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From a Zerg viewpoint, [insert any of many possible Zerg "morale" decisions], therefore, causing there to be less of them is a morale decision.Quote:
This. Since Gna was asking about the morality of Kerrigans acts before BW being potentially sound, this act in BW is particularly heinous from a human moral/ethical viewpoint.
Moria was part of the Dominion after SC1, so you answered your own question with the quote. Even Stukov says "We are here to take control of the Terran Dominion and all of its outlying colonies." So after they do that, they moved on to the Overmind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
In BW, it was done as part of the war effort against the UED. In HoTS, it was against actual civilians due to cocooned colonist and ruined apartment building doodads, plus sacking all the planets irrelevant to attacking Korhal.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
Gradius, if you could point out what part of the game/manual/other says that Moria was part of the Dominion (preferably not SC2-era retcon) I would appreciate it.
I still feel that this was an attack on more or less civilians. Yes, Moria is militarized, but that's like calling the US militarized -- we have military bases, but we also have lots of places that aren't military bases. The target they were going after, that is to say, the mineral resources, were more than likely not mined by military forces, but by regular people or guilds. Probably those people had been mining Moria for years, and possibly had never even left the planet before. Moria is, after all, one of the three worlds originally settled by humans in the K Sector. There would be a large civilian presence there. Probably lots of husbands and sons working the mines. Quite frankly, this is the most despicable act of BW, imo, and Fenix and Raynor's actions are indefensible. Sure, Kerrigan wanted minerals, so you can see Zerg going after Moria, but for regular people to want to kill civilians in order to make the Zerg stronger is disturbing, whether Moria was part of the Dominion or not.Quote:
On moria, that planet was heavily militarized. And as Fenix pointed out, he doesn't like "raids" but rather full battle. So it was more of a raid, but gameplay demanded and allowed for something else.
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Gradius, if you could point out what part of the game/manual/other says that Moria was part of the Dominion (preferably not SC2-era retcon) I would appreciate it.
I still feel that this was an attack on more or less civilians. Yes, Moria is militarized, but that's like calling the US militarized -- we have military bases, but we also have lots of places that aren't military bases. The target they were going after, that is to say, the mineral resources, were more than likely not mined by military forces, but by regular people or guilds. Probably those people had been mining Moria for years, and possibly had never even left the planet before. Moria is, after all, one of the three worlds originally settled by humans in the K Sector. There would be a large civilian presence there. Probably lots of husbands and sons working the mines. Quite frankly, this is the most despicable act of BW, imo, and Fenix and Raynor's actions are indefensible. Sure, Kerrigan wanted minerals, so you can see Zerg going after Moria, but for regular people to want to kill civilians in order to make the Zerg stronger is disturbing, whether Moria was part of the Dominion or not.Quote:
On moria, that planet was heavily militarized. And as Fenix pointed out, he doesn't like "raids" but rather full battle. So it was more of a raid, but gameplay demanded and allowed for something else.
I'm pretty sure it states that the KMC was part of the dominion in one of those green-text cards.
Kerrigan is a vile terrorist from beginning to end.
but at least in SC1 it was intetionally a morally grey (at best) game instead of SC2's STARCRAFT HEROES! :D nonsense.
Yes well Kerrigan was probably right about the UED and all that. In HotS, you really don't know that when it comes to attacking Korhal. A fundamental rule of war is you're not supposed to underestimate your enemy. Kerrigan already did this during the Char invasion for WoL and look how that turned out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gradius
It's from the BW manual. It says that all the koprulu colonies were united under one ruler for the first time.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nissa
It was only during the BW times? I thought the KMC joined the Dominion at some point during the events of SC1 (can't tell which part in the timeline of the zerg or protoss campaign though)Quote:
Originally Posted by Gradius
Only humans get hung up on issues of morality/ethics. I didn't think I had to point that out specifically but thanks for doing so?Quote:
Originally Posted by TheEconomist
Gah, I forgot about this. I got thrown by your comment about Fenix mentioning Moria is a part of the Dominion and sold out to them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gradius
Still, I consider the KMC as still being an important and distinct enough entity away from Mengsk's core Dominion holdings and authority to be worthy of moral consideration because if we generalise that all Terran worlds as being "the Dominion" (as it plainly is according to the BW manual), then every Terran is essentially "fair game" (ie: not civilian but military targets) to Kerrigan.
Given the Kerrigan arc in discussion, it's notable. Especially since you're analyzing (I assume) the believability of the Zerg/Human/Redemption ... "story"/retcon.Quote:
Only humans get hung up on issues of morality/ethics.
Also, obligatory caveat that Protoss, also, and quite more so, get caught up on morality.
