Objection to Fiend Theory of 640 No Influence? As if!

[Alex Warlorn]

Okay, the Fiends has said in plain english the three souls can NOT influence V's actions in any shape or form. I find this absurd. Simply because they can't override his actions or replace parts of his personality with their own does NOT mean they have no influence.

If you hear someone, heck, if you hear THREE someone's giving you three separate arguments on why you should do the selfish thing in your head constantly, there's no way that's NOT going to end up having an influence on you! And that's not even counting if you hear them in your SLEEP/MEDITATION You're gonna eventually break down and end up LISTENING to what they have to say if you have to hear their three voices to your one constantly.

Just because V doesn't have to worry about them getting together and overriding control of his body or deleting one of his ideas and replacing it with one of their own DOES NOT mean those voices will NOT have an effect on him!

What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

[Kaytara]

I think they meant it more in the sense of "They aren't influencing V in any way that three real people looking over his shoulder whispering suggestions wouldn't influence him".

I agree that voices by themselves, even if they aren't exercising literal control over your thoughts and actions, can still be a pretty major influence. Especially if you are stressed, desperate, may or may not be still suffering from trance deprivation, with your self-esteem raw from months and months of abuse, and have recently been convinced by three archfiends that your "noble" motives are just a sham and that all you really want to do is prove yourself superior to others.

A normal, sane, psychologically healthy person would have little trouble dismissing those voices. But V isn't.

[afroakuma]

I think it was already implied that the voices are actually audible to others. So not so much a tiny ear radio as a stereo system at a moderate volume.

[FoE]

What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

Your theory might hold weight if V had been hearing those voices for a while, say, a few hours. But V made the Soul Splice pact minutes after the dragon had left, and then quickly teleported to the black dragon. The battle with the mama dragon lasted only a few minutes, and once the ABD was dead, V immediately cast "Familicide."

So how long has V had to put up with the voices in her head? A half-hour, tops? Is that really enough to drive someone over the edge?

Rich has stated in-comic that V's actions are her own. There's no "the fiends made me do it" excuse here.

[Dr. Cthulwho]

Okay, the Fiends has said in plain english the three souls can NOT influence V's actions in any shape or form. I find this absurd. Simply because they can't override his actions or replace parts of his personality with their own does NOT mean they have no influence.

They explained the extent of their influence in the cheerleader bit. In another way it is like having a couple of jerks following you around saying "Hey, burn that building, go on mate" over and over again. I'd get super annoyed at them and send them away long before they managed to make me say "Ok, Ok! I'll do it!"


If you hear someone, heck, if you hear THREE someone's giving you three separate arguments on why you should do the selfish thing in your head constantly, there's no way that's NOT going to end up having an influence on you!

V has had them for a couple of minutes. A smart guy/gal like V, who knows the voices are an outside influence. And could end it any time.


And that's not even counting if you hear them in your SLEEP/MEDITATION You're gonna eventually break down and end up LISTENING to what they have to say if you have to hear their three voices to your one constantly.

V hasn't tried meditating with them. And sure, you could break eventually, though breaking doesn't necessarily equal suddenly doing what they say.

Breaking could involve curling into the fetal position or jumping off a bridge.


It's why the Borg collection is able to snuff out a person's own objections to how the Collective disregards the value of individual life and pursuits so utterly and without fail, it's a billion voices to one! That you crush one at a time and add to the billion!

Which is a bit different then this case. V, for a few moments, has had three guys talking in the background.


Just because V doesn't have to worry about them getting together and overriding control of his body or deleting one of his ideas and replacing it with one of their own DOES NOT mean those voices will NOT have an effect on him!

Eventually maybe, if V decides to give in resisting their pestering. At this point in time? No, the fiends are right.


What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

Do we, like V, have the power to get rid of the radio at any time? And do we know full well that the voices we hear are coming from the radio in our ear, and it is only there because we agreed to have them put there?

I'm sure I'd last a couple of days at least.

[factotum]

What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

I would hope it would take a bit longer than the 2 or 3 minutes (tops) that it apparently took in V's case, assuming you're using this as an excuse for his evil acts in the last couple of strips. If you're NOT using it as an excuse for that, then what was your point again?

[Paramour Pink]

I'd like to think that a strong-willed person, like say, one that can bend reality in the way a wizard can, would be even less impacted by mere suggestions. At least, he should have more resilience than any ordinary commoner. The closest excuse V has for going down the Evil path is a lack of sleep making him a little more susceptible to their suggestions. Otherwise, it's all his own doing.


