Grrl Power #1015 – Shock and brimstone
Yeah, everyone called it. Who else would have been calling Tom?
Deus enjoys stacking the deck. Also counting the cards, bribing the dealer, and telling the guy across the table that his mom gives great blow-jobs, and also replacing his girlfriend who is sitting next to him with a shapeshifting double agent who is blinking the guy’s cards in morse code.
He loves competition, because he’s very good at cheating winning.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: Getting Proofed!
You know what’s taking so long? Fucking hyphens. Every paragraph I type seems to have six pairs of words that supposedly require hyphenation. Or should that be “Every-paragraph I type seems to have six-pairs of words that supposedly-require-hyphenation.” I don’t know. I just don’t get it. The rule seems to be that if there’s a adjective that modifies another adjective in front of a noun, then you use a hyphen, like the difference between “the loud, red car” and “the loud-red car” is one describes a car that is both loud and red, and the other describes a car that is very bright red, but honestly, if that’s what you’re trying to convey, you probably need to reword your sentence. That stuff I kind of get, but apparently all the other stuff (other-stuff?) is just brute force memorization. (brute-force?) Like ill-conceived, or silver-tongued or build-up. Is the sentence “There was a build up of leaves in the gutter.” so fucking hard to parse? Is anyone going to read that sentence and think someone built an “up” out of leaves? And “silver-tongued devil.” Without the hyphen, yeah, maybe it’s possible someone might read that phrase and think it’s about a devil which is silver, and has recently been tongued, which probably says more about the reader than the structure of the sentence. It just-assume there’s a cabal-of English-Professors sitting-around in a wood-paneled-room coming-up with a-bunch of extra-rules to torture-us with-.
Anyway. I’m on my last set of notes, about halfway through the book, and I may as well incorporate all this stuff so there are a few technical errors as possible. Still, I think it’s crazy that I’m on my last set of corrections, and only about 1/5th of the stuff this proofer caught had already been corrected by the other five. I guess everyone just has different things they notice. Hopefully the combination of proofers means I will have covered all the bases, but I can’t shake the suspicion the first final draft of the book will still be roughly 17% typo. I guess we’ll see.
Also I evidently messed up every possible use of laying/lying down. Pretty sure I’ve reversed them when speaking ever since I learned the words.
January’s vote incentive is titled “The Origin of The Might Halo.” Hopefully the reason is evident.
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Honestly, I think the biggest question should be: how would everyone feel if the comic was all about Deus?
I don’t mean “let’s rename it DeusPower.” I mean, imagine if this entire comic were depicting Deus’ point of view, made him the protagonist. Would he still seem like the villain?
Hell, look at Maxima. She served overseas in Afghanistan; how many war crimes did she witness? What did she do in response to the CIA torture program? When troops started reporting on the child sex slaves of Afghani warlords, what was her reaction? Did those things even happen in her world, or did she (and others) prevent them?
How much of our support/condemnation of these characters is dependent on the points of view being presented?
Honestly, he does not seem like much of a villain as portrayed, period.
If anything, he is less of a villain than your average tech billionaire irl…
To make my stand on the matter clear however, no I don’t consider Maxima a villain by association. That’s a silly idea.
at most a tech billionare irl will not pay their employes and force them to pee on bottles which is extremly shitty yeah but they dont go around starting wars and literaly hiring the forces of hell to do their bidding
Deus’ employees seem happier than those of the average tech billionaire. He’s actively trying to build a middle class, rather than destroy it.
Starting wars with despots to free their people sounds pretty selfless, even if he expects to gain economically from it in the long run. The people will still be better off.
What’s wrong with employing the forces of hell? I think you’re bringing a lot of baggage into it that doesn’t necessarily apply in the setting.
“Starting wars with despots to free their people sounds pretty selfless, even if he expects to gain economically from it in the long run. The people will still be better off.”
I completely agree. Not only are his goals noble, but the demon army doesnt even seem to be KILLING the enemies – just disabling their weaponry and allowing them to surrender.
“What’s wrong with employing the forces of hell? I think you’re bringing a lot of baggage into it that doesn’t necessarily apply in the setting.”
Not to mention ARCHON has a demon in their employ as well.
Its not that he expects to gain from his activities, its that he WILL gain from them. He understands that a healthy middle class with a well developed infrastructure will make him infinitely more money than being a tyrant ever would, and happy people are people that wont turn on him, and will keep making him money.
Hes not at all selfless in any possible meaning of the word. Hes ultimately selfish, but smart enough to realize the true road to long term wealth, and that plan just so happens to include appearing selfless in his works.
Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.
(At least, intelligent altruism. A more precise formulation would be “as the accuracy and horizon of long-term planning increases, self-interest and altruism become indistinguishable,” but that isn’t quite as snappy.)
“Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.”
complete and utter trash, spoken only but fools with no understanding of anything whatsoever.
And you’d be the expert in that field, I’m sure.
no but there are actually people that do study things like this and none of them agree with this statement.
the only fools that vomit up this none sense objectionist/ libertarian nutjob to justify their insanity
A reference rather than contempt would add considerably to the credibility of your statement.
I think it might be more accurate to say that enlightened self-interest is SOMETIMES indistinguishable from altruism.
@ Peter Wone
i really do hope you see this but we’ve moved beyond were I can respond directly to you.
let me make this abundantly clear the concept, not just the terminology the very concept, of “enlightened self-interest” does not exist in the academic world. the ONLY place it exists is the vapid ramblings of objectivist “intellectuals” like Ann rand. there was no logical or study that went into is existence it is simply a work of nonsense used by people to white wash they selfish beliefs.
even if you want to break it down etymologically the concept is at best an oxymoron. to be “enlightened” one must understand you do not matter and so self interests are meaningless.
the only way “enlightened self-interest” could ever seem like altruism is if the viewer blinds themselves to the whole of reality and only looks at the PR
I kind of feel like objectivists and libertarians aren’t sufficiently advanced self interest. They are just garden variety selfish. They specifically don’t see the benefits of things like paying good wages to everyone, providing strong safety nets, ensuring health care for everyone. That’s kind of the point to me. They would be better off if they did these things, but they don’t because they can’t look past the short sighted self interest for the long term benefits.
Ask yourself this, Dex: Which would you rather be (assuming you have zero morals whatsoever for this thought exercise): A dictator in a country with no running water, no electricity who keeps his subjects terrorized, or a dictator in a country with running water, infrastructure, internet, prosperity, and wealth generation? In both cases, you’re a dictator, but in the second one, you have ready access to flush toilets, electric lights, running water, and you don’t have to see people starving to death on the streets outside among the corpses when you look out your window.
and more important, you don’t have to SMELL IT.
Now, just guess which kind of dictator gets UN ‘peacekeepers’ and foreign insurgencies dropped on their doorstep? (here’s a hint: Josef Tito died in his bed. Franco died in HIS bed, both of old age, both in a business where the life expectancy isn’t exactly fantastic.)
Improving the general welfare of your subjects is generally a good thing for keeping yourself alive to live a long life, and modern comforts and conveniences make that long life a hell of a lot nicer to experience.
Thus, self-interest, when sufficiently enlightened, is materially not much different from Altruism, because both pay back dividends in the long term beyond a ‘warm feeling inside’.
On the flip side, ignorant Altruism has led to every horror that ignorant self-interest has only with the added caveat that the war criminal in question slept well knowing he was ‘doing the right thing’.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” C.S. Lewis
In this context, Deus is the robber baron; He’s happy enough to have the people under him happy, because it benefits him, and maybe a bit past that, but he’s expressly in it for his own good. Even if he killed a thousand dictators for that little girl, he’d be doing it ultimately for himself, the happiness he got from pleasing her.
He’s not out to improve their lives whether they like it or not. Maybe whether their current oppressors like it or not, because he means to displace them and be less stupidly oppressive.
Interesting set of questions. Equally interesting Nicolae Ceaușescu essentially answered “Yes” to “A dictator in a country with no running water, no electricity who keeps his subjects terrorized”. Remember he had a fake river built overtop to hide a polluted river. His security services kept sample pages from every typewriter in the country. That allowed them to track any typed critique of the government to a specific typewriter.
So you’re saying that altruistic people are stupid? That altruism is always suboptimal? It would always be better in the long run to be selfish?
What you’re reading in “Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.” is a justification for selfishness, but I think the intention was clearly that a sufficiently enlightened individual would realize that altruism would ultimately serve their own interests better than pursuing their interests at the expense of others.
Selfishness may be faster, but the returns on altruism are better, and you have people fighting for you, instead of against you.
Assuming you’re referring to Indinge, Sr., I’m not sure that could really be counted as a war.
Thoth might be a slave owner but might object to being called a force of hell.
At most they’ll do shitty business practices? LoL. They’re actively performing psych experiments along the lines of the Milligram nonsense and publishing it!
He just wants unlimited power and will use any means, fair or foul, to get it. Sounds like a goddam villain to me
So the powerful are villains, no matter how they use their power, or to what ends.
What exactly is ‘foul’ about his means here? He employed an army to help him to fight an enemy army of a well-known corrupt government, and made sure that during this conflict, as few people died as possible despite how his overwhelming force could have simply killed the entire Mozambique army rather than letting them surrender and just destroying their vehicles and weapons.
The United States also has used powerful beings in war, including MAXIMA, who already has bragged that she was used to kill enemy supers in places like Afghanistan. Deus is not villainous.
I mean, he did straight up murder the sitting king of a country for the sole purpose of taking over said country. He was willing to strike a deal with an evil tyrant to make money. The fact that murdering the king and creating a new economy has benefited the common folk, does not change the fact that he is a selfish villian, hes just smart enough to look like a good guy
Oh good. I can take apart each of these statements.
“I mean, he did straight up murder the sitting king of a country”
He did not ‘straight up murder’ the sitting king of Galytin, the warlord formerly known as General Indigne. General Indigne was about to order his men to throw Deus OFF THE ROOF OF HIS PALACE because Deus said ‘If I gave you a million dollars, I would be surprised if even $1000 went to your people.’ Because Deus was calling him out for being a corrupt despot who does not actually care about his people. Which Indigne did not. Indigne was a monster, much like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot. And even then, Deus’s first option was to try to reason with and work with him in a way that would have made Indigne rich. All Indigne had to do was not continue to be a monster to his own people and let Deus help Galytin. Also not try to murder Deus. Which Indigne did try to do. That was the bad move on the part of Indigne.
If I order my guards to throw you off the roof of a building, in order to murder you, and you have bodyguards that prevent that and instead kill me…. guess what… you did not commit murder. You acted in self-defense.
“for the sole purpose of taking over said country”
That was not the sole purpose for Indigne dying. As I said before, the reason he died was Indigne tried to kill Deus first. If he had just agreed to let Deus help his people by investing BILLIONS of dollars in Galytin’s future for infrastructure which would go DIRECTLY to his people’s wellbeing, and… yknow… not order his guards to MURDER Deus because Deus hurt the warlord’s feelings by calling him out on being a tyrant who embezzles money… then Indigne would be where his son, the Prince, currently is. In charge of Galytin’s politics, with Deus as as the czar of industry, which Deus would DESERVE to be since he’s the one who invested billions of his own wealth into the nation.
Also yknow… the Prince did not continue to try to murder Deus. And never tortured men, women, and children of his own homeland unlike his father, the murderous tyrannnical warlord, General-turned-King Indigne.
“He was willing to strike a deal with an evil tyrant to make money.”
Yes, for the good of the innocent people of Galytin, Deus was willing to make a deal with an evil tyrant, rather than going as a first option to just killing the aforementioned evil tyrant. Doesnt seem to put Deus in a very bad light. He was trying to shield the evil tyrant’s own people from the evil tyrant’s…. evil tyranny. Or at the very least, make their lives not suck horribly. The people of Galytin seem to appreciate this greatly, and Deus seems to appreciate them for reasons MORE than just money, shown from how he treasures a pre-teen child’s ash tray that she made for him to thank him for getting rid of the evil tyrant who would systematically murder people like her and her family.
Yeah, does not really put Deus in a bad light or look like a villain, does it?
“The fact that murdering the king”
Didn’t murder – self-defense.
“and creating a new economy has benefited the common folk,”
This is literally the opposite of villainy. He did not strip mine the nation. He is actively trying to create a burgeoning middle class in Galytin, which is something that does NOT benefit him except for in the VERY long run. There were so many other things he could have done to make a lot more money, a LOT faster, but which would have been very evil. Things that other nations and people HAVE done, most of whom you would not think of as villains. And Deus puts those people to shame by being absolutely VIRTUOUS in his goals. The fact that ONE of those goals involves him making a LOT of money does not remotely remove the fact that most of the other goals benefit people who were downtrodden and victimized.
If I make a business with the goal of helping victims of child abuse, and that business winds up becoming so huge that I also get very rich as a result, my success should in NO WAY erase the good works I’ve done.
If I was a criminal attorney and defend a person who’s accused of a crime they did not commit in a very media-popularized case, and I wind up making a lot of money as a result because then law firms all want to hire me, even if I did the initial case pro bono, why would you think I’m evil just because I wound up making money? The person who’s life I defended would not think I’m evil. His or her family would not think I’m evil. Anyone who discovered he or she was NOT guilty in the first place would not think I’m evil. Being successful and being able to make money does not make you evil.
“does not change the fact that he is a selfish villian,”
He is not selfish. He is greedy. But his greed has limits, in that he also wants OTHER people to benefit right along with him. That’s the OPPOSITE of selfishness. That’s graciousness. He wants to have scenarios where both sides win, as long as they go along with his plans, which seem to always wind up being REALLY GOOD PLANS that benefit EVERYONE involved. The only ones who do not benefit tend to be the people who oppose and try to fight him, who seem to ALWAYS be really bad people who are the ACTUAL selfish villains.
” hes just smart enough to look like a good guy”
The best way to be smart enough to look like a good guy is to… actually do things which make you a good guy. His plans which benefit millions of innocent people are not ‘fake.’ There’s no potemkin villages in Galytin. They’re real people (as far as the grrlpower universe is concerned) who are REALLY benefitting from Deus’s good works.
All praise Deus amen.
The problem is Deus owns all the infrastructure. There are no public works, and the people have no rights protecting their access to education or healthcare or clean water. Even the military is overwhelmingly comprised of Deus’ allies and mercenaries. Yes, the people have better lives now then they did under the previous despot, but there is nothing they have that Deus cannot take away, so can you even say they have it?
The man has successfully groomed a nation into a dependant relationship with him…
“The problem is Deus owns all the infrastructure.”
You mean the infrastructure which he paid for, designed, and was responsible for building? Or do you mean the people who work in the infrastructure, whom he is responsible for the seed money which wound up paying their salaries? Or do you mean the schools which he is responsible for having been built so they can be in occupations that they never could have dreamt of being in before he invested in them?
“There are no public works,”
Because the ‘public works’ were managed by a murderous dictator that never bothered to build any. Deus has planted the seeds by which they will EVENTUALLY be able to have public works. It does not spring up out of nowhere.
“people have no rights protecting their access to education or healthcare or clean water.”
Do you mean the education, healthcare and clean water which they had no part in creating themselves, which were created entirely from the multi-billion dollar investment that Deus invested into their nation?
They are being given education, clean water, and health care for which they can, if they wish, one day build their OWN industries as well. So I’m not sure what you’re suggesting – that no one should be grateful that Deus spent billions to make millions of people’s lives better and give them, their children, and their children’s children worthwhile lives and futures that are NOT filled with pain, suffering, and death? Just because he also wants to make a profit from his EXTREMELY expensive investment in people?
“there is nothing they have that Deus cannot take away, so can you even say they have it?”
They could, and I’m just spitballing, use the education he’s providing them on HIS DIME, the fresh water that he’s provided, the health care that he’s provided, etc… to build their OWN infrastructure if they wish. But instead, since Deus is actually INCREDIBLY loyal to his followers and employees, maybe they actually trust him to not screw them over.
Any employer/employee relationship does require this type of trust to work. The employer must trust the employees to do the work they are paid to do, so that the employer’s investment actually may make a return. The employees must trust that the employer will not screw them over. If the employer does not trust the employees, they do not have to hire them. They can fire the employees that are not trusted to do the job.
If the employees do not trust the employer to not screw them over, they can always leave.
Which, thanks to Deus, they also now have that option. The option to leave, if they want. Which they did NOT have before. They had no options before. Now they do.
“there is nothing they have that Deus cannot take away, so can you even say they have it?”
They have choice. They have the freedom of not being subjected to an evil, murderous warlord who will torture and kill them and their loved ones. Unless someone figures a way to resurrect Indigne and return him to power. And also figures a way to remove the education, skills, and taste of freedom and hope for their future and their children’s and grandchildren’s future that they’ve been given.
“The man has successfully groomed a nation into a dependant relationship with him…”
Again, where has Deus removed their ability to leave if they so wish? I just feel that it’s odd to say that someone who gives a person a job has ‘made them dependent.’ As if they have no free will. As if they don’t stay out of choice, rather than because ‘they have to.’ It’s not like Deus OWED them employment and everything else he’s given them. Which he doesn’t. He did so because they were downtrodden and NEEDED someone better to lead them out of a horrific situation. And yes, he also wanted to make a profit out of it. But he could have made profits in much, much, much easier ways if he wasn’t such a savior of the common man and paragon of humanity. Bless that perfect man of the people.
All praise Deus amen.
Why would they build their own infrastructure, and where would they build it? Do you really expect them to build their own parallel electricity, water, roads, communications, etc. when they have access to the ones Deus has built and provided? He has improved their lives, but he’s also made them into perpetual children. They may theoretically be free to do otherwise, but it’s so ridiculously economically inefficient that only the most ardent devotee of freedom would voluntarily turn away.
And that’s entirely the point. No matter how free the people are on paper, they will not do anything so long as he does not wish it. If you control enough of a person’s environment, you can control most people without force or coercion, just by arranging things so that the choice that benefits you is by far the easiest for them to make, and choices that don’t benefit you are very difficult. Most people will choose the easy way.
“Why would they build their own infrastructure, and where would they build it? Do you really expect them to build their own parallel electricity, water, roads, communications, etc. when they have access to the ones Deus has built and provided?”
If they don’t want to be beholden to Deus for his property, they can build their own. That’s all I’m saying. I didnt say they HAVE to. Like you said, Deus has built and provided this stuff for them. They can be grateful for it and use it, they can be ungrateful and not use it and use the free education and skill training that Deus has provided to build their own, the prince could do the same like a good ruler might, the people can leave with their skills to go elsewhere that they might think is better, although Galytin is looking like the best place in Africa because of Deus, etc. They have choice. That’s all I’m saying about that.
“They may theoretically be free to do otherwise,”
Not theoretically free. Actually free. They can ACTUALLY leave. They can ACTUALLY become entrepreneurs themselves. They can ACTUALLY be ungrateful to Deus if they want. They choose not to because they’re not being massive jerks and recognizing a person who actually helped them when no one else would.
“but it’s so ridiculously economically inefficient”
They can choose to be economically inefficient.