Yeah, if that traitor Tassadar had gone ahead and purified Mar Sara, everything could have turned out completely different. Or if he'd vaporized Tarsonis instead of landing and fighting the Zerg on the ground, maybe Kerrigan never gets infested.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheEconomist
True, but that wouldn't have changed anything for Amon. Remember what Duran said to Zeratul in Dark Origins: Kerrigan's integration into the swarm merely sped up his progress. Based on that, he would have brought his master back anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Robear
I would appreciate it greatly if someone could list the things Kerrigan did in BW and prior, after her infestation, that made her evil.
I'd like to know, since I couldn't find it by playing BW. I want to know them honestly.
Also, what do you guys think about her internal motivations? Is she really murderous, how?
Well for the moment, take out the events of SC1, since people could argue she was under the Overmind's spell.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Aside from killing Fenix, corrupting Raszagal and forcing Zeratul to kill her certainly sealed the deal. Killing the UED (despite that Raynor admitted she had a point about them) and planning to rule over the sector can count just fine. Remember, this is before the events of SC2. No one knew she'd gather the swarm back to Char and disappear for a few years.
This is explained in the DT Saga Twilight, where RM Dahl admitted to Selendis she would see why the Protoss hated her so much.
Kerrigan was genuinely surprised that Zeratul did this, it wasn't her plan.Quote:
and forcing Zeratul to kill her certainly sealed the deal
Yes, but as Zeratul pointed out, better death than life as a slave.Quote:
Originally Posted by Robear
And as Jake Ramsey was explaining to him in the DT Saga Twilight, Kerrigan's actions in corrupting her already killed Raszagal anyway, so therefore Zeratul wasn't responsible for her death.
It's exactly one of the reasons why LONG before Blizzard even thought of SC2, many had wondered if Zeratul would take a similar dark path and force a scenario for Kerrigan to kill Raynor as his retribution.
I think another question is whether Kerrigan is still considered evil by the end of Legacy of the Void? I mean she became an Xelnaga and defeated Amon? Is that enough to redeem herself of all the wrong that she did?
Being a fictional creation of idealised humans by humans, of course the Protoss are going to be hung up on morality. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by TheEconomist
The problem here is that you haven't defined your standards for what is "evil". You can define it many ways but knowingly manipulating people (even if they were dupes or "deserved it") so that they can meet her own ends and then bringing untold and unwarranted suffering on those she had "pretended" to help earlier (Raynor and Zeratul) doesn't really win her any favours. She shows apathy toward Raynor's reaction after killing Fenix and Zeratul's anguish at feeling forced to kill Raszagal. She also revels in the prospect of "toying" with these people presently in and after BW, as well. Her selfishness harms others - that is considered, by some, to be evil enough.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
You don't have to be murderous in intent to be classified as evil. If you bear ill will toward others and act in a way to elevate yourself at the knowing detriment/harm of others, that's bad. If you don't care about how your actions affect others or worse, take pleasure of some kind at the detrimental effect of your actions on others, that's another layer of evil. Kerrigan in BW shows all these traits.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Of course, the story says so, so it must be true! :p:rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by DonnyZeDoof
Really, for redemption to work satisfactorily in a story, there has to be some sort of sacrifice or recompense of the person that is to be redeemed. Kerrigan has nothing of this since she steadily just keeps getting handed untold power and is forgiven by the one person who would always forgive her eventually anyway (and happens to be not dead after being "killed" near the start of HotS) such that and all she really loses, is her "looks". Then, this one and only problem is resolved (if it was even a problem to begin with) when she becomes a god that can do anything, up to and including getting the man and having powers to create life to "make up for what she did". The story of Kerrigan in Sc2 is not one of redemption, it's one of Mary Sue.
Not all of that is her fault entirely, you know that. The Confederate ghost program started it all, especially given that it was designed for ghost operatives to be nothing but automatons.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
You and your mary sue BS. The main problem again with her is that Kerrigan didn't understand humanity except the most cruel aspect it was capable of. This is something that takes time to understand. It doesn't occur instantly, nor for that matter in days and months. It takes many years for it to work out. If there never was an ascension, it still would have taken her years of learning from Raynor to understand this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Besides, the whole untold power was never intended for her to use as the way she thought. That's why there's the speculation the whole ascension was never a reward in the first place.
WAIT! When Kerrigan betrayed her allies, did she like destroy Korhal and civilians there? She said to Mengsk something like, "do you really think I'd let you come into power again?"
Or was that referring to Duke, that Mengsk needs him to regain power?
I think Kerrigan would have killed civilians without remorse back in those days. Most of Korhal was still a blasted wasteland back then, with some cities, as evident in Mengsk's inauguration broadcast, so I think Kerrigan just concentrated on the military encampments.Quote:
WAIT! When Kerrigan betrayed her allies, did she like destroy Korhal and civilians there? She said to Mengsk something like, "do you really think I'd let you come into power again?" Or was that referring to Duke, that Mengsk needs him to regain power?
