Archived Discussion Main / HonorBeforeReason

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Roland: Amusing as this trope description is, bitter much? :-)

Ruthie A: You know, I find the introductory paragraph rather hard to believe. I just don't think most people would be that heartless. I know some people might be scared, or not think they would be able to help, but to not help someone in serious trouble because they're afraid of messing up their shirt? I just don't think people would act like that.

Ronin Aquila: I envy you, for you have had the good fortune of not meeting too many animals known as the cynic. I have severed my ties with many former "friends" because they keep telling me to stop caring about a starving kid I met on the streets, and then go and watch some heartless cynical crap called "Family Guy" wherein its okay to laugh at orphans and cancer patients because apparently, it is "cool" and "smart" to be a black hearted cynic.

I created this trope as an angry reaction to cynical animals who think that being happy is more important than being honorable and caring for other human beings.. I for one would gladly live without laughter than live without honor.

Gemmifer: But removing the links to Lawful Stupid and Martyr Without a Cause as exampels of the trope done wrong was still unneccessary. I put them back into the text.

Austin: Yeah, I'd agree. This site is anything but neutral, but the opening paragraph isn't written with the grace that most articles are. I think someone should reword that so that it's less extreme.

T Matt: This text is ridiculous. Not only is the openning paragraph demonstratably untrue but the closing paragraph about a "return" to some "more honorable" age is nonsense. Modern humans are nicer than our historic counterparts: we have concepts like "human rights."

Austin: I edited the opening paragraph, because to say "most" people wouldn't help is a big generalization.

Shay Guy: Did the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann cast ever actually display this? —- Shay Guy: Removing TTGL until anybody can cite an instance of this. And Kamina's overall "manliness before reason" ideal doesn't count.

Cromage: Removed a bit of bias in the article. It can come back if you demonstrate that it is true. =P (alas, no [citation needed] markups in this wiki)

I also propose renaming this trope to Honor Before Practicality. It's not like people who act honorably aren't using a form of reason; it's just that if you view the world as a constant series of "jobs" that have to "get done" then you'll use reason in a different fashion than people who have other views on the world.

Sunder The Gold: I can get behind Honor Before Practicality.

Also, if this trope is going to be contrasted against Shoot the Dog, it's more like Sentimentality Versus Practicality — shooting a rabid dog is heartbreaking, but not dishonorable.

Also, removing the following, as Aldaris is an example of Lawful Stupid if anything.

• Judicator Aldaris in Starcraft. As evidenced by the following line, on why he refuses to kill Cerebrates (who control entire swarms of Zerg):
  Aldaris: Nevertheless, we must stand resolute. For attacking defenseless Cerebrates is not the way of true Protoss warriors!
  • It actually goes a bit farther than this. Aldaris does eventually try to kill a Cerebrate, but finds that it doesn't work; the Cerebrate is regenerated. The only way to kill them is with Dark Templar, a caste that the Protoss had long since exiled and whom the Judicator consider unclean and blasphemous. This leads to a minor civil war among the Protoss while they're in the middle of being invaded by the Zerg.
    • There's also the minor matter of him considering, not the Zerg, but Tassadar, who DARED to consort with Dark Templar to be the greatest danger to the Protoss race as a whole. He also sincerely believes that his more "honorable" strategies are actually winning the war against the Zerg, despite losing the outpost Antioch, as well as Praetor Fenix getting killed.

• In The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Kafei promised to have his wedding mask, and so hides himself away after it gets stolen, vanishing without a trace as far as his friends and family know. Better to have your fiancee wondering if you're alive or dead, to his way of thinking, than to show up without the mask and say "sorry, this Sakon guy yoinked it, but I've got A Simple Plan to have it back by tomorrow night."
  • To be fair, the reason he was in hiding wasn't because the mask was stolen, but because the Skull Kid had de-aged him into a small child, and he couldn't be sure that his own family and friends would recognize him. The only reason the black market shop owner whose backroom he was hiding out in recognized him is because of his Keaton mask, which had no significance to anyone else—thus implying that he wanted the Sun's Mask back in part because it would serve as proof of his identity.
    • Thing is, that's never mentioned in the game. It certainly sounds like a better explanation than the in-game one, but... why isn't it the in-game one?
    • It must have been mentioned at least once, because in the ending, when we see their wedding, the camera focuses through Kafei's eyes. He's certainly taller than before. In the Majora's Mask manga, it's explicitly stated that Skull Kid cursed him to look like a kid again.