“that only the most ardent devotee of freedom would voluntarily turn away.”
Working for Deus still can make them a devotee of freedom. Deus is providing free education and skills. What better tool for giving oneself freedom is there?
“you can control most people without force or coercion”
That’s not control. That’s persuading people to make their own choices, by making the choice to do what you want the BEST choice. Why do you work? Because you’re forced to work? No. Because you have a choice to work. Could you start your own business if you wanted to? Yes. Could you do nothing and be a shiftless ward of the state, getting state benefits and being a general drain on society? Sure. Could you decide to go out in to the woods and live off the land while living in a van down by the river? Sure.
Don’t blame the person providing you the best choice if you go for the job that lets you pay for a nice home and quality food.
“Most people will choose the easy way.”
What you are describing is LITERALLY not ‘controlling people.’ You’re admitting that they are CHOOSING this, of their own free will, because Deus is giving them the absolute best option available from a plethora of choices that they now have, which they did not have ANY of before. He even gave them, for free, the abilities and skills to be able to make these choices, by providing free education and getting rid of the person who was murdering and torturing them, and making a deal with a new ruler who… does not murder and torture them and does not WANT to.
If you can reliably manipulate other people so that they do what you want them to do, then you control them, regardless of their illusion of freedom. Adding more levels of indirection doesn’t change that fact, doesn’t make it any less coercive.
Even a slave can choose to defy their master. They can choose to suffer the consequences, choose to face death rather than follow orders. If you define freedom as having choice, then everyone is free.
Pander said:
> Do you mean the education, healthcare and clean water which they had no part in creating themselves, which were created entirely from the multi-billion dollar investment that Deus invested into their nation?
I generally agree with you that Deus is a moral man (in the utilitarian consequentialist sense) and is acting to the benefit of Galtyn from enlightened self-interest, but let’s not go too far. He didn’t build all the infrastructure with his own two hands, he paid to have it built. Most of the labor was undoubtedly done by the locals, probably with some foreign-born engineering experts and construction foremen that he flew in from overseas.
“He didn’t build all the infrastructure with his own two hands, he paid to have it built.”
True, you magnificent fellow supporter of Deus (all praise Deus amen), but like David Xanatos or Lex Luthor (the only thing Deus really has in common with Luthor other than being wealthy), Deus is extremely intelligent in more than just business and seems to have technical expertise as well. He understands how the technology he pays for WORKS. And you can see in the flashback where he got the ashtray that he seems to be actively involved in Galytin’s infrastructure being built. He’s a hands-on kind of guy where Galytin is concerned. Meeting with the people actually doing the work, getting updates, possibly directing them on what to do in a more general sense, etc.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-413-green-herring/
(first panel)
“Most of the labor was undoubtedly done by the locals, probably with some foreign-born engineering experts and construction foremen that he flew in from overseas.”
I agree with you again. And I think that shows even more how Deus is a moral man. It’s showing the old proverb of “Feed a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.” He is teaching the locals how to fish. Not just giving them a fish. :) Although for certain things which might be too complicated for them to do in the immediate present, he might import a few fish to help set things up. :)
So it only counts if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps and build their own infrastructure?
no it only matters when its done in a way that treats them as equals and not as a tool to subjugate them.
What evidence do you have that it *wasn’t* done in a way that treats them as equals?
I am fairly certain that increasing the amount of FREE SCHOOLS in Galytin from 19 to 288 (see the last panel) is a way to promote more equality… not as subjugation. The uneducated have fewer options than the educated. For example… LITERACY.
@Eaglejarl
every word out of Deus’s mouth
@ pander
ever post you make is filled with disingenuous arguments, logical fallacies, outright lies and every tactic professional troll farms teach its workers. at best you just like causing strife at worst you’re a sycophantic fascists cheerleader.
either way i suggest you seek medical treatment
“ever post you make is filled with disingenuous arguments,”
Show one.
” logical fallacies”
Show one.
“outright lies”
Show one time I’ve ever lied. My arguments are so annoying to you specifically because they’re NOT lies.
“every tactic professional troll farms teach its workers”
I think you’re taking an internet forum too seriously if you think my support for a well-written fictional character who is definitely not a villain is trolling. Everything you’re writing right now is an ad hominem attack because you can’t think of any arguments that beat mine.
“at best you just like causing strife ”
I like pointing out that Deus is portrayed as a good person because he’s done good things and not evil things. Not sure how that’s ‘strife.’ You’re the one who seems to have been defending a king who murdered and tortured men, women, and children while abusing his entire nation, which he only got by a forcible military coup from Zaire during a civil war so Zaire did not even notice it. You’re not exactly on the side of angels.
“at worst you’re a sycophantic fascists cheerleader.”
1) Deus is not a fascist. Nothing he’s done has been fascistic.
2) I am not a sycophant. I am not trying to gain any sort of advantage by my support of Deus. Deus is not a real person. I’m also not a fan of Deus in an attempt to butter up DaveB. I make critiques all the time. But Deus happens to be a fantastically written character who does good and morally positive things, even when he’s using villain tropes in a very genre-savvy way. I don’t think that you understand the definition of several words that you use because you’re just trying to throw insults instead of argue intelligently and rationally.
“either way i suggest you seek medical treatment”
Either way? You didn’t give a choice of ways. You just made a bunch of insults, all the same type of insult. And what medical treatment would I need to seek by pointing out something verifiably true, since I frequently post links pointing out what I’m referring to. Without insulting people, mind you.
Don’t hate just because you’re not making a good argument.
In real life infrastructure is owned by the state or a corporation. Listed corporations universally behave like supervillains. Each is a legal fiction of a person utterly without compassion, which proxies the profit seeking of the shareholders.
Deus at least seems competent and efficient, something that cannot be said of most states or corporations.
For the purposes of this discussion (DexDraco) “enlightened self-interest” should be taken to mean aware ness that no man is an island, entire unto himself, and that our own prosperity depends on the prosperity of the community that performs the myriad support activities we don’t do personally. Being seen to behave like this defuses opposition and often engages grassroots support. I don’t even know the name of the person who carts my garbage away but I’d really like him to keep doing it. By proxy I want the guy who maintains his truck to keep doing that. And so on to the rubber growers and metal workers and iron and coal miners who make the truck and its spares. He’s figured out that setting up so everyone who supports him wins is a fast and bloodless way to take over the world. I knew some of the original Microsoft millionaires and I can assure you they don’t mind that Gates became even richer than them.
Dude, stop denying reality. The king repeatedly told deus to leave, deus ordered his men to “abdicate the king” and *then* the king *almost* ordered his men to throw him out, which he couldn’t, because by that time deus’ henchmen had already abdicated the king. Get you head out of your ass and stop trying to see how much bullshit you can spew
“Dude, stop denying reality.”
Dude, stop denying the glory that is Deus, all praise Deus amen.
“The king repeatedly told deus to leave,”
After Deus said he would not be cutting him a check because he would never spend it on his people. Which made Indinge want to kill him if he did not immediately leave, and his guards guns raised at him. BEFORE there Deus had done ANYTHING.
“deus ordered his men to “abdicate the king””
Abdicate means renounce one’s throne. In other words “Convince him to renounce the throne for the good of his people, and his son can take over who does NOT commit atrocities on them like this guy does.”
The king’s immediate response was to order him thrown off the roof. At which point, Deus was in peril for his life. Or would be had he not had his bodyguards like Cthilla and Vale and Vekter.
“because by that time deus’ henchmen had already abdicated the king”
I really don’t think you know what abdicate means.
“Get you head out of your ass”
Well you are just a fountain of good debating tactics arent you.
“stop trying to see how much bullshit you can spew”
Stop trying to see how much ignorance you can put up about denying Deus’s good and moral works for the downtrodden, and how he’s never actually done ANYTHING evil, all praise Deus amen.
I feel like you’re really going out of your way to defend a man is described in the comic as one who tortured men, women, and children while their friends and extended family are forced to watch. It seems like an odd team for you to be defending, since I highly doubt you’re normally a fan of child torture or death squads murdering innocent civilians.
You’re not, are you?
Again, I’m a Deus supporter overall, but let’s be clear that Deus started the murdering: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-389-interview-to-a-kill/
The sequence went:
Deus: I want to build infrastructure and make you rich.
Indigne: I don’t trust you. If you want to donate to my war effort then we can talk infrastructure later. If not, get out.
Deus: Nope, not donating to you. You’re corrupt.
Indigne: You promise the impossible, then insult me? Get out before I have you shot!
Deus: Cthillia, abdicate the king.
Cthilia: [fades into visibility, kills the king]
Guards: Your majesty! [raise guns]
Deus security force: [fades into visibility, disarms the guards]
So if he shouldn’t have killed him, or tried to make a deal with him, what should he have done? Just let him continue to oppress his people?
Torabi, I just want to say that even when we have argued on opposite sites in the past, I always liked you (plus you usually make rather well-thought out posts which don’t involve name-calling, and that I appreciate hugely).
And now here we are, both on the same side of the argument. :) I love this. I get to argue on behalf of what you’re saying. ON THE SIDE OF DEUS! :)
As the saying goes, “For evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing.”
And Deus, being a good man, will not stand aside and do nothing while evil men accomplish their purpose of torturing, killing, impoverishing and enslaving the downtrodden masses. Nay, he wants a bright tomorrow for them!
*thankful nod to Deus, that magnificent man he is* All praise Deus, amen.
In addition to everything Pander said, which I agree with, I note that whether or not Deus is a villain depends entirely on your moral framework. If you’re a deontologist then you might claim that there is a rule saying “do not kill under any circumstances”, in which case Deus is a villain…and so is everyone who has ever killed in self-defense or defense of their nation, so that’s probably too broad a brush. If you’re a virtue ethicist and want to say “humility is a virtue and therefore the desire for power is morally wrong”, then you’re condemning most of the human race.
Personally, I’m a utilitarian consequentialist. I judge the morality of an action by its outcomes — specifically, by how it enhances or detracts from human flourishing. Under this definition it is indisputable that Deus is a moral man. His actions have led to vastly greater human flourishing in the form of higher standards of living for nearly everyone he has interacted with in Galtyn and its surroundings.
Really? Selling evil artifacts to whoever pays him enough benefits people? Collaborating with multiple factions wanting to conquer the planet, one being very open about wanting to enslave and subjugate humanity? That benefits people?
TempoDiValse said:
> Really? [Deus s]elling evil artifacts to whoever pays him enough benefits people?
First, ‘evil’ artifacts? We know that there’s a knife that will rebuild your body and can be recharged “at the cost of 99 lives”, but it never said those lives had to be sapient. Go to any slaughterhouse and use the knife to kill 99 cows instead of using a boltgun — boom, bob’s your uncle. Unless you want to argue that the meat industry is immoral, in which case I assume you’re a vegan? The other mentioned artifacts consist of:
1. Two that we know nothing about except their names (Lazarus Scalpel, Big Book of Vampires) so have no reason to believe they are evil.
2. The Regenator, which can be used to bring people back from the dead (Cooter) and it can merge two beings together (Wyrmil and Cooter). Nothing explicitly evil there.
3. The brane ripper that can be used to open portals to other worlds. Nothing evil there.
> Collaborating with multiple factions wanting to conquer the planet, one being very open about wanting to enslave and subjugate humanity?
Whom are you thinking of, specifically? Right now, what I see is an army of extradimensional mercenaries who are very careful not to kill anyone they don’t have to kill. If you mean Sciona, then all he did was show her a manifest.
*Maybe* Thothogoth defects and attempts world conquest — although his agenda seemed to start with a PowerPoint so eh — and *maybe* Sciona does something actually dangerous, but if so then Deus will deal with it when it comes. He already seems to have channeled Thothogoth’s proclivities in a positive direction; as Emperor Sigismund once said, “Do I not destroy my enemies by making them my friends?”
Regardless, you’re missing the fundamental point of consequentialist reasoning: If the outcome is good then the action is good. From what we have seen, the sum effect of Deus’s actions have been the uplifting of millions of people from poverty to a high quality of life. If he has also done some bad things then he is imperfect but not evil.
I could not have posted anything better than this post. Seriously. Brilliantly written.
PowerPoint presentations are inherently evil!
PowerPoint presentations are a gift from the heavens and transcendent in their informative beauty, you cur!
But surely it is spreadsheets that are truly transcendent, for slide decks exist merely to simplify their glorious tabular data for those who cannot withstand the full power of the formulas.
If you murder millions of people but someone else brings them back to life, what you did is still evil even if someone else undid your mistake. Same with deus and sciona, he collaborated with someone who was trying to conquer the earth, and the only reason it didn’t work is because archon was able to stop her. You are trying to treat her as a non threat when everyone who knows about the alari agrees that they are an evil empire on steroids.
And what is this “careful not to kill anyone they don’t need to kill” utter bullshit. The only thing we have seen the shock troopers do is kill people. Literally the only thing we have seen them do is destroy tanks and the tanks crews. He is giving a faction that wants to conquer and ubjugate humanity a foothold on earth. They are not shy about this, they have openly stated it before, that their end goal is to conquer humanity.
At this point, at best you are just an idiotic asshole trying to argue what is on the level of claiming that red is blue just to see if you can. You are ignoring pretty much all of the evidence presented just so you can present deus as a God child gift to humanity when we have repeatedly seen him do unethical and dangerous actions just to benefit himself.
“If you murder millions of people but someone else brings them back to life, what you did is still evil even if someone else undid your mistake.”
Deus has not murdered anyone (outside of self-defense via his bodyguard). Archon did not bring anyone back to life. What are you talking about?
“Same with deus and sciona, he collaborated with someone who was trying to conquer the earth,”
He allowed her to check his manifest in exchange for some Alari nookie. That’s hardly collaboration. He even let ARCHON know she had come to see him afterwards. Heck, he had a member of ARCHON in the room (Harem) when Sciona first came over.
“and the only reason it didn’t work is because archon was able to stop her.”
1) ARCHON did not stop her plan. The Squidwards stopped her plan.
2) Why are you so sure that Deus did not know about the destruction of Alari by the Squidwards before even showing Sciona the manifest in the first place? Deus tends to know stuff that he should not know by any normal standards (I suspect time travel information is involved). In which case, Deus was giving Sciona useless information which could not be used to harm the Earth. Also, the whole reason Deus did ANYTHING with Sciona was in order to get the Sky Ripper, in order to power up his Stargate. Not to help Sciona. He clearly was building the stargate BEFORE SCIONA EVEN CAME TO MEET HIM. He knew what was going to happen somehow.
“You are trying to treat her as a non threat”
Considering Sciona’s main goal was to ESCAPE EARTH after the Council tried multiple times to murder her, including chopping off her head, she wasnt actually a huge threat to Earth. Aside from ARCHON being able to stop a Fel invasion, the Council is made up of aliens as well, and the Xevoarchy would not allow an invasion either, despite Sciona’s rantings about it.
“when everyone who knows about the alari agrees that they are an evil empire on steroids.”
We know the Alari government is aggressive, and we know Sciona and her followers are evil. But the Alari as a whole are not evil. That’s just a stereotype. The refugees saved by Sydney and Cora are not evil. And you are making an assumption that the Alari in Galytin are evil, based on nothing but Cora and Dabbler’s biases against the Alari. Hypocritical biases sometimes, given how Cora actually uses Alari tech after criticizing it.
“the only thing we have seen them do is destroy tanks and the tanks crews.”
With both tanks, the big obelisk-sized things literally smashed the tanks in places where the tank crew would NOT be. Not in the crew area.
“And what is this “careful not to kill anyone they don’t need to kill” utter bullshit.”
First off, swearing does not make your arguments more persuasive.
Second, because we’ve seen in the comic RIGHT ABOVE that their aim has been to destroy vehicles without killing the people inside. An 80% surrender shows that there’s more of an emphasis to get surrender than to get attrition. And that demon army looks like it would be able to kill every person in the Mozambique army if they wanted to. They haven’t because that’s not the goal. They’re trying to minimize casualties.
“He is giving a faction that wants to conquer and ubjugate humanity a foothold on earth.”
1) You have no idea of the agreement and offer Deus sent Tom. It has nothing to do with Tom subjugating anything. Does Deus seem like the type of person who wants to be subjugated? And after the bodyslam, Tom had no interest anymore in trying to do anything to Earth.
2) Deus probably showed a powerpoint presentation which showed the benefits of working as a mercenary group for HIM. The transitions were probably extra transcendent.
“They are not shy about this, they have openly stated it before, that their end goal is to conquer humanity.”
Again, not their end goal. All that fell by the wayside after a single bodyslam and a 5 time romp in the hay with Dabbler. Now Tom is doing something completely different at Deus’s behest. And probably getting paid well for it. Not necessarily with money but very unlikely that it’s any sort of foothold on Earth for conquest. Deus doesn’t CREATE unnecessary enemies for himself.
“At this point, at best you are just an idiotic asshole ”
You really need to learn how to argue without using ad hominem attacks and swearing. You are not even remotely convincing. Eaglejarl presented a very well thought out post. And you responded with something juvenile and composed largely of swearing and namecalling. Eaglejarl is engaging in a rational argument. You are engaging in a one-sided flame war (or trying to – it’s not particularly effective).
“You are ignoring pretty much all of the evidence presented”
No. He’s pointing out out that your ‘evidence’ is incorrect, and not supported by the facts in the story, or have far more obvious reasoning that put Deus in a very good light. You’re the one that’s been ignoring evidence.
“we have repeatedly seen him do unethical and dangerous actions just to benefit himself.”
This is an example of you ignoring evidence.
His actions are frequently ethical, especially in results. Even when he does an action which might seem unethical taken out of context, it becomes ethical when shown IN context, based on how what he does wind up helping people. Good people. Innocent people. Not bad people.
And there’s nothing evil or immoral about engaging in dangerous actions. Maxima engages in dangerous actions. Heck… SYDNEY engages in dangerous actions.
And it does not just benefit himself. It benefits his employees. It benefits the people of Galytin. It benefits the Alari refugees. It benefits the United States if they agree to become his trading partner. It benefits the entire world since his technology will be able to help billions and put Earth on a more even standing with the rest of the galaxy without having to ONLY rely on ARCHON.
The fact that it ALSO benefits him seems to be what’s getting your goat though. There’s no reason a person should not want a win-win situation for everyone, rather than helping everyone while himself getting nothing and, in fact, losing a lot in the process. That would just be a dumb strategy. Deus does not do dumb strategies.
So, I’d like to believe that Deus and Dexon showed each other their powerpoints, and everyone agreed that Deus’ was better, so Tom and his army all signed up for plan Deus.
This is an excellent and uncannily accurate summary of the entire M&A process.
Pander said:
> Deus has not murdered anyone (outside of self-defense via his bodyguard). Archon did not bring anyone back to life. What are you talking about?
Again, I back up your basic argument that Deus is overall moral, but let’s not overstate the case: Deus absolutely murdered Indigne and it was not in self-defense. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-389-interview-to-a-kill/ The overall effect was positive (a repressive dictator was removed, many people were uplifted), but it was still unprovoked murder.