I think it was already implied that the voices are actually audible to others. So not so much a tiny ear radio as a stereo system at a moderate volume.

Hey, I missed this completely. Tell me which comic please. :smallsmile:

[Zanaril]

Comic #638, when the dragon says "Silence!" to the taunting voices. V hasn't spoken for several panels, so we can assume it's the souls who she's responding to.

[Foryn Gilnith]

The voices don't have much influence after a half-hour. Raw emotion, i.e. spite and revenge, is what drives Vaarsuvius to do "evil" things. The voices are complicit in this, true, but not in a way that resembles traditional "evil" corruption. Even one normal person who just happened to be a slight jerk (i.e. evil, tending towards neutral) could have easily pushed V towards the spell, even if the voices were silent. Vaarsuvius doesn't strike me as the type to exercise any sort of restraint or reason where family matters are concerned; and in this light the spell is nothing terribly major.

[Lissibith]

I see it as sort of half one, half the other. On one hand, I'm fairly certain what we're seeing is what V really, truly wanted to do. But on the other hand, it's something that, for reasons of society, friendship or simply power limitations, he's restrained from doing.

Given simply the power without the voices, I don't think V would have gone this far. Without three others validating that he was in fact doing the right thing at each step in this fight, I personally don't believe familicide would have come into play. Terrible retribution, certainly, probably even the entire fight to that point, but not to that extent.

However, as with all theories, ymmv.

[NerfTW]

You're assuming schizophrenia, where the voices are actually in your head, created by your own brain, and therefore can influence your actions simply because a person with schizophrenia typically cannot tell that the voices aren't real.

V knows where the voices are coming from, knows who they are, can communicate with them (as seen by knowing about the Familicide spell), and knows that they'll stop when the soul bind is over. And has only had them for a few minutes at best.

It's a completely different situation. Like they said, it's similar to three people standing behind you shouting suggestions. You know where they are and why they're talking, ignoring them is simple.

[Paramour Pink]

Comic #638, when the dragon says "Silence!" to the taunting voices. V hasn't spoken for several panels, so we can assume it's the souls who she's responding to.

*completely missed that*

Thank you. :smallsmile:


The voices don't have much influence after a half-hour. Raw emotion, i.e. spite and revenge, is what drives Vaarsuvius to do "evil" things. The voices are complicit in this, true, but not in a way that resembles traditional "evil" corruption. Even one normal person who just happened to be a slight jerk (i.e. evil, tending towards neutral) could have easily pushed V towards the spell, even if the voices were silent. Vaarsuvius doesn't strike me as the type to exercise any sort of restraint or reason where family matters are concerned; and in this light the spell is nothing terribly major.

It doesn't matter what a "normal person" would do. Mass murder on a flimsy excuse using power accepted through pride does an Evil person make.

[Rotipher]

Don't forget: V has accompanied the Order for a long time, and has regularly been exposed to statements in favor of Good behavior from Roy, Haley, Durkon, and Elan. We know that V respects at least two of the four, and did not lose vir respect for Durkon until recently. (Even Elan occasionally had a point to make.) As for Belkar, we've seen many examples of how V holds his lack of morality or ethics in contempt, to the point of proclaiming the little creep's brain to be sub-sentient.

Nevertheless, despite these many discussions with vir comrades, V remained morally Neutral throughout previous story arcs. If V were the kind of person whose moral stance is subject to peer pressure, ve would most likely have converted to Good long ago! Any alignment change on V's part, for good or ill, will surely need to come from external experiences and/or internal shifts of viewpoint, not from the persuasiveness of others.

[GNUsNotUnix]

It's why the Borg collection is able to snuff out a person's own objections to how the Collective disregards the value of individual life and pursuits so utterly and without fail, it's a billion voices to one! That you crush one at a time and add to the billion!

I realize you're trying to cite internal inconsistency in a fictional universe, but the Borg, while fictional, aren't part of that universe, so it's hard to argue that principles which apply to them necessarily apply to V.

In fact, in an argument for internal consistency, it doesn't necessarily follow that real-world principles apply, since the real world is decidedly external to OOTS. Granted, there are some parts of the OOTS universe which suggest that at least some of our world's principles apply (e.g., the characters walking on the ground suggests the principle of gravity similar to our own), but suggestion is a long way from logical proof.