If she hadn't conducted that surprise attack, I wonder how much larger the Dominion and Protoss retaliatory fleets would have been over Char Aleph.
A little of both. Remember what she said in the True Colors briefing: that without Duke, Mengsk would be easy to deal with. I'm willing to bet she thought Duke was necessary for Mengsk to regain military power in a way.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Yeah, it's kinda her fault because she still chose to do those things. That she treated it like a game and delighted in others suffering just makes it worse. Having a freudian excuse does not absolve her or her responsibility nor does it prevent one from still judging correctly that she is evil.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
It ain't BS, it's the way the story is written. It's why the story fails because the telling of it is abysmal and contrived.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
The lack of experience makes it hard to know better. That's mainly her problem in that she couldn't see anything to humanity except when it's at its worstQuote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Actually, I think she sees the worst possible outcome. I take it from this angle:
That she has been abused all her life, used, and discarded. This makes her so afraid of being discarded by the other races that she knows want the Zerg dead, herself included. And be used by the New overmind.
The being used by the new overmind though is obviously a lie, as the UED, having control of the Overmind, though with difficulty, was unable to get to her even a little.
This leads me to believe the Overmind created her as a free agent. Her affinity to the Overmind was not by choice at first, but as her DNA is changed, she takes on the vicious nature of the Zerg. So while she was a free agent, she was Zerg.
Aldaris spoke about her being fully infested and irredeemable. He seems right.
Her deceitful nature would come from the innate nature taken from her humanity, her murderous nature comes from the Zerg.
What I'm saying is that she couldn't have done otherwise. She's Zerg now, fully. But then at the end, she felt an emptiness. She felt tired. Maybe there is still a part of Sarrah that survives inside of Kerrigan.
I still felt that some part of her felt it simply wasn't her problem if Dominion civilians got caught in the crossfire. I'm willing to bet Raynor told Kerrigan about the events of Media Blitz and what he did there before HotS happened.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
If so, perhaps Kerrigan felt that (this is before HotS of course) Mengsk be an easy target now that the population turned on him. But after he claimed victory on Char, the population just got back behind him again, which as Kerrigan saw it, meant the Dominion population consists of nothing but mindless drones who just blindly follow everything Mengsk tells them to.
Having an excuse/reason for evil doesn't make it not evil. Worse, after going what she's been through, saying she didn't know what she was doing was evil makes her either stupid or insane. She is clearly neither of those.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
This is also the same reason why she seeks power. Like most of who have been abused, they'll do anything to never be in a position like that ever again. This means happily being an abuser themselves if need be.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Of all things, I don't think she's lying there. She fears the potential of being controlled/used again, which is why she wants the neo Overmind destroyed. The reason it hasn't controlled her yet is because the Overmind is immature (it's also presumably why it was so easily captured by the UED with drugs?) and that she was given agency to act on her own whims in the first place.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
The Overmind didn't create her as a free agent because it couldn't actually control her, it wanted her perspective so that it and the cerebrates could learn from her "fierce example". The potential darkness/evil was already there in Kerrigan from the get-go, it's just that circumstances allowed it to take the fore. I find that seeing Kerrigan throughout Sc1 and BW as one continuous character who always had her own agency is much more interesting. It's especially poetic in light of her being taken by the Zerg since being pure of essence (well, according to Sc1 at any rate), there is the horrifying prospect that what we see of Kerrigan after her integration into the Swarm is actually the full expression of her pure essence.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Maybe not, but this is why she still has to be held responsible for criminal neglect. Regardless, I just don't think she understood anything else.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Gotta back Tura on this. There's no particular reason why Kerrigan would have to lie about it controlling her. She's not a "free agent," she's just someone with a wider range of choice, much like how Zasz was the cerebrate who got to be the skeptical cerebrate. Also, the Overmind couldn't control her because it was juvenile, probably.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Honestly, this is what I saw the whole point of BW was. Kerrigan is an evil being now, but her human motivations haven't disappeared. That's why it was clear, even before SC2, that she was going to have a "redemption story," even if that redemption was simply choosing to do something right before she got killed. Or at least she was going to be useful, one way or another.Quote:
Her deceitful nature would come from the innate nature taken from her humanity, her murderous nature comes from the Zerg.
What I'm saying is that she couldn't have done otherwise. She's Zerg now, fully. But then at the end, she felt an emptiness. She felt tired. Maybe there is still a part of Sarrah that survives inside of Kerrigan.