> Considering Sciona’s main goal was to ESCAPE EARTH after the Council tried multiple times to murder her, including chopping off her head, she wasnt actually a huge threat to Earth.
No, she was clear that she wanted to conquer the earth. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-636-promises-promises/ “We will crush your pathetic feuding governments and unify humanity under our rule! Your resources and the secrets of your super powers will belong to us! Bow to me and I’ll see you live your lives as battle thralls instead of laboratory samples!”
> Aside from ARCHON being able to stop a Fel invasion, the Council is made up of aliens as well, and the Xevoarchy would not allow an invasion either, despite Sciona’s rantings about it.
Eh…I’m not sure Deus had a way to know that ARCHON could stop an invasion. Although I suppose he could have talked to some of the Council’s alien members, heard about the Xevoarchy police force, and assumed that they would be willing and able to protect Earth against all comers. Still, that’s a pretty big amount of trust.
> TempoDiValise: …when everyone who knows about the alari agrees that they are an evil empire on steroids.
> Pander: We know the Alari government is aggressive, and we know Sciona and her followers are evil. But the Alari as a whole are not evil.
Not as a whole, no, but TDV is correct that their government is aggressively expansionist and that’s the key point. Doesn’t matter if there are some nice Germans who just want to live their lives if Hitler is running the government and rampaging through Poland.
I agree with the rest of your points.
Has everyone just kinda forgot that he robbed a vault full of extremely evil artifacts and sells them to whoever pays him enough? That he is blackmailing politicians? That he has collaborated with not one but two factions trying to conquer the earth?
He is a villain with good pr, don’t forget that we haven’t actually seen most of what he has done without the lens of pr.
Repeating what I said above since you’re repeating your libel here:
First, ‘evil’ artifacts? We know that there’s a knife that will rebuild your body and can be recharged “at the cost of 99 lives”, but it never said those lives had to be sapient. Go to any slaughterhouse and use the knife to kill 99 cows instead of using a boltgun — boom, bob’s your uncle. Unless you want to argue that the meat industry is immoral, in which case I assume you’re a vegan? The other mentioned artifacts consist of:
1. Two that we know nothing about except their names (Lazarus Scalpel, Big Book of Vampires) so have no reason to believe they are evil.
2. The Regenator, which can be used to bring people back from the dead (Cooter) and it can merge two beings together (Wyrmil and Cooter). Nothing explicitly evil there.
3. The brane ripper that can be used to open portals to other worlds. Nothing evil there.
They are in the vault because they are evil artifacts. If the knife could be recharged on animals, then why the hell is it in the vault of evil artifacts?
The very premise of that black site is that it is to house evil artifacts that are difficult to destroy and must be contained. Trying to state that we.only know their name is ignoring that we know their context and how much the council did their damndest to make sure they never see the light of day again.
Who said the Reliquary was only for evil artifacts? It’s for powerful ones that must be tightly controlled, I don’t recall the Council saying anything about morality.
“then why the hell is it in the vault of evil artifacts?”
There’s nothing definitively evil about any of it. The Council just doesn’t want it getting out. Most of the artifacts were taken from people who were USING them for evil, or for purposes that went against the Council’s wishes.
“The very premise of that black site is that it is to house evil artifacts that are difficult to destroy and must be contained.”
Dangerous items, not necessarily evil items. From what we’ve seen, each of the items taken that we know of are not actually evil. Like anything, they can be used for good or for evil.
Take the death field for example. The one that was holding containing the items in the first place. Good example of a thing which you might argue is ‘evil’ being used for what you might consider ‘good.’ It depends on how you’re using it.
A truck can be used for good, to transport orphans, bunnies, nuns, and orphan bunnies to a nunnery.
That same truck can also be used to run down a bunch of children and their families during a peaceful Christmas parade.
A gun can be used to defend your family from a killer, or can be used to hunt in order to get food to feed yourself and your community.
It can also be used to hijack a plane or kill dozens of children and teachers in a school.
The same is true for the items in the Black Reliquiry. The Council might simply not trust humanity as a whole to use them. They probably don’t even trust most of their own members to use them, given the history of the Council and the history of humanity in general, in their minds.
Most of the time, the items in the black reliquiry seem to actually be there because their former owners, who were likely murdered BY the council, were going to use them or did use them for evil purposes, or because the Council feared that their owners MIGHT use them for reasons that would breach the Veil or for evil in a very Minority Report mindset.
> That same truck can also be used to run down a bunch of children and their families during a peaceful Christmas parade.
Or counterprotestors during a neo-Nazi parade. #realpolitics (Okay, it was a car, not a truck.)
I wouldn’t be reading it thats for sure
first off Deus is very the definition of a Mary sue and the honest the most boring and stupid of characters. second to see anything Deus does and “good” take a massive misunderstanding of human nature and reality that makes me seriously question many of the commenters. honestly these people are using the same narcissistic and materialistic nonsense that has driven the greatest tragedies in the real wold.
neither Max nor Deus is the hero of this story Sydney is the hero of the story.
People often use the term Mary Sue to mean “powerful character I dislike”. Lets try to define some terms, so we can understand what is trying to be said.
You say he is “boring and stupid.” I believe what you mean is that you personally would be uninterested in watching him do things, because you think it would be too easy for him and thus unengaging. Because he is overpowered and successful and you don’t like the character. I presume you use stupid for “unliked”, anyway.
You then say that to see anything he does as “good” takes a “misunderstanding of human nature”.
Seems like a very stark view of the world and one that needs Good defined. Some would say, selfless acts that improve others lives. He does things out of self-interest, which is pretty common human nature, but it’s selfish, so it’s not good. It is something that could even be defined as Evil.
Except some of those things still lead to a net positive in certain other peoples lives would be considered “Good” by them, and he knows it and plans for it. Even if he has selfish goals, he clearly could be selfish and NOT improve others lives and likely be far better for it.
Point of view is important, because as far as that little girl that gave him a gift is concerned, he is a force for good. And as he argues, there are a LOT of people that benefit from economic improvements that could see him as a “Good” too.
You may counter, well, her viewpoint is flawed, narrow, she doesn’t know the full story.
Exactly. Neither do we.
“unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses.” is subjective. And when you consider that Deus shares a character archetype with people like Lex Luthor?
Deus has great strengths and has been written to be able to surround himself with further strength and to do a lot. That doesn’t mean he isn’t flawed. He is egotistical, over confident and surrounded by people that could easily kill him. He cares about his image as much as he cares about the bottom line. He WANTS to be the good guy, but is also incapable of properly managing his actual image. As evidenced by here, as he leads a demon army. It doesn’t matter that he rightly points out the good he will bring as well, he’s ALSO bringing a demon army and he is rightly going to get pushback. That isn’t a Mary Sue.
That’s a flawed and selfish person doing good, that also helps them, and doing so to the extent that it makes their job harder and will eventually be their downfall.
He is not the hero of this story.
But the point was that point of view matters, that the framing of the story changes things so very much, that a story written with Max as the villain is just as plausible. And even if that idea bores you, I and others find it interesting. Especially since it leads to introspection. Such as how Sydney with her grievous bodily harm, world threatening power, sudden wealth, recklessness, it all combines to make her an absolutely terrifying and volatile threat to the people. There is a reason Ariana wants to be very, very careful.
I read Gunnerkrigg Court, I’ve seen people losing their minds over Tony for years and stubbornly refusing to spot the similarities between him and Annie, because of who the POV was. So you’re going to need to be a bit more specific when access to clean drinking water, electricity, warmth, are included in the things he’s bringing and “narcissistic and materialistic nonsense” and vague great tragedies don’t convince me he’s too perfect for a superhero comic.
I think the “boring” part of Deus is that we haven’t seen him seriously struggle with anything yet. Like, NOTHING.
His pompous needling of a blood mage made a situation where he had to rush his looting of the artifact room, but we didn’t see him miss out on anything he wanted, or nearly die because he couldn’t stand not getting (thing). We haven’t seen him struggle emotionally; to have everything material but still suffer a burning need for the few things he can’t have, like Lex Luthor or Wilson Fisk.
Now, some of this is screen time. It took us a while before we saw Maxima challenged by anything. Well, other than “emotionally challenged by Sydney’s tomfoolery.”
And maybe this plot line will give us a chance to have his hopes dashed. Or a private moment where we see him upset about (thing that actually matters to him enough that he cares that it failed). Or maybe he’ll keep getting everything he wants forever, or when he doesn’t get what he wants we won’t get shown that he cared about it.
We’ve seen him struggle, admittedly with minor things. Nothing that’s upset him, or disrupted his plans to a degree that required him to do more than delete a slide from his World Domination powerpoint.
He’s competent. He’s an antagonist, possibly the primary one. If he struggled a lot, he probably wouldn’t be. I imagine it’s possible to write incompetent antagonists that still present a challenge to competent protagonists… but that sounds a bit convoluted. If your protagonists are unusually competent, then your antagonists will also need to be unusually competent to keep up.
Agreed with most of what you said, although I don’t think he deserves the term ‘antagonist’. The antagonist, by definition, is attempting to thwart the goals of the protagonist. Deus’s goals do not interact with Sydney’s in any meaningful way and therefore he is at most a side character. If Archon gets assigned to stop the Galtyn war THEN Deus might become antagonist.
Perhaps there’s a better word than antagonist for what I’m thinking, which is that he drives the plot and creates conflict that the protagonist must resolve, even if he is not doing it to intentionally frustrate or obstruct the protagonist.
I’m also making predictions about the role he will play in the story in the future, rather than commenting on what role he has played in the past.
He hasn’t really impacted Sydney much at all, yet. He is effectively a side character with a side story. If Sydney gets deployed to Galtyn to deal with the invaders *then* he will start to become an antagonist, but he hasn’t been that before now.
Yeah, because we didn’t see him loot the rest of that room at all, or even get a full accounting of what he was looking for versus what he got. The last we saw of him was hiring Cthillia to help move the loot… because Sciona had broken the containment field and added a time limit. And like Torabi said, he’s struggled with plenty of mundane things.
Deus doesn’t have superpowers (that we know of), and he’s clearly very smart. There’s no reason we would have seen him “struggle” with anything. His M.O. is to use good planning and superpowered allies to accomplish his goals with a minimum of struggle, risk, or conflict.
You said the important part…”we haven’t seen” Part of the whole thing is image. If he is seen to struggle, then he is not the unstoppable force he projects. I believe he does have struggles, we just don’t get to see them. Do not do your laundry in public and all that. Have to wonder what the negotiation with Tom was like. What did he agree to? Right, Wrong, or just Mean… He’s moving and the UN is only going to say “Stop” and then say “Stop, or pay us some penalties and we’ll stop saying ‘Stop'” Not saying the UN is a joke, just saying they are the Evil we know. As to war… well, I’ll have my Omlette with a side of bacon please. Deus is doing some serious grill work, and I do not want to be in front of the exhaust port.
PS. You know what they say about making Omlettes….
Deus does seem to struggle with preventing Lorlana from yelling out embarrassingly inappropriate things about him and a woman wearing a latex catsuit. While at an expensive reataurant with Maxima as a guest. :)
I love FFKonoko’s post. I wish there were a like button.
He is borderline omniscient without it ever being explained. How the hell does he know not only about the supernatural, but nexus and other off planet stuff? How did he know about Tom who came out of the blue totally unpredictably? How was he constantly monitoring an Uber secret secure vault enough to know precisely when it is not only vulnerable but already successfully breached?
Add on to that he openly and flagrantly breaks laws and international treaties and doesn’t have to give more than a farcical excuse. **he confessed to blackmailing politicians into diverting massive amounts of government funds right to maxima and somehow she can’t do anything about it??**
Add on to that he somehow knows about and **found** a random half geode that gave maxima her powers? Something that would be Uber classified, if it was noted at all? Srsly how the hell did he know about the geode? When the hell would he have had the opportunity or means to learn about it?
His ability to repeatedly do thing that he shouldn’t be able to do and know things automatically is what makes him a Mary sue. A proper magnificent bastard is smart and knows a lot, but they aren’t omniscient. Rather than having any normal limits, deus just knows whatever would be most beneficial for him to know without even a half-hearted excuse from the plot as to how he knows.
TempoDiValse said:
> He is borderline omniscient without it ever being explained. How the hell does he know not only about the supernatural, but nexus and other off planet stuff?
As to the supernatural, probably by hiring Vale. She’s clearly some sort of eldritch creature. As to Fracture Station, presumably he learned about that from the Alari refugees that are sheltering in Galtyn.
> How did he know about Tom who came out of the blue totally unpredictably?
Probably because he was the one who summoned Tom, as stated in the author’s note to this very page: “Yeah, everyone called it. Who else would have been calling Tom?”
> How was he constantly monitoring an Uber secret secure vault enough to know precisely when it is not only vulnerable but already successfully breached?
Most likely is that, after Vale clued him into the supernatural and told him about the existence of the vault, he bought the services of any number of mercenary wizards that no doubt exist.
My interpretation was that Deus was the contact that was received while they were visiting Earth. When the two demons returned, the subordinate handed Tom his tablet with a message from somebody on Earth. Tom asked “Who even knew we were there?” The answer to that question is Deus, but we have no idea how he knew. Tom clearly was confused about how he knew, thus not the source.
My bet is on Deus watching the training in the quarry, although how he got from there to Tom’s contact info in a handful of hours (or less) is beyond me.
Firstly, how the hell did he hire Vale? That would itself be contained under “how the hell does he know about the supernatural ?” He would presumably have to know about the supernatural to specifically hire Vale, so it doesn’t make much sense for it to be the other way around.
Secondly, the timelines don’t make sense for him to have learned about fracture from the alari. He had been making preparations to go to fracture since well before the timeskip.
Thirdly, no deus didn’t summon Tom, that’s just stupid. Tom more or less summoned himself by honing in on Kevin. Deus managed to literally call Tom on a cell phone or such, somehow being instantly aware of Tom being on planet and managing to get a way to contact him within about 30 minutes to an hour.
Finally, ***even the owners of the vault didn’t know that it was vulnerable***. And deus would have to be constantly, which is an expensive use of resources, monitoring, which should be almost impossible, as it is a black site operated by the aggregate wizard government, a vault that it should be impossible for even the supernatural community to know about. As again, it is a black site. It has literally every protection that the wizards could think to put in it, and I’d that doesn’t include warding against scrying then they are just idiots and it is unbelievable as a story.
My money is still on the idea that he got all this information from a time travelling version of himself from the future, much like David Xanatos did in Disney’s Gargoyles, but on a larger scale. Or Layla Rose Miller from X Factor Investigations (aka Butterfly) who’s ‘power’ (despite not being a mutant) was that ‘she knows things.’ Because she seems to know what is happening and what will happen all as if she is remembering it.
Which is because she’s a time traveler from the future, or connected to a time travelling version of herself from the future, who has told her pretty much everything that’s going to happen so that she can do things to make sure it does happen.
So yeah, Deus knows things. Just like Layla. Without being a super or a mutant.
> That same truck can also be used to run down a bunch of children and their families during a peaceful Christmas parade.
Actually, I’m fairly confident that he *is* a super. He’s got the physique for it — he’s about 9 heads tall (a normal human is ~7) and has 8-pack abs. If he is a super with an information-based power it would go a long way towards explaining his wealth and his ability to do the various things he does.
Damn, that was the wrong quote. I mean to respond to this: “So yeah, Deus knows things. Just like Layla. Without being a super or a mutant.”
Really wish this site had an edit function.
On the other hand, the immutable format does provide for some interesting non-sequiturs. For a moment I was trying to imagine what thread of reasoning led to a confident conclusion that holiday vehicular manslaughter could only be the result of super powers, and it really threw a wrench in my mental gears.
TempoDiValse said:
> Firstly, how the hell did he hire Vale? That would itself be contained under “how the hell does he know about the supernatural ?” He would presumably have to know about the supernatural to specifically hire Vale, so it doesn’t make much sense for it to be the other way around.
Simplest explanation: She came to him and offered her services because money is nice and economic adventurism is fun.
> Secondly, the timelines don’t make sense for him to have learned about fracture from the alari. He had been making preparations to go to fracture since well before the timeskip.
Fair point. Most likely is that, after Vale clued him in to the Twilight Council, he reached out to various members to find out more about the veiled community. Some of the Council’s members are aliens (as opposed to supernaturals) and could easily have given him the information needed.
> Thirdly, no deus didn’t summon Tom, that’s just stupid. Tom more or less summoned himself by honing in on Kevin. Deus managed to literally call Tom on a cell phone or such, somehow being instantly aware of Tom being on planet and managing to get a way to contact him within about 30 minutes to an hour.
I mean…it’s literally Word of God that Deus called Tom. Yes, Tom opened the portal from his side because he wanted to talk to Dabbler, but what’s to say that the sequence wasn’t: 1. Deus summons Tom and makes the offer, 2. Tom returns home to organize everything, 3. Tom detects Dabbler and portals himself back.
> Finally, ***even the owners of the vault didn’t know that it was vulnerable***. And deus would have to be constantly, which is an expensive use of resources, monitoring, which should be almost impossible, as it is a black site operated by the aggregate wizard government, a vault that it should be impossible for even the supernatural community to know about. As again, it is a black site. It has literally every protection that the wizards could think to put in it, and I’d that doesn’t include warding against scrying then they are just idiots and it is unbelievable as a story.
Clearly the knowledge of its existence and protections is out there, since Sciona was able to learn of its existence and figure out how to break in. As to needing constant monitoring, why is that hard? My servers need constant monitoring so I set up a script to ping them on a regular basis and ping me if there’s an issue. Given that magic appears to have similarities to programming, I see no reason Deus couldn’t arrange something similar.
This isn’t a superhero comic. It’s a parody of one, or at least it WAS when it began. You could make a case that it has become what it once mocked. Even so, the individual characters are fun. Sydney avoids being a Mary-Sue by being the very incarnation of chaotic-good. Deus breaks the super-villain mould by being competent, reasonable, methodical and largely non-destructive with ongoing displays of enlightened self-interest. The horde of superheroines and dearth of heroes is a victory for feminism and in no way reflects DaveB’s enthusiasm for boobs. The dumb blonde is a redhead. The toughest character is a cheerful himbo with no ambition. The cleverest person in the room is a purple alien sex maniac who isn’t always the smartest person in the room.
“first off Deus is very the definition of a Mary sue”
I think, perhaps, that you don’t know the definition of a Mary Sue (or Villain Sue, despite Deus not being a villain either). Because Deus clearly does not meet either definition. He’s more of a Xanatos, post heel turn.
