The rapid change in Tarquin

[DerekCale]

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before...I've never posted in the GitP forums and I'm not sure if there's a search function (I haven't found one). But I'd like to discuss how much Tarquin has changed in his run of the comic.

When he first showed up, he was an ultra-competent LE character running the empire (and half the continent or more) from behind the throne with his group of ex-adventurers. While UNDENIABLY evil, he kind of shattered some of the illusions held by a lot of people (and players) in regards to how evil people think and act. His obvious love for his children shocked Elan, and cemented his place as Evil, but somewhat redefined evil...at least in regards to this comic. (Most of the evil villains in this comic have been wholly and undeniably evil...nothing to show that they have normal lives outside of being evil. Redcloak {with his goal of Goblin equality [Supremacy?]} and Tsukiko {With really just wanting to be loved} would be the closest parallel, but even then both of those characters merely show somewhat noble / understandle motivations for their obviously evil acts)

Fast forward to now. Tarquin has killed one child, for no other reason than that son acted as that son *always* has. No longer do we see the calm, cool, and collected dictator that always has a plan. We're seeing a rage driven maniac who's just flat out murdering people for murder's sake. He had *EXACTLY* what he wanted when the OotS flew away from the Empire of Blood. A conflicted Elan who still felt obligated to come back and take down his father's regime. But instead of just waiting it out, he comes in and stops being the 'redefinition of evil' from before, and just flat out becomes the 2 dimensional cookie cutter villain that we, as D&D players, so often see.

TL;DR I guess I'm just disappointed that the character stopped being so interesting and thought provoking, and just became, frankly, boring.

[Corvis]

He hasn't changed at all. You're just seeing him when he doesn't get his way.

[ThePhantasm]

He didn't murder Nale out of rage. He murdered him out of... disappointment.

Elan and Julio, meanwhile, have been pushing al of Tarquin's buttons. He's unraveling. That's not boring... that's where his whole arc has been going. People have been predicting for awhile that Tarquin's narrative-mastery would be thwarted.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is boring.

[Shadic]

He hasn't changed at all. You're just seeing him when he doesn't get his way.
This.

Tarquin is about control. That should have always been fairly obvious. He's losing control, thus he's going down in a whirlwind of desperation and rash actions, all for "the greater goodnarrative, from his perspective."

[kalkyrie]

Personally I think Tarquin missed a trick.
Instead of attacking Haley, he could have sundered the rope which is pulling up Julio.
He could then claim victory at that point by simply leaving (his party has teleportation, the OoTS do not).

His 'burn everything to ash' approach is more than a little off the deep end.
(After all Tarquin should know we are in at least Act 2 of the story. He should be encasing Elan's party members in carbonite, not killing them. Not enough time to bring in new lackeys for Elan ;) ).

[Morty]

Tarquin was calm, amicable and wise-cracking when he thought everything was going his way. When it became clear things weren't going his way, the cracks in is façade began to show. And it as only spiralled downhill since Elan first denied him at the Rift.

[FujinAkari]

TL;DR I guess I'm just disappointed that the character stopped being so interesting and thought provoking, and just became, frankly, boring.

See... that's the thing. Tarquin didn't change. At all.

Tarquin has always been someone who is methodical and competent, who looks down the long road and decides how things are meant to play out. His greatest strength is his ability to predict the flow of events, but his fatal flaw is his reliance on being in control and his insistence that things play out precisely as he has envisioned.

As with so many characters, we meet them when their fatal flaw is recessed, when things are good. The initial Tarquin was in absolute control of his environment and was able to influence the actions of the majority of the continent.

However, as time has past, Tarquin has steadily lost his control of the situation and has run out of clever ploys to re-assert his will on unfolding events, and we are seeing the steady emergence of his fatal flaw.

So, in short, yes: Tarquin is becoming less "fleshed out" because his essential need is being more and more directly threatened. When Tarquin isn't in control of his environment, the only thing Tarquin does is gain control of his environment. It is only when that is achieved that the other facets of his personality can come to the surface.

tldr; Tarquin didn't change, our understanding of Tarquin did.

[Gift Jeraff]

He's always been needlessly and disproportionately antagonizing people for the pettiest of reasons. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0735.html)

[Kish]

Tarquin has not changed. The creepy control freak who literally did not hear "I don't want to marry you" as anything he needed to care about is exactly the same as the creepy control freak who heard "I want you out of my life" as "I don't want a life." The only difference is that the former was directed at a bit character and the latter at a recurring villain with a name.

A great many people on the board saw him as far cooler, far more powerful, and most especially far more sane than he ever was. Their disappointment was inevitable. A is A, Tarquin is Tarquin. Tarquin doesn't realize Elan would already come back because--in an ironic mirror of posts which treat "ripped the liver out of a living sapient being so that he could have exotic food at his feast" as representing a far lower level of evil than killing Nale--he doesn't realize that burning a few dozen nameless slaves alive is something Elan truly cares about, enough to come after him for; in Tarquin's mind, he hasn't done anything personal to Elan (or Elan's property, such as the redhead with the perky eyes), so he hasn't done anything it makes sense for Elan to come after him for.

[dancrilis]

Tarquin should know we are in at least Act 2 of the story.

Hmm ... in my opinion no.

Elan meet his father for the first time, had a reunion, found out he was evil - but had no reason to oppose him personally, now he is getting a reason.

This is the prelude from Tarquin's point of view.

Everything that happened before this is backstory of no real importance - sure it might get its own book sometime to flesh out the story of how Elan came to be - but it isn't important for the Tarquin story.

Chapter One will start with Elan shattered and alone needing to collect himself and find his way in the world so he can oppose his evil father - it will likely end with him in a town being robbed by a good natured love interest/comic relief character who will introduce him to some other people who might help against his father.
And from there the story truly begins.

[Lamech]

And from there the story truly begins. Tarquin is being savvy about the wrong story. He isn't important. End of the World Xykon is what matters. The Snarl is what matters. The Dark One, the oppression by the Sapphire Guard, and Redcloak's character arc are important. Tarquin could never be more than a side villain or, if he was lucky, the guy Elan teams up with to fight the even greater evil.

But now that's ruined. Tarquin has chosen the role of insane side villain. And thus he shall die for his delusions of grandeur.

[ReaderAt2046]

As I posted elsewhere, this is showing Tarquin's greatest asset being twisted against him. Tarquin is incredibly Genre Saavy and will faithfully follow the narrative no matter where it takes him. Usually, this is a huge advantage, because it means that he always knows what's going on, always has a suitable plan, and the plan is always perfect. However, he is now following the wrong storyline, which means that his actions are increasingly being based on an erroneous concept of the world. For the first time since we met him, he's trying to fight the Story instead of riding it, and it's pushing him into more and more ridiculous positions.

Frankly, I'm more surprised that Laurin is keeping this up. Loyalty to a friend is a good thing, but I would have expected her to say "Give up, they've won this round" by now.

[RMS Oceanic]

I wouldn't say he's "changed" per se. Just that more of his character has been revealed to us. Before 927 we didn't know how he dealt with his plans being derailed.

[Deliverance]

When he first showed up, he was an ultra-competent LE character running the empire (and half the continent or more) from behind the throne with his group of ex-adventurers. While UNDENIABLY evil, he kind of shattered some of the illusions held by a lot of people (and players) in regards to how evil people think and act.
He also revealed, inadvertently, how a lot of readers have no idea about how egocentrism and narcissism can work in an otherwise intelligent person, therefore causing them to repeatedly misread his actions for something they were not.

Tarquin was a thoroughly manipulative bastard from the start, living his life according to his own rules of narrative causality, treating everybody he has relations with based on how he sees their role in his story, and valuing everybody based on their value as assets to be acquired, used, or discarded in the telling of his story - which inter alia doesn't preclude friendship or love, but does make both rather conditional - and he has been completely consistent in his actions.

For those that still don't get it, read up on pathologically narcissistic parents and evaluate his behaviour towards Elan and Nale in that light.

[ThePhantasm]

Frankly, I'm more surprised that Laurin is keeping this up. Loyalty to a friend is a good thing, but I would have expected her to say "Give up, they've won this round" by now.

She must really want that favor.

[Porthos]

As has been commented upon, the other thing the last 20 comics or so has shown is that Nale really didn't fall that far from the tree when it comes to petty need for revenge or obsessive behavior.

Well, the petty need for revenge had already been established, but this is hammering it home.

Tarquin is far more like Nale than he would like to admit, I think.

[Morty]

He also revealed, inadvertently, how a lot of readers have no idea about how egocentrism and narcissism can work in an otherwise intelligent person, therefore causing them to repeatedly misread his actions for something they were not.

Tarquin was a thoroughly manipulative bastard from the start, living his life according to his own rules of narrative causality, treating everybody he has relations with based on how he sees their role in his story, and valuing everybody based on their value as assets to be acquired, used, or discarded in the telling of his story - which inter alia doesn't preclude friendship or love, but does make both rather conditional - and he has been completely consistent in his actions.

For those that still don't get it, read up on pathologically narcissistic parents and evaluate his behaviour towards Elan and Nale in that light.

One of the things I like about this comic is that it realistically depicts highly intelligent and perceptive characters doing stupid, irrational and self-destructive things because of their convictions, delusions or obsessions. I think there's this expectation on the readers' part for intelligent people to always behave rationally and sensibly, and OotS subverts this expectation skilfully.

[Gift Jeraff]

As has been commented upon, the other thing the last 20 comics or so has shown is that Nale really didn't fall that far from the tree when it comes to petty need for revenge or obsessive behavior.

Well, the petty need for revenge had already been established, but this is hammering it home.

Tarquin is far more like Nale than he would like to admit, I think.

Though it should be noted that even Nale is willing to let his persistent obsessesions subside and temporarily cut his losses:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0458.html

I don't think Tarquin would've done the same in Nale's situation. Rather than admit that Xykon, Miko, and D-listers would steal some of the spotlight, I think he would stay under the notion that all these lesser characters would be put to the side in order to make room for him.

[Porthos]

Though it should be noted that even Nale is willing to let his persistent obsessesions subside and temporarily cut his losses

I was thinking that exact same thing, though I was having trouble remembering the exact comic to point to.

Another one would be pointing out that Nale finally ditched the whole 'Evil Opposites' thing when he realized it was just counterproductive and stupid.

But apparently Tarquin is too Lawful stubborn to course correct in situations like this. :smallwink:

[shockeroo]

I agree that this is more of a reveal than a change; Tarquin will do anything rather than accept defiance. He is a draconian authoritarian, and would rather murder one son, and his other son's loved ones, rather than accept their disobedience.

[Orm-Embar]

It's been surprising to me that Tarquin is so brittle and inflexible, but maybe that comes with being the winner in every encounter all the way up to whatever level he is. I would count this as more of a reveal than a character arc though. Certainly I'd guess he was always like this and we're just now getting to see it due to the adverse circumstances.

[BlackDragonKing]

Though it should be noted that even Nale is willing to let his persistent obsessesions subside and temporarily cut his losses:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0458.html

I don't think Tarquin would've done the same in Nale's situation. Rather than admit that Xykon, Miko, and D-listers would steal some of the spotlight, I think he would stay under the notion that all these lesser characters would be put to the side in order to make room for him.

Really? That's the impression you got? Tarquin's deliberately ducking out of trying to get involved in the Gate plot because he knows he has a 50-50 chance of dying in a fight with Xykon. The fact that he's not giving appropriate weight to the heroes he's antagonizing is a different matter.

[Douglas]

He had *EXACTLY* what he wanted when the OotS flew away from the Empire of Blood. A conflicted Elan who still felt obligated to come back and take down his father's regime.
Actually no, that is *NOT* what Tarquin wanted - not in full. It's missing the critical element of Elan being the primary hero of the story. Tarquin wants "a conflicted Elan the Main Protagonist who still feels obligated to come back and take down his father's regime." Tarquin will not be satisfied until *EVERY* part of that is description is accurate, and as it stands Elan is still Roy's sidekick. Add that to all the control freak, narcissism, and family-oriented factors that everyone else has already pointed out, and Tarquin's actions are perfectly in character with everything we have ever seen of him.

[Socratov]

Guys, can we please remember that Tarquin is an intelligent LE NPC with delusions of grandeur? I mena, it's like he said, he wants a legacy, and running an empire form behind the scenes won't bring that. So, instead he wants a legacyof which bards will tell tales of aeons to come. It's no coincidence he, with this genre savviness, uses Star Wars References, only he was smarter: he bet on 2 horses, or sons so to speak. The first was to crate a way of a dynasty (Nale following him up as shadow ruler/evil overlord), the second he had as a back-up for when the son was disappointing him. If we really compare Star Wars to the current plot of OotS, Roy is Han Solo. IN the original movies (IIRC), Han Solo is the hero, hte leader, etc. When Han is encased in carbonite, Luke takes over and by Return of the Jedi Han has gone to sidekick, and Luke has become the hero. In the current storytelling of OotS, We allready see Elan showing leader traits (making plans, using resources, etc.). But things are not going the way Tarquin want them to. They are moving too slow and Targuin is trying to speed up that process.

Something tells me Tarquin has a secret involving his time left and I think it's not much, else Tarquin woudl have let them get away trusting in the laws of narrative to grant Elan his spotlight and defeat him. The fact that he wants his demise as soon as possible prompts me to believe that his time is indeed dwindling and he knows it.

[Irenaeus]

TL;DR I guess I'm just disappointed that the character stopped being so interesting and thought provoking, and just became, frankly, boring.
My view on this is the complete opposite. Tarquin has become a much more interesting character since we got to see the facade break away. The overly perfect villain isn't that interesting a character in himself. With the added delusional and obsessive aspects, he most certainly is.

[factotum]

Tarquin's deliberately ducking out of trying to get involved in the Gate plot because he knows he has a 50-50 chance of dying in a fight with Xykon.

What? Tarquin doesn't even know who Xykon *is*. As far as he's concerned, Xykon is a side-villain whose only purpose is to get defeated to prove his son's heroic credentials before he can come and defeat the main villain--who is Tarquin himself, of course. If he had any real interest in the Gates he wouldn't have allowed Nale to lead the party that went looking for Girard's Gate in the pyramid, because he knows what an idiot Nale was.

[SaintRidley]

However, he is now following the wrong storyline,

He always was.

[Gift Jeraff]

Really? That's the impression you got? Tarquin's deliberately ducking out of trying to get involved in the Gate plot because he knows he has a 50-50 chance of dying in a fight with Xykon. The fact that he's not giving appropriate weight to the heroes he's antagonizing is a different matter.

Tarquin pursuing Xykon himself would be messing with what he perceives to be the proper narrative structure and natural order. It would be throwing things out of control and that's where the toss-up comes in.

Nale pursuing the OOTS during the war would have been Nale doing what he usually does. Instead, he chose to sacrifice the short-term for the long-term. He was able to put aside his crazy obsession for over 10 months.

Tarquin pursuing the OOTS right now is Tarquin thinking in the short-term ("The story needs to be fixed RIGHT NOW!!!"), rather than put aside his obsession for a day, then attack the OOTS at another time.


My view on this is the complete opposite. Tarquin has become a much more interesting character since we got to see the facade break away. The overly perfect villain isn't that interesting a character in himself. With the added delusional and obsessive aspects, he most certainly is.

I agree. Frustrated Tarquin is a lot more enjoyable than "Everything you do is either harmless or beneficial to me!" Tarquin.

[WindStruck]

Oh c'mon, Tarquin is acting perfectly natural. Really, he'd be doing this all with a straight face except Elan made him mad. And Elan defying him isn't what made him mad. It's the fact that Tarquin is now being forced to murder his girlfriend, all his friends, his mentor, and chop off his hand... after he did the dramatic "I am your father" reveal.

Any good storyteller would say you are supposed to do all that beforehand, for maximum shock.

[Obscure Blade]

He hasn't changed at all. You're just seeing him when he doesn't get his way.This. He's a control freak, OCD about stories and an egomaniac. He's really competent, self-controlled and clever as long as he's in control and as long as everything both revolves around him and fits what he thinks the story is supposed to be like. But change any of those factors and he starts to lose it; both his judgement and his emotional control start to collapse.

