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The Multiverse is a Big Place(SI) Part 2

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bastur2 said:
What is interesting in this tale, is how Winter's behavior change as he change his mana composition.

Before, whith more red and without blue (more emotional), he was extremely close to his summons (animals), now, with more white he can say that he wouldn't casualy dismiss a sapient summon, but that the animals are acceptable,...

How long until the simple dismiss of a sapient summons would be acceptable, one more black, two?

If this was vampire the masquerade, we would be seing his humanitie lowering bit by bit, as he lose touch with his origin ...
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We'll know he's too far gone when he goes around naked like Dr Manhattan.
 
bastur2 said:
What is interesting in this tale, is how Winter's behavior change as he change his mana composition.

Before, whith more red and without blue (more emotional), he was extremely close to his summons (animals), now, with more white he can say that he wouldn't casualy dismiss a sapient summon, but that the animals are acceptable,...

How long until the simple dismiss of a sapient summons would be acceptable, one more black, two?

If this was vampire the masquerade, we would be seing his humanitie lowering bit by bit, as he lose touch with his origin ...
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Actually, I think you're mistaken/reading too much into it. He never had any issue with getting rid of non-sapient summons in general, just the two in particular that he kept around for a long time and bonded with. They were basically real to him at that point, not just 'generic dogs' that were summoned, but the two specifically that were 'his dogs.' So when he tried to walk through the Blind Eternities with them and they just exploded into cosmic confetti and were erased, it was pretty horrifying.

Other than that specific example though, he never had any obvious qualms about making a varren, riding it around like a horse, and then dismissing it. Or creating and dismissing ravens.

Winter isn't on some slippery slope towards evilness, there was just one specific counterexample where he bonded with the summons and then felt like crap when they faded. He's still got the same morals now as he did at the start for the most part.
 
bastur2 said:
And with more mana, the positions will be much more accentuated, with time he will end seeing nothing wrong in calling a slayer to figth, just to dismiss her afterward... And it will not be wrong, from a planeswalker point of view.

After all, it's not like they existed in the first place.
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Actually, we don't know that he'll be doing that at all. You can't make judgments on his character based on actions he hasn't yet actually taken. Wait until he's actually created and then destroyed a sentient with thoughts and feelings out of hand before you start accusing him of being corrupted by black mana and developing a god complex.
 
shiv katall said:
Would Winter need to stay in GoT for 5 years before before any slayer he summons becomes real? Maybe when he summons something, he can leave the summons a universe but still keep pumping mana to them, and they'd be fine.
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You miss the point of the five years. It is so he can gain a lot more mana, while time skipping so he can be more powerful, without the slower pace necessary to gain all this without a timeskip.
 
Misterwindu422 said:
You miss the point of the five years. It is so he can gain a lot more mana, while time skipping so he can be more powerful, without the slower pace necessary to gain all this without a timeskip.
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Still leaves unfinished business in the MEverse. Of course, his return to Buffyverse implied that time flowed differently in each plane.
 
LockedKeye said:
Still leaves unfinished business in the MEverse. Of course, his return to Buffyverse implied that time flowed differently in each plane.
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Well hopefully he hasn't left for long time in the GOT-verse. Imagine if he comes back and Mary has ruled for thousands of years and can crush him like a bug.
 
Brellin said:
Hardly. I don't think anyone could honestly feel bad about the death of a sapient being if that sapient being just so happened to be a purely evil puppy murdering asshat that likes to wear the skin of orphans for shoes mixes her mascara with the tears of ultimate suffering. You know, someone like, I dunno, a Hell Goddess. That's like feeling bad about killing a mass murderer just because he happens to be a living thinking being. Truth is, feeling bad for that type of person is counter productive, because people like that need to die anyway. That Winter just happens to have the ability to theoretically summon such evil people/beings and put them to good use is hardly an issue. In fact, being able to instantly dismiss them whenever he feels like it is actually something of a bonus all things to consider. Not only does he accomplish his goals but he gets to feel good about himself because he managed to do it while sticking it to a bunch of unrepentant assholes that would never have aided him if it wasn't for the fact that he was summoned.