“second to see anything Deus does and “good” take a massive misunderstanding of human nature and reality that makes me seriously question many of the commenters”
Point out anything you think of him doing being evil, and I’ll be able to easily argue that it’s not evil. And in many cases, I’ll even be able to argue it’s good. And if anything, Deus understands human nature VERY well. Anything ou can use against Deus, you’ll usually have to use against ARCHON as well to say that ARCHON is also evil. When in fact, Deus actively goes out of his way to not be evil, while still employing and subverting ‘evil overlord’ tropes because he actually LIKES the tropes and is very genre savvy about them. So no, he’s not evil. Not even a bit. He’s just a good showman and his choices on who and where to fight seem to always be based on ‘the opponent being the worst possible people’ where his victories wind up ‘helping the downtrodden.’ Sure, he also makes a profit, but that’s because he’s also intelligent and a good businessman on top of everything else. But there are a LOT easier ways for him to make money than what he’s doing, which would NOT help all the people that he is helping.
“honestly these people are using the same narcissistic and materialistic nonsense that has driven the greatest tragedies in the real wold.”
Being narcissistic or materialistic is not villainous. Not to mention Deus is going at making his profits in a way which is a LOT more difficult than it would be for him to make his profits WITHOUT benefiting an entire nation, going out of his way to minimize casualties every step of the way, and making sure to usually do everything in a way which is not illegal.
“neither Max nor Deus is the hero of this story Sydney is the hero of the story.”
This is semi-accurate. Sydney is obviously the main hero of the story, but Maxima and Deus are not therefore villains. They are deuteragonists possibly – I’m not sure we can even call either of them antagonists (so far Deus has not done ANYTHING to be antagonistic to Sydney about).
Think of it like Gargoyles, end of the second, beginning of the third season. Goliath and his clan are the main heroes obviously. But Xanatos is no longer the villain. He’s an ally and possibly a deuteragonist after his heel turn when they both join up to fight against Oberon, and before that against Demona. Demona is the actual villain, as is Oberon to a lesser extent.
Think of Deus as being like Xanatos, not like Lex Luthor. Or if you MUST think of him as being like Lex Luthor, then think of him as being like Lex Luthor in Injustice, or in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War. Where Lex Luthor actually is PART of the Justice League, even though he’s not actively in it as a member but still has a say in things.
If Deus were a Marty Stu, he’d already have gotten Maxima in the sack, for one thing. Or at the very least she’d be in love with him. He’d probably have rescued Halo from Fracture station, too, because other characters don’t get to do anything important when Mary Sues are around, that’s one of the reason Mary Sues are bad writing.
Deus and max dated in the past remember, Dave when out of his was to have max and a 19 year old harem talk about how great in bed Deus is….
We don’t know that Deus hasn’t already gotten Maxima in the sack. The author has wisely allowed this to be a subject for reader speculation.
Not being the one to rescue Sydney from Fracture doesn’t disqualify Deus from Mary Suedom. What pretty firmly disqualifies him is two things:
1) Amount of ‘focus time’ – Deus is a recurring character for sure, but we go weeks or months without even hearing his name or having him even be hinted at being involved even in background events;
2) Being a male character in a comic called Grrrl Power, where if a male becomes a main character the comic fails entirely.
I’d hate it. The only thing that’s standing between Deus and Mary Suedom is not actually being the protagonist
Two problems with that – Mary Sues don’t have to be the protagonist, and Deus isn’t a Sue any more than David Xanatos is.
The defining trait of the standard Mary Sue – assuming you want to permit a definition more complex than “a character I don’t like” – is that the setting’s morality and characterization bends around them. A Sue can do no wrong, for they are inherently Right. A Sue can never be legitimately criticized in-universe – anyone who criticizes the Sue is wrong, evil, jealous, or at best misguided, because why else would someone criticize The Character Who Is Always Right? Characters who are Good support the Sue; characters who are Evil oppose the Sue; no exceptions exist. A Sue is never shown to be foolish, petty, or otherwise flawed in a way that would make them wrong.
That’s not Deus. He’s a dorky megalomaniac dripping with ham and cheese, and everyone in-universe knows it. His relationship with Maxima ranges from helpful, to sneaky, to the superhero equivalent of tugging on her pigtails. He has a remote for the specific purpose of summoning Dramatic Lightning (TM) on cue, and it didn’t even work right the first time we saw it. I’d have to check to be sure, but I don’t think he and Maxima have shared a page where Maxima didn’t lob some sort of criticism his way – their first on-screen meeting devolves into childish sniping by the end of the page, and she’s repeatedly raised more serious questions about his activities in Galytn.
A character like Deus, or in a similar position to Deus, could easily be a Sue in some other hypothetical story. But this Deus, in this story, is not.
Yep. It’s not anything about the character that makes them a Sue — it’s how the story, universe, and other characters respond to them that does. It’s not that they never do anything wrong, but that they’re treated as having done the right thing even when they’re in the wrong.
Deus doesn’t always get what he wants, things don’t always go his way, and other characters criticize, oppose, and mock him without being treated as obviously wrong for doing so.
Dude, that’s a heroic Mary sue. The guy you are responding to is referring to a villainous variant called, fittingly enough, a villain sue, which can often result when you are trying to make a magnificent bastard but go to far. Often by making them pretty much omniscient, not k owing what it would make sense for a well informed villain to know, but knowing everything that benefits them for no justifiable answer.
Villain sues exist, and deus is definitely one
Villain Sues exist, but Deus is definitely not one.
Well, currently, Max hasn’t committed or voiced support for any war crimes. (Neither has most of the main cast) Nor do we defend when they even come close to doing so. (Like Sciona’s peoples genocide)
So I’d say we’re clear on that scale.
“oh destroyer of mosques”
And restaurants…
Anyway Max was no doubt in a super fight and hit it by mistake “That was an accident… mostly…” and “When you target a perp, look behind them and assume you’ll miss them and hit that” lets not forget “It’s a super fight, things are going to get destroyed” Just imagine you’re in a street fight with hand grenades instead of your fists.
And bridges.
Eh… it wasn’t finished so road construction? Either way most of the damage was caused by the group that was attacking Arcswat and had to be dealt with before any civvies were hurt.
It was finished. There were cars and trucks driving over it at the time, some of which were transporting orphan puppies and bunnies.
And the only one who did damage to the bridge was Maxima.
Unless you’re talking about the overpassunder construction during the restaurant fight? Which isnt a bridge per se.
In which case that was … still Maxima. Everyone else except Vehemence was already defeated and Sydney actually called her out on that.
When the active bridge was damaged, it was sciona deflecting maximas shot, something that is weird and doesn’t happen in normal engagements. Maxima didn’t shoot and miss, she shot and her shot went in an entirely different direction after it was bounced
“it was sciona deflecting maximas shot,”
And it was Maxima who made the shot not taking into account the danger of a ricochet, when she could have done other things which would not cause danger to innocent bystanders. I think I’ve had this argument in the past, several times.
“Maxima didn’t shoot and miss, she shot and her shot went in an entirely different direction after it was bounced”
If a police officer shoots as a guy in a suit of armor, and the bullet hits that person, then ricochets off the armor and hits a mother and her baby, the guy in armor MIGHT be in trouble if he was committing a crime at the time (ie, felony murder), but the officer will ALSO be in trouble, or at least under investigation (possibly criminal, possibly not, but DEFINITELY administratively) for recklessly firing their gun if there were other alternatives available or no one’s life was actively in danger at the time. What Maxima did was NOT necessary and she was definitely reckless. She did not use alternative means which would not have the additional danger of ricochet in an area where bystanders were nearby. She is faster than Sciona by a WIDE margin, stronger than Sciona, and even if she did still want to blast her, she should have heeded HER OWN ADVICE GIVEN TO SYDNEY about firing at a bad guy.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-193-wont-somebody-think-of-the-exploding-children/
(panels 2,3, 4, and 5)
Uh, the bridge wasn’t behind Sciona. She quite logically assumed that, even if she missed, she would just hit the water and at that point had no reason to believe her blasts could be deflected like that.
So she was, in fact, following her own rules.
And mosques.
Oh wait, we already said that one, that doesn’t make sense.
It was only the one!
Clearly an accident?
Max doesn’t make a habit of destroying civilian targets.
It kind of already is and has been for years.
Kind of like how yes the series is called “Batman”, but Batman is just a navigation tool for Joker’s story.
I find Deus annoying, galling, and generally insufferable on every level.
He is always right, always 42 steps ahead, always gets what he wants, never suffers any real setbacks, frequently pulls off the seemingly impossible, etc; whenever we see him he is always smugly in control and frequently lording his power over people while extolling how everything he’s doing to enrich himself is in everyone’s best interest and makes those opposing him look like ignorant fools. Greed is good, and governments and commoners just get in the way of the Great Man personally making paradise on earth through the power of greed, money, and his personal skills.
Also a complete asshole and piece of shit.
He’s just a really terrible character and I quietly wish he’d fall between the pages and be forgotten, forever. By far the worst part of the comic. Probably the only thing I *actually* hate about it.
Depressingly it feels like he’s being set up as a major recurring villain and we’re unlikely to be rid of him for years.
Interesting. I find Deus to be annoying, smug and generally insufferable – but that is why I really LIKE him.
Sidney is adorable and has a whole suite of powers, many of them still hidden from us – but she needs challenges in order to shine. IMO Deus will make an excellent opponent for her – as will others who are still being introduced.
Remember that conflict drives plot. Otherwise things get boring.
And a bored Sidney could well be more dangerous than any other single threat in the multiverse.
I think the issue is, Deus hasn’t earned his position in the story. By all accounts, he should be dead a thousand times over based on what we have seen of him. The only reason he seems to have reached his position is authorial contrivance rather than actual competence.
Unfortunately, in order to build him up as a threat, it seems difficult to show how he deals with being out of his depth. After all, if he struggles at all with the threats of today, how are we supposed to believe he’s a legit threat himself when the heroes fight him next year?
“Honestly, I think the biggest question should be: how would everyone feel if the comic was all about Deus?”
Deus is too humble to have the comic named after him. Deus, praise be his name, prefers to work behind the scenes making things better for all of us.
“I mean, imagine if this entire comic were depicting Deus’ point of view, made him the protagonist. Would he still seem like the villain?”
Still doesnt seem like a villain to me anyway, since he’s not doing anything villainous. If he’s doing something villainous by making a legitimate agreement with extradimensional entitites who humans have called demons, then ARCHON is villainous as well, since they have a demon on their team (Dabbler). One should note that the demons, in Deus’s employ, seem to have gone out of their way to NOT kill the enemy, but instead disable and destroy their weapons and vehicles.
All praise Deus amen.
“Hell, look at Maxima. She served overseas in Afghanistan; how many war crimes did she witness?”
Correct, Maxima did serve in Afghanistan, killing enemy supers (and likely non-supers as well). She admits to this. But she isnt villainous either. She’s a soldier.
“How much of our support/condemnation of these characters is dependent on the points of view being presented?”
As always Archone, you are very wise and eloquent in your posts.
All praise Deus amen.
Deus is a megalomaniacal narcissist who makes excuses for his bad behavior to make him look like a good guy. I’m guessing you are a big fan of that ode to socialism, Atlas Shrugged?
First, taking over a sovereign nation, regardless of the disposition of its government is an act of war, as is assassinating a head of state. He was making standard colonizer threats to the Warlord of Gatlyn, who predictably responded as a head of state. Deus used this response as a reason to kill him. The second Iraq War was an illegal extra National use of military force by a nation. The fact that it was done by a nation is the only difference between that and Deus in Gatlyn.
I make the point somewhere in here that Dr. Doom is a better human than Mr. Fantastic. You are using exactly the same ethical framework that makes that statement true.
Deus paid for infrastructure and now gets to use it as a carrot and stick against the people of Gatlyn. He has turned an entire country into a company town. I’m betting any unions thinking of getting established in Gatlyn are brutally suppressed. Freedom of speech is dependent on Deus’s whim, and freedom of the press is about as robust as it is in Russia or North Korea. Tell me again about Deus the great man.
You keep talking about all good things flowing from Deus. I have a native distrust of Jeff Bezos and anyone with enough money to have a Scrooge McDuck money pool. Billionaires do not get to be billionaires by behaving in an ethical way. Even St. Oprah built her billions on pseudoscience and snake oil. Deus’s wealth is the reason to suspect his motives and methods.
Finally back to infrastructure, I 100% guarantee Deus did not pay for all of Gatlyn’s new infrastructure. Why? Because building miles of railroad track and roads costs tens of billions of dollars, even in a third world country. Water, power, medical and technological infrastructure, educational improvements, everything Deus claims to have accomplished requires hundreds of billions. Forcing a country up the development curve that quickly requires even more. Deus is not rich enough to do what he claims to have accomplished without wealth being generated by the country and citizens of Gatlyn well in excess of his “small percentage” for doing the “good work”
I haven’t even touched his expansionist military policy and wars of aggression against his neighbors.
Deus is a thug in a suit.
“Deus is a megalomaniacal”
There’s not actually anything wrong with having an obsession with power. Many people want to gain power. It’s how you use it that matters. The more informal definition of megomaniac, being where they are convinced of their own greatness…actually sort of fits with Deus. He has good reason to believe he’s pretty great. Because he literally is pretty great.
Maxima has the same problem, by the way. And yet she’s a hero because she is a de facto hero in the story presented. Harem’s also acted the same way frequently, and yet is also a hero. Again, just because of the ‘group’ she’s in.
“narcissist”
Other people think he’s pretty great as well. Yet he does sometimes point out when he makes mistakes or almost makes mistakes. Still, I don’t think Deus is an arcissist because he does NOT ignore the needs of people around him. He focuses on it, in fact. He just tends to make sure it ALSO benefits him. That’s not being a narcissist. That’s being smart.
“who makes excuses for his bad behavior”
What excuses? What bad behavior?
“to make him look like a good guy.”
Like I said elsewhere, the best way to look like a good guy is to do good things that makes you a good guy. That’s what Deus does. He literally has been a good guy who just happens to like villain tropes.
“I’m guessing you are a big fan of that ode to socialism, Atlas Shrugged?”
1) Clearly you’ve never read any of my posts if you think I’m a fan of socialism. A lot of my diatribes are on the virtues of capitalism and libertarianism.
2) Atlas Shrugged was not an ode to socialism. It was about the dangers of socialism, fascism, communism, and any sort of state intervention in society which allows unproductive people to leech off the wealth earned by the productive members of society without giving anything to the society. It’s a caricature, not an ode. Although I don’t think you’ve read it. I’m a fan of a lot of books though in general,although Atlas Shrugged isnt really one of my more preferred books Anthem was a particularly good one, though. Probably would make a really good Arnold Swartzenegger or Liam Neeson movie. I’m also a fan of movies like The Island, which was based on the Michael Ritchie book.
Not sure what that has to do with my post though, since Deus doesnt seem to have anything to do with anything in Atlas Shrugged, which makes me think you probably never read the book and are just using it as the most well known book of Ayn Rand (please stop calling her Ann Rand, it’s like calling someone Bob Shakespeare).
Btw, with you trying to use Ayn Rand as some sort of cudgel regarding her belief in Objectivism, you might want to know what that philosophical system means first.
Rand described Objectivism as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
Deus, however, does not fit this description, because his own happiness is not the only moral purposes in his life, and he does listen to others reasoning. He will then give arguments on his own beliefs, like a reasonable and rational human being. Because he uses the Evil Overlord Handbook as an idea of what not to do if you’re in power, while simultaneously doing good. A lot of the Evil Overlord handbook, if followed would make the Overlord distinctly NOT evil. Which is sort of the point.
“First, taking over a sovereign nation, regardless of the disposition of its government is an act of war, as is assassinating a head of state.”
1) Technically, Galytin was not its own state. General Indinge (then considered King Indinge) had seized part of Zaire during Zaire’s civil war and they were too busy to notice. The World Bank did not even recognize Galytin as a sovereign state. By all estimates, it was a failed state at BEST.
2) Deus is not his own nation – it’s not an act of war. There was literally no war when he had the king killed in self-defense.
“He was making standard colonizer threats to the Warlord of Gatlyn,”
he was making NO threats whatsoever to the Warlord of Galytin. He was making promises that he’d invest billions into Galytin to build an infrastructure, give his people food and clean water and electricity and schools and job skills. But he wanted to make an investment – not just give the corrupt warlord who systematically regularly murdered and tortured men, women, and children a blank check, since he knew, and stated outright, that if he was to give him even a ‘small’ check for $1 million, not even $1000 would go to the Galytin people’s welfare.
That is NOT a threat. It’s like me threatening to bake you a delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies. And trust me – I make amazingly good cookies.
“Deus used this response as a reason to kill him.”
Deus used Indinge ordering his men to throw Deus off the roof as a reason to kill him. Self Defense.
Indinge was an absolutely evil monster in a human skin suit, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Leopold the 2nd, or KimJong-Il. And the world is a definitively better place with him dead. It’s weird for someone to defend him given what we know about him.
Also, using the term colonizer seems like you think Deus is being evil just because he is white. That sounds a bit racist. If Deus was black, would his offer have seemed different? What if he was black and from Africa, but everything else he said was the same exact thing? So maybe don’t bother using ad hominem attacks like colonizer. General Indinge tried to use it because he had no actual argument against Deus’s offer when he realized he would not be able to just con Deus into buying him a new summer palace.
“The second Iraq War was an illegal extra National use of military force by a nation.”
Actually the second Gulf War was actually a continuation of the first one, which ended with a ceasefire dependent on Iraq doing certain actions, or the war would resume. He did not abide by the agreements made, so the war resumed. This isnt my political opinion, it’s just legal fact. Not sure what it has to do with Deus or Galytin though. Deus is not a nation unto himself, even though he, by himself, would qualify as the 98th largest GDP on the planet if people were listed on the GDP list.
“The fact that it was done by a nation is the only difference between that and Deus in Gatlyn.”
1) That’s a pretty big difference.
2) That’s not the only difference. There was no war with Galytin. There was one person killed, who died as a direct result of ordering his men to kill Deus. Then a short movie to show what a monster he was to his son, followed by the Prince taking over as King.
“I make the point somewhere in here that Dr. Doom is a better human than Mr. Fantastic. ”
Doom might be a smarter man than Mr Fantastic in a ‘cut lex luthor a check’ reasoning, via business sense, but I don’t that makes Doom a better man. Then again, Reed Richards is a pretty self-involved person in general. Not evil, not good. Just… very self-involved and oblivious to the outside world much of the time. Doom actively attacks other people in unprovoked fashion, including people who have never threatened him, are not themselves absolute evil, etc. Doom just attacks anyone – good, evil, neutral, whatever. He is not like Deus, who seems to limit himself exclusively not only to attacking bad people, but the worst possible OF the bad people, and even then he tries to give them a non-violent option first, second, and third.
“Deus paid for infrastructure”
What a horrible person.
“and now gets to use it as a carrot and stick against the people of Gatlyn.”
So far I’ve only seen him using it as a carrot, not a stick.
Show me where it’s been a stick to the Galytin people?
“I’m betting any unions thinking of getting established in Gatlyn are brutally suppressed.”
Show me where that’s happened. You can’t. It’s made up in your head. It’s your own personal head canon strawman argument. Heck, Deus’s own company probably has people in unions. The people of Galytin seem to LOVE him. I don’t think ‘brutally oppressing anyone who might want a union’ would lend to people loving him.