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—- Austin: I removed the Supernatural example. I don't think it's a case of HBR. It's not honor, it's love. Dean loves Sam to death (And how!) and likely couldn't live life without him, hence why he was so determined to find things out for sure. Given Dean's speech in the season three finale, the writers may have even intended for this to be selfish on Dean's part, and even Sam questions whether Dean could really kill him if he went bad. I'll leave the example here.

• In the Supernatural episode Born Under A Bad Sign, when Dean is faced with overwhelming evidence that Sam has turned evil ( He's been possessed by Meg but we don't know that until much later), he still doesn't shoot. When asked by Sam, he still can't and even says he would rather die. He gets rewarded by knocked out with a pistol-whip and left in the hotel room, getting taunted about his worthlessness, a bullet (and a thumb later on) in his shoulder, getting left to drown and being beaten within an inch of his life. But that's all just a day's work for the show's favourite woobie. And just another phase in their continual routine of Breaking the Cutie.

"As an Asian, like John Woo who made this movie, I found this to be the honorable and decent thing to do. Deakin and Riley are warriors, and to have done otherwise is a sin that no hell is evil enough for. "

This is ridiculous. Risking thousands of innocent lives just for a straight up fight is not "honorable", it's stupid. Honor isn't how to fight, it's why you fight. Say Deakin had lost the fight, and then Riley had donated the bomb. Thousands would die, but would you say "Oh well, at least he went about it honorably!" I hope not. The correct choice is the one that saves the most innocent lives.

Wellington:

If this wasn't a Justifying Edit, I don't know what is. Yes, paladins work this way in Quest For Glory... that's the point of the trope!

In Quest For Glory 2, a fighter faces The Dragon in a climactic swordfight, and quickly disarms him. If he chooses to kill his unarmed foe, instead of letting him have his sword back, the game treats it as a dishonorable act... even though The End Of The World As We Know It is due to happen in a few minutes, if the hero doesn't get a move on. The VGA fan remake is even more extreme in this regard; giving the sword back leads to a truly Nintendo Hard fight. Apparently, The Dragon waits until after you show him mercy to bust out the really nasty moves.

• Which is entirely the point of the honor/paladin system in the series. In other words, honor can't be discarded for any reason, especially when it would be more convenient to just ignore it for the sake of expediency (even when saving the world). In effect, this is basically saying that the paladin has to be a near-superhuman Bad Ass: to be capable of fighting honorably when the situation demands speed, the paladin has to be able to kill his opponent without resorting to underhanded tricks.

I'm cutting down its length.

Normally, I'd edit this down:

• Xiaolin Showdown: Omi in regards to promises. At one point, Omi has to team up with one of the Big Bads to stop a race of unstoppable spiders. They do this by combining two Mac Guffins that work together to give infinite knowledge to find a way to stop them. Before doing so, the Big Bad makes him promise to only look for the way to stop them and specifically not to look for "the way to destroy evil forever". In the end, he mentions he "peeked" (apparently it's okay to break a promise but not to gain from breaking it). In later episodes the main group finds themselves in a desperate situation and begin telling him they want him to use the secret. He holds firm that he cannot because it would go against his honor as a monk even when all 3 of them think it would be better to do it anyway but he still refuses (it seems that fellowship and the fate of the world as you know it mean nothing in comparison to a small boy's moral code). The end result is as part of the Big Bad's plan, this divides him from his friends and causes him to go against their safer wishes of not listening to the villain. He ends up temporarily locked in an aggressive mood from this and pledges his allegiance to the villain. Once he returns to normal, he stays with the villain because he made that promise (ignoring his friends cries of "he wasn't himself"). In the very end they try to make it sound like Omi made the right choice by saying the Big Bad reveals that he knew Omi would peek and swapped what he saw with the secret to destroying good (they completely ignore the fact that without this, he risked everyone's lives and future suffering from evil-doers for his honor and that the world was put into peril a second time because he joined the Big Bad with a reason that equates to a promise made while drunk).

