Aligniment of V (from OOTS)

Wait, no i meant the elf who...actually thats pretty good

Now I started my article on racism in D&D, and I still haven’t gotten my computer back, but I realized that talking about racism is such a delicate issue in any context, so I’m going to take awhile to edit that one. And seeing as there is a thread on this on OOTS forum, I figured I might as well contribute. The alignment of everyone’s favorite elf of unknown gender, Vaarsuvius. Now for the rest of the article, I am calling her V, because I don’t want to spell that out a million times. And I will be referring to V as a girl, because I think she is female, just go with it. Oh and spoilers, so heads up now.

So throughout most of the comic, I’d peg V as neutral. She certainly isn’t evil*, as proven by Miko, and she helps the order do various good deeds, but she has always been ambitious and power-hungry, and as seen by the dirt farmer incident*, isn’t especially eager to help others, even if she isn’t a cruel or vindictive person. She can be rather petty however, assaulting and abusing Belkar*, which, through somewhat justified, is a little extreme. She also attempts to blow up (non fatally, but that’s D&D for you) Miko* and the horse seller*. So I’m guessing neutral, through good is still a possibility, as she does act guilty about conning people, even if they brought it upon themselves*.

But to cut to the chase, the thing everybody has been talking about, what is her Alignment currently after the Azure City debacle. Well, basically, I’m going to go with…Evil. I don’t know which one, but I imagine NE or LE, but Evil certainly. First*, the murder of the Lord Kubota. Killing a prisoner is, in D&D, always evil. It doesn’t matter if he was a sociopath and a murderer, killing for vengeance is evil. And the fact is, Kubota may be ruthlessly ambitious, but he isn’t a sociopath, he cared about his ninja until she betrayed him, he is just a ruthlessly ambition selfish man, we’ve seen many of those throughout history. More to the point through, he had surrendered, and it is wrong on so many levels to kill a prisoners. There is a very good reason why the UN forbids the shooting of POWs, and even disregarding real world ethics, murder is defined as evil, the fact your killing an evil person does not make it any less evil. Now, people say in defense of V that killing an unarmed prisoner is justified because he was a threat, thus making it just normal D&D killing opposed to murder. The thing is, the idea of threat is determined by if they are a direct threat. If Kubota had drawn a knife on Elan, or tried to flee, then killing him, while heavy handed, would be justified. But Kubota was a political threat, boasting that he could get out of his trial. The thing is, people assume that Kubota is 100% right. He also predicted he would be able to kill Hinjo and take over the fleet, and was wrong about that. We have no way of knowing what Hinjo would have done. Hinjo is, shall we say, far smarter than Elan, and might have found a more politically suitable solution to the problem. Or Kubota could have lost the trial, it wasn’t certain. It’s like killing every criminal who bragged they could escape the US justice system, sure some do slip through, but a lot of them get caught. To make matters worst, V didn’t even do it because she thought Kubota would escape, she murdered him because it would be a hassle to go through a second trial. And then hinted she would kill Elan if he snitched but changed her mind. But we have evil action, and not even the humility of a decent intention.

Then we have the fiend incident.* Again, evil. Now, in D&D, any sort of contact with fiends is evil, summoning a fiendish hamster to give treats to orphans is still evil. Now, V committed not one, but three evil acts here

1) She asked the imp to summon the fiends to make a deal. Now, this one isn’t really that evil, she was desperate and didn’t actually summon them so much as let them know that she was willing to deal, but she did still get an imp to try to get her an evil deal.

2) Her accepting the deal, even if it was a normal deal, is quite evil, just by accepting a deal with fiends is an evil act in itself. However, the other thing about this through, her back wasn’t totally against a wall. One of the friends offered a legitimate solution to her problem, one that wasn’t evil and effective. But V took their deal anyways, most because of ego.

3) Finally, knowing that there was another solution, she took the deal knowing that her soul would be used by the three fiends for evil purposes, and that is willing allow her own power to aid the forces of evil. And as she is going to grow more powerful, she will be stronger in aiding the forces of evil. What’s more, she took the deal knowing that the three fiends would try to unit the evil outsider races as a group, to fight the forces of good, something that nobody wants. And it is noteworthy, when her mate asked if she could just end the spell early so her soul would not be in there power as long, but she kept it up none the less, because she was high off the power.

Finally, the most infamous evil deed is Familicide, killing every creature related to the dragon that tired to kill her family, effectively wiping out ¼ of all black dragons in the world. Now this is the one that bugs me the most when people defend this action as not being evil, saying that it was good cause V killed a lot of evil creatures. Here is the thing, killing evil creatures isn’t a good act. Killing in D&D is never a good act, it is at best neutral, and that’s when it’s in self defense. Now, I know that Black Dragons in D&D are “Always Evil” in alignment, but first off, nobody actually follows that rule, cause t doesn’t make sense (dragons aren’t evil outsiders nor spiritual creatures why are they always evil?), Forgotten Realms doesn’t follow it, Ebberon doesn’t follow it, I don’t even know if Dragonlance follows it. But in OOTS, maybe they do follow the always evil description, the thing is, that doesn’t justify murdering them. They don’t have the evil outsider subtype like Demons and Devils, so they aren’t evil due to their make up (killing Demons and Devils is always justified as they are literal embodiments of evil), and so they are not hundred percent evil. The Book of Exalted Deeds notes that they are redeemable, even if it is difficult. And being evil isn’t a crime; a paladin who walks through town killing anyone who has the evil alignment is still evil, because that is murder. Killing a whole species, including babies, that’s genocide. I mean, literally murdering ¼ of a race is by definition genocide. And even if you accepted every dragon was hundred percent, irredeemably evil, half dragons are murdered too, as shown in the comic. Half Dragon’s alignments are more viable, and thus you can have as many good half dragons as evil and neutral, and even the evil ones can be redeemed. Thus that is murder. Now some people have said killing 500 evil dragons for 4 good half dragons is a good deal, but the thing is, good doesn’t work on that utilitarian level. Murder is murder, each good/neutral dragon or half dragon that died is a separate murder. In fact, every single victim of that spell is a separate murder, it isn’t a single evil action, and every single death is a separate stain on her alignment.

Finally, and I know this pales in comparison to the rest, she didn’t do it for any reason other than sadism. Raising the dead dragon simply to force it watch the death of its family, that’s just sadistic. Even if V just wanted to protect her family from vendettas (which is silly, cause Tiamat isn’t going to like the death of her children), she didn’t need to raise the dragon for it. And murdering an enemies family to protect yourself from reprisals has been an excuse for murder and infanticide throughout history (Rome, I’m looking at you), that isn’t a justification.

In short V is, of this writing (comic 667), is evil. If this will change remains to be seen (I just wish somebody could link this).

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