'll keep defending... Uhm... There... There was a word for it... It was something... Uhm... Help me out here...

Nobody is defending forced marriage. I will repeat my request from earlier, since you have ignored it:

Show me a quote where someone in this thread suggested that women should be treated like chattel, or that Hilgya did something to deserve being forced into a marriage she did not want. I've read most of this thread, and the only person I have seen suggest this is you in order to justify your argument that genocide is a morally acceptable solution to such a scenario. Show me who is making this argument (again, other than you).

[The_Weirdo]

Nobody is defending forced marriage. I will repeat my request from earlier, since you have ignored it:

Show me a quote where someone in this thread suggested that women should be treated like chattel, or that Hilgya did something to deserve being forced into a marriage she did not want. I've read most of this thread, and the only person I have seen suggest this is you in order to justify your argument that genocide is a morally acceptable solution to such a scenario. Show me who is making this argument (again, other than you).

Hilgya The Seductress:

Its hardly "jumping through hoops" when its her only established pattern of behavior. She seduces Durkon, then blames him for not sharing her values AND for getting her pregnant, and apparently deludes herself into thinking he seduced her and not the other way around. She similarly misrepresents Ivan as being horrible and cruel instead of kind and considerate, so its really not too much of a stretch to imagine more context behind her marriage than just "the clan forced me to do it at crossbow point for no reason."

It Was Her Fault, Right? RIGHT???

I will thank you to kindly not strawman my arguments, please. We don't know the circumstances of her marriage beyond that she didn't want to do it, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been a consequence of her actions in some way.

It Was Her Fault, Right? RIGHT??? 2: This Time It's Personal.

Off hand? Seduced Ivan. Or perhaps she scammed him into agreeing to marry her in an attempt to rob him or otherwise take advantage of him, and her clan found out and forced her to go through with it.

The first one seems unlikely given their marriage was never consummated, but it makes my point. Hilgya causes problems and then blames convenient targets without accepting any herself.

Where Hilgya Is Either A Law & Order SVU Antagonist Or In Breach Of Some Sort Of Contract.

And, I'm back. EDIT: Just in time to be ninja'd by Keltest.

People also don't want to go to prison, but they do things that result in being sent to prison. For Hilgya, marriage was the equivalent of prison. I stress once again that we don't know and this is all speculative, but to give her clan as much benefit of the doubt as Hilgya is getting, it's possible that she wasn't forced into marriage as a political pawn, but as the result of some action of hers that meant she HAD TO marry Ivan.

In American tradition, the shotgun wedding was resorted to when a boy "took advantage" of a girl and the families saw to it that he "did the right thing" by getting hitched. If we follow the reference all the way through, then this is the situation Hilgya was in, in the role of the aggressor. So, she was not blameless by any stretch of the imagination. She romanced Ivan as she did Durkon, but whereas Durkon left her, she wanted to leave Ivan- and the families weren't having it.

TL;DR: she might have been getting married at crossbow point because the alternative was jail for being a sex offender. This is just a possibility, but since you asked "what she could possibly have done," well, here's a possibility. And in that case, the marriage would have been a lenient alternative.

EDIT TO THE EDIT: Yes, if she had somehow scammed Ivan with a promise of marriage, had him hand over some wealth or other, and then reneged, under Dwarven law that might well justify a forced marriage. Contracts are involved. "Breach of promise" was a thing in law until very recently. Agreeing to marry under false pretenses was a crime.

It's Victimism To Complain And Forced Marriage Is A Slap On The Wrist

We only know she exaggerates her own victimhood from the flashback scenes. If those scenes are a function of her own interpretation of the events, not how they actually happened, then it doesn't make sense that Ivan behaved the opposite of how she described.

Or, to go the other way, if you say "we know from the flashback scenes that she exaggerates her victimhood, so the marriage at crossbow point didn't happen" you have to explain why that specific scene is shown exactly as she describes. If we're accepting the scenes as more reliable then Hilgya, and the scenes are supporting her point, we can't say "the scenes contradict her elsewhere, so she must be wrong here." We'd have to dismiss both the scenes and her as unreliable, but the only reason we believe her to be unreliable is that the scenes contradict her.

