Grrl Power

That's a very dirty and dilapidated death penalty chamber.

Okay, now there's a reason. I think we knew from the start when the dagger showed up that Deus would find a way to use his nation's worst criminals to recharge it—but that's probably not something he wants publicized. Even putting aside the ambiguous morality of a dagger that needs a hundred kills to be recharged, if he put it through the normal legal system people would find out about it. Even if the Twilight Council is fine with him having it (which I doubt), supervillains would come after him for it. As Deus noted way back when, it's not actually evil, but it is far too useful to have in the wrong hands.

This whole thing is still, at best, morally grey, but that's better than what I thought before. Because my initial thought was "what possible reason could he have to distrust a legal system he set up?" Now I have a decent answer.

On the nature of innocence.

And the author backtracks the "Deus has some bad points" thing by making absolutely sure we know that his mercs aren't allowed to kill innocents.

I don't think those are *his* mercs, but hired by the competition?

Deus feels like he'd not hire those guys in the first place.

And ethically its still sketchy as hell, but not morally

Edited by 3of4 on May 26th 2022 at 2:59:29 PM

I think "his mercs" refers to Vale and Cthillia in this context.

Keep in mind that this is still about what Deus considers to be an Asshole Victim - and we've seen him engage in the Unreliable Narrator trope before. Plus, you could easily make a 10 hour "this was their life" documentary about practically anybody that portrays their death as being unjust considering all they went through.

Edited by ironballs16 on May 26th 2022 at 9:09:02 AM

I think Vale is a proper contracted employee, 401k and all. Now Cthilla...

Given the ongoing uncertainty about her species and origins, I'm not sure how easy it would be to set her up as a regular employee. (Though I'm sure that Deus can afford excellent forged documents.) Anyhow, I'm more interested in her psychology, and in how the heck Deus controls her. She's not human, and she appears to be at least a borderline sadistic psychopath, and yet she gets sentimentally upset (rather than just bored) by a ten-hour video of a sad story. More to the point, she's extremely powerful, and yet Deus can keep her loyal and make her watch that video.

The other thing about this strip is the reminder that Max has a wobbly grasp at best of the importance of due process. Her morality and ethics aren't really very different from Deus's, qualified only by a bit of patriotism. If his medium-term project is to recruit her, he should really have a pretty good chance, if he can just keep his wish to get into her pants under some kind of control.

I'm also getting a bit of personal dissonance from all the stuff about piri-piri sauce, given that one of the most successful chain restaurant growth stories in the UK over the last decade or so has been a peri-peri chicken outlet. For me, it's a fast food product.

(Part of the explanation for that may be that peri-peri sauce is popular in former Portuguese colonies, and so has spread to places in Portugal where Brits go on holiday. They found a pre-sensitised customer base here.)

Edited by Spindriver on May 26th 2022 at 4:08:40 PM

Morals and ethics are not the same thing.

Crippling a rapists hand is morally fine, I'd say. Doing it in Max circumstances is ethically not quite as okay

Indeed, but I'm not sure that Max and Deus differ very much in morality or ethics.

Insofar as, for example, due process is about ethics more than morality, Deus and someone else might share very similar morals, but be forever divided if the other person put a strong ethical emphasis on formal public trials and so on. But Max seems to share a lot of his morality and his impatience with The Book.

I'm pretty sure that feeding blood and souls to a hungry magic weapon is morally wrong, though, and that might be the sort of thing that ultimately stops her siding with him.

Max has impatience with The Book, but she has absolutely been shown to be willing to abide by it in almost all circumstances. One of her closest friends is a lawyer. My guess is that with the rapist, she just "accidentally" squeezed too hard when she was capturing him. Whoops, too bad, now have your due process. It's a very different beast than deliberately staging an extrajudicial killing.

Whether feeding criminals to a sword that needs to be powered by lives is right or wrong could be debated until the end of time, but I'm sure Deus simply sees it as practical. They're gonna die anyway, may as well use them. And even if he doesn't know what it does to their souls, I doubt he cares.

"Doubt he cares" is the clear sign that somebody has dropped into morally grey areas at best.

It's a thing that I often notice about settings — especially superhero settings — with lots of functioning magic; that tends to end up implying the existence of objective "good" and "evil". When you know there are actual hell dimensions populated by actual demons, you should logically start taking personal morality very seriously indeed.

This setting consciously works around that by making demons just aliens with occasional bad attitudes and some wacky Clarke's Law tech. But a magic dagger powered by human lives, which even a society of vampires and werewolves thought was better locked far away than kept on hand, strikes me as the sort of thing that might deserve the "objectively evil" tag.

The implication I got from the dagger was that there was so much worse out there that it was merely terribly practical. This is a universe where a civilization thought shoving the souls of their population into an And I Must Scream box was a good last-ditch lifepod. In the vault, Deus mentions many of the artifacts are actively encouraging them to fight, while the dagger is just too useful to leave sitting around for anyone to grab.

Objective, universal morality always makes things tricky. I've always loved the way Eberron does it, where (vastly simplifying) objective morality pretty much only exists for supernaturals. Demons are pure evil and angels pure good, but the Lawful Evil vampire king is fighting for peace and the Neutral Good mage-queen thinks restarting the war is a fine idea. So you can point to a demon and say "everything he is doing is evil," but for mortals it's much trickier because they have things like free will and opinions rather than embodying a concept.

Of course, even the Demons, Devils, and Fiends of this setting have some grayness to them, at least in regards to the Always Chaotic Evil aspects.

Edited by ironballs16 on May 27th 2022 at 11:04:12 AM

Sand. It coarse and gets everywhere

One would think that an occasional comics reader and military officer with intelligence connections would know better than to treat "really hoped" as good enough.

Edited by Spindriver on May 30th 2022 at 12:18:22 PM

My guess is Intelligence decided "he ded" but Max was less convinced for lack of a body.

(granted, said body might be hard to find in the desert if its made out of sand)

So we're just missing panels 2 and 6 for future plotlines - kinda funny that both 3 and 4 have shown up within one arc!

Defense of non-allied nations.

The villain's name is Darude?! Okay, this is damn-near obligatory at this point.

It's what they call him, since his name is unknown

I miss the days when that song called up memories of DDR rather than of LoL memes.

Edited by TwinBird on Jun 2nd 2022 at 1:09:35 PM

Embarrassing reveals

Oh, and new vote incentive up. Dang it, now I want a sundae. Obligatory mention that NSFW versions are available on the patreon.

Dabbler intercedes

Deus is the smartest himbo on the planet.

Seems he has developed a fetish for.... women who look like Maxima?

I don't think he counts as a himbo.