You literally are making up things that have not happened in the comic to justify your stance.
“Freedom of speech is dependent on Deus’s whim,”
Again, SHOW ME WHERE THIS HAS HAPPENED? Show me one place where Deus has punished or even tried to punish anyone for speaking against him? Not that he’s even done anything that anyone in Galytin would WANT to speak against him for doing.
(begin sarcasm)
Oh god no, Deus, that evil man, has given us jobs, skills, money, electricity, and made sure that a murderous tyrant would not torture, murder, rape, or disappear us! Oh no! That horrid man Deus has invested in hospitals to decrease the infant mortality rate in our country so our babies do not die during childbirth! OH GOD WHAT HAS THAT MONSTER DONE NOW?! He’s … had hundreds of schools built so our children (and adults) can learn basic literacy and math and science! So that our children might have a better life than we’ve suffered with, and their children might live in a first world nation instead of this third world hellhole we currentl had been living in before Deus came and made these investments!
Yes, that sounds like Deus is really quite the monster.
(/end sarcasm)
“nd freedom of the press is about as robust as it is in Russia or North Korea”
Again…. WHERE IS THIS IN THE COMIC!? If anything, the exact opposite is in the comic. Deus has made sure the people of Galytin have access to things like TELEVISIONS…. and what he’s doing is being PUBLIC on the news on TV. Not even all perfectly wonderful news praising Deus, since Suzie News is reporting it with a minorly biased slant to the reporting against him.
“Tell me again about Deus the great man.”
I have been. I have no idea who you’re talking about though, since the person you’re describing has not been shown to be in this comic at all. Just in your imagination.
“You keep talking about all good things flowing from Deus.”
I do try. It’s difficult since there are SO MANY GOOD THINGS he does on such a regular basis. All praise Deus amen.
“I have a native distrust of Jeff Bezos and anyone with enough money to have a Scrooge McDuck money pool.”
It’s fine to distrust Bezos. Bezos does bad things. But you need to actually… yknow… point out the actual bad things that he actually does, not hate him just because he’s wealthy and a little smug about being wealthy. I could point out bad things that Amazon has done, at Bezos’ specific requests (although I can also point out a lot of good things he’s done as well) I can’t point out -any- bad things that Deus has done though. Because…. there havent been any that have actually been presented as fact. You havent been able to either. You just point out things that you think he could have done that have never been shown to happen, or you point to a murderous tyrant being killed when he was trying to execute Deus as an example of Deus being evil.
It’s like saying if a time traveler went back in time, killed Hitler, and prevented the deaths of 11 million people (including 6 million jews), that you’d for some reason think the time traveler is evil. That makes NO sense from a morality standpoint.
“and anyone with enough money to have a Scrooge McDuck money pool.”
Technically Bezos does not have enough money for a Scrooge McDuck Money Bin pool. His liquid assets are usually not more than around $560 million. The rest tends to be tied up in stocks, buildings, products, and other business related things. Scrooge has quadrillions, so his liquid assets are enough to fill the money bin.
So now you can rest easy.
“Billionaires do not get to be billionaires by behaving in an ethical way.”
Prove it. So far you’ve only shown that you simply don’t trust people who are billionaires. I’m not sure if you’d have the same opinion if you wound up becoming a billionaire through… gasp… hard work and innovation and smart business decisions. It makes me think that it’s not ‘rich people’ that you distrust, but rather ‘people who are just a lot more wealthy than you are’ that you distrust. It makes me think of how Bernie Sanders changes his stance on ‘stopping the millionaires and the billionaires’ to ‘stopping the billionaires’…. after he became a millionaire.
Mind you, you probably shouldnt trust ANYONE. People lie. But you shouldn’t be making it an assumption of fact that they did not make their money in an ethical manner. You need to actually have proof of that. Not to mention, we’re talking about a fictional person in Deus (alas, more’s the pity) – he could be the pinnacle example of an ethical self-made (by Maxima’s own admission) multi-billionaire.
“Even St. Oprah built her billions on pseudoscience and snake oil.”
She built her billions more on being a personality that people wanted to listen to and see on TV. She provided a service people wanted – entertainment – and she got rich because of it by being one of the firsts in her particular field to do so at her level of success.
“Finally back to infrastructure, I 100% guarantee Deus did not pay for all of Gatlyn’s new infrastructure. Why? Because building miles of railroad track and roads costs tens of billions of dollars, even in a third world country. Water, power, medical and technological infrastructure, educational improvements, everything Deus claims to have accomplished requires hundreds of billions. ”
Deus literally said this exact thing when talking to Indinge. Deus HAS sunk billions into Galytin, in fact. And stated he was paying for it in the comic. See… I can actually point out where my points are coming from in the comic, down to the exact panels.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-387-a-noble-investment-embiggens-the-smallest-wallet/
(panels 3, 4, 5, and 6)
Deus: I am offering to transform this sliver of land into an economicpower. I will take a portion of your GDP as both compensation and motivation, but the MAJORITY will be funneled back into the country to improve infrastructure. No one can compete with Asian manufacturing wihtout roads, education, and stable sources of electricity, food, and clean waste.”
And when Indinge asks “How do we afford this infrastructur? Our GDP does not even rank with the world bank! HMM?! WE’RE NOT EVEN RECOGNIZED AS A COUNTRY!”
Deus responds with “I’ll pay for it.”
Indinge: “The… infrastructure of an ENTIRE COUNTRY?”
To which Deus responds :”It’s not a big country, Indinge. Let’s be honest, and I am personally the world’s 98th largest economy. A few billion in, dozens of billions out in the long term. Most executives only care about the next quarter. They lack vision. I plan in decades.”
So there. You’re 100% wrong.
“Deus is not rich enough to do what he claims to have accomplished without wealth being generated by the country”
Again, you really need to learn the difference between wealth an assets. The wealth generated by Galytin is almost entirely BECAUSE of the money he is funneling back into Galytin. He’s TRYING to make it so they can start making their own wealth. Aside from it just being good for everyone, it’s also great for him. If he gets a sliver of the GDP of Galytin, the higher he is able to get that GDP, the more money he can make as a result, while simultaneously the people of Galytin would be making even MORE THAN THAT as a nation. Deus has already caused the GDP of Galytin to go from 209th to 120th. 209th does not even rank for the World Bank, which only bothers to go up to 190th (Tuvalu being the lowest GDP with less than $40 million GDP at 190th). Which means Galytin’s GDP was pathetically low already before Deus stepped in. Now, at 120th, that means their GDP is around $15 billion. So he went from a country worth a few million to a country worth $15 billion, the first several billion of which came from Deus’s own pocket and his company’s coffers.
“I haven’t even touched his expansionist military policy and wars of aggression against his neighbors.”
1) Galytin was already at war with all of its neighbors before Deus took one step into Galytin. Which is more likely bause they were under attack since Zaire’s loss of Galytin was seen as potential new territory to the surrounding nations The only difference is now they are able to win and take land of those surrounding nations.
All of whom have the majority of civilians apparently PRIVATELY ASKING DEUS TO COME IN TO DO SO. Which is something he actively admits to Maxima.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-840-loopholio/
(panel 6)
Deus: “I will have cut a path to the ocean long before then. But, more importantly, I will be absorbing cities near my border that HAVE BEEN PRIVATELY BEGGING ME TO BRING GALYTN’S INFRASTRUCTURE AND JOBS TO THEIR CITIZENS.”
End quote. Again, when I make an argument, I am able to back it up, usually with exact links.
“Deus is a thug in a suit.”
Deus has an excellent suit, but he is in no way a thug.
Warder said:
> Deus is a megalomaniacal narcissist who makes excuses for his bad behavior to make him look like a good guy. I’m guessing you are a big fan of that ode to socialism, Atlas Shrugged?
Pander said:
> 2) Atlas Shrugged was not an ode to socialism.
Warder was being sarcastic, implying that when you state that Deus is a good guy you are reversing reality in the same way that claiming Atlas Shrugged is pro-socialist would be a reversal of reality.
Warder said:
> “Deus used this response as a reason to kill him.”
Pander said:
> Deus used Indinge ordering his men to throw Deus off the roof as a reason to kill him. Self Defense.
This is one of the few places where you consistently get it wrong. No, Deus started the murdering. Also, I’m not sure where you get the “throwing off the roof” part, since that was never said. Indigne first told him to get out, then Deus insulted him, then Indigne said “You promise the impossible, then insult me? Get out before I have you shot!”, then Deus ordered Cthillia to murder Indigne. It was not self-defense and the guards never raised their weapons until after Indigne was murdered. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-389-interview-to-a-kill/
> [Oprah] built her billions more on being a personality that people wanted to listen to and see on TV. She provided a service people wanted – entertainment – and she got rich because of it by being one of the firsts in her particular field to do so at her level of success.
Yes, but the nature of the entertainment was that she was peddling pseudoscience and snake oil. Warder is correct on this point.
Again, I agree with pretty much everything else you said. I’m not sure about the “Galtyn was at war with all its neighbors” bit but it doesn’t make any particular difference so I can’t be arsed to dig it up.
I would pay to read that. And yeah – Deus, as presented in the comic so far, is not a villain. At worst, he’s a hero dressed up as a villain, whose motives and interests are not strictly bound to the protagonists’. I’d compare him to David Xanatos, but Xanatos was actually an antagonist from episode 1. Deus has never been outright antagonistic to the ARCHON crew – sneaky, not entirely honest, and a little weird, yes, but it’s not like ARCHON has much business complaining there. The closest we’ve ever seen him come to villainy is stealing from the Twilight Council’s vault (or rather, piggybacking on Sciona’s heist), and I’m not convinced that was even illegal in more than a theoretical sense. On the other hand, he’s doing unambiguously good things on a scale that rivals or even surpasses ARCHON, who seem mostly focused on conventional superheroics like stopping super-crime and otherwise preserving the status quo.
He’s no paladin. He’s definitely not Lawful Good – I’d peg him as Chaotic Good or at worst Chaotic Neutral, splitting the difference between “he massively improved the quality of life of however many people live in Galytn” and “but he’s doing that for his own long-term benefit” – but he’s not evil in any meaningful sense.
I agree with every single part of this incredibly intelligent and probably very good looking poster’s post.
+1 internet for DaringSteel, and I commend your observations.
Deus definitely does seem more like Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral with a preference towards Good. As critical as I like to be about characters, I just can’t see anything evil about what Deus does, and I think he’s intentionally written that way despite his deep love for ‘evil overlord’ tropes, because everything he does seems to go out of its way to not actually be ‘evil’ and, at worst, he just uses the trappings of it (evil laugh with lightning in the background sort of thing – all for show, when his actual actions are quite noble overall). All praise Deus amen.
Thank you very much, my fellow intelligent-and-probably-good-looking poster!
I’ve always thought of the Evil Overlord list as being almost a better guide to good than to evil, in that an Evil Overlord who followed all the rules would see a significant reduction in their evil-ness (or at least would be much harder to cast as a villain). How many “evil” characters would be better off achieving their ends by plausibly-good or at least morally grey / less blatantly evil means? How much weaker would the Rebel Alliance have been if Palpatine hadn’t enacted such blatantly racist (in the sense of human-supremacist) policies, thus pushing every non-human sapient towards the Rebel Alliance by default? How much more successful could Sauron have been if he’d taken advantage of his immortality to play the long political game, instead of throwing armies of orcs at far better-trained and better-equipped kingdoms? Why would Rourke care about being able to sell the Heart of Atlantis, when he already had at least two perfectly viable avenues to stupendous wealth (to wit: being the guy who led the expedition to Atlantis, and/or asking the even-more-stupendously-wealthy Whitmore for an extra zero or two of hazard pay on his paycheck) that didn’t piss off all his remaining allies and the city of super-tech?
If you think about it long enough, fictional “Evil” always ends up looking like just bad choices – and if those bad choices aren’t justified in-universe, it starts looking like something the author shoved in to justify that character being the bad guy. Which is a bit more insightful than I want to be about my fantasy fiction.
“Thank you very much, my fellow intelligent-and-probably-good-looking poster!”
You are too kind, but I would expect nothing less of someone as virtuous as yourself.
“How many “evil” characters would be better off achieving their ends by plausibly-good or at least morally grey / less blatantly evil means?”
Exactly!!!
There’s literally a couple of tropes about this – one for villains and one for heroes. For villains, it’s the ‘Cut Lex Luthor a Check’ trope. For heroes, it’s the ‘Reed Richards is Useless’ trope.
For villains, you’ll have some guy who builds a jetpack… in his garage… from spare parts, which works AMAZINGLY well….. and he uses it to rob banks. Superman caught a guy like that and when he found out, the look on Superman’s face was just one of supreme disappointment. Not anger. Just…. he was really disappointed in the guy. In All Star Superman, Superman said flat out to Lex Luthor that Lex could have changed the world ANY TIME HE WANTED with his intellect, money, and ambition. IF not for his obsession with wanting to beat Superman. And when Superman is dying, he tells Lex that now is his chance to prove that to be true.
Or Sauron, who can literally rewrite DNA. Spider-Man points out that he could cure CANCER with scientific knowledge like that. But no. Sauron does not want to cure cancer, he wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Sauron is an idiot.
With Reed Richards, for a guy who invents all sorts of incredible things on a whim, he has the business sense of a brain-damaged chipmunk. Actually that is an unfair comparison to the chipmunk. Reed should legitimately be the wealthiest man on the planet, but the only reason he even has the Baxter Building is someone had to TELL HIM to sell a few of his inventions or patent them or SOMETHING in order to pay for the building because HE DID NOT KNOW TO DO THAT.
‘How much weaker would the Rebel Alliance have been if Palpatine hadn’t enacted such blatantly racist (in the sense of human-supremacist) policies, thus pushing every non-human sapient towards the Rebel Alliance by default? ”
VERY well put and I completely agree, you prodigious paragon of posting perfection!!!!
Although in Star Wars, even many of the rebel factions are very human-centric and a bit species-ist as well. If anything galvanized the rebels, it was using the Tarkin Doctrine. Especially since Palpatine COULD have, once the Empire had formed, alerted everyone to the threat of the yuuzhan vong (which would have galvanized humans and non-humans together against this threat, and not made them as interested in rebellion). Btw i’m not actually that knowledgeable about Star Wars but I watch a lot of Generation Tech videos.
“If you think about it long enough, fictional “Evil” always ends up looking like just bad choices – and if those bad choices aren’t justified in-universe, it starts looking like something the author shoved in to justify that character being the bad guy”
Exactly. Which brings us to another trope I love. “The Villain Has a Point.”
For example, 2012, which is a genuinely awful movie if I have to be honest. Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser is supposed to be set up as the villain. But EVERY step of the way, everything he’s doing is actually the correct decision and meant to save humanity, while EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, everything the ‘heroes’ do, if they implemented most of it, would have doomed humanity to extinction. And most of what they do almost DOES doom them. Anheuser just happens to be pragmatic about things.
He lets the wealthy people board the arks first. Because they were the ones who PAID to have the arks built. If they had not paid, they wouldnt have been able to build them. He does not put his 90 year old dementia-ridden mother on the ark, because that space being used would mean someone more productive to the future of humanity’s 400,000 remaining survivors would NOT be on the ark and “his mother had already had a good life and would understand.”
He doesnt alert the public about the impending apocalypse. Because if he did, there would be mass panic, and they might not be successful in either building the arks, getting the necessary people vital to the future of humanity on those arks, or getting all the collected knowledge of the human race and the stored artifacts of humanity on those arks so that humanity would still have both a past AND a future.
When the ‘hero’ is shown his quarters on the ark and says ’10 people could fit in here!’ without understanding that 10 more people means 10 times more food, resources, and air required for the future during which they would be dependent on the arks’ resources until they can rebuild civilization, Anheuser just tells him ‘Fine, you choose 10 people and you can leave the ark.’ Note – the hero is an author of a poorly written book which never sold and he only got on the ark because he snuck on it, and was not thrown off with his family, because Carl Anheuser is not a monster. And when faced with this offer by Anheuser to leave the ark and save 10 other people, the hero does not take him up on the offer. Because the hero is not an actual hero – he just talks a big game when he does not have to make the big decisions.
And yet Carl Anheuser is made out to be the villain. For no good reason. While everyone who watches the movie will listen to his reasoning and think ‘hmmm actually that’s a really good point. The hero is a dumbass.’
He’s not evil. But amoral can sometimes be worse.
He’s not amoral OR evil.
He does care about the rightness or wrongness of something. Otherwise, he would not focus his plans in the way he does on people who are the worst of the worst so very often. Yes, he tries to FIRST deal with them. But if they try to turn on him or attack him, he’s fully prepared to end them. This isnt evil. And it isnt amoral. If anything, it’s VERY moral.
He tries non-violence FIRST. Every. Single. Time. :) That shows a preference for non-violent means… even when violent means would definitely be easier … and possibly less risky. That shows morality, in that he knows the difference between right and wrong, and cares about it. It’s why he treasures the ashtray, and considers if valuable. And considers that paying for it would DIMINISH its value. Because he has a very good understanding of right and wrong, but is also pragmatic about it in order to ultimately achieve a good end.
“He tries non-violence FIRST. Every. Single. Time. :) That shows a preference for non-violent means… even when violent means would definitely be easier … and possibly less risky.”
I have to disagree here. He tries non-violent means first because they’re less expensive and draw less attention. Deus is not a moral person, he’s Pragmatic Evil. The fact that he goes to violent solutions after the non-violent one fails, means he is amoral at best.
Remember that none of what he’s done has been for any purpose other than his own aggrandizement. He is not really looking to help anyone, other than himself. Helping raise a GDP or whatever, is a tool to get him the power he wants. He doesn’t really care about anything but his own ambition. The fact that he invades a nation which refuses to give him what he wants is a dead giveaway.
In short: invading a country so you can “help” the residents, is NOT moral. And it’s probably just another step toward his eventual goal of world overlordship.
“He tries non-violent means first because they’re less expensive and draw less attention.”
I think you’re making an unfair assumption there, based on… nothing really. Every time he’s EVER been involved in a possible conflict, he’s always FIRST started with tryin to talk and reason with the person. Even when when it did NOT change cost or where attention made no difference. For example, when he was in the Dark Reliquiry Vault, he could have just had his supers beat Sciona. He did not. That was not because of expense or attention. It was because he is, by nature, a person who would prefer to reason with people and take the non-violent option. That is, by its very concept, a GOOD quality, not an evil quality.
“Deus is not a moral person,”
Explain why he treasures the ashtray made by the little girl?
“he’s Pragmatic Evil.”
Nope. he’s Pragmatic Good. I’ve yet to see an example of Deus being evil. But I’ve seen a lot of examples of Deus doing things that are genuinely MORALLY GOOD.
“The fact that he goes to violent solutions after the non-violent one fails, means he is amoral at best.”
That’s a very odd definition for amoral. So… when dealing with a genuinely evil person, if you first try non-violent approaches, then have to use violent approaches, that’s amoral?