Seriously. It's like saying you'd feel bad for killing Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or any insert-name-here-person-most-everyone-agrees-is-pure-evil. It's just silly, they're fucking evil and no one honestly thinks that it would be a good thing for them *not* to die.
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It's not the killing that's the problem. It's the creating, then killing when you no longer have any use for them.
 
LockedKeye said:
It's not the killing that's the problem. It's the creating, then killing when you no longer have any use for them.
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Uh, why is that a problem when you dealing with a balls to the wall EVIL hell god?
 
ckk185 said:
Uh, why is that a problem when you dealing with a balls to the wall EVIL hell god?
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Brellin said:
Again, Glorificus is a Hell Goddess. There isn't a lot of room for interpretation in that particular title. Summoning someone/something like that (for good reasons) is perfectly fine because there is no reason to "feel bad" about them not getting to live. Because they are exactly the type of person/beings that everyone can agree would need to die anyway.
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So you're going to create life...simply to kill it. Creating evil life for that matter. Yeah...no.
 
Brellin said:
No. It's creating evil life in order to force it to do something good (which it would never normally do) and then not feeling bad about killing it (de-summoning it) when that purpose has been fulfilled. That is not "simply to kill it". I'm not suggesting he start summoning Hell Goddesses or whatever just to fucking kill them when he desummons them, that would be retarded. I'm saying that he shouldn't feel bad when he de-summons them *after* they have completed whatever purpose he summoned them for. Because every sane person would agree that something like a Hell Goddess would need to die anyway.
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If you create life you are responsible for it. It does not matter what purpose you created the life for if your ultimate purpose for it is death.
 
LockedKeye said:
If you create life you are responsible for it. It does not matter what purpose you created the life for if your ultimate purpose for it is death.
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Let's not get into a arguments about fucking abortions and shit here. Let's just enjoy the fucking story?
 
ckk185 said:
Let's not get into a arguments about fucking abortions and shit here. Let's just enjoy the fucking story?
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Huh... I didn't even notice that this whole thing could be taken as a metaphor for such until you pointed it out. That probably explains why I already felt tired of hearing about it when it started.
 
ckk185 said:
Let's not get into a arguments about fucking abortions and shit here. Let's just enjoy the fucking story?
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Where the hell did you pull that from (actually, this is closer to cloning, really)? And it's not really similar to either, because we're talking about creating fully aware beings.
 
I think the ultimate issue here is whether or not the amount of good brought about by the use of the summon outweighs the evil the act would be if you summoned it to do nothing at all.

If you could summon a perfect clone of Hitler with all his memories, thoughts, and emotions, and you did so just to shoot him in the face, how evil is that? You can't argue that it's good because the only good brought about by it is whatever satisfaction you personally derive from the act, and a few moments of feeling good doesn't outweigh the act of murdering anyone. You're not avenging anyone he ever killed or removing him as a future threat to the world because that's outweighed by the fact that you brought him back in the first place.

If whatever act you summoned this theoretical hitler-levels-of-evil being to do is more good than the act of summoning them just to kick them in the groin a dozen times is evil then you are making a net profit in terms of goodness accomplished.

Or at least, that's the Ethical Calculus spin on it as far as I can see.

Really though, again, I'm content to just wait until Winter actually does something so that I can render judgment fairly. I mean, everyone whines about him theoretically killing some hypothetical slayer when he leaves, but I wonder if anyone considers that he'd be summoning a generic/typical American girl with some superpowers and forcing her to fight in a war and then leaving her stranded in some medieval hellhole run by a bunch of douchebags. If anything, dismissing her into a painless non-existence would almost seem a mercy compared to trapping her in a world as crap-sacky as Game of Thrones.
 
