Dragon no I de Oyasumi - Ch. 25 - Good Night for a Friend

[Teruyo]

Shiba is a nice chap. He'll also will destroy the world if something happened to Amon but still a nice guy.

 

[Landale]

Noncombat magic is possibly underdeveloped? Interesting it's a more 'recent' discovery.

Makes sense. Technology has always been driven by what kills and/or undermines those other guys first, or prevents them from doing so to you, then general public gets the watered down stuff.

"This Fireball can kill so many of those dudes." A few years later, "Jim said something about the smell of burning flesh making him hungry, so we realized we could make a really tiny Fireball that cooks food quick."

 

[th3rizzl3r]

Amon but badass and has more rizz

 

[mcmoor]

I mean I'm the side of sparing Marill solely cuz she's useful. We can paperclip her.

 

[mcmoor]

All-consuming dragon as therapist, whoda thunk?

It does feel like Shiba was a BBEG at some point, so maybe Amon's using his body and the isolation of the dragon as a way to keep him thoroughly sealed?

I think the "taken way too much damage" and "hold out for two or three minutes" means this BBEG was on the brink of death and Amon shelters him from that.

 

[BobBob]

One was actively forced into it, it was either obey or forfeiting her life and reason to live. The other chose it because of strictly personal reasons, not like her parents were killed by humans either, it's not even that she thinks humans and elves are evil, she just hates them because of her previous experiences, which ultimately makes her as narrowminded as the people bullying her. She disregards their value because they are someone other than herself, it's not even about being a human or an elf.

If not killing her is an option, then aight, I don't really care as long as they know they can deal with her if she ever puts up some shit like this again.

However, their circumstances are not the same in any way. The only similarities is that they've had (mostly) shitty lives up to this point. I do find it annoying when people overreact to a character doing evil shit only to get spared later, but this comparison is wrong in every way. I find it annoying cause all of this shit about someone deserving a second chance or not is always just stupid, in one hand you have people willing to forgive anything as long as there's an excuse, in the other hand there's people who behave as if making mistakes wasn't a thing good people can do, like only evil people do evil shit cause they know it's evil shit.

I don't think she's evil cause she does evil shit, but I do think that killing her is both safer and justified enough. Honestly, I'd have different thoughts if she had a long ass history that justified her being completely convinced that human and elves are evil. But, again, it's not even that she thinks they are evil, she just dislikes them and chose to kill any who got close regardless of their intentions.

There's this other thing I read in which a character ends up becoming the tyrant of a fairy country after millennia of failed attempts to save them, attempts that failed because every time the fae themselves sabotaged her, only to then blame her and (sometimes just attempt to) mutilate her body. Aside from that she continuously witnessed how they mistreated and abused her reincarnating daughter through different lives.

fgo mentioned

 

[Umbrum]

fgo mentioned

Tonelico's the perfect example of justified hatred towards a whole species.

 

[DLRevan]

Tonelico's the perfect example of justified hatred towards a whole species.

And yet in that story, everyone still tried to save that whole species anyway.

Even if it was futile, the point is that they tried, and at some point the hatred has to stop else it just keeps going. Justification is one thing, but how about practicality? Hostility affects both the person giving and receiving it.

Someone else here said it is so 'this century' to equate a bullied person with a slave soldier strapped to a suicide bomb. Well I've got another one. It's so this century to match tit for tat, that equal retribution is always justified, that 'disturbances' must be eliminated for the good of all, that taking the role of the better person is a fool's dream.

Quite sad, and maybe worrying when one realizes the same kind of mentality became especially pronounced in the final centuries of dead empires and civilizations, or that its pretty equivalent to cavemen mentality.

 

[Kurovah]

"Huh, that's a lot of comments I wonder why"
reads chap
"Ah I see, it's one of these chapters"

Well the olive branch has been extended so nothing we can do lol. Let's just hope she's not going to be annoying down the line and/or they don't sweep what she's done under the rug, same applies for the lass who came before.

 

[Umbrum]

And yet in that story, everyone still tried to save that whole species anyway.

Well... only Chaldea actually... Baobhan prayed to Cernunnos so that he would destroy them after what they did to her and Morgan, Barghest realised all of the Fae had to be killed and became a calamity, Melusine didn't really care about them either way, even the land itself gave birth to Oberon in "a bout of self-hatred", Morgan wasn't even trying to save the Fae, she completely gave up on them and chose to save the land instead of it's people. Humans didn't even get a chance to fight back at neither Morgan, Aurora, calamities nor the Fae.

Even Castoria didn't fight to save the Fae but to prevent Cernunnos from destroying the rest of the world, she even explicitly says that she wouldn't care about what he's doing if he hadn't become a threat to PHH as well.

Regardless of that, the part of my argument that compares Tonelico and this Merill is unrelated to whether or not she should be punished. I set Tonelico as an example of justifiable hatred towards a whole species, not making any judgement of value regarding this fairy's actions, but trying to explain that she isn't even acting on the misguided notion that humas or elves are irredeemably evil.

She's acting out of hatred for everyone that's not herself, as much of a victim as she might be, she still chose to nurture her hatred to that degree, she's the only one responsible for her own feelings, as our own selves are one of the very few things we have actual control over, as limited as that control is.

Think of it this way, when do you think she became an achieved magician? after or before being eaten by the dragon? as far as we know the requirement to survive being eaten by the dragon is being strong, as such, the rational conclusion is that she was at the very least as strong as Amon by the time she arrived to the dragon's belly. How long do you think she got to live and see the world? yet, the one reason we get for her hatred is that she was bullied, we don't see anything of her life between being a novice at magic and being eaten by a dragon, and I doubt she was already strong enough to survive being eaten by the dragon when she was still bullied by those kids.