Scenario: The police are handling a hostage situation. they first bring in a negotiator to try to talk the hostage taker into giving up. Then, if it fails and the people are still going to be in danger if nothing is done, they send in a SWAT team or use a sniper if they can take the shot. Does this make the police amoral? No, I would argue that it does not. Using violence as a fallback position when all non-violent positions fail IS in itself a moral act, because you are not going the route of violence first. And when the opposition is itself evil or your action will help people in need begging for help, then doing nothing could be the actual amoral act.
“Remember that none of what he’s done has been for any purpose other than his own aggrandizement.”
And this is where you are the most wrong. Because there HAS been many other purposes other than his own aggrandizement. You are taking the fact that wealth creation being one part of what he gets means it’s the sum total. He’s fully aware of all the good he is doing in ADDITION to helping himself. That’s why he’s PRAGMATIC GOOD. If he was just trying to do stuff for himself and did was doing evil as well, THAT would be pragmatic evil. You ignore all the good he’s done. You ignore that he has not actually done anything evil. And you focus on that he’s making life better for himself WHILE making life better for everyone else. Why are you so focused on a zero sum game? Deus does not seem to believe in a zero sum game – he believes in a win-win scenario from what I’ve seen. He would probably totally beat the Kobiyashi Maru.
“Helping raise a GDP or whatever, is a tool to get him the power he wants. ”
Funny. Have you noticed that he doesn’t actually talk about the nation’s GDP? He talks about PEOPLE’S median wealth. People’s educational levels. People having a future now. People being able to live without being in fear. PEOPLE having a burgeoning middle class, which is one of the key elements if you ever want a true representative democracy which is more difficult to fall back into despotism. He talks as if his own profit is a happy but very intentional side effect. And even if it’s the other way around, where everyone else benefitting is the side effect, how does THAT make him evil either? The result is still the same. Everyone winds up being happy. Bad people get punsihed. Innocent people have hope and a future. Oh how evil.
Not to be cliche, but Deus literally is the rising tide that raises all boats.
And that’s actually a god thing, regardless of if he has ambition or not. In fact, it’s GOOD that he has ambition, because he’s using his ambition to make everyone’s lives better. INCLUDING HIS OWN. Why should good mean ‘for everyone but yourself?’ That’s just masochistic.
In short, not that this post is any way short, AMBITION IS NOT EVIL. Ambition is no more evil than any other quality. Just like greed is not evil. It’s all about how you use it. If you use it to do good, then it’s good. If you have a complete lack of ambition to do ANYTHING, then you’re not ‘good.’ You’re just nothing. Or if you have no ambition to do anything while evil is happening around you, then to quote the old saying “The only way for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.”
“The fact that he invades a nation which refuses to give him what he wants is a dead giveaway.”
I’m assuming that:
1) You have not done a bit of research on Mozambique.
2) You missed where it was already stated that the residents in the areas he takes over were privately BEGGING him to take over, so that they would not be living in poverty and famine.
3) You missed what the former king of Galytin was doing to his people, OR HOW THAT KING CAME TO POWER IN THE FIRST PLACE.
4) You missed that Deus is trying to minimize any death. In a war. Which was likely already ongoing before he even was in Galytin since Galytin was already in a war on all sides under King Indinge.
“invading a country so you can “help” the residents, is NOT moral.”
Really. Even when the residents beg for the help?
Were the Allies immoral on D-Day when they landed on Normandy Beach?
When the police come to get a child out of a home where they are being physically (or worse) abused, are the police immoral?
When a firefighter breaks down the door of a burning building to save the people inside, are the firefighters immoral?
When the North went into the South during the Civil War, which wound up ending slavery (regardless of what you might think was the actual reason for the Civil War, slavery was a big part of it), was that immoral?
You’re focusing on the tool being used, instead of the effect of that tool’s use. And Deus’s effects show what his reasoning is, and it’s more than just acquisition, even if acquisition is part of it. Again, because he’s pragmatic about being good.
If this only happened ONCE with Deus, where he does something that winds up helping people, then maybe I’d agree with you. Or twice. But he keeps on doing things which wind up helping MASSIVE amounts of people. At some point, you have to wind up realizing the guy is not actually evil after all, much as he likes to try to give off that image for the memes or tropes. All praise Deus amen.
Not caring about right or wrong is literally the definition of amoral.
Not caring about the means used to reach a goal is in the DSM as an identifier for antisocial personality disorder, which Deus exhibits with his behavior. We used to call ASPD being a psychopath, which is a more common condition among billionaires and heads of large corporations.
He talks about GDP and then people’s wealth. He is running a puppet state. He turned an entire country into a company town. Just because you approve of the parts you can see doesn’t make him less of a despot than the guy he murdered to do it.
He is being marginally more pragmatic than Lex Luthor or Bruce Wayne, this still makes him a megalomaniacal narcissist. His book of drawings of his sexual conquests, gaslighting literally everyone around him, and his insistence that what he wants is always right for everyone, not to mention his ode to greed, are all indicators of severe and profound psychological problems.
His level of rich is by definition at best amoral and more often than not, actively evil.
this
“Not caring about right or wrong is literally the definition of amoral.”
And Deus does seem to care about right or wrong. Otherwise he would not KEEP ON DOING WHATS RIGHT. :)
I’m basing Deus’s morality on his actions, which keep being for good purposes. You’re basing his morality on… that you don’t like him. That’s not convincing.
‘He talks about GDP and then people’s wealth.”
No, he talks about people’s wealth, other than his own btw, THEN the GDP, as a measure of how he’s made people’s lives better. His focus seems to be split between making things better for himself AND making things better for those he’s helping. He’s doing a win-win scenario. That is moral. Being moral does not mean you have to suffer as a result. That’s just masochistic or self-flagellating. If you can help others WHILE helping yourself, why is that inferior to helping others while hurting yourself? Both are moral – but Deus’s option is moral AND smarter.
“He is being marginally more pragmatic than Lex Luthor or Bruce Wayne, this still makes him a megalomaniacal narcissist.”
Lex Luthor is not all that pragmatic, but if one is to argue he’s pragmatic, Lex would be pragmatic evil (ie, making sure that his cure for cancer does not work, and making it into a temporary treatment in order to make more money off of it). Bruce is marginally more pragmatic, but is not pragmatic in his mission itself (the amount of good he does as Batman would be dwarfed if he used his wealth to make Gotham into an economic powerhouse like Metropolis is, like his father had wanted for Gotham).
Deus is more like David Xanatos, who IS a pragmatist.
“His book of drawings of his sexual conquests,”
Nothing wrong with wanting to capture the moment of his sexual dalliances in artwork. It’s not like he’s secretly videotaping them doing the horizontal mambo.
“gaslighting literally everyone around him”
How’s he gaslighting? He’s misleading people sometimes, but that’s for business strategy. He’s not GASLIGHTING them. He’s not being a bluly or abuser.
“his insistence that what he wants is always right for everyone”
So far he’s been proven to be right about that though. Also having self-assurance is not a bad thing. Especially when he can and has backed his assurances up every step of the way without fail.
Oh no! The man is competent at what he promises people in a way that consistently benefits both sides!
See I don’t understand the fear or hatred of the above sentence at all. It’s definitely not evil. I struggle to see how someone can even argue that it isnt undeniably good.
“not to mention his ode to greed”
He’s right about greed though. There’s nothing he’s said in his speech about greed which is not based on a true definition. It’s almost reminiscent of Gordon Gekko’s speech in Wall Street, with the notable exception that Deus has not actually done anything illegal.
“Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents, each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents.
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you.
I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
“His level of rich is by definition at best amoral”
I think I see your problem. Being wealthy is not amoral. You are confusing people who do amoral things to become wealthy with being wealthy itself being amoral.
“more often than not, actively evil.”
You’ll have to show examples of him being actively evil then. Just pointing out he is insanely rich is not evidence of being actively evil.
> Bruce [Wayne] is marginally more pragmatic [than Lex Luthor], but is not pragmatic in his mission itself (the amount of good he does as Batman would be dwarfed if he used his wealth to make Gotham into an economic powerhouse like Metropolis is, like his father had wanted for Gotham).
It’s actually canon that he *does* do a lot to help Gotham economically. The Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation does large amounts of charity work, Wayne Enterprises creates lots of jobs, etc. We don’t see those things because economics is boring and punching villains is awesome.
As to the “greed is good” speech…eh, no. Greed and the profit motive is what causes corporations to focus on the next quarter instead of the next decade, thereby causing a lot of long-term harm. It’s what causes them to pay below living wages, and to schedule people for 37 hours instead of 40 so that they aren’t full-time and therefore don’t get benefits. Etc, etc. One could make the argument that this is because corporations are greedy but lack enlightened self-interest, but that’s a distraction. Whatever the reason, corporate greed is the root cause of a lot of America’s problems.
Most of Wayne Ent.’s work is as a military contractor, with many branches that aren’t particularly great for humanity or the environment. The charitable work is an attempt to offset some of that impact, but probably a net negative company.
And as you say, “economics is boring and punching villains is awesome”, which is key to the entire premise because Bruce’s chosen approach to making a difference in the world is pretty ridiculous if you ever stop to question it.
Yup.. Deus is clearly Evil Incarnate.
And not beause he starts a war/not-war that seems to have everyone’s panties in a bunch.
It’s because he is so inconsiderate to interfere with Sydney introducing her dad to earth’s finest capseïn-laced cuisine in the company cafetaria. ( Grakz being off the menu because.. well.. Max would throw a major wobble if she found out…)
He could have easily waiting a couple of hours to give us a teary-eyed father-daughter moment..
This is what treaties are for! And when breached, genocide is for! No one should, ever, interrupt spicy food time!
“It’s because he is so inconsiderate to interfere with Sydney introducing her dad to earth’s finest capseïn-laced cuisine in the company cafetaria.”
I’m sure Dad and Sydney can visit Fusion before taking an invited field trip to Galytin if they really wanted to, no worries. Plus, at worst, this just means we can have a future visit by Sydney’s parents so that they can go to Fusion with her in the future, ensuring future inclusions of Sydney Scoville Sr. in the comic. Hurrah!
I just want to see Deus and Sydney Sr. in a bro-hug now, with Deus looking quizzically confused
I agree fully with this wish.
I have never agreed more with any wish ever.
I wonder how the religious fundies of that world will react to seeing an actual demonic army. Isn’t this one of the things that the Shadow Council was afraid of?
On the other hand, it could be a golden opportunity for them. What better way to make the point that “yes there are Weres and Vampires – but they’re on our side” than for them to take a highly visible part in opposing extraplanar invaders?
on that same concern, will this cause the Vale program to no longer target demons to be covered by it, so now all over the world demons are suddenly EXPOSED, if they aren’t using secondary disguises?
Like some bar hoppers suddenly having people compliment their horns and wings and tails and…wait does that guy have tentacles coming out of his back?
Interesting point — why aren’t the demons being covered by the Veil?
Actually , it might be because panels 2,3,4,5,6,and 7 are not being shown on TV, but are instead us seeing what’s actually happening during the war.
Panel 8 is being shown on tv and it’s a barely visible picture of Tom. So the Veil probably IS in operation.
But you’re right in that… the enemy soldiers probably should not be seeing demons – they should be seeing people instead.
BUT then I realized… the Veil is currently still running on partial power because of what Sciona had done to a few of the Veil-producing structures, which might allow blatant breaches of the Veil break through to human sight.
> BUT then I realized… the Veil is currently still running on partial power because of what Sciona had done to a few of the Veil-producing structures, which might allow blatant breaches of the Veil break through to human sight.
We don’t know that. It’s been months since Sciona’s attack and it’s quite possible that the Veil has been repaired by now.
One question though: why Panzer IVs?
A quick search – ANY quick search on Wikipedia would have revealed Mozambique’s army consists of the obiquitous T-54 and T-55. Literally nobody has used the Panzer IV in anger for over 55 years now (the last user being Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Yes, call me a nerd. But this thing triggers me. Easy-to-research facts gotten entirely wrong.
I was going to raise that one!
I kind of assume the author doesn’t care about that those details. And just found a quite detailed reference for a tank that happened to be a Panzer IV or something like that.
The great majority of people see a tank and don’t care to look up exactly which tank. The same thing happens when a gun is shown or even when a car engine is shown.
The soviets were one of the earliest nations to integrate supers into their armed forces, and in early combat tests most of their old tanks were destroyed. So Mozambique had to buy old equipment from somewhere else.
Or could be any of a million other explanations that’d make sense in-universe.
Superhero comics can’t be perfectly accurate to our world’s standards and need to rely on readers being willing to suspend their disbelief. But even if you decide to put as much effort as humanly possible into making that as easy as possible, there’s too many niche topics that some people care a whole lot about, and too few hours in a day to research them all.
I guess today you’re one of the unlucky ones.
These Panzer IV drivers would be blind (no vision slit) and there’s no front glacis MG34, either.
Dave explained this last week, he found a detailed tank model and used that, it just happened to be quite a distinctive historic design.
The question should be “How” Mozamb… has PzVIf s. Not why. Even with all their T55 / T62s destroyed, there are more T34/85s out there than PzVIs.
I am glad others identified them as PzVIs.
You mean, Panzer IV (4), not VI (6). ;p (The Panzer IV being the 25-ton standard Panzer; Panzer VI being the designation used for both Tiger I and II.)
T-34/85s would actually have been acceptable too, Mozambique actually used about 200 of those during their civil war of 1976-1992, some might have survived beyond that but none are any longer in service, even though several can still be found scattered throughout the country, mostly as wrecks.
They found them parked in the secret nazi Antarctica base where they did they’re colonising moonshots from. They wouldn’t fit in the last V8 rocket launches and were left behind.
The author answered that in the comments on the previous page. He picked a random 3D model of a tank that didn’t look too American or futuristic, and didn’t care what exactly it was beyond that. Most people are just going to look at it and think “tank”, and are not going to care whether it’s similar to any real-world tank.
Absolutely.
Aaaaaaand, we’re NOT in the Real Universe. We’re in DaveB’s imagination — and we can leave anytime we don’t like what he’s imagining. DaveB is not accountable to us, but WE ARE accountable to us.
I agree with both of you, although I think that DaveB has made it clear that he appreciates, or at least is able to tolerate in good nature, constructive criticism when done with respect given for the talent on display by him. So its reasonable for his fans to make critiques as long as they’re not being rude about it. It’s what separates good creatives from great ones. DaveB is definitely in the latter camp. :) He is very involved in the fan posts from what I have seen and he actually seems to read what’s said in the forums. It’s really cool of him.
Btw not saying that to suck up. It’s not. Reading that it might look that way but seriously… the guy is pretty unique in how active he is among the fan base and the story and characters are extremely original and engaging and the art has progressed soooooo much since he started the comic.
Soo… am I the only one wondering why the harem clone that spends a lot of time with Deus didn’t have much info on this, at least a few minutes prior to the news organizations, to provide for Maxima?
I mean… maybe she’s not kept up to date and wouldn’t know things hours or days in advance, but it does seem to me to be likely that with literally simultaneous experience through bodies at Archon and in and about Deus’s offices, PROBABLY nearly limitless access to his country and all military bases associated to it if she felt it was worth the risk of getting caught/outed, that she wouldn’t have at least been the one to turn on the TV because she has first hand knowledge of the attacks.
Deus could probably hide A LOT from her with a little bit of effort, and vorping into restricted areas would probably be detected and have some sort of negative consequences for her, but it seems a small stretch that he could hide an entire demon army and all plans of this sort from her… idunno
This basically means I wonder what Maxima thinks the utility and appropriateness of her hanging around Deus is, if not as an intelligence asset. Will this raise concerns about her being effective if that’s the case? Will it raise concerns she is a double agent that has fairly high clearance?
“Oh, I’m counting on it.”
Deus literally lives to play these games. She’s seeing _exactly_ what he wants her to see, and she’s not smart enough to figure that out just yet.
She’s not ARC’s spy in Deus’ headquarters. She’s his spy in theirs.
Presumably she doesn’t hang out with him when he’s in Galytn.
Because deus somehow *just knows* that harem is a triple agent. He explicitly has not Vicente other than the mere possibility that she could be, so he assumes, and just like every time, he is automatically correct because the comic won’t let him be wrong about any information.
I really suggest you read X-Factor Investigations and in particular, check out Layla. Her feats of being able to know exactly what’s going to happen on a minute-to-minute basis puts Deus’s ability to know things to shame.
Scarily enough, war really ISN’T changing…the principles remain the same. The best equipped army with the best strategy, and the best tricks, wins.
Deus just has more tricks.
It’s the same principle behind Mongols and their invention of the short calvary bow. Or the invention of the calvary charge.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be a dick, but it’s “cavalry” and you need to know.
A mob of angry church ladies charging your position would be pretty scary. Who knows what kind of weapons the can hind in those large purses of theirs, that’s not even counting the umbrellas.
This mob of church ladies fighting organized crime* is a old family favorite, mainly for a few key comedy moments.
* Note that the trailer gives almost no feel for what the actual movie is like. Slow burn to a ridiculous car chase, much like another of my favorite dry comedies.
the one with the dump truck! ‘They all pealed off?!?!?’ the infamous nail break…. after skimming all that debate I needed this. thank you!
In general the idea of using overwhelming force and demoralizing the opponent tactics is a good strategy to reduce casualties especially if you intend to incorporate the opponent side into your empire and it’s soldiers into your army. That said however sometimes too great a show of force or too violent of one, or if the demoralizing tactics trigger a “righteous fury” response due to various reasons, then you can end up with opportunistic guerrilla warfare groups even if the main target is taken care of. This is one reason the Ju-el empire of my own series leads with both a overwhelming military force and gifts of advanced technology alongside civilian care (medical, utilities, enhance living conditions) to act as a PR campaign. Deus seems to be following the same general idea. Although he may be utilizing conflicting Allie’s given his own ambitions.
That being for comparisons sake, most real world attempts at this are extremely limited as the overwhelming invading force either can’t or won’t back up their claims to enhance the life styles of the people, at least not any further than to further a profit agenda.
but in the sci-fi sense.
Deus is only a little better he has the overwhelming force that can end any major normal combat in mere moments. The carrot part of this carrot and stick strategy however.
while the Ju-el empire can promise clean air, clean water, abundant food, free advanced medical and utility needs and back it up near instantly while using overwhelming force methods that minimize casualties to such an extent yet clearly show they could exterminate everyone if they so wanted to. Deus is not working at those levels.
He has more real world realistic time frames for enhancing the infrastructure, he might be able to make the above promises if he gets his hands on enough Xevoarchy tech, by the sounds of his transactions at the Fracture station he is trying to circumvent their “rules” and get his hands on the tech of the higher members of that federation/empire. Which are likely some tier 2 – 2.5 maybe a little higher civilizations (suspect Lambda’s civilization being on that higher end being quasi-ascended beings with bio-frame constructed hosts and access to handheld stasis weapons. So Deus just might turn around and say he has molecular assemblers, nutrition enrichment devices that don’t alter flavor, free unlimited energy ect..