Look at his "Genre Savvy" skills. As long as everything going on revolved around him and his plans he was both self-controlled and extremely competent, capable of predicting and manipulating events with ease. But as soon as events started occurring related to the larger story where he isn't the central figure that went out the window; he is clearly incapable or unwilling to admit that he is not the central villain and that he is not in a story mainly about the conflict between Elan and his father. He knows about Xykon, but clearly never inquired how powerful he is and can't even be bothered to get the name right - Xykon isn't Tarquin, therefore in Tarquin's mind Xykon can't be the main villain.

[masamune1]

Guys, can we please remember that Tarquin is an intelligent LE NPC with delusions of grandeur? I mena, it's like he said, he wants a legacy, and running an empire form behind the scenes won't bring that. So, instead he wants a legacyof which bards will tell tales of aeons to come. It's no coincidence he, with this genre savviness, uses Star Wars References, only he was smarter: he bet on 2 horses, or sons so to speak. The first was to crate a way of a dynasty (Nale following him up as shadow ruler/evil overlord), the second he had as a back-up for when the son was disappointing him. If we really compare Star Wars to the current plot of OotS, Roy is Han Solo. IN the original movies (IIRC), Han Solo is the hero, hte leader, etc. When Han is encased in carbonite, Luke takes over and by Return of the Jedi Han has gone to sidekick, and Luke has become the hero. In the current storytelling of OotS, We allready see Elan showing leader traits (making plans, using resources, etc.). But things are not going the way Tarquin want them to. They are moving too slow and Targuin is trying to speed up that process.

Something tells me Tarquin has a secret involving his time left and I think it's not much, else Tarquin woudl have let them get away trusting in the laws of narrative to grant Elan his spotlight and defeat him. The fact that he wants his demise as soon as possible prompts me to believe that his time is indeed dwindling and he knows it.

Luke was always the main hero. Star Wars is a sci-fi fantasy epic, and epics usually have more than one main character. Luke, Han, Vader and Leia were all the main characters, with Luke as the First Among Equals.

Tarquin simply doesn't realize he is in a fantasy epic (if a fairly satirical one starring stick men). He thinks he is in a Sword and Sorcery with one main hero (Elan) and one main villain (himself), which suggests Nale was somewhat right about his lack of ambition. Not to mention saying volumes about how self-centred he is.

Or maybe he thinks he's just in a different sort of epic, starring himself, with Elan as his second main character. Roy is Obi-Wan, and will share the same fate.

[Lamech]

Frankly, I'm more surprised that Laurin is keeping this up. Loyalty to a friend is a good thing, but I would have expected her to say "Give up, they've won this round" by now.
Because quite frankly Tarquin is winning. The OotS has been on the run essentially this whole fight. This is not a fair fight. The only real victory they have had is triggering contingencies. Worse their is a very good chance scarf guy is healing up to teleport back. And if the OotS ever does start winning Laurin can just port out with Tarquin.

[masamune1]

Also, from the POV of the characters, the fight has only been on a few minutes. And Laurin might feel that she owes it to the men she let Tarquin send to their deaths to kill these little pricks.

[The Giant]

I can't think of anything more boring than a character who always wins and never gets emotionally impacted by anything.

Also, undercutting that so-called "redefinition of evil" is sort of the point. Because it's bull****. It's not a real thing. You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence. It's who you are. This idea that Tarquin was this perfectly rational actor despite being a complete monster at his Day Job is a pipe dream. Tarquin wants you (and Elan) to think that what he does is separate from who he is—that he's a fundamentally decent man who just so happens to murder a bunch of people here and there—because that's how he tricks you into slowly accepting his blatant Evil as a valid life choice that needs to be respected. Which it is not.

Some people want to love the villain without having to face the fact that villains are largely terrible people who do horrific things with deficient reasoning. Not on my watch.

[CaDzilla]

I can't think of anything more boring than a character who always wins and never gets emotionally impacted by anything.

Also, undercutting that so-called "redefinition of evil" is sort of the point. Because it's bull****. It's not a real thing. You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence. It's who you are. This idea that Tarquin was this perfectly rational actor despite being a complete monster at his Day Job is a pipe dream. Tarquin wants you (and Elan) to think that what he does is separate from who he is—that he's a fundamentally decent man who just so happens to murder a bunch of people here and there—because that's how he tricks you into slowly accepting his blatant Evil as a valid life choice that needs to be respected. Which it is not.

Some people want to love the villain without having to face the fact that villains are largely terrible people who do horrific things with deficient reasoning. Not on my watch.

So are you admitting that Tarquin is a rapist? Also, is Tarquin's amount of kilonazis higher than Xykon's

[zimmerwald1915]

I can't think of anything more boring than a character who always wins and never gets emotionally impacted by anything.

Also, undercutting that so-called "redefinition of evil" is sort of the point. Because it's bull****. It's not a real thing. You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence. It's who you are. This idea that Tarquin was this perfectly rational actor despite being a complete monster at his Day Job is a pipe dream. Tarquin wants you (and Elan) to think that what he does is separate from who he is—that he's a fundamentally decent man who just so happens to murder a bunch of people here and there—because that's how he tricks you into slowly accepting his blatant Evil as a valid life choice that needs to be respected. Which it is not.

Some people want to love the villain without having to face the fact that villains are largely terrible people who do horrific things with deficient reasoning. Not on my watch.
I realize a word-for-word transcription is too much to hope for, but I would love to see this point repeated in the Book 5 commentary.

[zimmerwald1915]

So does that mean that Tarquin is a rapist? Also, is Tarquin's amount of kilonazis higher than Xykon's
A marriage by duress is no marriage at all, and sex by duress sufficient to overcome express lack of consent is rape. Make the judgment.

[Math_Mage]

So does that mean that Tarquin is a rapist? Also, is Tarquin's amount of kilonazis higher than Xykon's
Yes (Tarquin all but states it in the comic) and no (Tarquin's Evil is more insidious than Xykon's, but not more Evil).

[CaDzilla]

A marriage by duress is no marriage at all, and sex by duress sufficient to overcome express lack of consent is rape. Make the judgment.

I was asking if he actually...consummated his duressed marriages

[The Giant]

I was asking if he actually...consummated his duressed marriages

It doesn't matter either way (and I have no intention of exploring it further). It's attempted rape regardless, and someone who repeatedly attempts rape is a rapist, even if he never succeeds.

[rbetieh]

The Generalisimo just hates Chaos. What he seems to take seriously is challenges to the way he believes things ought to work. Take the example of Enor and Ganji, he let those two go, more because they served their function (entertaining the crowd) than for anything else. Elan thought that the two had defied his authority, and Tarquin states that they have, but they did not defy their function. That is what really matters.

[CaDzilla]

It doesn't matter either way (and I have no intention of exploring it further). It's attempted rape regardless, and someone who repeatedly attempts rape is a rapist, even if he never succeeds.

How does/did the rest of Team Tarquin think about this tendency of his? By which I mean his forced marriages

[Kish]

So are you admitting that Tarquin is a rapist?
Damn, I was hoping Rich would answer this, so I could ask him if he's admitting that Blackwing is smaller than the Mechane.

(The preceding post may contain traces of sarcasm.)

[oppyu]

Yes, Tarquin is a rapist.

[SaintRidley]

Yes, Tarquin is a rapist.

Those might need to be bigger. And on fire. And made from a tasteful arrangement of slaves before some people get it.

[CaDzilla]

I just wanted to know if he ever succeeded. I am relieved that he didn't.

[NerdyKris]

I just wanted to know if he ever succeeded. I am relieved that he didn't.

Rich didn't say that. He said he wasn't going to explore the question. That's not a no.

[The Fury]

How does/did the rest of Team Tarquin think about this tendency of his? By which I mean his forced marriages

They seem all right with it. At least Scarf-guy does. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0757.html)

[Math_Mage]

The Generalisimo just hates Chaos. What he seems to take seriously is challenges to the way he believes things ought to work. Take the example of Enor and Ganji, he let those two go, more because they served their function (entertaining the crowd) than for anything else. Elan thought that the two had defied his authority, and Tarquin states that they have, but they did not defy their function. That is what really matters.
I'm extremely uncomfortable with the assertion that this is "just" animosity towards Chaos, because Tarquin's beliefs about the way things ought to work are relevant to this analysis.

[Vaylon]

You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way.

You're absolutely wrong here. For example, there are plenty of cases where children had no idea that their parents had committed atrocities or had helped commit atrocities. The fact of the matter is that, yes, Virginia, people can and do do horrible things and otherwise come across as decent people to those who don't know about their actions. It's astounding that you think otherwise.


Some people want to love the villain without having to face the fact that villains are largely terrible people who do horrific things with deficient reasoning. Not on my watch.

All this talk in the comic about upsetting traditional narratives, and here you are on the forums complaining about the fact that your audience loves the villain.

[BlackDragonKing]

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the assertion that this is "just" animosity towards Chaos, because Tarquin's beliefs about the way things ought to work are relevant to this analysis.

I'm not sure, I kind of see that point.

Tarquin's not evil AND Lawful, he's SUCH an evil man BECAUSE he's so Lawful. He's got about the same amount of evil in him as Xykon or Nale, but unlike Redcloak, who's just Lawful Evil because he's evil with something approaching impulse control compared to 90% of the villains in the series, Tarquin is so much worse than he might be if he was Chaotic because he takes Law way, way, WAY too far.

Tarquin HATES Chaos, and everything about chaos. Freedom. Spontaneity, Creativity, uncertainty, disagreements. Tarquin cannot and doesn't want to live in a world where these things are rampant. EVERYONE needs his kind of security more than they need to be free. Or alive, for that matter. Stories happen HIS way or they don't happen, period. Arguments are resolved quickly and reasonably by Tarquin's metrics or they end with death.

Tarquin would be quite evil if he was Chaotic or Neutral, but Lawful grabs Evil and does ten consecutive touchdowns with his characterization where normally you'd expect Lawful Evil to be the pick of a bad lot because it at least has some code compared to Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil. Tarquin's a good example of why Lawful Evil can be so much worse when Law really gets its teeth into this whole Evil thing instead of struggling with it.

[Koo Rehtorb]

I don't really think "deficient reasoning" is a necessary flaw of evil.

"Evil" is a necessary flaw of evil.

[zimmerwald1915]

You're absolutely wrong here. For example, there are plenty of cases where children had no idea that their parents had committed atrocities or had helped commit atrocities. The fact of the matter is that, yes, Virginia, people can and do do horrible things and otherwise come across as decent people to those who don't know about their actions. It's astounding that you think otherwise.
There's a fairly significant difference between keeping something a secret from your loved ones and actually becoming a different person in their presence. It's a difference Laurin, for one, seems to appreciate.

[Ted The Bug]

there are plenty of cases where children had no idea that their parents had committed atrocities or had helped commit atrocities. The fact of the matter is that, yes, Virginia, people can and do do horrible things and otherwise come across as decent people to those who don't know about their actions.

I'd have to agree. If anything, that's something I find scariest - that some people can do horrible, horrible things, and then go home and act as if they're just another person. It's one of the most common and disturbing trends in history, and regardless of whether Tarquin fits that mold or if his rottenness extends from his Big Actions to his day-to-day life, I am surprised that that reality is so outright rejected. In the past (and even to a certain degree today), otherwise rational people have found excuses for their inexcusable behavior (it's business, I was ordered to, everyone else is doing it, etc), and once said behavior is completed, they compartmentalize it and go about their "normal" lives just like anyone.

It doesn't matter whether Tarquin is meant to be one of those, but it does matter to me that the presence of such people is acknowledged as all too real.

[Math_Mage]

I'm not sure, I kind of see that point.

Tarquin's not evil AND Lawful, he's SUCH an evil man BECAUSE he's so Lawful. He's got about the same amount of evil in him as Xykon or Nale, but unlike Redcloak, who's just Lawful Evil because he's evil with something approaching impulse control compared to 90% of the villains in the series, Tarquin is so much worse than he might be if he was Chaotic because he takes Law way, way, WAY too far.

Tarquin HATES Chaos, and everything about chaos. Freedom. Spontaneity, Creativity, uncertainty, disagreements. Tarquin cannot and doesn't want to live in a world where these things are rampant. EVERYONE needs his kind of security more than they need to be free. Or alive, for that matter. Stories happen HIS way or they don't happen, period. Arguments are resolved quickly and reasonably by Tarquin's metrics or they end with death.

Tarquin would be quite evil if he was Chaotic or Neutral, but Lawful grabs Evil and does ten consecutive touchdowns with his characterization where normally you'd expect Lawful Evil to be the pick of a bad lot because it at least has some code compared to Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil. Tarquin's a good example of why Lawful Evil can be so much worse when Law really gets its teeth into this whole Evil thing instead of struggling with it.
I disagree with several things about this post.

Starting from the bottom: No, I don't normally expect Lawful Evil to be the pick of a bad lot. Any such perception is due to either a difference in degree of Evil in your perceived norm, or your preference for Law. Law acting as a check on Evil, something for Evil to struggle with, is not the default where alignment is concerned. As for the last sentence...worse than what? Than other Evil alignments? No, because the others can be similarly amplified. Than other Lawful Evil characters? By what baseline?

Second, of course Lawful works well with Evil with respect to Tarquin's characterization. You're praising the glass for fitting the water; Tarquin's character was designed for Lawful Evil, so naturally his brand of Evil is very Lawful. That doesn't make his Evilness derive from his Lawfulness. Nor does it mean one couldn't construct a character very similar to Tarquin, alignment CE, that was just as bad as Tarquin, and devoted himself to destroying Good civilizations instead of establishing Evil ones.

Third, you're uncritically repeating the same pattern I criticized in rbetieh's post: describing Tarquin's devotion to Law in loving detail while casually reducing his Evil to the phrase "his kind of". Are we really just going to pass over the fact that Tarquin's envisioned order is a horrible place, and not just because it lacks freedom? Is it really so inconceivable that a LG character might hate chaos just as much as Tarquin, but express it differently because he actually has concern for the dignity of sentient life and has a different vision from Tarquin? Tarquin isn't Evil because he is extremely Lawful; he's just extremely Lawful Evil.

Finally, Redcloak's brand of LE is more complex than you portray it as. But that's a tale for another time.

[Boring McReader]

I disagree with several things about this post.
Third, you're uncritically repeating the same pattern I criticized in rbetieh's post: describing Tarquin's devotion to Law in loving detail while casually reducing his Evil to the phrase "his kind of". Are we really just going to pass over the fact that Tarquin's envisioned order is a horrible place, and not just because it lacks freedom? Is it really so inconceivable that a LG character might hate chaos just as much as Tarquin, but express it differently because he actually has concern for the dignity of sentient life and has a different vision from Tarquin? Tarquin isn't Evil because he is extremely Lawful; he's just extremely Lawful Evil. Whether you phrase it as Evil in a way that is very very Lawful, or Lawful in a way that is very very Evil, is window dressing.


"His kind of" evil works best if it's used as a description of his monumental narcissism. He does things because they make him happy. How they make other people feel never crosses his mind. He'll do arbitrarily cruel things or show unexpected generosity because that's what he wants to do. Sometime in his past, he took his selfish attitude and applied it to his future, and realized the best way to give himself that happiness was to take control of everything. He achieves his goals using order, but his goals are selfish and evil no matter how he reaches them.

[BlackDragonKing]

I disagree with several things about this post.

Starting from the bottom: No, I don't normally expect Lawful Evil to be the pick of a bad lot. Any such perception is due to either a difference in degree of Evil in your perceived norm, or your preference for Law. Law acting as a check on Evil, something for Evil to struggle with, is not the default where alignment is concerned. As for the last sentence...worse than what? Than other Evil alignments? No, because the others can be similarly amplified. Than other Lawful Evil characters? By what baseline?

I will admit it is a bias on my part to view that if I had to pick an Evil enemy, I would probably pick a Lawful Evil one because of the chance of them having SOME restraints on the evil they're willing to do, on top of being more predictable. I'm merely pointing out that it's a common image for Lawful Evil to be just as vicious but more restrained and methodical than Neutral Evil, who will do whatever is expedient to get their way, and Chaotic Evil, which is so unpredictable it will gladly hurt ITSELF to kill you and cannot be anticipated, reasoned with, or resolved with anything but a sharp blade or a jail cell and a prayer.