Brellin said:
You're pretty ignorant aren't ya? Allow me to make the argument from Hitler. If, for some reason, Winter (or whomever) was able to summon Hitler and bend Hitler to some good purpose before dismissing him (aka killing him) would you *honestly* feel bad for Hitler? He is still fundamentally an evil person that pretty much everyone agrees should die. So, do you really want to argue that allowing Hitler to live would be the better choice? News flash genius, you're being an idiot. People like that just need to die. That Winter happens to be in the somewhat unique situation where he can summon people/beings like that and bend them to a good purpose is irrelevant to the fact that they would need to die anyway. That he can get some good use out of them is simply a nice bonus.

Point being, when the thing that is being summoned is unambiguously EVIL it doesn't matter whether or not it can think for itself, because everyone can agree it needs to die anyway. So what if it was created for the sole purpose of fulfilling some goal of Winter? And? Who fucking cares? They're unrepentantly EVIL and need to die regardless. Trying to argue that killing them is wrong is retarded. There is no reason to feel bad about using/abusing the abilities of EVIL people/beings because those people/beings *need to die anyway*. That he happens to be able to force them to perform acts that lead to ultimately good purposes is entirely secondary to the fact that no one would feel bad about them dying.
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I don't think you get it. "Summoning" is a misnomer. He's not summoning anything from a different place, he's creating copies out of mana. So if he "summoned" Hitler, the copy wouldn't actually have done anything, because it's just a copy. So...yes. I would feel sorry for the copy, because until it tries to do anything evil it's innocent of any crime.

Your argument is essentially that it's okay to sentence a person to death if you create them knowing that they're evil. That's called playing god. And no, I don't care if planeswalkers are theoretically powerful enough to qualify.
 
LockedKeye said:
I don't think you get it. "Summoning" is a misnomer. He's not summoning anything from a different place, he's creating copies out of mana. So if he "summoned" Hitler, the copy wouldn't actually have done anything, because it's just a copy. So...yes. I would feel sorry for the copy, because until it tries to do anything evil it's innocent of any crime.

Your argument is essentially that it's okay to sentence a person to death if you create them knowing that they're evil. That's called playing god. And no, I don't care if planeswalkers are theoretically powerful enough to qualify.
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The counterargument to that goes like such:

You take a mass murdering criminal. He's just been sentenced to death for being a horrible evil bastard. He drowned orphans to death in buckets of puppy blood or something. For whatever reason you use your Star Trek Transporter to move him to the place where he'll be executed. The process fails, but the pattern remains stable and he is successfully recovered on both sides of the transporter before either side realizes what's happening.

You now have two copies of the criminal. Which one do you put to death? Because obviously at least one or possibly both of them were 'created' just now, which means they've never committed any crimes.

More specifically I suppose, your argument focuses more on the idea that the act of creating this copy is evil regardless of its history, but to that I can only say once again: wait and see. People keep throwing fits over hypothetical actions, but Winter hasn't actually done any of these supposedly reprehensible things he's being condemned for.
 
Brellin said:
You're pretty ignorant aren't ya? Allow me to make the argument from Hitler. If, for some reason, Winter (or whomever) was able to summon Hitler and bend Hitler to some good purpose before dismissing him (aka killing him) would you *honestly* feel bad for Hitler? He is still fundamentally an evil person that pretty much everyone agrees should die. So, do you really want to argue that allowing Hitler to live would be the better choice? News flash genius, you're being an idiot. People like that just need to die. That Winter happens to be in the somewhat unique situation where he can summon people/beings like that and bend them to a good purpose is irrelevant to the fact that they would need to die anyway. That he can get some good use out of them is simply a nice bonus.