BUT COME ON. It's being cut for now; if the original poster wants to rewrite it in a way that trims the unrelated parts, they can go ahead. As it stands, I can't even understand it well enough to safely edit it.

Ronin Aquila: Dear Sir/Madame/Miss. I started this page in the hopes of CELEBRATING old-fashioned values that unselfishly places decency, kindness, honor and chivalry above the petty needs of one self. And in a scant half year this page has become a place for cynical people to sigh at and MOCK heroes who would lay down their own happiness for the greater good. I am going to return this page to what it once stood for. And in Greek, "cynic" does mean "dog." An appropriate way for Socrates to name a creature that has no faith in anything.

Freezer: You're aware that this is the internet and cynical people mocking things makes up half of it? (The other half, of course, is porn). And it's "sir", BTW.

Ronin Aquila: No disrespect, sir, but more accurately, 50% of it is Porn, 25% of it is cynical assholes who don't care, and I'm proud of belonging to the final 25% of angry idealists who give a damn enough to want to make a difference in this world.

Caswin: On a broader scale, I'm going to have to side with Aquila on this one. Apathetic cynicism isn't universal, even on the Internet. (Aaand I'm gone again.)

Removed this

• Rin from Fate Stay Night also has a very bad case of this for a magus, who are basically supposed to live in the most pragmatic and self-centered manner possible. She flat-out refuses to absorb souls to strengthen her Servant even though it's the surest way to increase his power, saves Shirou at the cost of her biggest linchpin in the war, and spends much of the first of the game incredibly annoyed at him because he's a rival Master who has basically painted a big 'KILL ME FIRST!' sign onto himself but her sense of nobility won't let her exploit it — and in the one case she's forced to Shoot the Dog in one bad end of Heaven's Feel, she ends up going insane due to it.

Rin really doesn't fit here at all, really, and the examples given are definitely not cases of this. In general, Rin is reasonably pragmatic. None of the things listed here are examples of putting honour before reason, they're examples of being an ordinary human being, with human emotions, rather than an uncaring Complete Monster. The only times Rin does seem to embody this trope (for example, when she takes Shirou to the church to explain the war, rather than killing him whilst Saber isn't watching), it's generally just her using "duty" and "honour" as an excuse to hide her true feelings. In any case, the 'pragmatic' thing to do wouldn't be to kill Shirou. It would be to spend the entire war hanging onto him as a valuable ally, and then stabbing him in the back at the end when only the two of them remain. There's absolutely no chance of him betraying her (because he fits squarely under this trope, and is also an all-round nice guy), so using him (and his exceptionally powerful servant) as a meat shield would be the ideal strategy. The fact that she does feel that she has to kill him is actually an example of this (and, the bad end where she defeats him and removes his command spells and memory most definitely is, given that it quite possibly could have lost her the war unless she obtained Saber).

True, she goes insane from having to Shoot the Dog, but when the 'Dog' in question is [Spoiler:your younger sister, who you spent the last ten years watching over from a distance and trying to protect as best as you can, only to find out that she's been suffering the most horrific abuse imaginable]], going insane isn't particularly surprising. And, yet, she still does it, unless Shirou stops her. Occasionally, in HF, she does seem to embody this trope to some extent (in the way that she keeps threatening to kill Sakura, even when she's not a danger), but again she never really attempts to act on it, except when it seems to her that it would clearly be the 'right' thing to do.