Would you disagree that Tarquin plays with that notion? I thought he certainly did; at first he does seem like the Lawful Evil villain that does his evil getting to the top and then brutally making sure nobody else can get to his level and providing an organized contrast to Xykon's willingness to annihilate everything but himself as long as his enemy's not still standing when the dust settles. But then it's flipped; Tarquin's lawfulness is shown as driving him not just to kill people for pleasure, like any evil individual will usually do, but to throttle individuality, hope, freedom, and a number of other wonderful, "messy" things out of the universe in an effort to crush it down and make everything surviving think the way he does. A lot of writers explore how frigging dangerous absolutely unfettered villains like Xykon are, but I thought it was interesting for Tarquin to go the other way with showing how an evil but intensely organized and obsessively focused mind can be just as dangerous in its own way when many Lawful Evil villains are either Lucius Malfoy, the rule-manipulating scumbag with some unimportant standards for himself that's ultimately stepped over by more unhinged villains, or someone slapping on the Hitler parallel and calling it a day. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but this is where my thoughts on evil vis a vis tarquin have led me.


Second, of course Lawful works well with Evil with respect to Tarquin's characterization. You're praising the glass for fitting the water; Tarquin's character was designed for Lawful Evil, so naturally his brand of Evil is very Lawful. That doesn't make his Evilness derive from his Lawfulness. Nor does it mean one couldn't construct a character very similar to Tarquin, alignment CE, that was just as bad as Tarquin, and devoted himself to destroying Good civilizations instead of establishing Evil ones.

I'm not sure I can agree with this; a Tarquin who is not a horrible person certainly would not be Tarquin, but I also feel that a Tarquin who is non-lawful is similarly not Tarquin at all. And while you might be thinking that seems to line up with your point, let us say that a Lawful Neutral character who doesn't care about anything but seeing the narrative rules carried out and a Chaotic Evil character obsessed with destroying Good civilizations and skating by on superficial charisma are both introduced. I would argue LN is a Tarquinesque character minus the rampaging socipathy, while CE is just a knockoff of Xykon more than "Tarquin on a different axis". Evil just wants to get ahead by making other people suffer, which is why when it's not lawful or chaotic, it just uses whatever means are expedient. Tarquin's not like that. He'll act AGAINST expedience to impose his arbitrary, cruel rules on other people because his warped Law is just that insanely important to him. Imaginary rules and formulas that cannot be fought or altered go hand-in-hand with bloodshed in the life Tarquin's carved out for himself, but I still argue that Tarquin is SUCH a bastard BECAUSE he puts those rules so far over people's lives and happiness. Tarquin can't be Neutral or Chaotic any more than he can be non-Evil; to speak of one half of his alignment is to speak of the other, but I still contend that Tarquin and his engine of human misery are a clear portrait of Lawful going way, way too far to produce a particularly virulent evil more than a portrait of an Evil character that happens to be Lawful in his operations.


Third, you're uncritically repeating the same pattern I criticized in rbetieh's post: describing Tarquin's devotion to Law in loving detail while casually reducing his Evil to the phrase "his kind of". Are we really just going to pass over the fact that Tarquin's envisioned order is a horrible place, and not just because it lacks freedom? Is it really so inconceivable that a LG character might hate chaos just as much as Tarquin, but express it differently because he actually has concern for the dignity of sentient life and has a different vision from Tarquin? Tarquin isn't Evil because he is extremely Lawful; he's just extremely Lawful Evil.

Actually, I do believe that a Lawful Good character could never hate Chaos as much as Tarquin and remain good, which might be another point of disagreement between us. You seem to think that I'm mitigating just how evil Tarquin is because I'm so focused on how obsessed he is with laws, but that's where I see his evil. All three branches of the Evil Tree create places that are horrible, but Lawful Evil, particularly as Tarquin practices it, is particularly horrible to me because it is an order that can't stand freedom, creativity, the right to be spontaneous, or any of the things that make life LIFE. It is inconceivable to me that a Lawful Good character could hate Chaos as much as Tarquin does because that implies someone that is OFFENDED by the expression of free will, who believes the logical solution to irreconcilable differences is murder on as big a scale as it takes to resolve the disagreement, that would gladly rip the capacity to dream and create out of the universe because it makes things messier, could POSSIBLY be a Good person. That is ludicrous to me. Paladins have a rigid worldview, but the only one in comic who thought stepping outside that worldview ought to be met with a drawn sword and a smiting fell DAMN hard. Lawful Good doesn't always agree with the way people express their freedoms, but it can exist with that chaos without trying to destroy it because it's Good and acknowledges Chaos has a place. Lawful Evil will annihilate anything that does not reflect itself when practiced in Tarquin's manner, and then sow salt so that nothing divergent can grow from what remains.

[Ridureyu]

Look, someone can be a mass-murdering rapist, but good to his family - sure, that happens a lot (just ask about "Iceman" Kuklinski's family. Or Salvatore Riina, former head of the Sicilian mafia who has the blood of THOUSANDS on his hands. Good family man). BUT... Rich's point is that this DOES NOT MAKE THEM A GOOD PERSON WHO DOES EVIL THINGS. IT MAKES THEM AN EVIL PERSON WHO SOMETIMES DOES GOOD THINGS.

IF YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND THIS, THEN YOU NEED TO ASK YOURSELF IF YOU ARE JUSTIFYING SOMETHING HORRIBLE IN YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR OR IN THE BEHAVIOR OF THOSE YOU CARE ABOUT. IT IS NOT NORMAL OR SANE TO SAY THAT AN EVIL, MASS-MURDERING RAPIST IS A GOOD GUY BECAUSE HE IS NICE TO HIS FAMILY.

Sorry about the caps, but I feel it must be emphasized.

[Jay R]

It's worth pointing out that on this continent, until the OotS and Xykon got interested in the desert, Tarquin was the main villain, so all his genre-savvy actions based on that idea were working. The only problem is that he doesn't know that there is a bigger story going on now, and he's now a small character on a bigger stage.

[Boring McReader]

You're absolutely wrong here. For example, there are plenty of cases where children had no idea that their parents had committed atrocities or had helped commit atrocities. The fact of the matter is that, yes, Virginia, people can and do do horrible things and otherwise come across as decent people to those who don't know about their actions. It's astounding that you think otherwise.


You make a good point, but the character we've seen in the comic hasn't contradicted himself. He's genial and forgiving when it suits him, and selfish and controlling the rest of the time. He justifies his acts as moving beyond mere morality, but few would say he acts with utility for the benefit of others. When something becomes more important to him then sentiment, he acts without mercy. You're always at risk dealing with him, no matter how he's behaving at any given moment.

Your comment reminds me of Chinatown. Right up to the end, the villain is able to wear his respectable citizen persona with ease, even though his final few minutes on screen are more monstrous than all his previous despicable acts combined.

Real life bad guys don't always lose control of their facade or inflict suffering on everyone around them. On the other hand, there's always the question of who they are deep down. If someone they care about finds out they have slaves in their basement, do they keep up their facade, or act without mercy to keep the secret safe? If you give a murderer the keys to a kingdom, is he more concerned with keeping his behavior secret, or forcing his subjects to act like they believe he's a good guy?

The "Family Secrets" trials got a lot of attention for how ruthlessly outwardly civil mobsters treated their closest family members and friends. With enough pressure, genial relationships can become him-or-me life-and-death struggles. Maybe the question here is whether it matters how you behave in one area of your life if you're enough of a monster in the rest. Tarquin is a threat to everyone who comes into contact with him, no matter how ordinary he behaves when it suits him. He hasn't thrown away all of his old personality in the last few pages; he's angry and frustrated with Elan, so his evil control freak behavior is at its peak. Give him his way in the battle on the Mechane, and he'll no doubt go back to his laid-back in-control persona in a very short time. He's casually cruel at all times, but he's not a raging emotional beast until something really sets him off. He's still a deeply rotten, evil character underneath.

[Boring McReader]

But then it's flipped; Tarquin's lawfulness is shown as driving him not just to kill people for pleasure, like any evil individual will usually do, but to throttle individuality, hope, freedom, and a number of other wonderful, "messy" things out of the universe in an effort to crush it down and make everything surviving think the way he does.

He'll act AGAINST expedience to impose his arbitrary, cruel rules on other people because his warped Law is just that insanely important to him. Imaginary rules and formulas that cannot be fought or altered go hand-in-hand with bloodshed in the life Tarquin's carved out for himself, but I still argue that Tarquin is SUCH a bastard BECAUSE he puts those rules so far over people's lives and happiness.

He's also arbitrarily cruel, punishing minor insults with fates worse than death, then handwaving away direct threats on his life from his family. He'll wreck people's lives for his passing happiness. He uses law to achieve order, but he also abuses law to satisfy his desires. He's a despot, not a single-minded champion of order above all else.

[Math_Mage]

I will admit it is a bias on my part to view that if I had to pick an Evil enemy, I would probably pick a Lawful Evil one because of the chance of them having SOME restraints on the evil they're willing to do, on top of being more predictable. I'm merely pointing out that it's a common image for Lawful Evil to be just as vicious but more restrained and methodical than Neutral Evil, who will do whatever is expedient to get their way, and Chaotic Evil, which is so unpredictable it will gladly hurt ITSELF to kill you and cannot be anticipated, reasoned with, or resolved with anything but a sharp blade or a jail cell and a prayer.
Thank you for explaining your bias. However, it is still a bias; you are attributing mitigating ('restrained') aspects to Lawfulness and amplifying aspects to Chaos when it could just as easily be the other way around (or neither). The method and restraint of a Lawful Evil character could make them more dangerous or more villainous, or it might leave them equally dangerous and villainous, but you just assume it won't be that way. Yet that is the essence of Tarquin's empire plan: he restrains his Evil only insofar as restraint allows him to accomplish greater Evil. CE might require a jail cell and a prayer, but LE might lock you in the jail cell to live on prayers forever. Your preference for one over the other is an ethical preference, not a moral one.


Would you disagree that Tarquin plays with that notion? I thought he certainly did; at first he does seem like the Lawful Evil villain that does his evil getting to the top and then brutally making sure nobody else can get to his level and providing an organized contrast to Xykon's willingness to annihilate everything but himself as long as his enemy's not still standing when the dust settles. But then it's flipped; Tarquin's lawfulness is shown as driving him not just to kill people for pleasure, like any evil individual will usually do, but to throttle individuality, hope, freedom, and a number of other wonderful, "messy" things out of the universe in an effort to crush it down and make everything surviving think the way he does. A lot of writers explore how frigging dangerous absolutely unfettered villains like Xykon are, but I thought it was interesting for Tarquin to go the other way with showing how an evil but intensely organized and obsessively focused mind can be just as dangerous in its own way when many Lawful Evil villains are either Lucius Malfoy, the rule-manipulating scumbag with some unimportant standards for himself that's ultimately stepped over by more unhinged villains, or someone slapping on the Hitler parallel and calling it a day. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but this is where my thoughts on evil vis a vis tarquin have led me.
I agree that Tarquin does a good job of showing how Evil LE can be, but I disagree that he was ever portrayed in a manner that could be 'flipped' to that. That Tarquin's Lawfulness made him differently dangerous rather than less dangerous was clear from the empire plan reveal onward; that Tarquin's tolerance for contrary expression was nil was made clear by Gannji. The mitigating factor for Tarquin was his affability, never his Lawfulness. That is what has flipped.

Also, the next most common LE primary villain after the Hitler parallel is the Stalin parallel, so no, I don't think this 'throttling individuality, hope, freedom' shtick is underrepresented in literature.


I'm not sure I can agree with this; a Tarquin who is not a horrible person certainly would not be Tarquin, but I also feel that a Tarquin who is non-lawful is similarly not Tarquin at all. And while you might be thinking that seems to line up with your point, let us say that a Lawful Neutral character who doesn't care about anything but seeing the narrative rules carried out and a Chaotic Evil character obsessed with destroying Good civilizations and skating by on superficial charisma are both introduced. I would argue LN is a Tarquinesque character minus the rampaging socipathy, while CE is just a knockoff of Xykon more than "Tarquin on a different axis".
Well, of course; you have completed the CE character in a way that is unlike Tarquin, so naturally you conclude that he is unlike Tarquin. I'm sorry I didn't provide an extensive description myself, but I didn't think it would be that hard to get.


Evil just wants to get ahead by making other people suffer, which is why when it's not lawful or chaotic, it just uses whatever means are expedient. Tarquin's not like that. He'll act AGAINST expedience to impose his arbitrary, cruel rules on other people because his warped Law is just that insanely important to him. Imaginary rules and formulas that cannot be fought or altered go hand-in-hand with bloodshed in the life Tarquin's carved out for himself, but I still argue that Tarquin is SUCH a bastard BECAUSE he puts those rules so far over people's lives and happiness. Tarquin can't be Neutral or Chaotic any more than he can be non-Evil; to speak of one half of his alignment is to speak of the other, but I still contend that Tarquin and his engine of human misery are a clear portrait of Lawful going way, way too far to produce a particularly virulent evil more than a portrait of an Evil character that happens to be Lawful in his operations.
Of course Tarquin isn't purely a creature of expedience. That's why he's LE and not NE. However, that doesn't get you anywhere closer to the conclusion that Tarquin's Evil is just an extreme Lawfulness, unless you think Durkon was acting LE when he refused to bust Roy and Belkar out of jail.

The rest of this paragraph is just you repeating your conclusion as if that will make your argument stronger, so I'll skip it. Do you have evidence, or just contentions?


Actually, I do believe that a Lawful Good character could never hate Chaos as much as Tarquin and remain good, which might be another point of disagreement between us. You seem to think that I'm mitigating just how evil Tarquin is because I'm so focused on how obsessed he is with laws, but that's where I see his evil.
Please don't assume I don't know what you're talking about. I know what you're talking about. I simply disagree.

And again, some evidence of how much he hates Chaos would be nice. Far as I can tell, he gets way more emotional about being thwarted in his narrative concepts than about Chaos in general.


All three branches of the Evil Tree create places that are horrible, but Lawful Evil, particularly as Tarquin practices it, is particularly horrible to me because it is an order that can't stand freedom, creativity, the right to be spontaneous, or any of the things that make life LIFE.
...Food? Water? Shelter? Community? Some kind of protection from violence? Some kind of social contract? The Chaotic aspects of life are not privileged over the Lawful ones.


It is inconceivable to me that a Lawful Good character could hate Chaos as much as Tarquin does because that implies someone that is OFFENDED by the expression of free will,
*waits for example of Tarquin being offended merely by the expression of free will*


who believes the logical solution to irreconcilable differences is murder on as big a scale as it takes to resolve the disagreement,
That comes about because Tarquin has no objection to murdering people, not because of a particular degree of hatred of Chaos. Remember, it's not extremely Lawful people who "have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient." It's Evil people. It derives from their Evil. How much plainer does this need to get?


that would gladly rip the capacity to dream and create out of the universe because it makes things messier, could POSSIBLY be a Good person. That is ludicrous to me.
Maybe because it's also a ludicrous representation of how Tarquin operates. Look, you've wandered off into passionate ranting, which is all well and good, but can we get back to what's actually in the comic?


Paladins have a rigid worldview, but the only one in comic who thought stepping outside that worldview ought to be met with a drawn sword and a smiting fell DAMN hard. Lawful Good doesn't always agree with the way people express their freedoms, but it can exist with that chaos without trying to destroy it because it's Good and acknowledges Chaos has a place. Lawful Evil will annihilate anything that does not reflect itself when practiced in Tarquin's manner, and then sow salt so that nothing divergent can grow from what remains.
As I recall, the Paladin in question fell damn hard because she deluded herself into thinking a lot of Good people were Evil, not because they stepped outside her worldview.

And Lawful Good tries to destroy chaotic expressions of freedom all the time. Freedom of acquisition, for example. It is more restrained in its means because it has respect for sentient life, but that doesn't make it less Lawful than LE. Hell, the LG mirror to Tarquin's hellhole has existed in literature for centuries: Thomas More's Utopia.