She chose to foster that hatred, even if the world around her harmed her, it was still her own choice to hate it back or not. Think of Lily for example, she lived in a world that harmed her without a good reason, she had good reasons to hate the world back, but she didn't. You could argue that having a friend was bound to help with that, but we know what the world did to that friend, just like how Merill's parents died.

My idea is not to equate or weight one's suffering against the other, but prove that becoming hateful of the whole world is not something anything else can choose for yourself.

Since you seem to be familiar with Type-Moon I'll also add this quote from HF:

Then...
It would mean that the world wasn't weak and bad.
She was the only cowardly one for not looking up.

And there were people who awkwardly tried to love her.

You can't correct someone and lead them to the right path if you don't aknowledge their wrongdoings. That'd be a blind man leading another.

Justification is one thing, but how about practicality?

You want practicality? then prove to me that someone can be saved before they do something that can't be fixed. You don't know how long it'll take and neither can prove it'll ever happen. You want pragmatism, then prove to me that she can be saved without endangering other peoples lives in the process. It's simply impossible to prove it, and as long as that's the case you are playing around with peoples lives as if they belonged to you, do you think it's fine to endanger other people without their consent for the sake of one person? How could that be fair? How could it be "practical" to endanger the lives of many of the sake of 1?

She already tried to kill Amon, you can't be sure she hasn't done this to other people before, and it sure as hell didn't look like her first time. Someone who's killed someone to rob them of their possessions is much more likely to do so in the future than someone who hasn't done so before, if only because there's a track record. And killing someone in self defense or in the context of war is way different than assaulting someone you just invited to your home, it implies a completely different mindset. So, ultimately you have to weight the chances of saving her(success) against the chances of her not changing her ways(failure), which ultimately will lead her to kill someone in the future in the same way she tried to kill Amon.

If you consider that to be a rather extreme perspective, then how many resources should go to protecting human life? If human life's the priority, then taking your chances is wrong. Playing dice with other people's life for the sake of those standards is hypocritical. Just the possibility that this might ruins someone's life should be enough for you to rethink it.

Rehabilitation is not something that should be done for the sake of "saving everyone" or because killing is wrong, that's just hypocritical as you are potentially endangering innocents for the sake of a previous offender. The goal of rehabilitation should always be born out of what kind of future we wish to see, it has nothing to do with practicality. Take eugenics for example, Iceland has the lowest percentage of Down Syndrome cause of this, eugenics is the practical best way to go about preventing genetic deceases, but you can bet my ass I'd hate a world in which this practice becomes the norm.

Also, saying "this person is like this because of the system" and then saying "this person can be better if we help them to be", implies that you won't admonish/change the system despite acknowledging it's guilt. If their environment is the one who decides the kind of person they will be, then you are also taking away a significant chunk of their agency. A virtuous person won't always become wicked if put into a hellish environment, and viceversa, hence, there's a decent amount of inherent independency towards the environment. You can make an argument for infancy being important in someone's development, but's still not deterministic.

 

[SCP-978]

I feel a little bad now.

 

[DLRevan]

Also, saying "this person is like this because of the system" and then saying "this person can be better if we help them to be", implies that you won't admonish/change the system despite acknowledging it's guilt. If their environment is the one who decides the kind of person they will be, then you are also taking away a significant chunk of their agency. A virtuous person won't always become wicked if put into a hellish environment, and viceversa, hence, there's a decent amount of inherent independency towards the environment. You can make an argument for infancy being important in someone's development, but's still not deterministic.

Once you got to this point, I really wondered if you were just projecting something on me. At no point did I say that what they did was excusable, that is someone else's argument. However, I do think that a crime/sin/whatever's justification or lack thereof isn't the same thing as the reasoning for retribution.

I don't really understand what you're arguing by throwing that line from HF at me. You really seem determined to say that I think we should forgive the perpetrator. At the same time you seem to have missed the point of both HF and Avalon when it comes to the message of moving forward, even when it seems inevitable. There were no regrets among the Chaldea staff when their attempts to make change was in the end, effectively thwarted. Someone more cynical and reductive would say they should have never tried in the first place, they even risked themselves and their overarching mission on something that effectively didn't matter to the universe whether they succeeded or not.

But thanks I suppose. This theme is quite commonly repeated in the Mushroom's works, he himself claims he just keeps writing the same story over and over again anyway. An overarching theme, something he believes himself, is that humanity is ugly, yet their struggle is noteworthy. When it comes to moving forward over seeking retribution or performing a calculus, one shouldn't regret choosing the former. And yet I've always wondered, do people not really get it? Yes, from what I see of you. That is indeed the case. No wonder FGO causes so much consternation among the western fanbase.

 

[Jachinz]

Soul raping magic Loli has joined the party 🎉
Huh? Why is everyone mad? ​

 

[SCP-978]

Just picked up volumes 2 and 3!

 

[SCP-978]

Wanted to shout out this bonus I got with it.

 

[SleepyDemon]

Local bully not so tough after being reminded that being punched in the face hurts and isn't good for your health.

 

[mulate]

I just knew thered get braindead first page comments virtue signaling.

Does this story not teach the value and possibility of redemption? What about the newest member of the gang who was previously killing all of Lienna's comrades? She's changed and for the better, and she was manipulated into doing evil like this fairy has been isolated from mankind who originally were awful to her. The world's changed, especially the world inside the dragon. It's a story about rebirth as a person.

They probably forgot the story already. I like how no one mentions that Lily probably has a way higher kill count than the literally 400 year secluded fairy, but want to moral grandstand "killing bad" like everyone in here isnt a killer. One of them even has the edgy isekai waifu who literally murders for the heck of it.

 

[Carn109]

Shiba is pretty cool