-this all said I don’t know the tech level of the demons under Thothogoth, they might just be able to supply some of this as well.
that said, one kink, generally a massive invading alien force like the Ju-el are basically a single government operating with the same objective. Even with the countless sub divisions (massive empires and all that), they still use the same laws, regulations, and ideologies.
Deus on the other hand has whatever Vale is who seems to be operating as an individual not a representative *suspecting eldritch or 3rd tier entity (astral planer or ascended class don’t make much difference honestly).
and his own resources, financial, supers, alien tech he bought. The Alari ship is mainly following him but not to any great extent it seems, so he now has the demons. However the demons clearly indicated their own intentions to rule the entire planet, and use local representatives to rule and regulate different parts of the planet. In short Deus wants to be emperor while the demons want to use him as a human magistrate who would have to answer to a demon representative for Earth.
short term military gain but seeing some conflicts of interest there.
“son of a puritan”
alright, carry on…
that’s a major insult for someone of her moral stripe
welp, pretty sure there will be a hell of a conflict next…
Didn’t even need demons to destroy their tanks, any army that leaves their armor in range of enemy artillery and detected doesn’t have armor anymore.
Modern artillery (and by modern I mean 1940′ and up) is just that destructive, the first and moat important armor is cover.
STATIONARY armor. “Shoot & scoot” has been the doctrine since, well, there was that one absolutely legendary Nazi tanker that figured out how to do it–I assume Korea.
Not being there a second later when the incoming strike hits has been & will continue to be the preferred mode of defense for a LONG time.
I feel that the demon army was Deus’s attempt to get the Mozambique army to surrender so that there could be as few casualties as possible, since Deus was fully capable, even without Tom’s army, or wiping out the entire Mozambique army. Making them surrender just means he doesnt have to kill. Because Deus, being the paragon of humanity that he is, wants to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed whenever humanly possible, even when dealing with corrupt regimes who are awful to their own people, while simultaneously Deus being wonderful to the people on his own side.
Plus it’s already been stated that the areas into which Deus is coming are privately BEGGING him to come in to take over and make their lives better, rather than them living in the hellholes of poverty, famine, sickness, harsh tyranny that they currently are living in.
It’s already been stated that the areas into which Deus is coming are privately BEGGING him to come in to take over and make their lives better – Pander
If memory serves, it’s not been stated that all Galytn’s conquests were so invited. Some of them at least, sure, but “some yes, the rest no comment” is not the same as “all yes”.
Amen. Also, how did those demons get close enough to the tanks to throw their rocks without being bombarded when they were kilometers away? Did they teleport in? Are the demons resilient to anti-tank or anti-infantry shells?
Also, why do all the demons look the same, are they mass-produced organic automata like the succubi but with less interest in free will or individuality?
They don’t all look the same, you’re just stereotyping them and ignoring their individual hopes and dreams. /s
If Archon *does* decide to pay him a visit, what type of rapid deployment option do they have? By my estimate, (puts on ranging eyepiece), Mozambique is over 9000 miles away. Standard aircraft would take the better part of a day to get there. Has Sydney revealed her new top speed of 12,000 mph? Her bubble bus could get there in under an hour. Assuming she can take passengers at top speed.
Ether Causeway might be preferable, since there’s a planet in the way of that as-the-hypersonic-crow-flies route. We’ve already seen in-system FTL as a shortcut for orbital deployment, and Dabbler’s right there to help with whatever navigational math would be involved.
Last time Thothogoth showed up too late to see the Aethereum causeway, and as awesome an entrance it would make this would be showing both the Alari and Infernals she can make one.
“If Archon *does* decide to pay him a visit,”
ARCHON would be paying them a visit because Deus actively INVITED them to come in to visit. There would be no invasion by ARCHON. Heck, they could take a charter plane in on American Airlines probably.
i mean suposedly the US does have their own FTL shuttle buyed with the money gained after defeating the fel ship, and moving af faster than light speeds its usually considered as going really fucking fast
albeit i doub the technology has been reverse enginered yet
I don’t think they’ve even gotten the ship yet, but will. Then will need to reverse engineer it, which will probably take time as well unless they get help from someone like Deus. :)
And even if it’s in working condition, nobody is qualified to operate it yet. My money’s with Pander, the R&D people aren’t willingly letting it out of the lab at all in the next few months.
There’s also the question of whether the FTL ship is even usable at such close range, and/or whether doing so is any faster than using conventional transport.
When jumping between star systems, an error margin of a few light-minutes is negligible. When jumping between locations on the same planet, a light-millisecond either way gives a 60 km error margin – wider than many countries. Not to mention the time taken to plot the course, and for transitions between FTL and ‘normal’ drive, all of which can are less of an issue for conventional transport modes.
TFW you could sell your PzKpfw IV tanks to WW2 collectors and get more modern tanks for cheaper.
I’m looking for Deus’ angle here. As far a taking the river–that’s basic power politics. Talk about chaining warehouses was just that–you really don’t want to use Vale (or someone like “her”) as a ferry system more than once or twice, including emergencies.
We know of course, that Deus’ copies of _The Prince_ and the _The Art of War_ are _heavily_ annotated. Not to mention just the general history of the world.
The hiring of outside muscle invariably has ended with one of a very short list of outcomes. “They do their job, take their money, leave, and never come back without being freely asked” is NOT on the list. And when the “mercenaries” in question come with power points about the advantages of their remaining as the enforcement are of a new government….
If the term “international community” were not such a joke, Deus would be up for crimes against humanity simply for signing a contract–any contract–that brought in this force.
Even as such, the US did not act through the League of Nations to enact its trials post WWII.
What are the options?
1) Perhaps he is confident that these troops are WAY less troublesome than they themselves believe. We’ve seen multiple major alien threats dealt with in summary or near-summary fashion already. If Deus’ networks extend deeply off planet/out of realm, then perhaps he has the confidence that Vale or someone can hand Tom their walking papers and make it stick.
2) He lacks the ability to eject this force with his personal resources, but is confident of aid. Certainly, given Tom’s introduction this seems possible, at first brush. However, this has the necessary bad outcome of limiting his freedom of action in the future–perhaps catastrophically. Indeed, any “rescue” force might well go in with orders to ensure that he is accidentally rendered permanently non-sentient.
That’s really it. Therefore, he must be confident of his ability to eject this force–without spending many (if any) resources.
So why bring in a superfluous force which is at least as likely to become a liability as not?
The obvious answers are either signalling or baiting. Signaling to the locals seems superfluous. The local kleptocrats only care about deeds–and indeed, they care about his.
Perhaps he is signaling Tom? Letting him know where he is on the pecking order so as to prepare him for later negotiations? Possible.
Or baiting. This seems much more likely. But I don’t think Max is the target. I think Dabs is. Max is fully military, and simply will not go anywhere out-of-country unless cleared by her superiors. Superiors he can manipulate. Dabs, OTOH, is a contractor. She can break that contract & go with almost zero consequences. And given her relationship with Tom, she’s highly motivated.
But yes, “It’s a trap!”
“If the term “international community” were not such a joke, Deus would be up for crimes against humanity simply for signing a contract–any contract–that brought in this force.”
Um… as someone who actually has read up on the Nuremberg Trials and the resulting laws that were created as a result of them, like ‘Crimes against Humanity’ – how is what Deus is doing ‘Crimes against Humanity?’
I’m asking this seriously.
The definition of Crimes against Humanity, according to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, is “A deliberate act, typically as part of systematic campaign, that causes human suffering or ddeath on a large scale where it entails extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”
Literally nothing Deus has done can be described as Crimes against Humanity. In fact, a lot of what he has done has been against regimes that ARE guilty of crimes against humanity. For example, the former king of Galytin was guilty of Crimes against Humanity.
In addition, crimes against humanity are typically against CIVILIAN populations. Deus has not ever done anything bad to a civilian population – in fact, the civilian populations have begged for him to come in ON their behalf.
1993 UN Security Council Inernatioanl Criminal Tribunal:
“The International Tribunal shall have the power to prosecute persons responsible for the following crimes when committed in armed conflict, whether international or internal in character, and directed against any civilian population:
(a) murder;
(b) extermination;
(c) enslavement;
(d) deportation;
(e) imprisonment;
(f) torture;
(g) rape;
(h) persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds;
(i) other inhumane acts.”
“Dabs, OTOH, is a contractor. She can break that contract & go with almost zero consequences. And given her relationship with Tom, she’s highly motivated.”
Dabbler is also part of the Council and can’t violate THEIR rules. She’s not a contractor for the Council – she’s a member of it, and there would be consequences there. She’s just in ARCHON as a contractor as a test to see about Council members being able to become part of ARCHON as well. despite most of the Council initially being against the idea of it. “Thin edge of the wedge, you need to handle one finger before you can handle two”
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-461-clandestilen/
(panel 8 and 9)
Were “Crimes Against Humanity” well defined before WWII? There was the concept of “War Crimes”, derived from the Geneva Conventions. But “Crimes Against Humanity” was a term created ex-post-factor to deal with the truly heinous behavior of the German & Japanese militarizes.
When the situation is major enough, even nations steeped in British Common Law traditions will ignore them to make a show of revenge-based justice.
And this is that. The entire history of humanity regarding the use of outside forces indicates that the end result is the impoverishment of those surviving members of civilian population. The dangers inherent in such an act are at the level of nuclear war. You either act decisively to ensure that no one ever does this again, or you’re waiting for someone to invite the nasty version of the Fel in for tea & pollution.
As it is, as I recall from one of Dab’s info dumps, there are nasty magical forces at place with these races. Just having them on-planet can permanently alter the place.
So, yes. Inviting aliens in as shock troops is a crime-against-humanity-that-I-just-made-up-to-ensure-that-NO-ONE-does it. Ever.
“Were “Crimes Against Humanity” well defined before WWII?”
No. Crimes against Humanity did not exist at all before the Nuremburg Trials. I’ve mentioned this in past posts a few months ago.
“There was the concept of “War Crimes”, derived from the Geneva Conventions.”
The Geneva Conventions were four treaties that established international legal standards for humanitarian treatment during war. They were agreed to in 1949. While they did include two treaties from 1929 as well, those two treaties had nothing to do with War Crimes. The Geneva Conventions established rules for how to deal with wartime prisoners (ie, prisoners taken from the battlefield WHILE A WAR WAS CURRENTLY ONGOING), protections for the wounded and sick, protections for civilians in and around a warzone, and what rights prisoners of war had until a war is concluded. Nothing about that is about punishment for war crimes.
War Crimes did not come from the Geneva Conventions. They existed 3 years prior to that in order to prevent another World War 2 from happening on the scale that it did, in order to actually try the nazis. Otherwise, based on the laws at the time, the Allies would not have had a legal reason to execute anyone after the war was officially over.
“But “Crimes Against Humanity” was a term created ex-post-factor to deal with the truly heinous behavior of the German & Japanese militarizes.”
You do realize that war in general does not mean Crimes against Humanity, right? In fact, if anything, Deus’s attempt to minimize casualties both and during the war show the exact opposite from Crimes against Humanity.
“Inviting aliens in as shock troops is a crime-against-humanity-that-I-just-made-up-to-ensure-that-NO-ONE-does it. Ever.”
Except it’s not. Show me where, in the Nuremberg Trials use of shock troops over a war for territory, apparently partially at the behest of the residents in that area, comes under any definition for Crimes against Humanity?
For one thing, Crimes Against Humanity requires human suffering and/or death on a large scale. Minimizing death goes against this core definition.
The 12 crimes against humanity that were listed during the Nuremberg Trials, and later used in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial are:
Mass Extermination
Murder
Enslavement
Torture
Rape
Forced Abortions or other sexual violence
Persectution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds
Forcible transfer of populations against those population’s will (think ‘Trail of Tears’ or ‘Jewish Concentration Camps’)
Enforced disappearance of persons
Use of Child Soldiers
Extrajudicial Punishments (including summary executions)
Unethical human experimentation
Deus has not done any of this. If anything, the only side which has done stuff like this from what I’ve seen in my research has been Mozambique, which does have a history of using child soldiers during even its independence war. Not to mention several other crimes on that list. As recently as 2021, where they’ve used children as young as 5 years old, training them to handle weapons to fight. According to the UN’s own reports.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102202
You missed the keyword “inviting aliens” in the whole inviting aliens to use as shock troops bit. The aliens have already stated their goal to archon as invading the entire world, so a “betrayal of humanity” crime is pretty easy to see especially if Tom and Co start seeing any real success in their plans. At the very least it would look like a sub category of enslavement as it is an existential threat against the sovereignty of humans over their own planet.
And you keep going on this “it can’t be a war crime because it is minimizing human death” but again we haven’t actually seen that. The only bit we have seen of the demons is them killing people, so how exactly is that minimizing death? You seem to be reading them destroying tanks and mechanized infantry as just destroying property, but have you forgot that tanks have crews and infantry are people?
“You missed the keyword “inviting aliens” in the whole inviting aliens to use as shock troops bit.”
That is not a war crime or crime against humanity either. No matter who you hire, hiring mercenaries is not a crime against humanity.
Seriously, just read the results of the Nuremberg Trials. It’s publicly available information. VERY public.
“The aliens have already stated their goal to archon as invading the entire world,”
1) They did not.
2) The only mention of it anything aggressive at all was before Maxima bodslammed him, as he was saying it in response to her talking tough to him. After the bodyslam, Tom was a perfect gentleman.
“so a “betrayal of humanity” crime is pretty easy to see”
There’s no betrayal of humanity. Getting demons to fight against a corrupt regime, on behalf of a good nation that is bettering its people and the world, at the BEHEST OF THE RESIDENTS OF THE AREA BEING TAKEN, is not evil or a betrayal of humanity whatsoever. Not to mention the goal seems to be minimum casualties, maximum surrender as fast as possible.
“At the very least it would look like a sub category of enslavement”
There has been no enslavement. You are outright making up stuff now.
If anything, Deus has done the OPPOSITE of enslavement. He’s freed people FROM a dictator who was enslaving them. As well as torturing them, murdering them, and disappearing them. He literally saved them from someone who WAS committing Crimes against Humanity, for which the UN was doing nothing to help them.
“And you keep going on this “it can’t be a war crime because it is minimizing human death” but again we haven’t actually seen that”
We’ve seen a whole lot more of that than we’ve seen ANYTHING of an unreasonable death count. 80% surrender rate means a lot of people surrender and are not killed, despite the forces under Deus’s control being so powerful that they could have won a war by attrition instead of by surrender with EASE.
“but have you forgot that tanks have crews and infantry are people?”
Check out where the tanks were destroyed. It isnt where the tank crews would be seated.
And lets steelman your point for a moment. Lets say that some tank crew members did die. It’s still a minimal amount compared to who is not being targeted. In a war.
Okay, good, it sounds like *someone* is considering the more interesting (to me) angle here, which is that given that Tom wanted to conquer Earth, what did Deus offer to pay him?
A foothold and a partner with an established presence would be my guess. And possibly a neighboring country of only passing economic value.
Umm, is no one going to mention the obvious? Mozambique is destined to lose – they are fielding WWII German Panzer IVH tanks!
Well drawn Panzer IV H tanks, nice. :)
i don’t worry about Mozambique as this is likely the event that gets Syd the rack upgrade form the start of the comic. i honestly expect Syd to wipe this force out almost single handedly
While DaveB sometimes does supporting research, it’s a comic strip and those tanks are iconic. They are the tankiest tanks that ever tanked.
oops, Looks like Kan noticed this too. I guess I only saw the first page of comments when I wrote that.
My thought is Dave used that model because, A) they look good, B) it represents the immensity of the gulf between their resources, and C) this is a fantasyt comic, who the f*** cares if its not histprically accurate!
:)
so the only upside of this is now we get to see why Syd get the promotion (by likely wiping these forces out mostly by herself) and hopefully we get to see Deus get his first mayor failure at Syd’s hand
it would be an interesting way to get deus interested in sydney because soo far it looks like she is his blindspot, he had that staring contest with her, he didnt knew that she was in the fracture and it seems like he doesnt know what the orbs are, no one knows
whatever resource, power or whatever deus is using to gather his inteligence it looks like sydney is a blindspot and the stronger she gets the more dificult it will become to counter her
That’s an interesting point: His ability to know things he shouldn’t doesn’t seem to extend to Halo. Maybe the orbs are shielding her somehow from his attention? Wouldn’t be shocking if they had a low level “somebody else’s problem” field going at all times.
If anybody else in Archon had been there at Fracture station, I bet Deus would have somehow known it, and rescued them for credit with Archon.
So far she is the only person we have have seen deus actually attempt to get information on. Everyone and everything else, deus just knows it somehow, but with Sydney we see deus actually spying on her either the geatish ninja and being told about her by harem
Or maybe Deus did not know because the specifics of when she was on Fracture Station were never made public, so if he fets his info from the future he would only know that Sydney had been to Fracture station, but not exacyly when.
Assuming he knows things because of time travel shenanigans, which is still my main guess because of others who have done this in comics, like Xanatos from Gargoyles and Layla from X Factor Investigations.
HOW DID HE GET TOMS NUMBER
Vale, if she is an Eldritch then she or another of her kind could be the astral planers that manipulated demons in the past.
“He just has an annoying knack for knowing stuff he shouldn’t.“
If Deus used just supers, it would be hard for archon to investigate.
But Deus used demonic forces and that MIGHT make it easier for archon to investigate.
Still outside their jurisdiction. They are USA internal military force, not a an international coalition force like Justice League or Avengers are at times.
I did use the word “might” and earlier Tom did declare that he wanted to invade the entire world (which would include the USA) and the US military would want to prevent that
I responded to someone else on that as well, they will need to verify this is still their intentions before deployment.
And that should be enough to investigate, like I said
Archon is a newly minted force and I expect its charter and ROEs to evolve over time, possibly into US internal, US external and possibly extra-planetary response units. Consider the situation of the squidwards arriving and landing in France. They have the capability of attacking US territory directly from France (they chased Sydney halfway around a planet with explosions) Is Archon going to sit on their hands because the attacker is outside of the US. No, the US declares war on squidward and sends in Archon to deal with them. Archon knows that Tom said that he wanted to invade, representing an imminent threat to US interests. Archon may not be able to deploy right as of this moment due to limiting legislation, but legislation changes, sometimes quite fast.
That would be a sight, but I fear that if the squiwards ever show up, after what Sydney did to them, they’ll come armed for bear. Or Godzilla. Stilll would like to see them again though.
Like how the character bios for Sydney’s parents are Just that they are and *mic drop* Nuff said.
That’s because they are normals
Okay, the Pander-mic is spreading, better get the .44 calibre booster-shot ready for the inflicted
I don’t get it. Who is this pandering to?
G ha not yet realized the light which is Deus, paragon of humanity and savior of a brighter tomorrow for us all.
All praise Deus amen.
You know what’s funny? You, and all the other complainers, are more effective evangelists for Deus than Pander ever will be.