[Copperdragon]

TL;DR I guess I'm just disappointed that the character stopped being so interesting and thought provoking, and just became, frankly, boring.

I am not with you. Not at all.

Tarquin has not changed at all and I think he's just as interesting as he was all the time.
I also think this is a pretty clean and well constructed development. One of the cleanest, even. Since the Order entered Tarquin's city the board was set, the pieces played and this now is the endgame.

[The Giant]

You're absolutely wrong here. For example, there are plenty of cases where children had no idea that their parents had committed atrocities or had helped commit atrocities. The fact of the matter is that, yes, Virginia, people can and do do horrible things and otherwise come across as decent people to those who don't know about their actions. It's astounding that you think otherwise.

Purple emphasis mine.

You're arguing against something I didn't say. The "Evil Switch" i'm talking about is not the external facade, it's the internal reality of the person. I don't dispute for one second that people can come across as otherwise decent people. Yes, I concur that it is entirely realistic for people who commit horrible atrocities to seem like good people in other situations. But the key word there is, "seem." Being able to act like a good person some of the time does not make one a good person, it makes one a competent actor. Someone mentally and emotionally capable of intentional deliberate mass murder is still capable of mass murder when hugging their child. They're just not doing it that moment.

Tarquin seemed like a decent person when we met him, that's the entire point. It would have been entirely plausible for Tarquin to have never cracked his facade, to continue acting like a calm and collected person who separated his two lives, but I have no interest in writing that. First, it's boring, and second, it sends a message that you can totally commit atrocities and it's OK, that doesn't make you a bad person as long as you pet a dog afterward. Yes, it makes you a bad person. That is the point. That is the message I am consciously conveying with my story, and if you disagree with it, that's fine, I guess. But I'm not going to take, "You conveyed the message you wanted to convey but I don't like it!" as a criticism that I need to pay attention to.


All this talk in the comic about upsetting traditional narratives, and here you are on the forums complaining about the fact that your audience loves the villain.

I'm not complaining that they love the villain as a character, I'm complaining that they love the villain as a person. I want them to love Tarquin as a well-developed element of the fiction that serves his purpose in the story well while raising interesting points about both the way people act in the real world and the way that stories are often constructed these days, and gets off some funny jokes in the process. I don't want them to love him because it's so cool that he can do all these horrible things and still be totally emotionally untouched by it because yeah, doin' evil is awesome and totally should be portrayed as just another lifestyle choice!

And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

[Ridureyu]

Many people who believe that there is no such thing as "good" or "evil" find themselves truly challenged when they confront real evil.

I mean, if everything is relative, and as long as you're happy you're okay...

[rbetieh]

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the assertion that this is "just" animosity towards Chaos, because Tarquin's beliefs about the way things ought to work are relevant to this analysis.

Discomforts aside, you forget how lawful people operate. There happens to be a trait that runs common to those of the Lawful alignments; and that is the eventual assertion that the character answers to a higher authority, and that therefore their actions are done out of necessity. Even Roy throws a Lawful answer on to Xykon on the Zombie Dragons back (what about the oath of vegeance, I can't let you go because of that).

The character believes himself the big bad of a story, and that all of his actions are necessary because that is how bad people are supposed to act. In every sense his is acting "JUST" (in capitals, because he really had no other justification than this) out of animosity towards Chaos. He has a script, either you follow it or you get fired. He killed Nale for not following the script, he intends to punish Elan for not following the script, and he showed leniency towards Enor and Ganji because they acted in a way that was acceptable. And he will still claim that each action was forced upon him because of the dictates of his story. He shields himself behind his higher authority, but its not just him, look towards Malack, and Durkon, and Roy.

This really ought to be the motto for Law....We always answer to a higher authority, even if you don't recognize it.

[Kish]

All this talk in the comic about upsetting traditional narratives, and here you are on the forums complaining about the fact that your audience loves the villain.
The problem isn't that the audience loves the villain. The problem is that faced with a picture that unambiguously included mass murder, torture, and rape, some members of the audience loudly decided that the perpetrator of those acts was so cool that they wanted to see him get everything he wanted. If you ever thought Elan was advocating that, I'd suggest you misunderstood something somewhere.

Another problem, though not the one I understand Rich to be talking about there, is that the audience loves the character they've made up based on the villain--but not based on all of him--and imposed on him. And when the villain acts in a way that doesn't match the picture they have of him, they shriek about it on the forum.

[rbetieh]

Third, you're uncritically repeating the same pattern I criticized in rbetieh's post: describing Tarquin's devotion to Law in loving detail while casually reducing his Evil to the phrase "his kind of". Are we really just going to pass over the fact that Tarquin's envisioned order is a horrible place, and not just because it lacks freedom? Is it really so inconceivable that a LG character might hate chaos just as much as Tarquin, but express it differently because he actually has concern for the dignity of sentient life and has a different vision from Tarquin? Tarquin isn't Evil because he is extremely Lawful; he's just extremely Lawful Evil.

Finally, Redcloak's brand of LE is more complex than you portray it as. But that's a tale for another time.

Sigh, if I had read this first before responding to your last post....

This is not, as I understood it, a thread about "Is Tarquin Evil?", but a thread about "Why is Tarquin behaving so differently than he was 100 strips ago?". I answered the second question. I don't care to answer the already answered first question. But the glove I presented in my first post fits the hand. His behavior has changed because he perceives Elan has stepped out of the box.

[Killer Angel]

Tarquin is a terrible person, an evil tyrant, a mass murderer. That is usually able to wear a mask of politeness and mannerism, because he likes to give this image, because it gives him a certain style.
Which is true, he's a BEG with style and a good sense of drama.
When he's disappointed, the mask falls apart (hence, the apparent change of behavior), but what's behind, is still the same.

We can only be fascinated by the mask.

[The Pilgrim]

And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

I totally loathe acting like a groupie, but...

... I can't help it this time.

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Thank you, Giant. You are not alone.

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[Math_Mage]

Discomforts aside, you forget how lawful people operate. There happens to be a trait that runs common to those of the Lawful alignments; and that is the eventual assertion that the character answers to a higher authority, and that therefore their actions are done out of necessity. Even Roy throws a Lawful answer on to Xykon on the Zombie Dragons back (what about the oath of vegeance, I can't let you go because of that).

The character believes himself the big bad of a story, and that all of his actions are necessary because that is how bad people are supposed to act. In every sense his is acting "JUST" (in capitals, because he really had no other justification than this) out of animosity towards Chaos. He has a script, either you follow it or you get fired. He killed Nale for not following the script, he intends to punish Elan for not following the script, and he showed leniency towards Enor and Ganji because they acted in a way that was acceptable. And he will still claim that each action was forced upon him because of the dictates of his story. He shields himself behind his higher authority, but its not just him, look towards Malack, and Durkon, and Roy.

This really ought to be the motto for Law....We always answer to a higher authority, even if you don't recognize it.
This claim is complicated by the fact that Tarquin chose and chooses to write this particular story. It's not just The Script that Elan is bucking, it's Tarquin's script. So the question is, is Tarquin threatened by Elan upsetting the narrative, or by upsetting his control of the narrative?


Sigh, if I had read this first before responding to your last post....

This is not, as I understood it, a thread about "Is Tarquin Evil?", but a thread about "Why is Tarquin behaving so differently than he was 100 strips ago?". I answered the second question. I don't care to answer the already answered first question. But the glove I presented in my first post fits the hand. His behavior has changed because he perceives Elan has stepped out of the box.
Shrug. Your post was made in apparent isolation. I read it as an essentializing claim about Tarquin, though certainly not one related to the question "Is Tarquin Evil?", but rather to the question "Why is Tarquin the way he is?" Since many of the comments on this thread make the point that Tarquin isn't changed so much as revealed by the past hundred strips, this is not such a large jump.

And to cast the above point into your metaphor, is it The Box, or Tarquin's Box?

[Ninja Dragon]

I'm not complaining that they love the villain as a character, I'm complaining that they love the villain as a person. I want them to love Tarquin as a well-developed element of the fiction that serves his purpose in the story well while raising interesting points about both the way people act in the real world and the way that stories are often constructed these days, and gets off some funny jokes in the process. I don't want them to love him because it's so cool that he can do all these horrible things and still be totally emotionally untouched by it because yeah, doin' evil is awesome and totally should be portrayed as just another lifestyle choice!

And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

He's still amazingly cool, though. Even with his recent breakdown. Good job creating him.

But yeah, he deserves to be punished. And I think unless he realizes he is just a sidequest villain and stops chasing the order soon, he's going to die.

[Daywalker1983]

The get slightly back to topic...

Showing new sides of a charcter isn't equivalent to him changing.

Besides...I think he lost a true frind in Malack, and even if he of course is evil and there is no reasoning for him, he was kind of forced to kill Nale, from his point of view. Especially when we consider the "Their death brought upon themselves" reasoning sometimes floating around. On top of that his plans unravel, he had to call in a favor he hoarded for ten years, and even then we can glean from the last page he considered himself restraint all that time.

So, my point is: He's under a lot of pressure, and he really stands to lose something and already has lost parts of it. But he has not changed.

It'd be ridiculous if he still maintained calm.

[Daimbert]

It would have been entirely plausible for Tarquin to have never cracked his facade, to continue acting like a calm and collected person who separated his two lives ...

I think that's one of the big issues here: why couldn't Tarquin BE a calm and collected person whose actions in the various aspects of his life all follow from his Evil character?

Tarquin had the potential to be the Enlightened Egoist Evil character, differing from Xykon and Belkar in that he doesn't have any particular desire to hurt others but differing from someone like Redcloak in that he is willing to commit atrocities for purely selfish reasons as opposed to fulfilling a perceived noble goal. Dropping in Tarquin's arguments about making the world orderly hurt that interpretation, and this kills it even more. At any rate, that sort of character has interests and cares for things and for people, but only for specific people. Thus, that sort of Evil character could indeed genuinely care about his children and do whatever it takes to make things work out well for them ... even if it involves hurting others or even hurting them. And if they had other interests that outweighed their interests in their children, they'd abandon the children. That's still Evil, but then the affability and the working with the heroes and working against them all follow from that.

And that sort of character, one with motives that aren't simply "I want to hurt people", one who calculates advantage beyond the very short term thinking, IS more interesting than the typical villain. But it doesn't make them less Evil, but instead should make them an interesting villain.

So, take Tarquin, Nale and Malack. That Tarquin saw Malack both as a good friend and as a valuable asset seems, to me, undeniable. Given that, anyone who killed Malack's children or in any way incurred his wrath would prompt Tarquin to kill them, if for no other reason than to keep the asset happy. That it also involved Tarquin helping a friend would be a bonus, and Tarquin's always been about getting the most he can from any arrangement. But when it was Nale, Tarquin cared more about Nale -- and potentially about Tarquin's own legacy -- than he did about Malack, and so he would always TRY to preserve Nale ... and if he could do it without losing Malack as a friend and asset, he wins. When Nale kills Malack, now he's really ticked off the entire group, and cost Tarquin a valuable asset. And yet, Tarquin sees enough benefit in Nale to try to patch it over. Only when Nale makes it clear that Tarquin's not going to get what he wants -- in this case, at least partly for Nale -- does Tarquin then decide that it isn't worth it and then does treat Nale as he wants to be treated. At that point, Tarquin treats him the way he'd treat anyone else who did what he did ... and kills him.

But this follows from the EXACT same personality traits and, more importantly, the same Evilness that caused him to offer help to Elan in the beginning on his quest. For Tarquin to act "decent" is for him to act out of the same self-interested pragmatism to act "Evil". The slave example is, to me, the prime example of Tarquin's pragmatic Evil: hey, I need to recapture the escapees, I need to make an example of them, and, hey, I can do a nice tribute to my son doing it! Wonderful! To Tarquin, wrt Elan it's the same thing as taking him to the zoo, except that it also helps solidify his power and takes care of another problem he has. Which is why he's genuinely surprised that Elan is so upset by it.

Thus, there's no facade or mask to drop, no acting going on. Tarquin's Evil pushes him to be generous and even merciful at times, but always in service to his own aims. He at least had the potential to be a villain that wasn't Stupid Evil, but was Intelligent Evil, realizing that it doesn't benefit him to simply randomly slaughter people and finding no benefit in killing or hurting people just to hurt people. But he had no problem hurting people if he benefited from it.

A comparison might be this: Tarquin and Xykon are in a chilly room with some slaves. They want to be warmer. Xykon is likely to set the slaves on fire to warm himself up, because hurting people is fun. Tarquin will go get a cloak, because that's easier than lighting the slaves on fire. But make no mistake, if the best way to warm himself up was to light the slaves on fire, Tarquin would do it. That's what makes him Evil, and seems perfectly Evil enough for me.


Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

Morally questionable does not mean Evil. If you're talking about heroes, the very strongly morally upright can fall into Stupid Good or Lawful Stupid territory, being unwilling to do what needs to be done to stop the greater Evil, and so can come across as unrealistic and having the author have to find a contrived way for the moral way to work. And if you look at most cartoons from the 80s, they did that.

Note that trying to pull this challenge off with villains is difficult, and that you aren't actually succeeding, because of the villains the least morally questionable villain is probably Redcloak, and even you admit in the writing that he's the least cool of Team Evil. And when it comes to heroes, pre-vampire Durkon was the most morally upright, and again even in your writing you make him the least cool. In terms of interesting characters, for the most part Durkon and Roy sat at the boring end of the scale, and are the most moral. The most interesting good character is probably O-Chul, but that's because of his Determinator status and overwhelming kindness.

[The Giant]

I think that's one of the big issues here: why couldn't Tarquin BE a calm and collected person whose actions in the various aspects of his life all follow from his Evil character?

Because then there's no climax to the story?

He IS that, 99.999999999% of his life, but you are looking at his very worst day. Drama is all about taking characters and pushing them until they break, one way or the other. If a character can't be broken, then they have no place as a main character in a story. So writing a drama involves thinking of all the ways that your characters can be broken; this is the way that I chose for Tarquin.

I once read excellent writing advice that said, "Is this the most interesting time in your character's life? If not, why aren't you writing about that instead?" This is the most interesting time in Tarquin's life, because it's where the rubber of his self-image hits the road of reality. It's where his worldview is being challenged in a way that he can't just throw resources at it to fix it. Take away that conflict, that inherent crumbling of his previous cool, and there's nothing interesting to write about. There's just, "Oh, he was bad for a long time, but then the good guys fixed it by stabbing him." Boring.

[Daimbert]

Because then there's no climax to the story?

He IS that, 99.999999999% of his life, but you are looking at his very worst day. Drama is all about taking characters and pushing them until they break, one way or the other. If a character can't be broken, then they have no place as a main character in a story. So writing a drama involves thinking of all the ways that your characters can be broken; this is the way that I chose for Tarquin.

The issue I have is that from your previous posts you hinted that the way Tarquin is now is the way he's always been, that this is the REAL Tarquin, and we're just seeing it now, that he's dropped his facade and is showing us who he really is. Now, here you say that you've broken Tarquin. Fair enough. But when someone talks about breaking someone, the implication is that they aren't acting the way they would normally, or how they really are, but in an "altered" personality. When everything is crumbling around you, you tend to lash out ... but few think that in those cases you were always a person who lashed out blindly as opposed to someone who simply lost control of themselves and isn't acting how they would act normally or in a way that reflects who they really are.

So if Tarquin has just lost control here, fine. I personally think that it's dragging on too long to be interesting, but that's a personal opinion. But then the comments about Tarquin being Evil don't seem to fit that well; Tarquin's evil would or could be the sort of Evil I talk about, and this indicates nothing other than the climax to the story.

And, in fact, Tarquin losing control, in my opinion, works better if we think that he DOES genuinely care about his children rather than not, as it provides the really big catalyst for his breakdown, having to sacrifice things he really does care about and seeing things he cares about sacrificed for his narrative. At that point, he ends up having to go all in only because it's the only thing that will make the sacrifices worthwhile, the flip side of Redcloak who is doing it not for himself, but for his people, while Tarquin does it for himself solely.


