No need to get personal, now. It is vengeance and it is a cold way to deal with the possibility that one of the dragon’s relatives will try to get revenge, just as she tried to get revenge for her son. Eliminate all relatives and you eliminate that possibility.
Not so much. It’s not like familial relationships are the only relationships that exist. And it’s not like dragons are the only creatures who could be motivated by vengeance. There could still be plenty of people out to get V, now that she’s added dozens more to her kill count.
Nonetheless, that’s not the twist that I think will get V in the end. Take a gander at #633. The three tempters seem to imply that the splice would be hard to hold onto, but by no means state it explicitly. I’m thinking that they wouldn’t trade off power like what V just used without significant payment from her. So I think there one of two possibilities.
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The splice lasts a for quite a long period, leading to V spending equivalent long periods with each of the three fiends.
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The splice really doesn’t last a long time, meaning V’s time with each fiend will be relatively short. The catch is, the fiends have planned for this, and already have special surprises with far-reaching effects in store for when the splice wears off. This bargain was just the beginning.
Nevertheless, that is V’s intention and reason for using Familicide, besides just being an utter bastard.
Eighth panel in #639: “Had you simply attacked me, I would have left you dead. But you made the mistake of involving my family in the conflict. This leaves me with the task of ensuring that today’s events will never rise again to threaten them.”
That’s not mere vengeance, that’s eliminating the threat to V’s family.
–Whereas the more experienced roleplayer knows (and OOTS’s Belkar so effectively demonstrates) that it’s much more satisfying to cultivate party loyalty; thus forcing them to run interference when you indulge your evil alignment.
So if an elf kills a black dragon to steal his treasure, it’s an act of good because black dragons are evil.
And if the mother of the dead black dragon decides to kill the elf’s children, it’s proof that black dragons are evil because she’s killing somebody’s children.
But if the elf beats the black dragon and then kills the black dragon’s entire family, it’s an act of good because black dragons are evil.
But if a single black dragon somehow survived and decided to kill off every elf in the world, then a massacre that size would just be further proof of how evil black dragons are.
I’m pretty sure Burlew, at least, is aware of the irony of this double standard.
[hijack]Actually, he could have even dealt with the dragon in a non-lethal manner, but he disintegrated it just for expediency’s sake.[/hijack]
He was heading that direction anyway, probably since shortly before he Disintegrated Kubota for the sole purpose of avoiding a long trial which would disrupt his research into finding Haley, Roy and Belkar.
In the OOTS universe, it’s perfectly fine; that’s why the gods created goblins, after all.
ETA: Bosstone: Yes, that’s what V said, but many commenters on the OOTS forums simply don’t buy the justification, especially with V agreeing with the voices of the evil mages that the black dragon hadn’t suffered enough. I don’t think we know enough to say for sure his/her intent, and many argue that we don’t need to. I’m not sure whether I agree, tho’.
If Burlew had even the slightest hint of this whole three-MU-into-V stry arc when he was at comic strip 500 (Roy in heaven) he’s the greates writer in the history of the English language and we should “raise dead” Shakespeare (or Anne Hathaway, the original one) to give him blowjobs for all eternity
Treasure which the dragon always mined and refined itself, right?
I can pretty much guarantee that Burlew had something like this in mind for a long time, but planning plot points ahead of time and foreshadowing them does not qualify a person as the greatest writer. That’s a pretty basic skill…
His constant raising and subverting of expectations on the other hand definitely credit him as an entertaining writer.
Or treasure once carried in the packs of those who sought to kill a dragon just because it’s evil/just because it’s there.
:rolleyes:
What? Adventurers go kill dragons just because they’re there. Sure, dragons eat people and other things so they can live, too, but “you’ve heard of a huge dragon Way Over There and dozens have tried before you to kill him” is not an uncommon plot point. I’m not saying that I’m a charter member of the Black Dragons Are Just Misunderstood club, I’m saying that they killed a dragon just because it was more efficient to do so, and since then the revenge chain is ramping up in a big way.
V disintegrated a juvenile dragon that couldn’t possibly have amassed that horde because it was “simpler” to kill him than dominate him, V picked the path of making a deal with Pure Evil just because it would have been a blow to the ego to go the other route, and V let the soul of a damned necromancer pick the method of how to avoid this problem again. For someone who claims to be intelligent and looks upon his companions as having the intellect of housepets, s/he is soooooo bad at making decisions sometimes. V will be really lucky if Tiamat doesn’t take a very malevolent interest in making V’s life and afterlife a pure living hell, not to mention that of anyone who’s ever even looked at V.
How do metallic dragons amass their hoards, anyway?
Compound interest?
Pointe the first: The historically-traditional way of ending revenge chains was to murder everyone who cared enough to perpetuate it. V may well have just done this in one swoop.
He or she may well have stumbled into “Fuck! Epic necromancer alert! We need to permanently kill the sonofabitch before he or she does this again tomorrow!” and need to deal with people trying to kill him or her preventatively, but that’s not over what he’s done, it’s over what he might do.
Point the second: Said juvenile dragon was doing a wonderful job of nomming the party all on its own. Since it’s a reasonable assumption that the dragon wouldn’t have let the party wander off with the starmetal, they were pretty much left with no choice other than killing him. If you disagree with the landlocked-privateer model of adventuring, in which adventurers kill bad things and take their stuff, that’s fine and well, but V has been doing this for hundreds of strips at this point.
Point the third: The fiend’s alternative plan relied on a whole bunch of unknowns; that the imp would actually go along with the plan as intended, that the party would promptly raise V and not consider the head a fiendish trick, that Durkon hadn’t just used his scroll, that V’s master was promptly available, had Greater Teleport memorized, and would immediately leap into action. Any one failure in this link of items would give the dragon all the time she needed to torture and necromantically bind V’s family.
Plus, that plan was still taking fiendish advice and going along with fiendish cooperation. If those two acts are always bad ideas, the only good idea was letting the dragon do her thing.
Point the fourth: Hey, V used the resources available to him or her. I am reasonably sure that neither of the other two epic souls spliced into his had the ability to prevent any other member of the black dragon family from taking revenge. Plus, you know, he did kill off a whole bunch of evil creatures.
Point the fifth: Not only is V operating under a non-compete clause with Tiamat at the moment, clerics of the five-headed goddess seem to be in fairly short supply in this world, and gods seem to do most of their direct work through clerics. Then there’s the fact that there are a whole bunch of other gods who don’t much like Tiamat, and might well show up to defend V on general principle, or on the specific principle of “She’s weakened! Kill the goddess and take her stuff!”
Plus, there’s also the distinct possibility that a direct V/Tiamat confrontation would end with V punching a new hole in the Snarl’s prison. (This would also have the amusing secondary benefit of allowing himself to follow Tiamat into oblivion, thereby denying both the spliced souls and his own to the fiends.)
Yeah, but I can’t picture he had **FAMILICIDE ** in mind 100 strips ago.
My point was how you define evil. Too many D&D players act like good and evil are just like choosing which football team you cheer for. They’re both pretty much equivalent and you just pick a side.
But in reality being evil is doing evil things. And committing genocide is an evil thing. You don’t get to say “it’s okay for me to commit genocide because I’m good.” Good characters don’t commit genocide.
I think he probably did. This appears to be a pretty major plot point and Burlew has plotted out the overall storyline.
Burlew isn’t just winging this story. Look at the character of Miko as an example. She first appeared in strip 120 (the last strip of the first story arc). And Burlew has said he had already planned on how she would die, which didn’t happen until strip 464. So not only had Burlew planned on Miko’s fate three hundred strips in advance, he must have also planned out the entire fall of Azure City storyline at that point.