Okay dokay, I’m completely lost:
Please explain?
It’s all in reference to The Princess Bride.
It’s a skewering of an ethical incongruity in The Princess Bride.
Have you seen The Princess Bride?
EDIT: Triple simulpost!
Thanks. I though Westley sounded familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
2 minutes. You’re slipping, guys 
You missed a Princess Bride reference?
I have reported this thread and will expect your banning forthwith.
It’s not the first ref to PB or DPR in xkcd:
The mouse over says
Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3
which is pretty funny, considering.
Was it really in the story that the Dread Pirate Roberts actually killed people? I thought it was pretty well established at the end of the movie that the DPR was not a killer. I’m not even sure that the plot definiteively determined what the DPR did at all.
The book may have had more to say about it.
Wasn’t Westley the only one to not be killed from his crew?
Why is it a problem that Westley killed people? His motivation is true love, not revenge.
I think he “paid everyone off” and hired a new crew with Westley as DPR and the former DPR as first mate.
But when DPR raided Wesley’s ship originally (the ship that Westley signed on to in order to find his fortune), the pirates killed everyone but Westley, so that DPR is definitely a killer.
Because I’m such a fan of the Princess Bride, I had several people email me a link today… 
There’s no way he could’ve been the Dread Pirate Roberts long without killing people. If word leaked out that he’d gone soft, it’d be nothing but work, work, work.
He can’t afford to make exceptions. The Dread Pirate Roberts takes no prisoners.
There was of course that brilliant short story in Teemings where the hapless mariners would, upon siting the pirate Conan the Barbarian, throw all their valuables and jelly doughnuts into life boats, and escape with their lives while the pirate crew plundered their drifting possessions.
IIRC Goldman was having a wank at the mythical “Evil pirate” lore in that the standard plot point was that the pirates were reputed to be evil and never take prisoners, but then if that were the case, who started the rumors? How did anyone know which pirate was responsible? If nobody every survived, then you wouldn’t know you were being attacked by the fatal pirates until it was too late, you were going to die. Vs. other pirates that might just ransom you back, or threaten you a little for your goodies, etc.
The book IIRC makes the point more explicitly, to the effect that the Dread Pirate Roberts never killed anyone, even the first one, he just gave a good performance and had such a reputation that nobody wanted to risk crossing him, so it was better to surrender and give him what he wanted and be set free than to resist and be slaughtered. Even if the first Dread Pirate Roberts killed in the beginning, it was fairly well established that the ones that came after did not, they just rode his reputation. That was the point of the reputation, and thus passing on the moniker.
You know, that may be the incongruity. I don’t now recall what happened to rest of the people on his ship.
Of course, it may also have been a case where that ship resisted rather than surrendering, thus requiring said Dread Pirate Roberts to carry out the threats to therefore maintain the reputation.
The point is that Westley is not supposed to be evil, in fact he’s supposed to be heroic and noble. So it is incongruous for him to actually kill the victims of his piracy. That’s why he doesn’t kill Inigo or Fezzik. Of course, he kills Vizzini, but that’s okay because Vizzini is kinda evil.
That’s what the cartoon is poking jest at. He is being noble and heroic, even as a pirate he really wasn’t so much a bad guy as just an opportunist. Except for that whole “oh, no, they resisted, no I have to kill them to protect the franchise” thing.
I think I saw *The Princess Bride * maybe ten years ago but I have no recollection of the plot whatsoever. Even with the hint, the cartoon meant nothing to me.
Ed
So yeah it was a Princess Bride reference but was in no way funny. Maybe it just went over my head.