I once read excellent writing advice that said, "Is this the most interesting time in your character's life? If not, why aren't you writing about that instead?" This is the most interesting time in Tarquin's life, because it's where the rubber of his self-image hits the road of reality. It's where his worldview is being challenged in a way that he can't just throw resources at it to fix it. Take away that conflict, that inherent crumbling of his previous cool, and there's nothing interesting to write about. There's just, "Oh, he was bad for a long time, but then the good guys fixed it by stabbing him." Boring.

But based on your words and Tarquin's goals, shouldn't it BE the case that this is the least interesting time, and the end is really that despite his pretensions, Tarquin really was just someone who was bad for a long time that the good guys fixed by stabbing him? You DID earlier talk about subverting that idea of his importance, and after building that up in Tarquin's mind having him, at the end, be nothing more than the side villain seems to be the ideal way to do that.

[CaDzilla]

All this talk in the comic about upsetting traditional narratives, and here you are on the forums complaining about the fact that your audience loves the villain.

Well the audience loving the villain is still a cliche in of itself

[masamune1]

It seems people really don't understand Tarquin or the nature of Lawful Evil.

Lawful Evil, like Chaotic Evil and Lawful / Chaotic good, is like a see-saw- you can be more Lawful than Evil, or more Evil than Lawful. And it seems that people on this board think that Tarquin is the former when he is in fact the latter.

The former tend to believe in imposing order by any means necessary, or that order takes paramount importance even over their evil natures. Tarquin is not like that. Tarquin is Lawful because he thinks it keeps him disciplined; he seeks to impose order mainly because it will serve him; how it benefits anybody else is of secondary importance, if that. He runs an orderly and efficient evil empire- or three- because he knows that will benefit him. And he wants to impose narrative order on Elan because the narrative in question could be called The Rise and Fall of Tarquin the Glorious.

In short, Tarquin does not serve Order; he makes Order serve him. Redcloak is somewhere in-between, since he is technically subordinate to his Lawful Evil dark god and serving his ends (we can't say which one the Dark One is) but he probably leans towards Tarquin as well- he thinks Lawful means serve his Evil agenda.

And on that note, Lawful Evil characters are absolutely not the "nicest" Evil characters. Many of the most vile, despicable and ruthless Evil villains are Lawful Evil. And just because they are Lawful Evil doesn't mean that they are "above" certain Evil behaviours like rape or whatever- Lawful Evil is about consistency, discipline and / or the imposition of Order; if you want to go out and mutilate an 8 year-old for your own squicky sexual gratification that's entirely up to you, unless the lawful code you follow says otherwise, which it may not. Lawful Evil is, ironically, often relative and subjective.

Tarquin is every bit as vile and depraved as Xykon is; he is just more sophisticated and thinks more long-term, and he just likes to cultivate a nicer image for his own purposes and ego. Both are driven primarily by a desire to enjoy themselves by committing acts of evil- its just that Xykon is impulsive and reckless and prefers to do that via blowing **** up or slaughtering random people, while Tarquin likes political scheming, crushing enemies in war, spectator blood sports and efficiently running an evil empire. Both even would like the hero (Roy / Elan, respectively) to go away and gain a few levels before having an epic showdown with them, because that sounds like fun.

[The Giant]

The issue I have is that from your previous posts you hinted that the way Tarquin is now is the way he's always been, that this is the REAL Tarquin, and we're just seeing it now, that he's dropped his facade and is showing us who he really is. Now, here you say that you've broken Tarquin. Fair enough. But when someone talks about breaking someone, the implication is that they aren't acting the way they would normally, or how they really are, but in an "altered" personality. When everything is crumbling around you, you tend to lash out ... but few think that in those cases you were always a person who lashed out blindly as opposed to someone who simply lost control of themselves and isn't acting how they would act normally or in a way that reflects who they really are.

Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.

I don't think Tarquin sat around thinking, "Ha ha! I am fooling them into thinking I love my family! I am so clever!" I think he thought that he really loved his family, right up until the point where loving his family conflicted with him being in total control. And then both he and the readers got to see which one of the two really mattered to him.

In other words, when I use the word "facade," I am not referring to a conscious artifice on Tarquin's part. I am referring to the idea that the true core of his being is hidden—possibly even from himself—until the crucible of the story burns it out of him. This is why it was in conflict with comments on this thread about people in real life who segregate their evil actions from the love of family—because in real life, there's no guarantee that such a crucible moment will ever occur.

[Math_Mage]

It seems people really don't understand Tarquin or the nature of Lawful Evil.

Lawful Evil, like Chaotic Evil and Lawful / Chaotic good, is like a see-saw- you can be more Lawful than Evil, or more Evil than Lawful. And it seems that people on this board think that Tarquin is the former when he is in fact the latter.

The former tend to believe in imposing order by any means necessary, or that order takes paramount importance even over their evil natures. Tarquin is not like that. Tarquin is Lawful because he thinks it keeps him disciplined; he seeks to impose order mainly because it will serve him; how it benefits anybody else is of secondary importance, if that. He runs an orderly and efficient evil empire- or three- because he knows that will benefit him. And he wants to impose narrative order on Elan because the narrative in question could be called The Rise and Fall of Tarquin the Glorious.

In short, Tarquin does not serve Order; he makes Order serve him. Redcloak is somewhere in-between, since he is technically subordinate to his Lawful Evil dark god and serving his ends (we can't say which one the Dark One is) but he probably leans towards Tarquin as well- he thinks Lawful means serve his Evil agenda.
It should be noted that his latest spiel about 'bringing narrative structure to the world if no one else will' tilts the scales back towards Evil For Lawful's Sake somewhat. It's not that Law will benefit the world, but it is what he claims is necessary.

[Copperdragon]

The issue I have is that from your previous posts you hinted that the way Tarquin is now is the way he's always been, that this is the REAL Tarquin, and we're just seeing it now, that he's dropped his facade and is showing us who he really is.

If I may interject: There never was a facade. Tarquin always has been what he has been showing. A self-centered control freak. What happens if you deny a control freak the control? He freaks out. To me, there's nothing that changed in Tarquin or how he is portrayed, just the situation around changed and the very same Tarquin behaves as it makes sense for such a character.


Now, here you say that you've broken Tarquin. Fair enough. But when someone talks about breaking someone, the implication is that they aren't acting the way they would normally, or how they really are, but in an "altered" personality.

I disagree. If you "break" a character it means you have forced him to be out of his own comfort zone and confront him with a situation he cannot deal with. That "cannot deal with" is when the character behaves in ways that are not within his normal mode of operation and they "break down". But that does not mean that what happens now is totally outside of what the character normally would be.
In a way "breaking" a character in a narrative (or in RL, but we do not do that to our fellow humans) is you take away all his means and things he does and thinks to life a normal life and confront him with a situation where he has to behave based on his most basic instincts. "Breaking" a character in a narrative is actually not letting do him something that is unnatural but reducing him to only what he feels, to pure instinct. No thought, no ratio, a broken character will follow his very primal instinct. Breaking down and sobbing, violence, whatever. In Tarquin's case it's rage and violence.



So if Tarquin has just lost control here, fine. I personally think that it's dragging on too long to be interesting, but that's a personal opinion. But then the comments about Tarquin being Evil don't seem to fit that well; Tarquin's evil would or could be the sort of Evil I talk about, and this indicates nothing other than the climax to the story.

I did not fully get what you are aiming at, but I think Tarquin's character and how he breaks in this situation is both to 100% consistent with his character shown so far and also very dramatic.



And, in fact, Tarquin losing control, in my opinion, [...]
There's an easy solution for that: Write your own story. Yet I doubt what you outlined would be better than what I am reading here, currently.
We can argue about how something an author does does not work from our point of view, how this or that does not work with this character or you or how you cannot follow what's being shown. That is all fine.
But at the point where you make suggestions what would be better, you really enter the realm where you are better of writing it yourself. I mean, what is Rich supposed to say now?
"Well, yes, that is your proposal, but... I write the story I like"? What are we going to discuss about?
Yes, outlining why something does not work for your is similar but I feel that if we can discuss why we think this or that works well we should also be able to talk about why this and that does not work well (for each of us), but then doing the next step and go into alternative strands of narration I think we're either in the realm of fanfiction or pointlessness. Especially as we're still in the midlle of the scene.


But based on your words and Tarquin's goals, shouldn't it BE the case that this is the least interesting time, and the end is really that despite his pretensions, Tarquin really was just someone who was bad for a long time that the good guys fixed by stabbing him?

I think this is Tarquin's most interesting time because it is the "10 minutes of suck" that he was talking about earlier to Elan. It is the time where he has to realise his sons deny him (each in their own way, but in the end surprisingly similar), that he might not be able to solve all issues and overcome all obstacles, that this might actually be the time he loses for good, and that all his plans about legacy and even ruling are not going to come to fruitation.
I bet that whatever we saw of Tarquin reaching his limits was only the very beginning. He's about to crash much, much harder once he sees Laurin's and his own HPs going down.

[masamune1]

It should be noted that his latest spiel about 'bringing narrative structure to the world if no one else will' tilts the scales back towards Evil For Lawful's Sake somewhat. It's not that Law will benefit the world, but it is what he claims is necessary.

I think that says more about Tarquin being a delusional narcissist. If its running contrary to his grand master plan, its just WRONG.

Either way, on average he is definitely more Evil than Lawful. If he likes to imagine that its the opposite its only because his Evil goals -Elan aside, and even that is running mostly okay- are running smoothly and have been for the last couple of decades.

[Khay]

I think that says more about Tarquin being a delusional narcissist. If its running contrary to his grand master plan, its just WRONG.

I would agree with this. He's not trying to impose a certain narrative structure on the world for the sake of narrative structure, but because he likes the place he set up for himself in said structure - the affable, competent villain whom audiences love, the schemer with ultimate power, someone who gets to decide whether you live or die, and so on. There's no way he'd be willing to accept a lesser role.

If the narrative goes haywire, there's no telling where he'll end up. He wants to be Darth Vader, but if he lets Elan succeed, he'll end up as Dark Helmet (http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4100569856/ch0008869).

[Daimbert]

Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.

There's a difference between being under stress, and being broken. It may seem like semantic wrangling, but it isn't. I would say that Tarquin was under stress at the pit where he killed Nale, and he acted in precisely the same way he did otherwise. Yes, he demonstrated that he cared more about his own narrative fulfillment than Nale, but I've never argued against that. My whole point is that Tarquin cares more about his own interests than anything else.

If you take someone and, say, kill their family, and they express hatred for the murderers and the strong desire to have them be killed horribly, does that mean that they're people who want people to be killed horribly? No, they're broken people, acting against who they really are under such INCREDIBLE stress that they are overwhelmed by anger and emotion. That's not who they really are, that's who they are under the influence of such strong emotions. It's the reason why such people, when the emotion passes, feel strongly guilty for those feelings and those actions and words ... because those words, at the end of the day, AREN'T them.

In Tarquin's case, the evidence of his being out of control to that point is that there are numerous scenarios where he could get what he wants without engaging in this sort of wholesale slaughter, and putting himself at risk, and taking on all of this effort. Normally, he'd take them in a heartbeat, because that is who he is at the heart of himself: someone who will take the most pragmatic way to get what he wants, whether it involves atrocities or not. I don't diminish his Evil here: he's still evil and completely selfish and self-interested. He's just normally strong and disciplined enough to take the smart route instead of the stupid route. Here, he's consistently tossing away good resources and more than he needs to to get what he wants.


I don't think Tarquin sat around thinking, "Ha ha! I am fooling them into thinking I love my family! I am so clever!" I think he thought that he really loved his family, right up until the point where loving his family conflicted with him being in total control. And then both he and the readers got to see which one of the two really mattered to him.

But that's the disagreement here: I think he really DID and DOES love his family. I agree that he cares about control or legacy or whatever it is MORE, because at the end of the day he cares about himself more than anyone else. That's still Evil. Then the question is about how he normally goes about getting what he wants, and that's through calculation and control ... which he isn't doing here. Thus, at this point he's simply lost it.


In other words, when I use the word "facade," I am not referring to a conscious artifice on Tarquin's part. I am referring to the idea that the true core of his being is hidden—possibly even from himself—until the crucible of the story burns it out of him. This is why it was in conflict with comments on this thread about people in real life who segregate their evil actions from the love of family—because in real life, there's no guarantee that such a crucible moment will ever occur.

I'm not sure how much we're disagreeing at this point. I agree that his priorities were revealed by this, especially related to what it took for him to lose it, but I don't think this out of control and plainly irrational Tarquin is who Tarquin really is.


Tarquin is every bit as vile and depraved as Xykon is; he is just more sophisticated and thinks more long-term, and he just likes to cultivate a nicer image for his own purposes and ego. Both are driven primarily by a desire to enjoy themselves by committing acts of evil- its just that Xykon is impulsive and reckless and prefers to do that via blowing **** up or slaughtering random people, while Tarquin likes political scheming, crushing enemies in war, spectator blood sports and efficiently running an evil empire.

Totally agreed with you up to this point. I don't think Tarquin enjoys being Evil, but I think he enjoys the perks he gets from employing Evil actions when necessary to get those perks, perks that he wouldn't get if he didn't. If Tarquin fancied a woman and could get her by simple seduction, he'd take it. He wouldn't feel the need to do anything bad to achieve that. But if he can't ... well, killing a husband or some torture will work, too. Now, he'll likely end up in the latter situation more often because it'll be more meaningful if it's a challenge, but Tarquin does not do Evil to be Evil, but he does Evil to get what he wants. Note that I agree that this makes him as vile and depraved as Xykon, just in a different and at least slightly more subtle way.

[Carry2]

Because then there's no climax to the story?

He IS that, 99.999999999% of his life, but you are looking at his very worst day. ...This is the most interesting time in Tarquin's life, because it's where the rubber of his self-image hits the road of reality. It's where his worldview is being challenged in a way that he can't just throw resources at it to fix it.
Yes, except that 'throwing resources at it' was never supposed to be Tarquin's principle resort. (He says so himself- the massed troops are largely there for show.) Tarquin is supposed to have built up his empire on the basis of (A) his ability to maintain personal loyalties and (B) adeptly manipulate long-term outcomes to his favour, despite being (C) a major net negative for the continent as a whole.

But his observed behaviour does little or nothing to support this characterisation. Tarquin manifestly fails to anticipate the long-term outcomes of his attempts at manipulation and winds up screwing over the people closest to him (notably Malack & Elan, but one could argue others) in the process.

Pitting two of your sons against eachother in an elaborate battle-cage scenario for an objective you don't even want is not a good example of tactical genius, let alone quality time. The expectable outcome here is not 'they will love me and I will win big' but 'one or more of my sons or lieutenants will be dead, and/or hate my guts.'

If this is supposed to be any indication of Tarquin's general modus operandi, then he would never have acquired an Empire in the first place. He would have no social capital and no viable grand strategy. So yes, a number of fans are being driven to the conclusion that Tarquin has either gone rapidly nuts, or that you have bungled his recent characterisation. Or, heck, both.


Secondly, saying that he IS calm and collected 99% of the time is not solving the storytelling problem: people are going to draw conclusions on the basis of available evidence. If most of Tarquin's appearances in the strip show him being petty, erratic and short-sighted, a fair chunk of people are going to assume that's who he is.

It also undermines your claim that 'being evil pervades everything you do'- if we're supposed to discount recent events as being a 1% statistical aberration, why should we attach so much thematic weight to how he treats his family during this interval? You cannot ask us to simultaneously accept and discount the same set of evidence.

{SCRUBBED}

[Shale]

That Tarquin is really bad at predicting how people will react to his decisions is not exactly news. Propositioning Amun-Zora, burning a bunch of people alive as a gesture of affection to Elan...

[The Giant]

I disagree. If you "break" a character it means you have forced him to be out of his own comfort zone and confront him with a situation he cannot deal with. That "cannot deal with" is when the character behaves in ways that are not within his normal mode of operation and they "break down". But that does not mean that what happens now is totally outside of what the character normally would be.
In a way "breaking" a character in a narrative (or in RL, but we do not do that to our fellow humans) is you take away all his means and things he does and thinks to life a normal life and confront him with a situation where he has to behave based on his most basic instincts. "Breaking" a character in a narrative is actually not letting do him something that is unnatural but reducing him to only what he feels, to pure instinct. No thought, no ratio, a broken character will follow his very primal instinct. Breaking down and sobbing, violence, whatever. In Tarquin's case it's rage and violence.