Even if we could establish which OOTS-principles correlate with real-world principles, it's at least as high a hurtle to infer from this information the effect of a soul-splice, specifically because there exists no real-world counterpart to multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the body of a humanoid creature that not only doesn't exist in our world but whose neurology is different enough that it doesn't require sleep.

That said, you may be right that a soul-splice should have alignment effects within an internally consistent OOTS universe. However, the only way to provide a convincing argument would be to do so by citing similar situations in OOTS (keeping in mind that V's soul-splice is the only one presented to us in the comic thus far).

[Xorbon]

I would tend to believe the fiends when they say to Qarr that the voices have no effect on V's persona, outside of being like cheerleaders on the sidelines. There's no apparent reason for them to lie to Qarr.

Hmmm...voices in your head affecting your actions/personality? Sounds like something the Mythbusters (http://dsc.discovery.com/ads/ad_interstitial_fill5.html?dest=http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html) could test!

[Godskook]

Definition confusion!

Influence can have different connotations. The OP isn't using the same one as is used in the comic. The OP is using a broader version, which counts indirect and noneffectual sources as still being influential. The comic is using a fairly strict version, as evidenced by the cheerleader analogy. This version does not count any source whose ability to interact is solely verbal. Basically, it comes down to this: the souls can provide logic and reasoning to V, but they can't force V choice on anything. Since V's power of choice in V's actions is still maintained, V is still responsible for any and all actions V takes.

As for the schizophrenia comparison, it doesn't apply here. Someone who suffers from schizophrenia isn't aware they suffer. If they were helped to understand that, a schizophrenic could become symptom free without actually being 'cured' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/plotsummary).

Also, the comparison to the Borg is fallacious. The Borg does have non-verbal methods of compulsion and power that are brought to bear on members. Did you miss the augmentations? Despite that fact, it is still possible to resist the Borg, just really, really hard.

[NerfTW]

As for the schizophrenia comparison, it doesn't apply here. Someone who suffers from schizophrenia isn't aware they suffer. If they were helped to understand that, a schizophrenic could become symptom free without actually being 'cured' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/plotsummary).



Oh heck no. Schizophrenia is not all in someone's head. It has actual, physical changes and affects. You cannot just "will" it away by understanding it. You can take drugs to stop it, but willing it away only works in extremely rare cases.

Such as Hollywood movies "based" on one man's life.

[Foryn Gilnith]

It doesn't matter what a "normal person" would do. Mass murder on a flimsy excuse using power accepted through pride does an Evil person make.

If it was in our world using D&D alignment, that would be true. In our world, mass murder is an undeniable hallmark of pure evil, as far as we can tell.
Of course, in our world, the only possible "victim" of murder is a free-thinking, most likely moral person. In our world, there is no guarantee that the fate of a parted soul is anything other than horrific.

It is reasonably certain that all of the black dragons targeted were evil and planning to cause more evil in the immediate future. It is also reasonably certain that their fates after death would not be at all unpleasant. I am therefore reasonably uncertain about whether or not a significant amount of evil is involved - and a single, fairly ambiguous action does not make a person evil.

Back on topic, because I had really ought to save such discussion for its actual thread. I think that the analogy the fiends used is our best source for discussing this. How much influence do the souls have? As much influence as a cheerleader has on the final score of a game. Enough to be worth having there (i.e. enough for the fiends to bother allowing them to talk), but not enough to remove even a smidgen of responsibility from the players.

[Lord Zentei]

What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

I think there's a difference between hearing such voices you know to be from people who you willingly linked to your head as opposed to voices you hear in your head which you don't know how got there. In the former case you can simply ignore them as you would a radio in the room. For instance, I can play Rorschach quotes on my iPod all day, and it won't make me go downtown to beat up on random criminals or whatever.

[Mr. Pin]

Naaa, a person with the kind of intelligence V has can override bad advice, No problem. I mean, Roy has to listen to Elan while fighting, and that doesn't affect his game, does it? (not too much, anyways)

The trick was that V would THINK she was getting alignment feedback. a little removal of conscience was all it took for her to commit familicide.

on a related note, wouldn't the possession of epic evil necromantic magic affect you to some degree? I know that if I had the power of instant death to anyone at my fingertips, it might make me a little cuckoo, especially if I hadn't slept in a month.

[archon_huskie]

What if someone put a tiny radio in your ear and you had to listen CONSTANTLY to what a psychopath, a sociopath, and a nihilist had to say about every choice or action or word you said... see how long you remain sane or unaffected...

