The point is that a good DM will give the party of Lawful or Good characters a compelling reason to kill the orcs, such as “…after years of keeping to themselves, the orcs are sacking a nearby village.” Whatever. It’s not hard to find something to truly give a LG character license to kill that goes a bit further into rationality than “they’ve evil therefore they deserve to die” which is just really stupid.
Dude. We’re past it. I understand.
Again, I have no problem with people who just like to play a hack-and-slash campaign, where paladins don’t fall for smiting everything that pings their evil-dar, and where you kill the orcs just because they’re orcs. What I have a problem with is people who complain about that being a feature of D&D, when they’re the ones who chose to make it that way to begin with. If you don’t want to play a game with a senseless alignment system, then don’t make the alignment system senseless.
Eh, no problemo 
Happens to the best of us!
Some day we’ll play together, and I’ll let you annihilate as many orcs as you want 
Hear, hear.
Yet.
Like I said, I can appreciate both kinds of gaming - I just don’t choose the (IMO) flawed D’nD system for the nuanced kind.
But of course - I was merely countering those absolutists who said that’s definitely not how the system works.
Yes, I thought I made that clear.
Fair enough. I still think man-eating monsters are a clear case, morally, though.
I notice no-one’s addressed my point about making similar assumptions about the fiends.
Morally dubious - I agree completely. However, V is Neutral - morally dubious for him is not the same as for a Good character. I can certainly see the case for expedience over forethought, there.
New update, forum down. I’m trying to figure out what the fiend’s friend’s jersey says. Looks like, “Duke” and “Ancovia”?
And yeah, I kinda figured the 3 souls were mostly there to provide power and knowledge, but couldn’t actually alter V’s actions. If they could, I don’t think they’d waste time trying to be subtle - they’d just take over.
Nice twist. But I don’t get the punchline.
I’m a huge nerd who hates sports but even I recognized the college mascots and know that there’s a big college basketball tournament going on right now.
March Madness, baby. Duke and Arizona. The fiend is flashing on his college days and following college basketball.
I think it’s a March Madness punchline. Duke Blue Devils and Arizona State Sun Devils.
I think that also tells us which one is Lee.
I realize it’s V saying it, but the way he says ‘every creature in your family’ really makes me think there are unexpected deaths that will come to light. They didn’t show his family yet, so I’m really hoping it isn’t his kids.
The alignment non-effect thing is pretty expected, considering what V already did to Kubota and why. Power drunkenness and an excuse to cut loose are pretty powerful things.
ETA: But considering both this and the previously mentioned Kubota incident, does that mean that V was a flavor of evil to begin with? Or not necessarily? After all, the exhaustion when (s)he Disintegrated Kubota probably had a similar “reduce inhibition” effect as this.
Detect Evil didn’t pick Vaarsuvius up before. Given that V tends to swing back and forth between all the alignment poles I always took him/her to be True Neutral.
Besides, the “goes both ways” joke works even better with an ambiguous gender.
(Obviously that alignment no longer holds. V’s taken the big step.)
Although Burlew could’ve been conveniently ignoring alignements to make a good joke, it seems that V was once some variant of good. Since unholy blight only sickens Good creatures.
An excellent point, though that was in the period when the strip was just D&D gags and before he worked out that he wanted to tell a plot. I blame Cerebus for that. 
Anyhow, I’m going to argue that anything before around strip 60 to be only loosely in continuity with the storyline.
I dunno, Durkon is the only one who looks sickened, and your cite says that Unholy Blight does half damage to neutral creatures. That could still be enough to temporarily incapacitate V.