Please don't spit all over the idea of due process.
Personally speaking, I think it's not too much of a stretch to draw parallels to the Kukuni and the view that borderlanders have of barbarians like Nokai.
We don't understand it, we don't have that much info on it, and all our past experiences have involved aggression or the fear of it in some way. Finally given the opportunity to learn about such an entity with as little direct harm to others as is reasonably possible (and please don't pretend that a higher-level disciple or even an Elder wouldn't be able to wipe the kukuni out if it came down to it—there's no way that Ves would give us an outright impossible encounter without some degree of foreshadowing, and we're still a bottom-tier disciple in the grand scheme of things), it's only natural to want to learn more.
We got WoG that unless we rolled really fucking badly we wouldn't suffer from anything too abhorrent. That's as close to a safety blanket as one can reasonably expect to have.
I'm nowhere near a pacifist, nor am I an all-loving person utterly incapable of holding a grudge, and I'm certainly not free from the desire of revenge.
However, I do not think that something that doesn't even realize what it's doing is something "wrong" to us should be instantly blasted apart. You can't call it sociopathic, because it's not human and doesn't work on the same morality as us. What is horrible to them could be interesting to us, as we have seen here. Hell, in the SI-verse omake, Ves describes the setting as a deathworld where he'd probably end up as a Vestige, and then as materials for someone to make a snappy pair of suspenders from (paraphrasing). I, personally, think that that's got to be pretty fucked to some degree. These characters and people have similar moral values to us, but I don't doubt that they'd kill with very little hesitation, and then none at all.
What separates us from monsters? No, really; I'm curious as to what your personal beliefs on such a thing is, though we might need to take this to PMs before we get marked down for derailing.
There's so much cherry-picking (I don't mean in terms of evidence) going on here. We disapprove of this thing's actions in experimenting with its creations, and yet we ourselves actively went out to kill creatures to make shiny new objects. Granted, those creatures were not sentient, and thus we had about as much remorse for the action as one would have for picking out a parcel of ground beef at the supermarket.
But that's the difference; this thing is something we can actually try and communicate with.
I keep on reading that my plan doesn't work because "we don't know enough about it. You keep on making all these assumptions. It's heading right for us."
Yeah. I fully agree. I fully agree that we don't know enough about it to make a judgement on its character, its way of thought, everything else about it.
We clearly dehumanize it, and sure, to an extent we're right to. It's doing things no sane human would.
And that's because it's not human. I recognize that.
And I also recognize that such a thing does not preclude the ability to learn human customs or change ways of thought. It is a creature of Mind and has, at the very least, that much potential.
I know that power grants the privilege of choice, and we are sadly lacking in decisive amounts of it—but the Rakshasa is a pretty good equalizer. It was enough to be pretty much the final decider between a match of eclectic not-synergized-in-any-way items, and an optimized-to-the-gills item set. That's pretty fucking big.
Sorry for writing all over the place. I didn't get to cover everything that I was thinking of. Please poke as many holes into my argument as you can, so that I can shore them up. Above all, though, let discourse be relatively civil.
Please?
