LtNOWIS posted:

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Wait, so you're saying the only reason people don't look down on the US is because we won?

A better example might be the Colonial European powers. They did a lot of bad stuff a 150 years ago too, but you don't hear anyone condemning present day nations for it. England honors its thousand+ year old monarchy despite the bad things it did in the past.

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QuentinGeorge posted:

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I'll be sure to inform the United States Democratic Party that they condone slavery. After all they use the "symbols" and "trappings" of the 19th century party, and have not disavowed that part of their history so clearly, according to Rogue77, they must be all guilty of it.

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Rouge77 posted:

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QuentinGeorge posted:

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Where is the crime? Please point it out, I don't see one.

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Mass murder.

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Rouge77 posted:

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QuentinGeorge posted:

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I'll be sure to inform the United States Democratic Party that they condone slavery. After all they use the "symbols" and "trappings" of the 19th century party, and have not disavowed that part of their history so clearly, according to Rogue77, they must be all guilty of it.

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Your comparison to Fel Empire isn't working well. To it to work, the Democratic Party leaders and party workers should go around dressed in white robes and hoods. That's what it means for Fel Empire to have stormtroopers and TIE's and it's own Order of Force users reminiscent of the Royal Guard and various Dark Side Adept groups of Palpatine's Empire.

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LtNOWIS posted:

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Yeah, killing someone for treason is defensible. Killing a few thousand people for treason is also ok.

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Excellence posted:

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Cartoony? I didn't see anything cartoony. It's a gunshot picture on a wall. Creative and new, and the staring can get away this time because there was a camera taking it.

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jfostrander01 posted:

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Surprisingly, I agree with Rouge 77 (which should make him recoil in horror) on some points and, not so surprisingly, disgree with him on others.

1) Thinking evil is nowhere near as bad as DOING evil. Thoughts are not the same as deeds. I contemplate doing evil quite a bit; it's called plotting. Here I think I'm agreeing with Rouge.

2) Did Roan Fel orchestrate the Massacre at Ossus? No. He gave orders. As Emperor, he expected to be obeyed. VEED sent the troops and the Sith led the massacre. Veed sent the troops at the Sith's insistence. Rouge and I are NOT in agreement.

3) The role of the Emperor was not absolute in this Empire. Better comparisons would be the English monarch (ala Queen Victoria as Empress of India) or Hirohito in WW2 with the Japanese generals calling the shots for the war. The High Moffs have a lot of power still. That's to be expected since this new Empire grew out of the IR. The emperor's will should NOT be expected to be absolute EXCEPT among the IK and even there, sometimes there are problems (as witness Antares Draco's rushing off against orders to save Sia). Does it make Roan Fel less powerful? Perhaps -- but it may make him more canny.

4) Continuity of government. The current German Republic is NOT in any way a continuation of Hitler's Germany and, I think, it is insulting to the Germans to say so. They not only have a different STYLE of government now but they have repudiated and apologized for the Third Reich many times over. (Something Japan has NOT done to the same degree with THEIR tole in WW2.) South Africa has done a commendable job of confronting ITS past. The United States still has not adequeately, to my mind, confronted what we have done to minorities, how we dealt with slavery and its repercussions or how we have treated the Native Americans.


5) This is a galaxy long long ago and far far away. To expect it, its institutions OR the people in it, to conform exactly to OUR social or moral codes is myopic. There are things that obviously are alike; we need to have a way to relate to it, after all. Imposing one's own moral code on another society on on another time creates all sorts of problems, even in this time and on our planet. Evil things have been done in the name of great good. One minor example -- in the 1920s, liquor was declared illegal in the US. Prohibition. Imposed by those who had a narrow view. By and large , it was ignored, which led to a disrespect for law. It also fed and helped create Organized Crime, a far greater evil than that which the reformers were tring to erase.

6) Does that mean that Roan Fel was justified in killing that whole ship? Taken as a given that everyone ON that ship knew what the mission was about (some want to argue that but don't argue it with the writer; the crew knew). Legal, moral -- those weren't the questions Roan Fel were concerned with, if indeed they would even come up in his society. He was sending a message. I am not saying he was right. Those who want to condemn him have every right to do so. So far as i'm concerned, there is no final answer as to whether or not Fel was justified -- there is YOUR answer. That was the intent in the story.

As a writer, I'm not much taken with characters who are all good or all bad. Maybe they're fun to play with in a single issue but, overall, I'm more interested in that gray area inbetween. That's where most of us live. I'm not a fan of absolutes.

Okay, I didn't agree with Rouge77 THAT much. We can all return to normal.

-- John

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