Only the writers didn't know how to execute it. Many had argued in the past that if they had just let us know at the beginning of HotS than Amon had already been revived, it would have made more sense for all her actions in the gameQuote:
Originally Posted by Nissa
At the end of BW, I always felt Kerrigan felt empty with all that she's done. She saved the sector from the UED, yes, but she's alone, everybody hates her.
Thinking about these things would mean she retains her humanity. This was the question posed about her, and we get the answer. But it wasn't clear given the epilogue's ominious hinting that maybe there's something else out there. There's a threat, and her struggle isn't really over.
Maybe she feels the emptiness because the struggle isn't over.
Or maybe, that this ominous feeling would become her justification for having done what she just did. This perceived threat would sustain her for now, a form of rationalization, which she can use later, if said threat turns out to be actually real, to justify to herself that all she has done was for the greater good.
It's obvious that the ending is sequel bait to introduce another physical threat (especially when Dark Origins is included) but what I've always liked about Sc1/BW that it can be intrepreted in many ways. For example, I've always liked the psyhological explanation for why Kerrigan feel's empty/hollow as BW goes on and when she reaches its end. I like it because it's plausible even without considering that there is another actual future threat or that Dark Origins exist.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
Because her damage as an abuse victim has made her rail against others and see all others as potential threats she must overcome lest she be trapped again, she's paranoid and therefore always on the look-out for threats. So even when she's surmounted all of her perceived threats in BW, it hasn't really healed the damage still there. She's tired/weary not because she's starting to have remorse, but because she's probably realising that she'll never stop looking for and reacting to perceived threats (even if they do not immediately exist yet).
Her victory is hollow because although she has "won" on an objective and material level, it's superficial since she's still stuck in the same psychological mindset she was in since the start. She hasn't really won the thing that she really needs most: freedom from her psychological torment.
She felt empty because she's thinking at some point the terrans and Protoss would come back to exact their revenge. Then again, her arrogant mentality made it seem like she was untouchable, and that backfired on her just fine at the end of WoL.Quote:
Originally Posted by GnaReffotsirk
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Originally Posted by Turalyon
Yeah, but it's even simpler than that. In BW, Kerrigan wasn't really fighting for anything. Sure, she has supremacy over the sector, but she also has nothing to live for. What does it matter that she's the big and bad? She has no goal, no one to fight for, and nothing she really seems to enjoy that would make life worth living. She has no friends, everyone who knows about her hates her, and she doesn't really have anyone to talk to.
That makes me think, though. How many people actually knew about Kerrigan in BW? The UED didn't find out until the end of the Terran missions, so possibly at that point she'd not appeared in Dominion/Umojan/Morian newsfeeds. Ie, they knew nothing about her, and couldn't report on her, and so the UED had no source of information about her.
IZSHA Points out that Kerrigan was preparing for the threat posed by the end of zerg in a vision, the vision of overmind. efforts of kerrigan was destined to the rebellion against amon
You don't know that for sure. The BW ending only had her thinking she knew something was on the horizon. That could be interpreted in many different ways, not just Amon's threat.Quote:
Originally Posted by drakolobo
Eh, I don't think she really cares for "friends" at that point in BW nor do I think the lack of which would prompt those hollow feelings from her.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nissa
Sure, you could say that she isn't fighting for anything "materialistic" (being reductive by including "friends" as "material" that is) but she is definitely not fighting without reason or for nothing. She's fighting to ensure that she is in control now and to never be in a position to be controlled/abused again. That's the only tangible thing she has left to pursue.
Which was still stupid because she completely forgot about who she's trying to enslave.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
I'm just not convinced she would have stopped later on, even if we disregard everything in SC2 with the prophecy and Amon.
:confused: What part of my quote are you responding to? Rather, what do you think you are replying to here? Nissa and I have said nothing about enslavement.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
Rag uses induction methodology in his thinking process. Very beneficial for theorycraft, and speculative reasoning. He could have created a potential plot-point from another aspect of the lore, and combined them here to create what he sees.
It's very chaotic if he doesn't go through every point from which he took speculative freedom of, and placed that as an assumed point for another speculation in another subject.
I wish rag would reveal everything and not be too cryptic, and maybe, we can be quick about discussing what is acceptable or not.
Well, yeah, but it's also an empty goal. She's basically attained that in BW, and though probably she doesn't have the resources to attack immediately (assuming she wants to wipe out the Toss/Terrans), she does have lots of time to think. It is heavily implied that Kerrigan is emotionally vulnerable during the Zerg missions, and heavily implied that she's beginning to understand what exactly she has done. Given this and her time to think, she's going to realize, to a certain degree, that her life is hollow. Sure, she doesn't want to be hurt, but that's not a goal now, that's merely her state of being. And given her last interaction with Raynor, she's finally in a place to understand what she's become.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon