POST ALL ABOUT SEAL-CLUBBING 
To Blonddude
I am far from the kind of person you want to ask your "how much violence" question. Partially because of the bastardization of moral calculus I tend to employ for these kinds of things. It's also a different question to ask how much is morally forgivable rather than justifiable. I can stomach a lot of generally unpleasant things, but forgiving is a different story. Though, to answer the justified question as best I can -- too much to ever forgive.
See, this is the problem I have with adopting a value system where one specific evil act is assigned a badness value of 'infinity' or "eleventy jillion," and everything else gets badness values of "mere normal numbers," often with huge discounts because of the "I can't actually imagine one million people being starved and tortured as being one million times worse than one person being starved and tortured."
Because such a system leads to a pretty solid acceptance Stalin's famous quote about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths being a statistic- not just as a joke, but as an avowed stance. Which is one of the prerequisites for genocidal indifference to the welfare of others. The mindset that is quicker to forgive blowing up the planet, killing
everyone and destroying all future potential, rather than something like the Sealing.
I'm not attributing to you the view that it would have been better for to blow up the planet than to allow Jaffur to be Sealed, because
you didn't say that and I know that. But I can imagine a person saying such a thing, and to me this represents something of a breakdown of the ethical system used to make the judgment. Because the willingness to create literally countless individual tragedies, as the price of avoiding
one individual tragedy, strikes me as a very good recipe for evildoing. For becoming the kind of person who is a great net exporter of personal tragedy, a cause of it in others.
Of what I remember of your "While we know the sealing did X, and generally understand it was supposed to do Y" the general concept behind that is fine. What wasn't fine about it was phrasing in it that read to me that "Y" was fine. While it is obvious that what the sealing was supposed to do is many orders of magnitude better than what actually happened, saying it was a good thing* links it back to the Sealing is BAD therefore this is BAD logic I can't really stop. Mostly because that argument goes back to how you define what makes a person, which is always a messy argument with people talking past each other.
The furthest my argument actually went (and yes I'm mindful of your footnote) is that certain people directly responsible for the Sealing
believe it was a good idea, followed by a list of reasons why they believed that.
Somehow this got parsed into "therefore the Sealing was a good thing" for you.
Are you sure you're doing yourself any favors, with whatever process it is that leads to this being the way things get parsed?
As for what constitutes Pro-Dandeer statements, my view is wider than an impartial observer's from what could be described as a "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality I guess. A statement that claims we were in the wrong in an interaction with Dandeer will usually trigger that response.
So... we are
always in the right in an interaction with Dandeer by default, no matter what we do? It sounds like the stance you're describing is that nothing bad that is ever done to Dandeer can ever be a wrongful or regrettable act?
Am I misunderstanding you here?
Worse than The Sealing in the sense it is more damaging, sure. Worse in the sense that it wracks up a higher body count, sure. Worse in the sense that characters we care about die for good, sure.
But thinking that Poptart would have something happen that offends me as thoroughly as The Sealing did?
If I remember rightly, you didn't think you were this offendable in the first place until you read about the Sealing. How do you know this is your upper limit, that there is no further hidden reserve of potential for offense-taking?
I mean, I can say to myself "this is just about maximally offensive by my standards," but that's because when I see terrible things in a story I tend to get
analytical, in pursuit of "fix this" and "don't get mad, get even." My offense-taking is self-limiting, at least in the context of fictional stories.
Is yours?
To Everybody Else
I doubt we have been the only ones working on her. It seems like just about everyone is against the sealing.
All the better; it means
something else we haven't experienced may whittle away at her certainty. Nevertheless, we're still in a position of needing to try to do so ourselves.
She doesn't think that Jaffur exists anymore. She Sealed him away, so unless something starts to happen that proves that the seal is breaking, she'll probably think of her son as Jaron instead of Jaffur.
Uh... from the sound of it, she
does think Jaron is Jaffur, she just thinks she sealed away the evil parts of Jaffur so that her boy could be a happy good boy. That is, so far as I can tell, what
she expected and believed the Seal would do, in her own worldview and interpretations with her own beliefs about the negative effects of saiyan blood.
When Dandeer talks about her husband and son, does she use wording like "he's happy and safe now?" Or does she use wording like "I have a good husband and a happy son now?" I seem to remember it being more like the first, which suggests she thinks of her Sealed family members as the same person, just missing certain forms of insanity.
I never fully responded to you in our earlier debate, but remember when I was saying that
to Dandeer and Berra, the Sealing probably occupies a niche comparable to psychiatric medication? And you replied that no, that isn't a good comparison because psychiatric meds have to be adjusted regularly to avoid side-effects and make sure they keep actually working? Well, Dandeer would reply to that with "yes, and I'm right here to fix things if that sort of breakdown happens."
Any suggestion of
power leaking through the Masque, or capable of interfering with the Masque, is likely to touch off her decision to do that. Because she does think Jaron is Jaffur- just a happier version of Jaffur whose father never (for instance) broke his bones to 'teach him a lesson.' She's not likely to assume that magical powers of Jaron's are somehow distinct from those of Jaffur, or that they are incapable of interfering with the Masque.
While I don't want to actually tell her this, the answer to this point is a simple "I Saw it."
Being a Seer is an amazing excuse to know information we shouldn't.
I think our being a Seer is still a secret to saiyan society at large, though I'm not sure.
If there is ONE person I'd like to keep that a secret from, it'd be Dandeer.
