2008-04-21 - Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

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Graybeard
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Graybeard »

No One wrote:Ian is freaking me out now.

As for why he acts like this, it may be partly from a lifetime of hearing tales about Elves being the evil monsters that hunt you down and murder you for no reason. But personally I suspect that Ian's an Errant. Legitimately, I mean, not just by the Elven definition of "all half-Elves are errants." I think he's one of the ones who has mental issues.

I know that's not a new theory. I'm just saying it's the way I'm leaning on things here.
Ian may have gone Errant, but he surely didn't start as one. Look at the way Leah and Riley view him (who btw very casually listed risk of "getting killed by an elf" as one of the reasons why he was getting in over his head when he left on his quest). Read the letter he left Evelyn. Heck, even consider the gentle way he dealt with the Veracian priest he mugged for a uniform. You can quarrel with the ethics of getting the uniform that way, but you sure can't say he was callous about it.

More than anything else, Ian reminds me of the small fraction of people who came back from the Vietnam War seriously messed up, after going into it as naively patriotic kids. I knew a guy who came back from Vietnam with his brain burned out by a combination of what he saw there and the bad drugs he got into there, in a way that most certainly would have led to him being labeled an Errant if he'd been a half elf -- and if he'd been a spell caster, I'd have been dead 25 years ago, ten years after he got his mind turned to cabbage.
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Ged
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Ged »

Someone attacks you you kill them rather than let them walk away to try again another time when you might not be so lucky. That's fair enough in my book.
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Boss Out of Town
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Thus far, really, there's nothing Ian's done that wouldn't have gotten him applause if Ahnald or Chuck or Clint or Bruce had been doing it in one of their movies. Not his fault he isn't considered cool enough to splatter his enemies and quip about it as the blood flies.
runic
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by runic »

ian's not being boodthirsty, he's employing the scientific method to answering an age old question:

"will elves blend?"

oh and the growing instability part? most likely he is not over his sisters death and blames them for any one of a number of irrational reasons. recall, he went looking for their capital after he saw her grave, that was his takeaway of the whole scene.
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Destichado
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Destichado »

Who kidnapped who's girlfriend first?
Who used cowardly stealth and mental attacks first instead of an honorable show of force and demand for surrender?

Nope, there's nothing wrong with cutting those fucks in half and enjoying it.


First the Elves send a military squad to ambush him and Meji from behind invisibility spells using crippling mental attacks, for no other (apparent) reason than the fact that they exist. Then an elf is twisted enough to kidnap his own daughter from her own home and imprison her under guard. Then when he rescues her, how do the elves defend their own city? By hiding in the shadows -again- and fucking with their heads -again.

Every elf he has met looks like a racist, self important, cowardly, untrustworthy fuck who will attack him on sight for no better reason than his birth. They deserve to die. Killing them does a service to the world. And you know what? He's not half wrong.
Maiazuru
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Maiazuru »

Destichado wrote:Who kidnapped who's girlfriend first?
Who used cowardly stealth and mental attacks first instead of an honorable show of force and demand for surrender?

Nope, there's nothing wrong with cutting those fucks in half and enjoying it.


First the Elves send a military squad to ambush him and Meji from behind invisibility spells using crippling mental attacks, for no other (apparent) reason than the fact that they exist. Then an elf is twisted enough to kidnap his own daughter from her own home and imprison her under guard. Then when he rescues her, how do the elves defend their own city? By hiding in the shadows -again- and fucking with their heads -again.

Every elf he has met looks like a racist, self important, cowardly, untrustworthy fuck who will attack him on sight for no better reason than his birth. They deserve to die. Killing them does a service to the world. And you know what? He's not half wrong.
Are you serious?

I hope not.

Because, well, you got to remember something: in the Errant War, some elves actually opposed how things were going (Sarine's side during the War). At the end of the war, BOTH sides were exhausted, and BOTH sides came to live within the city.

What does that mean? It means at least SOME elves are still against the policy. They are probably the minority, but they're THERE.

Yet you casually say they deserve to die. In that case Ian, bloodthirsty as he obviously is, also deserves to die. And, given the fact that his recklessness caused so much destruction already? I think him being killed WOULD be a boon to the world.

