Imp-Chan wrote:Ian didn't have to go seek this nebulous magic McGuffin. He could have stayed home, and actually taken care of his family and friends even though he was powerless to do more than be there for them. That takes a different kind of being a good person, though, and Ian didn't choose the quiet support role. Instead he set out on the slimmest of chances to be a Hero, even though to all appearances nobody back home actually wanted one and it meant ditching his responsibilities in the meantime. Were his intentions good? Yes, of course, but that doesn't mean that deep down he wasn't in it for the chance to be Important as much as he was in it to help people. He made that same choice over and over... every time he had a chance to stop and care for people, he chose not to. Once he got Anilisized, he could have stayed in his village healing people and easily defending it from any elves ever. He could have gone political, allied with the Northern Confederacy, and made some pretty massive geopolitical changes from within the new power structure. He had options to work with other people to accomplish his goals... but he chose to go solo, and the only solution he could imagine was massive violence. That's... just not someone who was ever really a good person.
But Impy, helping people is
exactly what Ian did. Even after the awful jolt to his psyche administered by the murder-suicide his mom committed, he
still went on such a massive healing binge among the Errants of the town, for no other reason than that he
could. He devoted himself so single-mindedly to caring for people that his friends were worried about him. It wasn't until his disastrous attempt to resurrect Evelyn that he went completely off the deep end and became an evildoer. Furthermore, suppose he
had got back to Santuariel in time to keep his mother from killing Evelyn and herself, or suppose Evelyn had been severely burned (which he could surely fix) but not killed by the fire. All available evidence suggests to me that he would have simply healed Evelyn as he had set out to do, then got down to the business of improving the lives of his people -- with or without taking on the elves. That was the way he was, right up to the awful moment when he stood in front of the charred remains of the family home. (Of course, we wouldn't have had nearly as interesting a story... but that's the way fiction works.)
BloodHenge wrote: Forrest wrote:Shades of grey are what make the story interesting. Meji starts off cynical and callous and looking much more like the one most likely to turn into the superpowered evil maniac, but despite her very obvious sociopathic tendancies she apparently turns out pretty practical and responsible when she gets all her power. Ian starts off as the idealistic kid trying to save the world from a great evil and turns into the superpowered maniac himself. Without those initial good intentions, he'd be just as shallow an antagonist as if Chris (your stereotypical do-gooder adventurer with a heart of gold out to save the world) were the protagonist.
You raise an interesting point. Ian sought power as a means to an end, and once he had the power, that end is all he pursued. Meji wanted power as an end unto itself, and once she had it, she took a step back and thought about everything it could be used for. So Ian became a supervillain, and Meji became a philanthropist.
I don't see it that way at all. Meji had an end in mind too, and it was (at least IMO) a considerably less laudable end than Ian's. She just happened to survive the acquisition of superpowers with her basic sanity (such as it was) intact, which Ian did not. Nor was it obvious when it all happened that her sanity was going to survive.
This moment is telling: if she hadn't had this weird, supernatural intervention to get her straightened out, do you really think she'd have avoided the trap that consumed Ian? I don't.