You make it sound like the three spliced souls are like cheerleaders trying to affect the outcome of agame.

[seanearlyaug]

I like his idea of chearleaders.
I think that it ends up differently though.
There is something called home-court or home team advantage. It contains as a part the ability of the crowd to influence the game. And the Chearleaders can influence the crowd.
Sean

[Alex Warlorn]

You make it sound like the three spliced souls are like cheerleaders trying to affect the outcome of agame.

Except it's not a foot ball game. It's a chess game, where if someone tells you to place your piece there, you suddenly consider it, and think about it, and if you're playing speed chess, three people giving you advice screws you over.

Just as the conflicting suggestions of which way to dodge threw V off, he'd have been easily able to if the voices had given their opinions on which way to dodge the dragon's attack.

[Jan Mattys]

This discussion is about a moot point in this case.

V had voices in hir head for mere minutes. No way the mental pressure could drive him to the dark side so quickly, if he wasn't already well inclined to do so.

If we were talking days, or weeks, or months, then probably I'd grant the OP a point... but in this case, it's totally V's fault. You can't be driven mad in 5 mins, even if it's Hitler whispering in your head.

[Nezmith]

You can't be driven mad in 5 mins, even if it's Hitler whispering in your head.

I agree, and had a good chuckle.

V is evil, and did evil of his own accord.

[X2]

I think V was swayed by the raw dripping power he has at his disposal!

But three little voices? Nahhh...

[kabbes]

Are people really using the way in which the Borg react to something as evidence for how a person in real life should react to a similar thing? And are other people really actually responding to this by making arguments related to the universe the Borg exist in?

You do know that the Borg and their universe are *all made up*, don't you? And that anything they do comes from the imagination of a writer? It's not experimental data or anything. I wouldn't be using it as a guide to how real people behave.

[Volkov]

I wouldn't say it's like the borg, probably more on the order of being a possessed chaos space marine.

[archon_huskie]

Except it's not a foot ball game. It's a chess game, where if someone tells you to place your piece there, you suddenly consider it, and think about it, and if you're playing speed chess, three people giving you advice screws you over.

Just as the conflicting suggestions of which way to dodge threw V off, he'd have been easily able to if the voices had given their opinions on which way to dodge the dragon's attack.

Except it is not a chess game it is a basketball game, where the cheerleaders shout go Illini! But U of I is going anyways, so they ignore it, but the crowd starts following the lead of the cheerleaders and they make a lot of noise, and as the clock runs out, it doesn't matter because you have practiced in the Stadium with the sound system simuloating a lot of noise before. So it doesn't screw you over at all.

[Volkov]

Except it is not a chess game it is a basketball game, where the cheerleaders shout go Illini! But U of I is going anyways, so they ignore it, but the crowd starts following the lead of the cheerleaders and they make a lot of noise, and as the clock runs out, it doesn't matter because you have practiced in the Stadium with the sound system simuloating a lot of noise before. So it doesn't screw you over at all.

Stop making sports metaphors, it makes me unhappy that i'm too scrawny to play most sports. :smallfrown:

[Alex Warlorn]

Good thing magic has little to do in Gaming with being physically fit. Magic is about the mind, and there's no way you can think clearly when you've got three (two) chatter boxes on both sides of you who just WON'T SHUT UP!

[Mewtarthio]

A few guys whispering in your ear should be far less of a distraction that being digested by a fricking acid dragon. If V's concentration is good enough that (s)he can cast spells in the latter situation, the former will have no impact on her performance. Plus she's never once failed to cast a spell due to the spliced souls' interference.

That, and OotS runs on DnD rules, which means V doesn't even need to make a Concentration check unless V takes damage mid-cast or is subjected to something really distracting. Like, ship-in-a-storm distracting.

[Alex Warlorn]

A few guys whispering in your ear should be far less of a distraction that being digested by a fricking acid dragon. If V's concentration is good enough that (s)he can cast spells in the latter situation, the former will have no impact on her performance.



Except he WASN'T being digested! He cast protection from acid before being taken in, along with a number of other protective spells! So he wasn't distracted at that greatest from being inside.

[MorhgorRB]

V hasn't tried meditating with them. And sure, you could break eventually, though breaking doesn't necessarily equal suddenly doing what they say.

Breaking could involve curling into the fetal position or jumping off a bridge.


*V jumps*
*then remembers that (s)he has Overland Flight*
Curses, foiled again!