It makes far more sense to read the flashback scenes as showing us the events she's referring to as they actually happened. Sometimes she got it right. Sometimes she didn't.

And sure, the poison could be comical hyperbole. I don't see the joke in forced-marriage-at-crossbow point, but maybe it was hyperbole too. But the poison-hyperbole was exaggerating "tried to murder my husband" to "tried to murder my husband with a ridiculous amount of poison." It didn't change the severity of what happened. If you think, based on the comically-absurd amount of poison, that there wasn't literally a guy with a crossbow at their wedding, the only reasonable place to go from there is to consider a scenario approximately equivalent, just less over-the-top which... doesn't really change how I'd read things.

(I think the poison argument is weak anyways: it was a joke in a comic. It doesn't need to be straightforwardly serious and realistic to be canon, anymore than Haley stealing a diamond from the cast page needs to be.)

Let's All Culturally Relativize A Fictional Race.

Allow me to reply with my own "No".

By our societal norms, yes, it's offensive to be placed in an arranged marriage. But by the norms of almost every society for most of human history, that was the normal course of affairs (especially for the nobility) and was largely accepted by both parties. And every indication is that it's the accepted norm in dwarven society as well.

Again, it's not clear that there was a crossbow pressed to Hilgya's back, any more than there was a bottle of poison in Ivan's sandwich. The visual shorthand indicated that she was forced into marriage; that's all. I never once imagined that there was an actual crossbow there during the proceedings, just a case of her relatives telling her in no uncertain terms that she was getting married, "or else!"

Well, Something Happened, I Don't Know, BUT SHE WAS NO VICTIM, I Tell You That.

You've defined all arranged marriages throughout history as evil, by the fact that they were arranged.

Agreed, some were. Then again, some were merely a way of making the social contract between two families, where the kids were introduced, an attraction was there, and the relationship was formalized. Others were (and still are) hideous ways to marry off a girl to a rich old man who essentially bought a child bride. We don't know from the text what the dwarf marriage usually is, but as most dwarfs are Lawful Good, I suspect it's a social contract where both participants are usually willing.

What the circumstances were around Hilgya's wedding, we can't know as yet. We can only speculate. Given her personality, maybe she was a "wild child" and was being forced into marriage in an attempt to settle her down. I don't know. But I don't accept that Hilgya was a victim to the degree she portrays, or that she played no part in getting to that point- especially considering how we've seen her exaggerate the narrative of her affair with Durkon to cast herself as the victim there. She's an unreliable expositor in the extreme.

The Poison Was Totally True; Ivan's Niceness Was Totally True. On The Crossbow, We Need Evidence

But that's not what I claimed. I simply said that the crossbow didn't need to be there in order to exercise coercion on Hilgya. As in "maybe that's not the real explanation of how the crossbow ended up there in the first place". Maybe it was there because, you know, both clans are really aggressive/paranoid about the other party not fulfilling their part of the agreement. Maybe Hilgya was coerced by something else besides the crossbow in the room. It's plausible the family forced her because they are really evil and don't care about her desires; but maybe her family is the one threatened so they pushed her into doing so. Which (given what we know about her) she will surely interpret as their family not caring about her desires and blaming them anyway.

That the crossbow is a "reference of", doesn't necessarily imply that is the only plausible explanation. Maybe the real situation was literally a "shotgun wedding"; or maybe it was a wedding that looked oddly reminiscent of one. Maybe it wasn't an hyperbole. Maybe it wasn't a straight out lie on Hilgya's behalf. Maybe it was just a third option.

Let's Play The Conjuring Hypotheses Game

What if it's about saving the kingdom from utter destruction? What if it's to avoid the death of the father by having the other family pay his mob debts?

The Poison Was Totally True; Ivan's Niceness Was Totally True. On The Crossbow, We Need Evidence Part II: Now Even Less Crossbowy

I'll go along with the "forced into a marriage she didn't want", it's the crossbow that I'm not quite buying.