Yes, this. "Breaking" a character does not mean brainwashing them into being someone else, it means knocking down all the walls that the character has put up to hide from themselves. It's breaking through to see the truth. It's removing all the easy paths so that they have to pick one of the hard ones, and then seeing which of the hard ones they pick.

I guess if one thought that everyone walks around being 100% the person they seem to be on the surface, then that wouldn't make sense, but it's been my experience that most humans construct elaborate series of lies, delusions, and justifications for their actions that they trot out to convince themselves and others that they are in the right. "Breaking" a character is about getting past those and finding out what really matters.


If you take someone and, say, kill their family, and they express hatred for the murderers and the strong desire to have them be killed horribly, does that mean that they're people who want people to be killed horribly? No, they're broken people, acting against who they really are under such INCREDIBLE stress that they are overwhelmed by anger and emotion. That's not who they really are, that's who they are under the influence of such strong emotions. It's the reason why such people, when the emotion passes, feel strongly guilty for those feelings and those actions and words ... because those words, at the end of the day, AREN'T them.

And I am saying that I fundamentally disagree with this premise. It is them, and if they feel guilty that's because they don't want it to be who they are. And that's fine, that's normal and maybe people in that situation will do their best to change if they don't like what stress has revealed, or maybe they'll decide that they're fine with who they are. But deciding it's some sort of Other that takes possession of your body because stress happened is really weird. It strikes me as exactly the sort of self-justification I was talking about above, the kind that good writing breaks through. Tarquin would certainly say that he isn't really a violent control freak who is willing to sacrifice his family to feed his ego, it was just the stress making him that way. And I would say, "Bull****."

[Daimbert]

If I may interject: There never was a facade. Tarquin always has been what he has been showing. A self-centered control freak. What happens if you deny a control freak the control? He freaks out. To me, there's nothing that changed in Tarquin or how he is portrayed, just the situation around changed and the very same Tarquin behaves as it makes sense for such a character.

Yes, for someone who wants control of everything -- including themselves -- if you take that away from them they'll try to get back in control. But note that Tarquin definitely always wants to be in control of himself as well, and right now he isn't even managing that. This isn't who Tarquin really is, this is Tarquin who is frustrated to the point where he isn't acting as himself, like the person who normally plans everything out to the letter and thinks about it five times before doing anything grabbing something and yanking it out out of frustration. They don't stop being the planning type just because in a fit of anger they don't plan and act rashly. Or, to put it better, just because someone in a fit of anger acts rashly doesn't mean that they are a rash person; that's one of the exceptions that proves the rule, in that it is so out of character for them that it can only be the result of the anger.


I disagree. If you "break" a character it means you have forced him to be out of his own comfort zone and confront him with a situation he cannot deal with. That "cannot deal with" is when the character behaves in ways that are not within his normal mode of operation and they "break down". But that does not mean that what happens now is totally outside of what the character normally would be. In a way "breaking" a character in a narrative (or in RL, but we do not do that to our fellow humans) is you take away all his means and things he does and thinks to life a normal life and confront him with a situation where he has to behave based on his most basic instincts. "Breaking" a character in a narrative is actually not letting do him something that is unnatural but reducing him to only what he feels, to pure instinct. No thought, no ratio, a broken character will follow his very primal instinct. Breaking down and sobbing, violence, whatever. In Tarquin's case it's rage and violence.

But who is to say that what they "feel" in that case reflects anything about them at all, rather than about simply pure instincts? Who the person really is is what their first instinct is in a situation: do they stop to think, appeal to their feelings, take action, whatever. What they do when you push them so far that they are no longer capable of acting against their base instincts is not them, and is just a sign that they've lost control and, in my view, aren't really being themselves.



There's an easy solution for that: Write your own story. Yet I doubt what you outlined would be better than what I am reading here, currently.

Please never use this as any kind of reply to anyone; I am not, in fact, doing anything here but taking what's been shown in the comic and said by the author. After all, are you going to deny that Tarquin has lost control of himself here? If he has, my comment is that his really caring about Nale, Malack and everything else in some way works to demonstrate why he's lost control, even of himself here when he clearly cares about being in control of himself: it's the flip side, as I said, of Redcloak, and the idea that after sacrificing Malack, Nale, many of his troops (that he might need to keep control of the Empire), his favour, and giving Laurin a favour after all of that it had better work out!. Or else it wasn't worth it. And that's why he and Redcloak both can't just cut their losses.

So it's a commentary on the elements of the story, perfectly reasonable, and an expression of an opinion. The Giant can indeed say "That might have worked, but that wasn't what I was after" and what we get is my reading more into the story than he had put in, and an acceptance that you could indeed have an Evil character who cared about his family that would have produced a narrative that could have worked, which builds our understanding of stories. Are we not allowed to discuss stories and how they work, or say what we would like better?


Yes, outlining why something does not work for your is similar but I feel that if we can discuss why we think this or that works well we should also be able to talk about why this and that does not work well (for each of us), but then doing the next step and go into alternative strands of narration I think we're either in the realm of fanfiction or pointlessness. Especially as we're still in the midlle of the scene.

Sorry, but serious analysis of literature definitely means saying what might have worked better, and in fact if someone identifies a problem and says how they think it would have worked better that, to me, is a sign of actual good analysis. It's easy to say "This didn't seem to work", but much harder to say how it could have worked better. In this case, everything I said could still be in there, but even if it wasn't saying that if it had gone that way we would have had a nice parallel to another main character AND provided a different and interesting take on villainy is perfectly acceptable. So it's only if you don't want actual analysis done that you can say that such comments are out of place, in my opinion.

But also note that all of this is ... my opinion. As I said. I'm not -- I hope -- making it out to be some narrative law. It's my opinion, I have reasons for it, we can talk about the reasons, and go on from there.

[masamune1]

Totally agreed with you up to this point. I don't think Tarquin enjoys being Evil, but I think he enjoys the perks he gets from employing Evil actions when necessary to get those perks, perks that he wouldn't get if he didn't. If Tarquin fancied a woman and could get her by simple seduction, he'd take it. He wouldn't feel the need to do anything bad to achieve that. But if he can't ... well, killing a husband or some torture will work, too. Now, he'll likely end up in the latter situation more often because it'll be more meaningful if it's a challenge, but Tarquin does not do Evil to be Evil, but he does Evil to get what he wants. Note that I agree that this makes him as vile and depraved as Xykon, just in a different and at least slightly more subtle way.

Nah, I think he clearly enjoys being evil. He is well aware that he is the villain in a fantasy story and is not only okay with that, he absolutely enjoys it. He also enjoys taking brutal, bloody revenge on people who have crossed him, watching people fight to the death for the amusement of himself and the crowd, and he intentionally set out to create an evil empire where he could indulge in his evil impulses at whim, with the intent of leaving it to a Nazi death cult upon his death. He enjoys manipulation and betrayal as well.

He does evil to get what he wants, but what he wants is itself evil and to be evil. He might not torture a woman if he can seduce her, but that's just the exception that proves the rule and isn't far from Xykon's lack of desire to deflower virgins- a matter of taste and preference.

[Carry2]

Tarquin would certainly say that he isn't really a violent control freak who is willing to sacrifice his family to feed his ego, it was just the stress making him that way. And I would say, "Bull****."
Fine, well and good. But the problem is that this kind of Tarquin would not be capable of seizing power in the ways that you have described him doing. He's not a good manipulator, he's not a good strategist, and he's not good at forming strong loyalties. What assets, exactly, could he call upon in order to conquer a continent in the first place?

[The Giant]

Yes, except that 'throwing resources at it' was never supposed to be Tarquin's principle resort. (He says so himself- the massed troops are largely there for show.) Tarquin is supposed to have built up his empire on the basis of (A) his ability to maintain personal loyalties and (B) adeptly manipulate long-term outcomes to his favour, despite being (C) a major net negative for the continent as a whole.

But his observed behaviour does little or nothing to support this characterisation. Tarquin manifestly fails to anticipate the long-term outcomes of his attempts at manipulation and winds up screwing over the people closest to him (notably Malack & Elan, but one could argue others) in the process.

Pitting two of your sons against eachother in an elaborate battle-cage scenario for an objective you don't even want is not a good example of tactical genius, let alone quality time. The expectable outcome here is not 'they will love me and I will win big' but 'one or more of my sons or lieutenants will be dead, and/or hate my guts.'

If this is supposed to be any indication of Tarquin's general modus operandi, then he would never have acquired an Empire in the first place. He would have no social capital and no viable grand strategy. So yes, a number of fans are being driven to the conclusion that Tarquin has either gone rapidly nuts, or that you have bungled his recent characterisation. Or, heck, both.

Just out of curiosity, who was it that told the story about how Tarquin was a tactical genius and the mastermind behind his party's plot? Was it…Tarquin?

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?


Secondly, saying that he IS calm and collected 99% of the time is not solving the storytelling problem: people are going to draw conclusions on the basis of available evidence. If most of Tarquin's appearances in the strip show him being petty, erratic and short-sighted, a fair chunk of people are going to assume that's who he is.

Look, people are taking me to task because for the first half of the story, they thought Tarquin was calm and collected, and now they're upset that he's not. If you looked at the things that happened in the Empire of Blood and thought, "Hey, he's petty, erratic, and short-sighted," then congratulations, you grasped his character better than they did.


It also undermines your claim that 'being evil pervades everything you do'- if we're supposed to discount recent events as being a 1% statistical aberration, why should we attach so much thematic weight to how he treats his family during this interval? You cannot ask us to simultaneously accept and discount the same set of evidence.

I'm not. There are two distinct portions of Tarquin's time in the comic. The first is everything up to when he joins the Linear Guild; the second is everything that happens in the Windy Canyon. The first chunk is largely intended to portray how Tarquin has behaved for his life up until now, the second chunk is the "breaking" of that status quo.



SCRUBBED.
Nope. Not going to take that bait.

[masamune1]

Well, that's....disappointing. I could easily buy that Tarquin was a competent strategist and chessmaster and a delusional, egotistical control freak. I don't think they talked to him like the Order talks to Elan; I think they talked to him like Tarquin was a first among evil equals, or like how the Order talks to Roy. That he's not as good as he might like to think he is doesn't mean he isn't good at all.

[The Giant]

Fine, well and good. But the problem is that this kind of Tarquin would not be capable of seizing power in the ways that you have described him doing. He's not a good manipulator, he's not a good strategist, and he's not good at forming strong loyalties. What assets, exactly, could he call upon in order to conquer a continent in the first place?

Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

[Carry2]

{SCRUBBED}

[Killer Angel]

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?

To be fair, this is a completely understandable mistake. It's part of the human nature: we see a thing, we form an idea around it, then we tend to see further infos in that same idea... it's an error that was made also by many scientists.
In retrospective, it is pretty clear, but while you're reading the story, you could by fooled by the mental image you've created by yourself.

(of course, when we saw the real interaction between Tarquin and his group, it was almost like those flaming letters... :smallsmile:)

[masamune1]

Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

I think the fact that he is a General is what gave the impression that he did. Also if their conspiracy really was his idea then that shows at least some political imagination. Plus, its been verified that his story about conquering a bunch of countries before losing them is true. And as we've seen he can take on the entire Order of the Stick by himself and at least hold his own, if not outright win.

I don't really see him as the Elan of the team; he certainly seemed to be much more bossy and his teammates do listen to him and follow his lead, even if he has to do it by saying "its business" or "I'm calling in that favour".

I think if you plan to reveal that he was always completely incompetent that would be overstating things (and isn't very faithful to Elan, either).

Because Tarquin seems to fill the roles of both Elan and Roy.

[The Giant]

This is just a reminder that the fact that I am participating in a conversation does not make it open season to harass, abuse, or flame me.

If you want to express criticisms of the story, feel free; we're having a good conversation that is touching on some interesting subjects. If you want to call me names over what I've written or the very clear rules of the forum, then expect not to be welcome here.

[The Giant]

I don't really see him as the Elan of the team; he certainly seemed to be much more bossy and his teammates do listen to him and follow his lead, even if he has to do it by saying "its business" or "I'm calling in that favour".

I think if you plan to reveal that he was always completely incompetent that would be overstating things (and isn't very faithful to Elan, either).

Well, it's an analogy, not a perfect substitution. Maybe I oversold it when I said they treat him like Elan, but the main point was that he had overstated his own agency in their mutual plan. He may have had the initial concept, but if he had been left to run it himself it would have certainly failed, precisely because he would have had no one to keep him from going off the deep end at the first bump in the road. It's not a coincidence that Tarquin's breakdown started with Malack's death.

[Killer Angel]

I don't really see him as the Elan of the team; he certainly seemed to be much more bossy and his teammates do listen to him and follow his lead, even if he has to do it by saying "its business" or "I'm calling in that favour".

Really? for all we know, it's highly probable that Tarquin's "subordinates" let him believe he's their true leader, and let him fill a useful niche, while they carry forward their own agenda (see Malack and his idea of a Reign of sacrifices for Nergall).

[pendell]

Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.


Now, see, I'm afraid I must differ slightly. While I agree that humans being put up walls and rationalizations to hide from their true self, I do believe that stress makes a human other than what they really are.

The truth is, we're ALL two-legged hairless apes and 'society' and 'civilization' are elaborate fictions we use to disguise this fact. The ability to act as we OUGHT rather than as we WANT, the ability to act on our THOUGHTS rather than basic instinct or feelings, is what separates us from animals.

Push a human being hard enough, as in war or anywhere else, and eventually they WILL break and revert back to the primal ape. Only humans with great self-discipline can remain calm, cool, collected and reasonable when under the stress, say, of actually going to war. And even the humans with the greatest self-discipline will break down if they're under stress for long enough. I was just reading Tameichi Hara's book (http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Destroyer-Captain-Tameichi-Hara/dp/034531767X). He was the skipper of the Shigure during World War II, brought his ship through years of combat and didn't lose a single man. But he still, towards the end of the war, had to be put on shore and spend quite a bit of time on leave. Because the continual stress got to him and he was close to a nervous breakdown.

So is this saying that he wasn't a courageous man and a competent naval officer? I don't think so. It's saying that he had spend a very long time acting as he OUGHT to act rather than as the hairless ape WANTED to act, which is to break down screaming, and he no longer had the strength to maintain the illusion -- an illusion which was absolutely necessary to keep himself and his crew alive.

So he took a break.

I contend that who we really are is who we want to be and strive to be. But, being human, we are continually brought low by our own lack of self-discipline.

This is a sore spot with me because I have been under great stress this past month as we push out the 1.0 release of new software. This has meant late night and all-nighters. Because of this I have had to really watch myself, get more rest, because the temptation to bite people's head off is really strong. When, in the middle of all this, I got a call on the Thanksgiving holiday to come in and troubleshoot a crashed 2000 room hotel because evidently no one ELSE either at the hotel or my own organization thought to unplug the computer from the network and see if it ran when it was out of comms, then work through the bars to isolate the problem, didn't occur to anyone. So *I* had to come in on the holiday weekend and solve it.

And when the person spoke to me on the phone, I was quite rude to him. Yes indeed.

Does this mean that I'm not actually a courteous person but am actually a mean, surly, unpleasant individual? No. It means I'm tired. It means that weeks of stress are getting to me and I no longer have the internal resources to play Mr. Nice Guy. I need time to relax, unwind, so I can function as a normal human being. And when I don't get it, I Don't act as I do normally.

So I think your statement is unfair, and this poster is apropos (http://i.imgur.com/CWFTYoV.jpg) .

What do I mean 'unfair'? I mean that to tell a person that what they are when they are under stress is who they really are is no different than saying that a person under the influence of depression, or alcohol, that what they really are is what they are when the worst is brought out in them.

And ALL of us have that worst side. We're all two-legged apes , and it doesn't take much to bring that out. A lot of the reason military basic training is so harsh on people is specifically to condition them to function under stress, so that they can continue to function as soldiers rather than as panicking, screaming animals. And even then, even with the best soldiers, they all have their limits.