Point being, when the thing that is being summoned is unambiguously EVIL it doesn't matter whether or not it can think for itself, because everyone can agree it needs to die anyway. So what if it was created for the sole purpose of fulfilling some goal of Winter? And? Who fucking cares? They're unrepentantly EVIL and need to die regardless. Trying to argue that killing them is wrong is retarded. There is no reason to feel bad about using/abusing the abilities of EVIL people/beings because those people/beings *need to die anyway*. That he happens to be able to force them to perform acts that lead to ultimately good purposes is entirely secondary to the fact that no one would feel bad about them dying.
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From what i understan the summons creats a generic copy of whatever you took the essence from so having hitler would allow you to sommon a generic austrian wether male or femsl i don't know hiver was never clear on that point but you wont be summoning hitler same for glory it will be a blank slate so ther maral responsibility still stands.
 
Jiopaba said:
The counterargument to that goes like such:

You take a mass murdering criminal. He's just been sentenced to death for being a horrible evil bastard. He drowned orphans to death in buckets of puppy blood or something. For whatever reason you use your Star Trek Transporter to move him to the place where he'll be executed. The process fails, but the pattern remains stable and he is successfully recovered on both sides of the transporter before either side realizes what's happening.

You now have two copies of the criminal. Which one do you put to death? Because obviously at least one or possibly both of them were 'created' just now, which means they've never committed any crimes.
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Isn't much of a counterargument, because it's a completely different situation, not to mention an accidental one, whereas we've been discussing deliberate acts. That said, I'm not touching it. I'm not even sure there is an ethical solution.
More specifically I suppose, your argument focuses more on the idea that the act of creating this copy is evil regardless of its history, but to that I can only say once again: wait and see. People keep throwing fits over hypothetical actions, but Winter hasn't actually done any of these supposedly reprehensible things he's being condemned for.
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Agreed.
 
Epitaph90 said:
My take is that the Summons are like a Star Trek Hologram that's mana-based instead of photonic. They can do anything according to the parameters of what you summon are. Such as the Varren being beasts that are trained to follow orders. You can play with it, go hunting with it, etc. For the humanoid summons, like the Slayers Winter now has access to, they can talk, fight, and do anything a human can do. They can think, adapt, plan, follow orders, whatever.

But like all star trek holograms, they're not real. They don't have souls. It's only when they consume enough matter to become "Real" that you have that issue. They then become self sustaining, and I'm guessing the mana that went into their creation essentially condenses and sparks a soul for that being, which is why Winter dosn't need to pump mana into them to keep them around. It's at that point where you have ethical debates on killing a living being.

Not before.

My personal question on the slayer summons is, will the Slayers he get even be a slayer like Buffy? He got the Slayer Essence, not Buffy's own essence. So could the slayers come from all points in history and ethnicity from the beginning up until Buffy's era? And thus have different skill sets and whatnot?
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Check the last post winter specifically says to giles that they have souls
 
Brellin said:
Except the "essence" thing as has been described in the story seems to imply that the thing being summoned is a generic copy of the thing that the essence represents. Which, in the case of Glory, would be a Hell Goddess that likes to kill people and suck out their souls or whatever. That's pretty much text book evil there no matter what way you cut it. Remember what is being summoned might be a generalization but it's still shares traits with the original. In the case of Glory this would mean that it would in fact be summoning an *evil* HELL Goddess that was, superficially, similar to Glory but not actually Glory. But otherwise, for all intents and purposes, virtually identical.

As for the idea that if he were to attempt to summon Glory he would get a "regular" Goddess as opposed to a Hell Goddess ... that's fucking stupid. You don't see any other creatures in MtG being fundamentally changed just because they were summoned somewhere other than where they came from do you? No, you don't. If you summon a zombie, it's still a zombie. If you summon a dragon, it's still a dragon. If you summon a *Hell* Goddess it is still a *Hell* Goddess, nothing more and nothing less.
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I'm pretty sure that "hell goddess" isn't a species. Rather, that it means "goddess of a hell dimension."
 
Brellin said:
Please think about you just said. Please think carefully about what the possible differences between those two things could be. Please then understand why I am having serious problems not giving a face palm that would make Picard proud.
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One is a goddess that is, by nature, evil. The other is a goddess that could be good or evil.
 
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