- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So sorry about the wait, this weekend was-
*blink*
-busy. Evidently.
In general, Dragon Ball has very defined views of good and evil. It also, however, has points in between. At the time of Vegeta's death against Majin Buu, while he was indeed redeemed to an extent, he had on his karmic record a long list of sins not yet outweighed by any of the good he had done. Thus we see that good and evil are less absolute moral positions that you must act in perfect accordance with, one way or the other, and instead are more of a sliding scale. But all of that does not detract from the fact that there are unambiguous moral positions that the cosmology runs on, and while there exist points in between, those points exist in relation to the absolute end points. There is a concrete good and evil that Yemma judges you by, and he gives you a slot in the afterlife based on where, karmically, you fit.
People can and do exist at different points on the scale between good and evil, but Yemma has only two places for either. This is an amusingly bureaucratic notion of divine judgment -- each sin has a negative value attached, and each virtue a positive. What Yemma does is total this up. Positive end results move up, negatives go down.
So, as to the central question of how good and evil work in this quest? They work as I recounted above. Each act is either good or evil.
But, I don't discard the notion of nuance. Take the central spark of disagreement: Yammar and the Death of House Talt. Yammar tortured children to death emotionally and physically, all for the purpose of preserving saiyan society by shocking future revolts into submission. The question of the ultimate righteousness or wrongness of this action is answered by comparing the Dead Baby Sum of the situation (DBS) and comparing it against the Dead Baby Greater Total (DBGT) representing the number of people saved by this horrid, horrid act. Yemma would judge whether the Death of Talt was a righteous act or a sin, in other words, consequentially. If the number of lives spared by averted revolts is enough to outweigh the karmic weight of the torturous deaths of the Talts, then Yammar was a good man in that moment. It is...unlikely...though.
And none of this means a damn thing, because the Death of Talt was a single act committed years ago as part of a very long lifetime, and for all you know Yammar has been secretly crusading for good and justice out in the wider galaxy in order to wipe the stain of his crimes clean. Just because it's Dragon Ball doesn't mean morality became easy to the extent that you can make your call based on a single thing. There isn't a moral event horizon, either here or in the original Dragon Ball. That's one of the premises of the series -- people can be redeemed. They sometimes choose not to be. When Yammar goes to Yemma, maybe he'll be allowed into heaven based on the weight of good deeds that may or may not exist. But you don't know, and just like the real protagonists of Dragon Ball, you have to judge based on what you know of him. And I like complexity, so while there are final answers to the question of, "Is this person good or evil," I'm not going to make every villain be a puppy-kicking machine like Freeza. Some will be, yes. But people have reasons for how they act. I like Dragon Ball, but I would feel lazy by having everything be morally easy.
(Then again, some villains will be that evil. There are different kinds of moral difficulty, after all...
)
So in short: y'all can stop worrying so much. Just work it out for yourselves.
To get back to my original point, sorry about the wait, this weekend was very busy. Update will be up tomorrow.
*blink*
-busy. Evidently.
In general, Dragon Ball has very defined views of good and evil. It also, however, has points in between. At the time of Vegeta's death against Majin Buu, while he was indeed redeemed to an extent, he had on his karmic record a long list of sins not yet outweighed by any of the good he had done. Thus we see that good and evil are less absolute moral positions that you must act in perfect accordance with, one way or the other, and instead are more of a sliding scale. But all of that does not detract from the fact that there are unambiguous moral positions that the cosmology runs on, and while there exist points in between, those points exist in relation to the absolute end points. There is a concrete good and evil that Yemma judges you by, and he gives you a slot in the afterlife based on where, karmically, you fit.
People can and do exist at different points on the scale between good and evil, but Yemma has only two places for either. This is an amusingly bureaucratic notion of divine judgment -- each sin has a negative value attached, and each virtue a positive. What Yemma does is total this up. Positive end results move up, negatives go down.
So, as to the central question of how good and evil work in this quest? They work as I recounted above. Each act is either good or evil.
But, I don't discard the notion of nuance. Take the central spark of disagreement: Yammar and the Death of House Talt. Yammar tortured children to death emotionally and physically, all for the purpose of preserving saiyan society by shocking future revolts into submission. The question of the ultimate righteousness or wrongness of this action is answered by comparing the Dead Baby Sum of the situation (DBS) and comparing it against the Dead Baby Greater Total (DBGT) representing the number of people saved by this horrid, horrid act. Yemma would judge whether the Death of Talt was a righteous act or a sin, in other words, consequentially. If the number of lives spared by averted revolts is enough to outweigh the karmic weight of the torturous deaths of the Talts, then Yammar was a good man in that moment. It is...unlikely...though.
And none of this means a damn thing, because the Death of Talt was a single act committed years ago as part of a very long lifetime, and for all you know Yammar has been secretly crusading for good and justice out in the wider galaxy in order to wipe the stain of his crimes clean. Just because it's Dragon Ball doesn't mean morality became easy to the extent that you can make your call based on a single thing. There isn't a moral event horizon, either here or in the original Dragon Ball. That's one of the premises of the series -- people can be redeemed. They sometimes choose not to be. When Yammar goes to Yemma, maybe he'll be allowed into heaven based on the weight of good deeds that may or may not exist. But you don't know, and just like the real protagonists of Dragon Ball, you have to judge based on what you know of him. And I like complexity, so while there are final answers to the question of, "Is this person good or evil," I'm not going to make every villain be a puppy-kicking machine like Freeza. Some will be, yes. But people have reasons for how they act. I like Dragon Ball, but I would feel lazy by having everything be morally easy.
(Then again, some villains will be that evil. There are different kinds of moral difficulty, after all...
)So in short: y'all can stop worrying so much. Just work it out for yourselves.
To get back to my original point, sorry about the wait, this weekend was very busy. Update will be up tomorrow.