So I'm not going to tell someone in the middle of a nervous breakdown or a screaming fit that this is who they really are. No, who they really are is who they want to be and what they strive to be, but since they're mortal beings of flesh and blood they fall short, break down. I don't want them to waste on minute in loathing and self-condemnation. I want them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. And again and again, for as long as it takes.

In the case of Tarquin -- well, honestly, I agree with you and not with the OP. Tarquin was always rage, violence, anger, and self-centredness. It's just that he learned to mask this with a surface of affability. And since you're the author, I must believe you when you say Tarquin himself was unaware of this -- that he really did think he was Affable Evil. And now, under stress, he can no longer maintain affable and has reverted to just plain evil. A nasty, unpleasant person who kills and rages when he doesn't get his way.

So Tarquin did not suddenly change. It's just that stress brought out the worst in him, and we see what he is like when all his normal civility filters are gone.

Where we differ is the contention that the 'true self' is what happens when a person is under so much pressure they can no longer maintain their normal civil persona. And I say that an evil tyrant who burns slaves alive and eats intelligent creatures and betrays bounty hunters really is Tarquin's true self -- it's what he strives to be, positively glories in. Both Roy and Tarquin, when under pressure, revert to being angry, surly, sarcastic men. It's what they build on top of that elemental primal ape is what makes one good and the other evil.

ETA: I don't think we're actually that far apart. Isn't a variant on my reasoning the reason why the Deva let Roy into the celestial realm despite the fact he was nowhere close to Deva standards? Roy was a human being of flesh and blood, but he was trying to be more than just an angry ape. Roy was trying to be a man who followed the rules and sacrificed for the good of others, while Tarquin was trying to be a military dictator, a murderer, and a traitor, though an affable one. That's why Roy is lawful good and Tarquin is lawful evil.

ETA: Someone asked
"So is someone who tries to kill but never kills a killer?"

In philosophical terms, yes. It's not something humans can try other humans for, but it's still a truth about ourselves known only to ourselves and to any other being who might look at the deepest, darkest secrets of our hearts.

So I can't be put in jail for it. But if murder is the fixed intent of my heart, as opposed to a momentary temptation or a sharp snap based on stress, in a very real sense I am a murderer.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Sunken Valley]

And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

There is a very good reason why the last 40 years of pop-culture did that. They may not be "cooler" but morally questionable people are often more interesting characters.

The primary question surrounding an internal conflict in a story is "who is this character" in that it seeks to explain what makes the character tick. Thus, character development. A more morally upright character has less to develop because their morals are better aligned with those the story supports and thus don't need developing. Thus they can only be developed externally and not internally, for example, by breaking them like Durkon. A morally questionable character can have a greater arc of development either to a more morally upright or bankrupt direction.

Similarly a character who is more morally bankrupt is also less interesting than a morally questionable. If the character doesn't have some redeeming features or other complexities to them, they are just a cardboard antagonist to be overcome or not. However, a morally bankrupt character can be so far bankrupt that they are fascinating in how far they will go, like Xykon. However, that direction doesn't work for morally upright characters, they can't be so far morally upright they're interesting, unless they are written really well. Which is rare.



Look, people are taking me to task because for the first half of the story, they thought Tarquin was calm and collected, and now they're upset that he's not. If you looked at the things that happened in the Empire of Blood and thought, "Hey, he's petty, erratic, and short-sighted," then congratulations, you grasped his character better than they did.

I didn't get short-sighted and especially not erratic out of Tarquin in the first part of the story. In fact I've never got erratic (unpredictable behavior) out of Tarquin. His behavior to me has always been consistent and predictable. Am I missing something?


Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.

What about the stressed parent who momentarily snaps at their children for a relatively minor transgression and then apologises afterwards?


It doesn't matter either way (and I have no intention of exploring it further). It's attempted rape regardless, and someone who repeatedly attempts rape is a rapist, even if he never succeeds.

Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?

[factotum]

I don't really see him as the Elan of the team; he certainly seemed to be much more bossy and his teammates do listen to him and follow his lead, even if he has to do it by saying "its business" or "I'm calling in that favour".


One does not have to be as incompetent as Elan to be "the Elan"--you know, the person that you help out with their little pet projects because it's easier to do that than to argue the toss, even though you don't believe their ideas are good ones. As for calling in the favour, that's a pretty big deal in this group, it seems--Laurin was amazed Tarquin was going to the extent of calling in his favour to get Miron on-side, for instance.

[Kish]

What about the stressed parent who momentarily snaps at their children for a relatively minor transgression and then apologises afterwards?
They're human. Humans snap at each other occasionally, even when they wish they didn't.

On the other hand, imagine that, instead of merely snapping, the parent breaks the child's arm.

Do you think any number of apologies or self-recriminations are going to change the fact that, under stress, that parent revealed a serious problem in her/his psyche? I don't.

[Daimbert]

Yes, this. "Breaking" a character does not mean brainwashing them into being someone else, it means knocking down all the walls that the character has put up to hide from themselves. It's breaking through to see the truth. It's removing all the easy paths so that they have to pick one of the hard ones, and then seeing which of the hard ones they pick.

I agree here, but wouldn't call it "breaking" a character. It's putting them into a situation where they have to make tough decisions, and see which one they end up choosing. But they have to have choices to make that reflect who they really are -- you don't get to decide that a character is genocidal by giving them a choice of killing one group or another or letting both die, where no matter what they choose that's the result -- and have to be acting in a state where their base instincts and base emotions aren't overwhelming the decision. So you don't make them really, really mad and then give them a choice of taking an aggressive or passive role, because anger as an emotion biases you towards taking aggressive actions (as an aside, you can see the arguments from the Stoics on this, especially Seneca, and work on emotional reaction from people like Jesse Prinz to show that our emotions influence our thoughts far more than we'd like).

To use an example, in one old Transformers comic Optimus Prime and Megatron went into a game with the condition that whoever lost would be destroyed. Optimus ended up winning, but due to cheating by Megatron had to kill some of the virtual inhabitants. At the end, Optimus insists that he caused innocents to die because they were virtual, but he could never do that in real life, and so he actually lost and had to be destroyed. That says everything you'd ever want to know about his character, but didn't involve "breaking him", and was a choice made out of the heat of the moment.


And I am saying that I fundamentally disagree with this premise. It is them, and if they feel guilty that's because they don't want it to be who they are. And that's fine, that's normal and maybe people in that situation will do their best to change if they don't like what stress has revealed, or maybe they'll decide that they're fine with who they are. But deciding it's some sort of Other that takes possession of your body because stress happened is really weird. It strikes me as exactly the sort of self-justification I was talking about above, the kind that good writing breaks through. Tarquin would certainly say that he isn't really a violent control freak who is willing to sacrifice his family to feed his ego, it was just the stress making him that way. And I would say, "Bull****."

So what says more about Optimus Prime and who he really is: in that in the heat of battle and in a virtual world he was willing to take an action that killed some virtual innocents, or that after that he insisted that what he did was wrong and meant that he really lost the game? To me, it's the latter.

[Deliverance]

Just out of curiosity, who was it that told the story about how Tarquin was a tactical genius and the mastermind behind his party's plot? Was it…Tarquin?

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Let's frame this and put it in a prominent location, such that none of us have to go through the morass of trying to explain that people who are insane or the next best thing sees the world differently and should not be relied on for providing the truth, except as they see it, which may be at great variance with how others see it.

You've made an interesting character, a thoroughly evil egotist whose love for his children appears to be that of a narcissistic parent, and it has been truly frustrating to see his words taken at face value despite your frequently showing how he manipulates, rationalizes, and puts the best face on actions after the fact.

[Cizak]

Giant: You say Tarquin without realising it convinced himself that he loved his family, when really he didn't love them enough to not murder them when they got in the way of his ego. What about his team? Do you think he actually cares for them as friends or is he delusional on that part too? He definitely seemed to have memories of good times with Malack that they reminisce about and they could work out their problems with each other because they'd much rather go back to happily co-operating than being angry at each other. But in the end, were they truly friends, or was Malack (and the rest of the team) just another bunch of assets to Tarquin?

[Killer Angel]

So Tarquin did not suddenly change. It's just that stress brought out the worst in him, and we see what he is like when all his normal civility filters are gone.


Was he under stress, when he arranged the giant flaming letters affair? :smallamused:

[Sunken Valley]

Was he under stress, when he arranged the giant flaming letters affair? :smallamused:

Of course he was, it was really tight nailing them all down in time for Elan's surprise. :smallwink:

[Kish]

Giant: You say Tarquin without realising it convinced himself that he loved his family, when really he didn't love them enough to not murder them when they got in the way of his ego. What about his team? Do you think he actually cares for them as friends or is he delusional on that part too? He definitely seemed to have memories of good times with Malack that they reminisce about and they could work out their problems with each other because they'd much rather go back to happy co-operting than being angry at each other. But in the end, were they truly friends, or was Malack (and the rest of the team) just another bunch of assets to Tarquin?
Well, Rich already said that, in Tarquin's view, there were two people in the scene at the edge of the rift--himself and Elan--with everyone else being window dressing, including Laurin and Miron.

I'm not Rich, but unless I've read Tarquin wrong (and so far, I seem to have read him entirely right), he used "my best friend" to refer to Malack, in all sincerity, but with the same level of emotional investment a saner person would put into "my good china."

[masamune1]

Well, it's an analogy, not a perfect substitution. Maybe I oversold it when I said they treat him like Elan, but the main point was that he had overstated his own agency in their mutual plan. He may have had the initial concept, but if he had been left to run it himself it would have certainly failed, precisely because he would have had no one to keep him from going off the deep end at the first bump in the road. It's not a coincidence that Tarquin's breakdown started with Malack's death.

Well, I just don't see the contradiction between all that being true and Tarquin still be an at least above-average military and political strategist. It seemed to me that he was, but that his other teammates were roughly as good as he was as well (which made perfect sense since they came up through the rank together), and that this was one of the reasons they could talk to him like that- not that they didn't respect him, but that he was only their leader, not their boss. Again kind of Roy- he's in charge because its his idea, but they all have their own interests and he is neither bothered by that nor likely to beat the crap out of them if they changed their minds. As I said first among equals.

I never got the impression that he pretended otherwise. It always seemed to me that all he ever said was the idea was his, and his teammates were semi-independent because they were good in their own right. If he wants to pat himself on the back for that...well, why not? It was a good plan and he trusted it to the right people. And his own empire runs smoothly, as far as tyrannical dictatorships not-intended-to-be-permanent go.

For me it just seemed like he was a much better warrior and politician than he was a dad, and that too bad for him being a dad was the thing that mattered to him most right now, if for twisted and self-serving reasons. And he'd hardly be the first great leader in history to suffer some spectacular, fatal errors of judgement less because of lack of talent than because he'd gotten too used to everything going his own way.

[WindStruck]

Wow, Giant. Just the stuff you've said responding to the criticisms of how you portrayed Tarquin's character has been an eye-opener for me. I mean how you explain how people are under stress. Knocking down their "defenses" and making them choose between hard paths... that exposes who you really are.

For many reasons, I just can't comprehend how people can keep arguing with you about how your character in your story is somehow acting wrong...

[RMS Oceanic]

Giant: You say Tarquin without realising it convinced himself that he loved his family, when really he didn't love them enough to not murder them when they got in the way of his ego. What about his team? Do you think he actually cares for them as friends or is he delusional on that part too? He definitely seemed to have memories of good times with Malack that they reminisce about and they could work out their problems with each other because they'd much rather go back to happy co-operting than being angry at each other. But in the end, were they truly friends, or was Malack (and the rest of the team) just another bunch of assets to Tarquin?

Saying he's delusional about his friendship would be the wrong way to frame it, just that he can see people both as friend and asset.

"Putting aside the years of friendship, do you have any idea how valuable an asset he was?"

Rich has said before that evil people can have meaningful emotional connections to people, and I believe this is true with Tarquin. However he also has an element to his mind that weighs how valuable people are to him, how useful they can be. If there's a delusion, it would be how much weight he places on those possibly conflicting things: He may have convinced himself he values his friendship and his family deeply, but Nale's rejection shows he values assets and control of said assets more than the emotional connection.

[masamune1]

Really? for all we know, it's highly probable that Tarquin's "subordinates" let him believe he's their true leader, and let him fill a useful niche, while they carry forward their own agenda (see Malack and his idea of a Reign of sacrifices for Nergall).

Except that according to Malack, Tarquin knew full well about that and was entirely fine with it. The most revealing thing about that revelation was that Malack talked about Tarquin and the rest from the point of view of an immortal- he liked them, but he was making plans for after their deaths. Seems more like everyone does have their own agendas but they don't hide it from Tarquin, who has his own as well. Seems like he is the leader, just a team leader of a fairly democratic evil adventuring party. No doubt they could get rid of him if they really wanted to, but they don't because he's doing a decent job.

[Nerd-o-rama]

I for one am really happy with Tarquin's development over the last few scenes. I always figured him for having the same fatal flaw as Nale - an unassailably enormous ego the size of continents - but covered by being massively more personally competent. That competence allows him his urbane facade, but when people start successfully denying him...well, we see how well Nale dealt with that, and it seems we now know where he got it from.

Tarquin's breaking down here. He's still incredibly dangerous, but he's quite obviously lost it because he's run into a situation he can't control, which is exactly what I'd expect an egomaniacal control freak to do no matter how good a system he had going before.

[Eulalios]

You can't be a ... and then go home and turn your ... Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence. It's who you are.

This.

Cf. Pat Conroy, The Great Santini.

Forum rules prohibit discussion of more recent examples (http://vimeo.com/72788835).

[pendell]

Was he under stress, when he arranged the giant flaming letters affair? :smallamused:

No, Tarquin's normal self -- his "true" self, as far as I'm concerned -- is a jackbooted tyrant who murders the innocent, but is nonetheless charming. Strip away the stress, and you've still got a jackbooted tyrant but none of the charm.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Ceaon]

It'd be a great twist if Shoulderpad Guy turns out to be the Roy of the group, fed up with Tarquin's constant remarks about proper story structure and tropes. All Shoulderpad Guy wants to do is to prove to his dead father, Wizard Hat Guy, that fighters are just as capable as other classes by destroying the world. Wizard Hat Guy himself failed to accomplish that after swearing a Blood Oath to that effect. But his quest is constantly interrupted by Tarquin, the party idiot, who wants to do random side-quests like conquer a continent.

[The Giant]

What about the stressed parent who momentarily snaps at their children for a relatively minor transgression and then apologises afterwards?

That's who they are: a person who is not a saint and sometimes is rude to someone when they shouldn't be. And that's OK. It's OK to not be a saint. It's something you can try to be better at in the future. The problem is when you excuse that behavior by saying it was stress and so there's no self-reflection, there's no attempt to be better. It's OK for "who you are" to be less than perfect, as long as you're trying to be better.

The level of the stimuli and the level of the response are relevant. It's not all-or-nothing. Responding to stress with rudeness is not the same as responding to stress with genocide. With Tarquin, it is important to keep in mind that the provocation for threatening to murder Haley and chop Elan's hand off is that they don't want to escape in the exact manner he would prefer. He wants them to escape, and they were in the process of escaping, but they weren't doing it right.

To bring in pendell's point, there may well be a certain level of physiological stress that will reduce anyone to savagery. Tarquin is nowhere near that stress level. He could walk away at any time. So it's totally fair to judge him on that.


Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?

Sure. Competence at achieving one's goals is not really relevant to the morality of those goals.

[Copperdragon]

What they do when you push them so far that they are no longer capable of acting against their base instincts is not them, and is just a sign that they've lost control and, in my view, aren't really being themselves.

That is crap people start to blabber who beat their wife and children or who fling into rage once they are drunk. It's nothing but what falls from the behind of bulls. You are what you do when you do not think, when you are in an extreme situation. Everything else is just constructed for the sake of how you think your social environment wants to see you and how you want to see yourself.
Will you fight for someone you love or run away, flee and hide? THAT is who you are. Everything else is just a construct.
Because it is so nasty what people (characters!) find within themselves they overinflate the blabla, explain why this and that and this, but that is just to prevent seeing themselves. Elan is a very nice guy at his core so if you stress him out, he'll do something heroic (if that is stupid or not is a different matter). He's a good guy.
If you push Tarquin, he stabs his son in the stomac and breaks the arm of his other son's girlfriend. Because he's evil. Increase the pressure on a character and you'll see what's up with him.