Hee! :)
it’s total Pander-moan-ium
BOOOOOO! HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Now *that* was a good pun.
when calling out the Bad in a character, in real life or a story, makes you flock to that character more sad more about you then the person pointing it out.
and none of what it says is good
I’ve read this post 5 times and have no idea what you’re saying.
While I am aware that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the apparent inability of any of the commenters complaining about Deus to make a compelling argument does make it appear that there isn’t one supporting their position.
Basically, if you say something dumb, you make your whole side look dumb. If you resort to insults, rather than logic, you make the other side look better in comparison.
Ahhh ok thanks for that explanation Torabi. I agree.
Sorry G., wasn’t paying attention.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOO! HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Even SmugD can’t be that stupid to believe deploying literal demons would be overlooked
Dabbler is a demon and working for the United States, in a military capacity as as ‘contractor.’
And the only reason people don’t know that is the same reason they did not know she was an alien. Because the US didnt tell anyone that. Just like they didnt tell anyone about supers until the press conference, relying on the imperfect veil of the Council to keep most people from asking questions.
In fact, the only reason the US eventually had to let the world know they had aliens among them was because of Deus and the Alari ship. As Dabbler said “Governments have secrets.”
I guess Deus is just more honest about it.
All praise Deus amen.
Dabbles isn’t being used to invade another country
No. Instead Dabbler is being used to arrest American citizens on American soil, based on what would have to be a false identity since until recently Dabbler, as a somehow American citizen despite her ‘country of origin’ being classified information’, could not possibly use her real identity.
Somehow that seems either as bad or worse since it actually could violate actual laws on the books which the US is supposed to follow, while what Deus is doing does not violate any international laws which Galytin or Mozambique have agreed to.
Mind you I could probably argue in defense of Dabbler as well, but Deus’s actions are much easier to defend ad an attorney. Not to mention his actions have been far more honest than Archon’s actions regarding Dabbler.
> Dabbler is a demon and working for the United States, in a military capacity as as ‘contractor.’
Yes, but she’s an individual hot woman and the demonic invaders are an army of scary looking monsters straight out of Dante. The fundies are going to have a much stronger reaction to the latter.
FYI I’m getting a security warning if I try to vote on TWC via the (apparently broken) link on this page, which is missing the ‘www.’ of the URL. If I’m already on TWC, and use the voting link there, then I don’t.
Didn’t have any problems
And this comic page itself doesn’t have the ‘www’, a lot of pages don’t and they still work fine
The triple-w is mostly just a holdover from the early days when it was trendy and people didn’t know what URLs were for, and I wish it would go away forever. It just makes DNS and server configuration even more brittle than it already is.
Times for America to renew their efforts in exporting “freedom” and “democracy”: can’t let the competition have too mach leeway…
Aaaaah, no. Look what happened to the last two times the USA tried to “export” freedom and democracy. Both target nations were trying to deal with corrupt capitalist wannabe rulers fighting with almost-socialist rebels who’d had it up to here with poverty and injustice. Result? One hard-core Maoist regime and one softer-core almost-socialist regime that’s not too happy existing in the same world with the USA (but likes Australia because we got out as soon as we could AND was treating the locals as real people).
Leave the “hearts and minds” to folks who don’t need guns as bedtime comforters.
Well, that’s extremely concerning and definitely won’t come back to bite him in the well-toned ass. Methinks Deus may have bit off more than he can chew here.
I doubt it. Deus thinks MANY steps ahead of everyone else. That he made this so public only means he intended for it to be public because the disclosure of demons will benefit him and his far reaching goals.
Gotta agree here, this is a publicity stunt as much as a battle. This footage from the front lines wouldn’t even exist, let alone make international news, unless Deus had arranged media coverage in advance.
Deus likely made sure the footage would get to the news, assuming his people did not actively film it in the first place. :)
Maybe the entire battle is being faked just to put on the news, so Deus can get Max to visit while also getting the international community to prioritize some discussions about Galytn. Then once everyone’s at the table he can prove it was faked and show evidence someone else was behind it, then use the backlash to push some competitors off the board and garner some sympathy and concessions.
Son of a Puritan..
I may have to add that to my lexicon.
This would definitely provoke the U.N. into action of some sort. Usually, U.N. reactions to invasions and (un)civil wars is a rousing silence, or to send peacekeepers that set up sex slave brothels and kidnap local women to staff it. One of the few exceptions was when a South African mercenary group decided to take a country for itself, and the U.N. ordered them to hand it back or face actual first world military forces without the normal U.N. “Stop or I’ll say “stop” rules.
Seeing an unelected buisnessman using Very flashy and attention getting amounts of overkill involving (1) An army of Alien blood-mages, (2) A second army of Superpowered beings, and (3) a third, literal ARMY of daemons would make the most dedicated peacenik ambassador in the U.N wet their collective pants.
They would likely ask their respective countries if they could hold off Deus by themselves with THEIR supers if he suddenly wanted their country too.
You can be sure the nervous members of the UN who aren’t the USA, Russia, or China would hold a special session to address the “Galatyn Problem” and likely reach a level of action not seen since 1950.
Ooops, forgot a word “Usually, U.N. reactions to invasions and (un)civil wars /in Africa/ is a rousing silence…”
Oops, disappearing choker.
[ Is the sentence “There was a build up of leaves in the gutter.” so fucking hard to parse ]
“fucking-hard”
My main question is why does it appear that Mozambique is fielding Panzer IVs? I mean there is outdated and then there is equipment that was considered second tier before the end of WW2.
The question has been asked before. Even better, it’s been answered too.
Honestly, as someone who has just recently discovered this comic and read it all in the last few days, the single most unrealistic thing in the comic is Deus. I find him boring and transparent, but also wildly unrealistic. If an American Defense Contractor staged a coup on foreign soil using gear designed for (and thus had the R&D paid for by) the US military, and then became even effectively (if not in title, I’m unclear if he actually has an official role in their Government [although if he doesn’t, his claim to “diplomatic immunity” is even more non-sense that it already was. In order to be granted diplomatic immunity, he would have to be officially recognized as a diplomat by the current White House administration at least. I’m unsure if there is any Congressional Oversight on foreign diplomats, but the sitting President has to sign literal paperwork to make you an official diplomat and grant you immunity.]) part of the leadership of a foreign government, he would be branded a traitor to the Country. His businesses (especially the one that does Defense Contract work) and property would be seized and all assets frozen. So, I hope you have a lot of offshore bank accounts, because if you can’t actually bankroll all those promises, you aren’t going to be alive, let alone in charge, for long. Oh, and you had also best have had the world’s best accountant hide your money for you, because stashing your money offshore doesn’t mean it’s safe. Let’s say, for example, you stuck your money in Lichtenstein because they are less likely to co-operate with US subpoenas than the Swiss. That’s great if the US is asking for the name associated with account X76B4S7J12. But if the US instead tells the Lichtenstein government that the money in account X76B4S7J12 is associated with your pick of terrorism/arms-dealing/war crimes/etc., then they are going to freeze those accounts as they go through whatever court process they have to seize your funds. Sure the US doesn’t get your money, but neither do you. Not to mention the trade sanctions (with America at least, and frankly, probably a lot of Europe if for no other reason than to set an example for anyone else with similar plans in mind) both on you personally and whatever businesses you incorporated in places that might not seize them from you (although that’s got to be a tough needle to thread. You need them corrupt enough that you can get away with being an international fugitive and still keep your business, but not so corrupt that they turn on you the second it’s convenient), but also on the country itself. Oh sure, if you have enough natural resources (and they are scarce enough) then you and the top brass can make a nice living dealing with China, Russia, and the black market ala Sadam era Iraq. But that’s not even enough to fund the standard of living Deus is used to, let alone all the massive infrastructure he’s planned. Sure, maybe you have enough oil to fuel the generators to have electricity, but can you also refine the oil yourself? Can you afford to build an oil refinery (without the billions you had before)? Where are you going to hire the contractors from (this isn’t something that your average unskilled laborer can put together)? How about the Power Plants? And the transformers and power lines, etc. that could be done by unskilled labor, but need highly qualified engineers to plan? Also, all the pieces parts to build these facilities that you can’t pick up at the Home Depot, or make in a standard machine shop? You can’t do half that with just Sadam money (and you probably aren’t sitting on near as much oil as he was), and that’s assuming that Russia or China or similar will deal with you and supply the engineering and technical stuff plus non standard materials you need at reasonable rates and not no-one-else-will-deal-with-you-so-you-pay-however-much-we-say rates. These are just the problems I came up with in 15-30 minutes off the top of my head. I’m happy to grant you standard Lex Luthoresque “industrialist tycoon” bad guys, that’s a genre staple regardless of how silly it is that they never have to give up their riches and companies to pay for the damage that their schemes cause. But when you give them their own countries and militaries, but also US businesses and Defense Contracts I kinda just roll my eyes.
“And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”
Deus is a chancellor of Gatlyn. So it depends on what exactly office of profit or trust is taken to mean
That’s the “Emolument clause” and it only applies to US politicians. Deus, as a private citizen, is not in any way constrained by this law. Although, it does bring up another point, Deus, as a member of a foreign government, would no longer be allowed to donate to any US politician, either sitting or prospective. That would include things like PACs as well. Makes it a lot harder to buy politicians when you can’t give them money in any way, shape, or form that they can legally use to keep or win office. Not that it can’t be done, but that it’s a hell of a lot more difficult, and that’s assuming that they didn’t take/freeze all of your money to start with.
It also applies to federal employees
It’s pure gibbertarian fantasy. Power with no responsibility. I can do what I want yo whomever I want with no consequences because money. And of course that wealth will magically trickle down because tyrants who are willing to commit mass murder and make pacts with demons are wise and benevolent because money
Welcome! Some good discussion points, but hard to follow without any formatting… FYI you can use the most primitive HTML format tags (e.g. ‘b’, ‘i’, and ‘a href’ in angle brackets), raw URLs will be parsed automatically, and Mr Paragraph Is Your Friend.
Yeah, sorry about that. It didn’t seem like as long a rant in my head as it ended up being on the page :(
At last, someone with some sense, now if you could introduce the paragraph I would appreciate it. ;-D
When you say that all these things “would” happen, do you have any particular historical reference to them actually happening, or is your “would” more of a “should”? Because historically, rich people get away with a lot of things they shouldn’t, and governments seem slow to punish big companies, particularly those on whom they depend. Deus may offend one’s sensibilities, but I certainly don’t see the lack of punitive response to his actions as unrealistic.
If he were just a shady defense contractor, OR a shady African warlord it would be perfectly reasonable. The last person convicted of giving US weapons tech to an enemy was executed for treason, so there is certainly precedent. As for what would happen if a US military contractor became an African dictator, well that’s never happened before, but again see above for what happens when you share US weapons tech with foreign governments. It’s him being allowed to be both a US defense contractor and a foreign dictator that’s unrealistic. He’s even a current defense contractor! That’s roughly equivalent to the US government hiring Gadaffi as a defense contractor.
Deus probably has a bank of his own in Galytn where he keeps a large part of his money…
I’m sure Deus would say he has good intentions in hiring the demon hell lord or whoever Tom was, but that’s the thing. We pretty much only have his own word on what his intentions are. And some readers have sure bought it.
If Deus does turn out to be as good as his PR campaign, then that’ll be a nice surprise. But we (intentionally, I imagine) haven’t seen or heard much about him or his plans that strays outside of the public image he puts up.
I will say that if it’s true he has no bad intentions with anything he’s done, then stealing and distributing magical artifacts and working with Tom are short-sighted decisions that could easily play into the plans of people who do want to enslave the earth or something. He’d be an accessory to whatever acts they pulled at best, even if he somehow had a lapse of intelligence and didn’t realize what could happen.
I have not gone back and read all the comments, but if there are actually people who think Deus is not going to turn out to be evil, they are either bat shit, or too genre savvy for their own good. Honestly, if Deus turns out not to be a bad guy, then it would just be plain bad writing at this point. Red herrings are one thing, but this many flagrant examples of evil behavior have clearly passed the Moral Event Horizon. No, he’s a transparent Lex Luthor analog, and that’s fine in the medium. Just don’t ask me to believe that he’s both a US Defense Contractor, AND and an African Warlord/Benevolent Dictator. I get that he’s supposed to be the “power behind the throne” and isn’t titularly the ruler, but he can’t even pretend he’s not in charge. Having him be bad at not taking credit is fine insomuch as it’s fine characterization. Deus is too egotistical to let people believe that someone else is in charge, even when that should be paramount to pulling off his plan. But then, there should be consequences for that. He can’t go around claiming that he’s a high ranking member of their government an has diplomatic immunity, while also being a US military contractor. Those are fundamental conflicts of interest and would never be allowed. Similarly, if he used a single round of ordinance that was developed for a US military contract for his new country’s armed forces (that wasn’t purchased through official channels and approved by Congress), there would be massive consequences for that. It’s not any one that he does, but all of them together with the lack of consequences that make him unbelievable and therefore not interesting.
> I have not gone back and read all the comments, but if there are actually people who think Deus is not going to turn out to be evil, they are either bat shit, or too genre savvy for their own good.
Go back and read the comments because there’s a thorough discussion of this and the best evidence is that no, he’s not evil. Ctrl-F for ‘Pander’ in order to jump into the appropriate threads.
I don’t expect Deus to turn out to be good or evil, because I think DaveB’s a better writer than that. I expect him to remain a complex character with complex motivations, and it to be up to the readers to debate the morality of his actions, rather than authorial fiat.
He can be evil while thinking he’s the good guy. I absolutely think that’s where this is going. Well, saying he’s evil might actually be overstating things, he’s probably much closer to amoral than evil. He genuinely doesn’t take good or evil into consideration when he makes decisions. Deus earnestly believes that the ends justify the means (and also that his ends are the best possible regardless of whether or not that’s true for anyone else) and that he is every bit the hero/savior that he tells everyone he is. Honestly, him doing any good for the average Joe in the process already puts him far above the vast majority of similar characters in the genre, so I do want to acknowledge that. But Dave hasn’t been a G.R.R.M. kind of trope deconstructionist to this point, and for Deus to not end up actively opposing our heroes at this point could only really come out of a deliberate trope aversion, not from any kind of logical narrative flow. He doesn’t stand for any of the things our heroes stand for, ergo he is the “bad guy”. We just get to argue about how “bad” he actually was, instead of him being, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a “cartoonishly evil” level bad guy.
Deus gives me the impression that he always wanted to conquer the planet, but decided that doing it as an evil overlord would be too easy. So, for his own amusement, he set up a rule for himself: He only could conquer the world if he could become hugely popular and seen as a hero while doing it!
I may be wrong of course, but it strikes me as the kind of thing he could do, considering he’s both incredibly capable and incredibly competent with a great flair for the dramatic as well.
I think he realized that being wildly unpopular with his own people and taking on the whole world at the same time wouldn’t end well for him. It’s one thing to be a tyrannical dictator no one likes if your only goal is to control one small country the international community probably isn’t going to do anything about (unless you start a genocide campaign or something). It’s entirely another thing to send the troops out to conquer while there’s unrest at home. Generally speaking, tin-pot dictators use their military to clamp down on domestic dissent, which he can’t do if he’s going to conquer the world.
Machiavelli said that if you have to pick between them, it’s better for a leader to be feared than loved, because people are fickle, but if you can, it is best to be feared AND loved.
Deus clearly wants to be loved by his allies, and feared by his enemies. He’s going for the ideal that Machiavelli advocated, rather than second best.
Tough to accomplish, sure, but it’s the better approach because it divides your potential foes. I mean, if Deus were just rampaging around, and not bettering living standards, it would be easy to unite people against him. As there’s a case for him NOT being evil, assembling an anti-Deus coalition becomes more difficult.
OK I’m not saying that African leaders are not an in general massively corrupt and a stain on humanity, but specifically from the context of this comic, I thought it was implied that Deus manipulated the videos showing that Indigne committed whatever atrocities Deus used to gain the support of the prince? My personal politics currently side with Deus (which is a super first-world thing to do), but I’m also absolutely confident that the people of Galytin will end up dead or powering Matrix-style batteries while Deus sells their dreams to the galaxy. Or something. Deus is a classic capitalist where every interaction is purely transactional.
I don’t recall any implication of manipulation, nor do I see anything like that on this page: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-392-one-liner-post-mortem/
Do you recall which scene it was where the implication of video manipulation was presented?
You’ve linked the correct page, but it’s just the stinger line at the bottom.
One wonders how the worlds major religions will respond to:
A: Hell (or similar) is not an abstract concept.
B: Deux has made a contract with it, and its forces are pouring through a gate into this world.
It’s certainly going to create some lively debates in Unitarian Universalist circles! But then, a new flavor of potato chips causes lively debates in Unitarian Universalist circles.
Based on what we’ve heard so far, it seems to me Galytn is actually the southeasternmost part of the province of Haut-Kongo, which sticks into Gambia. According to Deus, Galytn had been expanding towards the ocean, meaning they must have cut through Gambia to reach the border with Mozambique. From the look of it, Galytn will very soon stretch to the Indian Ocean. Weird that their expansion through Gambia hasn’t drawn more flak from the rest of the world.
and in the comics Wakanda takes up all the countries on the west coast of Lake Victoria.
and all the other made up countries in comics and whatnot that got to be shoved in somewhere on the map somehow.
Although DC was funny about it, they claimed their Earth was just bigger than the real world so they could squeeze these extra countries and cities in between existing boarders without overlap.
Am I the only one super impressed by these guys aim? Seriously, that’s a hell of a throw to begin with but super strength blah blah they don’t even make a blip on the muscle department in-universe anymore.
But the AIM! Wow! Based on that first image those tanks were barely distinguishable as individual objects and they lobbed those fuckers dead on in one shot! That’s pro!
Yeah, that impressed me, too. I mean, the chain might give you excellent range control, but it wouldn’t help one bit with aim.
Maybe there’s some magic involved? They’re enchanted to never miss what you throw them at?
The really impressive part to me is that they may be be aiming to *miss* the crew compartment. The one in the foreground took out the engine but probably not the crew. OTOH, the one in the background seems to have taken out the crew, so who’s to say? Regardless, an 80% surrender rate means they are doing their best not to kill if they don’t have to.
Transmission, not engine. Those look to be Panzer IV’s so the engine is in the back but the transmission is in the front.
An 80% surrender rate means they are doing their best not to kill if they don’t have to. – eaglejarl
Based on what’s seen on-page, that may be a bit ambiguous. Are we talking about 80% of the starting numbers of the Mozambican force, or 80% of those not already casualties after the “shocking blitzkrieg”?
So Mozambique has Panzer IV tanks in their army, that’s odd. I’d have thought they’d be using Russian tanks of the 1950’s era rather than 1930’s German gear, especially considering little of the German armored units survived WW2.
Deus: a megalomaniac after my own heart
Rereading, and noticed the tanks. Did you seriously use Panzer IV’s?? F2 or G model, but repainted.
LOL