Don't put an entire race in the same package. An individual can be judged. NOT a race.
Kian
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Kian »

Destichado wrote:First the Elves send a military squad to ambush him and Meji from behind invisibility spells using crippling mental attacks, for no other (apparent) reason than the fact that they exist.
Actually, Ian knew that the reason a full elven squad appeared was because he stole a book. Given that he was hoping to find some clue in the book towards gaining untold power, the elves had pretty good reason to not want him to have that book.
Then when he rescues her, how do the elves defend their own city? By hiding in the shadows -again- and fucking with their heads -again.
His method of rescuing her was to punch a hole in the mountain where they lived and then murder the guards, even though no harm was ever done to Meji. Had the elves preferred to kill rather than disable, Meji and Ian would be dead. They're alive simply because the enemy they're fighting has not tried to kill them, despite the fact that Ian is answering with lethal force.
Every elf he has met looks like a racist, self important, cowardly, untrustworthy fuck who will attack him on sight for no better reason than his birth. They deserve to die. Killing them does a service to the world. And you know what? He's not half wrong.
No comment on how good for the world to kill every elf would be. The elves don't seem to be having much influence at this time, so I don't think their continued existance would be better or worse than the alternative. However, every elf he's personally met has only been after him because he stole stuff that wasn't his. The book first, and their goddess later.

As I mentioned, as the number of dead elves increases, so does the likelyhood that they'll retaliate with lethal spells instead of disabling magic. This places Meji in danger, as he's shown to be unable to protect her from everything that's flinged at her. It may also give the remaining elves more of a reason to go out en masse and exterminate whatever half-elves might be left. If they offered a good enough bounty for good info, it wouldn't be long before Santuariel's neighbours ratted them out.

Escalation is almost never a good idea. It is always best to keep your opponent's response as mild as possible. Ian could just as easily disable the elves without killing them, but he chooses not to and endangers those he cares about by doing so. Beyond any moral considerations, this is a bad idea.

On a more general scale, Ian introduced himself as something of a noble type. He didn't kill the priest for instance, and he didn't kill the library guards. He mostly played nice, and even just a few strips ago he chastised himself for having enjoyed killing the guards. He's now relishing the act, which marks a disintegration of his moral character. He lost his main motivation when his mother killed his sister. Without a moral structure, he becomes an aimless super-powerful entity, and those are always dangerous as people as Anita can get their hands on them and use them easily.

Lastly, Praenubilis doesn't only have elves that killed errants. A not insignificant part fought on the side of the errants as well. They're all living together now. Not all of those would be like Sarine, looking to leave as soon as possible. So Ian could, in his 'righteous' indiscriminate killing, be ending elves that were sympathetic to the half-elven cause, and that might have done more for their continued existance than he ever will.

Plus there's the basic moral belief, shared by most people, that one should avoid killing if possible. Ian has other options. He could simply shield himsef from anything they could throw at him and walk amidst them until they figured out that attacking him is pointless, for one.

Essentialy, I can't think of any valid reasoning that would make Ian's actions better than alternative solutions.
BloodHenge
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by BloodHenge »

Slamlander wrote:He is losing his sense of perspective.
I'm pretty sure he's always had this perspective. The only difference is that he has the power to act on it.
Kian wrote:And I'm not getting where all of Ian's animosity towards the elves comes from. I doubt that he knew any half-elves killed by a ranger, as we've not heard him bemoan the death of a friend.
We also haven't heard him say a word about his father, although I'm pretty sure he had one. (Maybe these facts are related?)
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Tiamat
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by Tiamat »

Kian wrote:Essentialy, I can't think of any valid reasoning that would make Ian's actions better than alternative solutions.
That's because there are no rational reasons left. The fact that he knows why he's been attacked (because of the book) and still responds to every elf with lethal or nearly lethal force instead of, oh, I don't know, returning the shit he stole, or not deliberately going out of his way to commit a full-scale GENOCIDE!, means that he's out of his god-damned mind. Regardless of how he got there, Ian has crossed the line from 'well-intentioned extremist' and entered the territory of anti-social personality disorder.
olshriek6
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Re: Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

Post by olshriek6 »

Time to delurk Hello hello

The Flaw in my opinion of comparing him to Action Heros is the situation and the psychological statements "I think Im Starting to enjoy that" and The current one.

Dirty Harry Doesn't work. Especially after Magnum Force where he said the system all hes got, and if you are going with the original only name any point where he shot first. Even nutjob he gave the line and the guy still ran at him.

Closest I can come to this situation is Commando with Arnie and even then he really never said anything when dealing with the mooks at the island compound thing. Even "I lied" to weekend at Bernies guy was supposed to be flat.

Also the heros normally just shoot the guy maybe knife to neck for Wow! effect. He's in Scanners teritory. Remeber Michael Ironside its not pretty
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