Why not? I suppose because A) Hilgya serially exaggerates her own victimhood and B) her flashback scenes also feature her feeding Ivan a poison-bottle sandwich. They get the point across without spelling it out in so many words. An actual crossbow may not have been in play any more than a bottle of poison, but the point is that somehow she was pressured into getting married.

All or nearly all of those took place before I even suggested murdering only her clans, let alone genocide. "Oh, but it's not EXACTLY like defending forced marriage". Except it's as close as it'll get to it without spelling it out in so many words, which would be socially unacceptable.

That is without adding the most recent ones, such as GW's post telling us that unjust laws are meant to be followed.

Really, that it took me 30 pages to get to this point is a wonder.

But oh, I'm sorry, you asked me to show you A quote.

[The Aboleth]

Her clan made her do it at crossbow point because she refused to do it otherwise.

You know, the way some rapes are done at gunpoint. And people, in real life, often do talk of rapes in terms of "what she was wearing".

So I don't know, maybe she was wearing something skimpy and her clan decided to marry her off? That would stisfactorily make it her fault SOMEHOW, right? RIGHT??? (Pepper this with sarcasm as you wish).

I like how you quoted a whole bunch of things above and yet left out the one in which you put words in peoples' mouths, thus deliberately escalating us to our present debate. Don't worry, though, I includes it above.

None of the quotes you pulled show ANYBODY supporting forced marriage. Most of them are speculations on why the clans might have forced her into marriage based on what we know of Hilgya and Dwarven society; nobody says they agree with those reasons.

In the other cases, people bring up historical examples to explain why an arranged or forced marriage might occur--again, nobody says they support the explanations , they are just trying to provide context to a situation in which we have very little.

You are mischaracterizing the nature of people's speculation in an attempt to paint them as misogynistic proponents of rape, when literally nobody here is supporting that line of thinking. Me pointing out that "The Holy Roman Empire justified the forced conversion of thousands of Jews because they felt that doing so would strengthen the power of the Church and/or they blamed the Jews for the death of Christ" is not an endorsement of that practice but merely a recitation of a historical fact.

EDIT: Only Darth Paul says in one post that he doesn't think Hilgya is completely blameless. So, one person says she might have had a part in the forcing of her marriage, congrats. See my final point below for why this ultimately doesn't matter to the genocide thing.

Finally--and I can't stress this enough--even if you were correct and they were in support of forced marriage, that still doesn't mean genocide is ok, and you acting like you were "forced" to take that position is incredibly insulting.

[The_Weirdo]

Finally--and I can't stress this enough--even if you were correct and they were in support of forced marriage, that still doesn't mean genocide is ok, and you acting like you were "forced" to take that position is incredibly insulting.

Maybe.

But I no longer am in the unenviable position of playing Sisyphus against all these nice folks hemming and hawwing that they aren't quite sure Hilgya is a victim or was wronged and equivocating on whether or not what she underwent was a bad thing.

[Keltest]

Maybe.

But I no longer am in the unenviable position of playing Sisyphus against all these nice folks hemming and hawwing that they aren't quite sure Hilgya is a victim or was wronged and equivocating on whether or not what she underwent was a bad thing.

You were never in that position in the first place. The only person making you read, reply or advocate for anything is you.

[The_Weirdo]

You were never in that position in the first place. The only person making you read, reply or advocate for anything is you.

Except I don't want people here using what-was-she-wearing-style justifications and equivocations to whitewash or relativize forced marriage, either, much like I don't want people here arguing that these insane laws should be respected "or she should leave" and, in short, a myriad of things that are, very much, outdated, offensive and repugnant.

So... Now they are not. And, in the future, they will likely be a bit more reluctant to do so, lest they find themselves shouting at walls that genocide is wrong much like I was shouting at walls that forced marriage (that, in, 99.9% of the cases, necessarily includes rape) is wrong in the beginning of this thread.

So, well, there is a reason.

[The Aboleth]

Maybe.

There is no "maybe" here. Your stance that genocide is morally acceptable is deeply insulting, and I demand you stop using it as a crutch to prop up your strawmen.