Please never use this as any kind of reply to anyone;

No, I mean it. I think you are so far off with what you critique here that the last part really belongs in your own story. I justify this by what comes after. You can talk about what you think that works and what not, but as soon as you're adding your vision, we're talking your vision, not what is in the comic anymore.


[...]

I do not understand what point this makes, so I do not answer to it.



Sorry, but serious analysis of literature definitely means saying what might have worked better,

We are not doing serious literature analysis here. First, you can only do that on a finished work (I should conclude with this, actually) and second, we're not disagreeing on anything analysed but what "breaking a character" means and when it's so bad that it actually is a plot hole. I say there's nothing like that here.

[FlawedParadigm]

I mean, okay, Tarquin has shown some incredible competency on his home ground, in places where he was in control of everything. In his own Empire, with his own guards, where he was the law, he seemed like the master of his own little universe.

Let's not forget, however, that this guy raised Nale. He's obviously going to have some very deep character flaws. If this wasn't obvious by the time of the 200 foot tall flaming letters, if not sooner, then I don't know what to tell you.

They're even some of the same flaws; neither could stand to be bested, even momentarily. Both are very hung up on petty revenge. And for all Tarquin's harping on Nale's "doesn't matter how we win or who we piss off, so long as everyone knows *I'm* the victor" philosophy, he does exactly the same thing. More subtly, to be sure, but "more subtle than Nale" is right up there with "nicer than Xykon."

Tarquin is cool, Tarquin is largely competent, and Tarquin is good at making plans, but Tarquin gets by because of where he's at. His style wouldn't slide in the real world. Refusing to admit any mistakes, blatantly treating people like dirt, and killing and dissenters? Unless he's backed by the entire military force and is paying them/treating them well enough to keep them happy, he wouldn't last a year.

Without getting into real world politics, let's just say you can't make *everyone* angry or *someone* will kill you. You've got to keep someone sweet, someone who can keep you from getting killed. Usually that's a military force. It's got to be a fairly large force. Those tend to cost money.

Tarquin gets away with that here because this is literally a world where level appropriate treasures can pop up just because they're needed. He gets away with that because there aren't rules for sleeping. He barely even needs to feed his troops. If I recall, they can be kept alive, if not in tip-top shape, by being fed once per three weeks. There aren't rules for morale detailed enough to take into account that he's probably keeping them on the verge of starvation. Maybe a -2 modifier.

This wouldn't fly in the real world, for most people. He'd run out of food or money and someone else would offer his military a sweeter deal to turn against him. All they have to do is not be as obviously bad as Tarquin and they win the support of the troops. Heck, his game is chiefly held together by people like Jacinda keeping the Empress ignorant of what's really going on. Not that I'm sure the Empress would understand even if it were spelled out for her, but I'm sure there's at least one non-moronic ruler in the Empires of Sweat and Tears who have to be kept in the dark. Tarquin, despite his beliefs, is not very good at keeping things on the DL.

Tarquin himself is not nearly as big a threat as he thinks he is. He's where he's at because he managed to attach himself to much more competent people like Malack, Laurin, and Miron. At the end of the day, he's one guy with an unjustly inflated opinion of himself, just like the son he raised.

[Copperdragon]

Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?

If it is a serious attempt? Yes. Yes, you are just as bad. Your incompetence to actually get the kill done does not excuse you wanted to do it in the first place.

But I think this ventures into "bad" (moral as well as legal) territory.

[A_Man]

It's not a coincidence that Tarquin's breakdown started with Malack's death.

That's actually surprising, to me at least. I always thought Tarquin used Malak and the team as tools to achieve his goals, not that they actually kept him from breaking apart.

So, Tarquin would happen to have a rather low self-check, and, while he was powerful, needed someone to play him while he played them?

[CaDzilla]

He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.


Does that make Malack the Durkon, Laurin the Vaarsuvius, Miron the Belkar, SPG the Roy, and Jacinda the Haley? And if Jacinda is the Haley, does that mean she's attracted to Tarquin?

[Copperdragon]

That's actually surprising, to me at least. I always thought Tarquin used Malak and the team as tools to achieve his goals, not that they actually kept him from breaking apart.

Why? Yes, Tarquin used his friend as a tool, but that does not matter much, I think. What matters much is that they worked as a Team - and as such were successful.

In fact this is a very dominant theme in the Order of the Stick (the comic, not the group): If you work as a Team, you succeed. If you are on your own, you get flattened.
The comic is full of examples for that (and it's also deeply rooted in the D&D-rules as well). Xykon, Redcloak and Tsukiko easily defeated Darth V because they worked as a team. Sure, Xykon is super powerful, but that fight, to me, is a prime example how different people work together.
The Order was horribly outgunned unless they started to work as a team (and I think that is what will enable them to beat Xykon in the end).
The Order of the Scribble (as far as we know) was very successful as long as they were a team but fell completely apart once a splinter was in that. They were not defeated by a foe, but by argument.

Tarquin rocked the western continent as long as he had a Team. He was a mastermind and a fighter, but he had a cleric, a caster, an assassin... no matter what they thought of each other or why they worked together - they did work together. Now he's mostly alone and no matter how powerful he is, he'll not be able to stand to a team working together, even if that team is weakened by wounds, level drain, lack of skills, etc.

This entire Team-Thing is very dominant and for the Order to win over Xykon and Tarquin and their likes, they must work together while the others don't. I am fairly certain we'll see a different development to this fight again (Tarquin loses his team members and not only to drained HP) while the Order manages somehow to work together when it comes to the final tussle with Xykon....

[FlawedParadigm]

Why is it 2/3rds of my posts are the last on a page? Ugh. I think the board has something personal against me.

[Clistenes]

*SNIP*

Yup...now I remember how Tarquin failed his first try to become king and it was Malack who called him, not the opposite...

So...Tarquin was a sort of savant for his group? A bunny-ears lawyer? A crazy guy that came up with crazy schemes that somehow went right?

Now I can't but wonder about the power dinamics of his group...How could a group of greedy, ambitious, evil character function without strong leadership, at least at the beginning, before they had stable, cushy positions to care about. Were they an evil democracy of sorts? Or, there is some other unassuming member of the group who acted as the true leader, leaving histrionics to Tarquin?

Man, I want to read a prequel about the formation of Tarquin's Team.

[The Giant]

OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!

[Daimbert]

That is crap people start to blabber who beat their wife and children or who fling into rage once they are drunk. It's nothing but what falls from the behind of bulls. You are what you do when you do not think, when you are in an extreme situation. Everything else is just constructed for the sake of how you think your social environment wants to see you and how you want to see yourself.
Will you fight for someone you love or run away, flee and hide? THAT is who you are. Everything else is just a construct.

The real me is not my instincts, because my instincts are not in any sort of conscious control -- most of the time -- and are in fact often humanly universal, like the reaction to anger. It says far more about a person what they do when they find that they have an instinct that they don't feel is them than that they have that instinctive reaction itself. So if you are a mean drunk, it says a ton about you if you decide that your reaction to that fact ought to be to stop drinking so that you don't react that way, and that you do react that way when drunk doesn't say all that much about you at all (ie that you really are an angry, angry person, for example).


Because it is so nasty what people (characters!) find within themselves they overinflate the blabla, explain why this and that and this, but that is just to prevent seeing themselves. Elan is a very nice guy at his core so if you stress him out, he'll do something heroic (if that is stupid or not is a different matter). He's a good guy.

And he's also violent, as evidenced by when Tarquin ticked him off he attacked him, despite Tarquin wanting nothing to do with the fight at all. So what does that say about Elan? That when you get him angry, he will engage in violence. EVERYONE does that. What's important about that scene is that he gets angry over other people being hurt, unlike ...


If you push Tarquin, he stabs his son in the stomac and breaks the arm of his other son's girlfriend. Because he's evil. Increase the pressure on a character and you'll see what's up with him.

... Tarquin, who gets angry when someone doesn't follow the plan he has set up for him.

What makes Tarquin evil is what makes him angry enough to act violently, not that he gets violent when he gets really, really angry.




No, I mean it. I think you are so far off with what you critique here that the last part really belongs in your own story. I justify this by what comes after. You can talk about what you think that works and what not, but as soon as you're adding your vision, we're talking your vision, not what is in the comic anymore.

I stand by my reply that it's all in the comic and the comments here, since the only thing that was really important was that Tarquin had lost control, and no one seems to be denying that. The only other thing would be if Tarquin really, at some level, cares for his family, and that's still debatable. I don't really see your argument for me being that far off that telling me to simply write my own story is a reasonable response.



I do not understand what point this makes, so I do not answer to it.

You realize that by not quoting it, you don't let me figure out what you aren't understanding, and so give me no way to actually clarify it, right? At this point, the possibilities of discussing anything are becoming non-existent.

(Hint: t'is possible that what you do not answer there IS my point, and the only reason you don't understand what point it makes is because you don't actually understand my point. But by not even quoting it, you would force me to do work to figure that out, and so far it doesn't seem worth it.)





We are not doing serious literature analysis here. First, you can only do that on a finished work (I should conclude with this, actually) and second, we're not disagreeing on anything analysed but what "breaking a character" means and when it's so bad that it actually is a plot hole. I say there's nothing like that here.

Who says we aren't doing serious literature analysis here? To address your first point, there's no reason that you can't do it on an unfinished work; it's just not commonly done, but it certainly can be. Second, the point that WE -- you and I -- were talking about when you took me to task for providing alternatives was not about what breaking a character was and I never talked about it being a plot hole in that sense. My main point was that Rich's comments about Evil missed at least one type of Evil that you could have, and that Tarquin seemed to be aiming for, including more importantly the idea that Evil characters can genuinely care for people and that if we see Tarquin as generally caring for his friends and family but about himself more, the breakdown works much better. In my opinion.

[pendell]

To bring in pendell's point, there may well be a certain level of physiological stress that will reduce anyone to savagery. Tarquin is nowhere near that stress level. He could walk away at any time. So it's totally fair to judge him on that.


Thank you. Then it appears we are almost in perfect agreement.



That's who they are: a person who is not a saint and sometimes is rude to someone when they shouldn't be. And that's OK. It's OK to not be a saint.


This can't be addressed in forum , but actually I can point to examples of real-life saints -- or at least people who are officially saints -- who did indeed lose their temper and snap at people occasionally. Even saints are still human.

For obvious reasons I cannot explore this matter further in public forum, but I can PM you a specific example or two if you wish.

Why even mention it in public on this forum at all? Well, because it's something I've noticed that seems to be a feature of alignment discussions on this forum -- it seems to me that many people set the standard for lawful good so high that no real human being could live it, that real-life exemplars of said conduct never achieved.

Regardless, thank you for responding to my point. I'd say we're in about 99.5% agreement.



OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!


Hah! Well, good luck and godspeed! I think we're all looking forward to more of your work. I hope you'll take it as a compliment that I consider your work deep enough to argue about. It's certainly meant that way.


Respectfully,

Brian P.

[DerekCale]

So after I started this thread, I laid down and thought about it some more.

I thought about how Malack, Laurin and Miron treated Tarquin. Malack, while close friends with Tarquin, treated most of his antics with disdain, possibly slight amusement, and/or a general lack of Patience. Laurin and Miron seem to outright not care about or respect Tarquin's goals, and military prowess (as evidenced in the dinosaur attack on the OotS). Which led me to the thought (that has been expressed here) that Tarquin IS the Elan of his party. All of his perceived competence from before joining up with Nale was due to of his knowledge of TV Tropes, and Nale's personality. (The Guard's handbook, knowing offhand that Elan =/= Nale)

As to the actual subject of the thread, I think I miscommunicated my point. I didn't mean to say that I thought that Tarquin was at all decent. He's a monster and has been throughout most of his time in this comic. Anyone who claims he wasn't an OBVIOUS villain just wasn't paying attention. What made him interesting was that he seemed to be more than that. He seemed to have things that he cared about outside of evil plots and being a tyrannical dictator. I guess I was a bit sad to see that go away.

THAT SAID: the Giant's comments throughout this thread have illuminated a lot into his character for me, and I truly appreciate them. The whole "Worst day of his life" concept really helps explain his backwards evolution into a 'frothing at the mouth boss battle'.

INTERESTING THOUGHT: Perhaps the things I found interesting in Tarquin can be found in Laurin (though she's not, and won't be, as fleshed out a character as him). Her comment in #921 about "doing this thing we do to keep her away" shows that while she's undeniably evil (Willing to murder half a dozen people for a favor), she has a life outside of being evil....or at least is willing to give one to her daughter.

ON THE NATURE OF EVIL: I think if you have the desire to do something, but don't act on it, it makes you the same amount of evil as those who act on it. Not acting on it means you're restrained, have respect for social obligations, or are just plain cowardly. But it means that just one push will bring you from model citizen, to a monster. It's the argument the Joker had in the Killing Joke. he thought that Evil was in everyone, and that 'one bad day' would bring it out. Gordon proved that such was not the case, because despite his one bad day, and the fact that nobody would blame (some would applaud) him if he did, he didn't kill the Joker.

[Hyena]

The whole "Tarquin's party disrespects him" bugs the hell out of me. I mean, he is the one that came up with the plan of uniting western continent, and he's also the most competent member of his party so far - especially contrasting with Miron.

[masamune1]

I mean, okay, Tarquin has shown some incredible competency on his home ground, in places where he was in control of everything. In his own Empire, with his own guards, where he was the law, he seemed like the master of his own little universe.

Let's not forget, however, that this guy raised Nale. He's obviously going to have some very deep character flaws. If this wasn't obvious by the time of the 200 foot tall flaming letters, if not sooner, then I don't know what to tell you.

They're even some of the same flaws; neither could stand to be bested, even momentarily. Both are very hung up on petty revenge. And for all Tarquin's harping on Nale's "doesn't matter how we win or who we piss off, so long as everyone knows *I'm* the victor" philosophy, he does exactly the same thing. More subtly, to be sure, but "more subtle than Nale" is right up there with "nicer than Xykon."

Tarquin is cool, Tarquin is largely competent, and Tarquin is good at making plans, but Tarquin gets by because of where he's at. His style wouldn't slide in the real world. Refusing to admit any mistakes, blatantly treating people like dirt, and killing and dissenters? Unless he's backed by the entire military force and is paying them/treating them well enough to keep them happy, he wouldn't last a year.

Without getting into real world politics, let's just say you can't make *everyone* angry or *someone* will kill you. You've got to keep someone sweet, someone who can keep you from getting killed. Usually that's a military force. It's got to be a fairly large force. Those tend to cost money.

Tarquin gets away with that here because this is literally a world where level appropriate treasures can pop up just because they're needed. He gets away with that because there aren't rules for sleeping. He barely even needs to feed his troops. If I recall, they can be kept alive, if not in tip-top shape, by being fed once per three weeks. There aren't rules for morale detailed enough to take into account that he's probably keeping them on the verge of starvation. Maybe a -2 modifier.

This wouldn't fly in the real world, for most people. He'd run out of food or money and someone else would offer his military a sweeter deal to turn against him. All they have to do is not be as obviously bad as Tarquin and they win the support of the troops. Heck, his game is chiefly held together by people like Jacinda keeping the Empress ignorant of what's really going on. Not that I'm sure the Empress would understand even if it were spelled out for her, but I'm sure there's at least one non-moronic ruler in the Empires of Sweat and Tears who have to be kept in the dark. Tarquin, despite his beliefs, is not very good at keeping things on the DL.

Tarquin himself is not nearly as big a threat as he thinks he is. He's where he's at because he managed to attach himself to much more competent people like Malack, Laurin, and Miron. At the end of the day, he's one guy with an unjustly inflated opinion of himself, just like the son he raised.

I think you'd be surprised- and probably disturbed- by how successful people like Tarquin can be in real life. The high-flying jobs of this world are filled to the brim with narcissists, psychopaths and attention whores like him, many of whom are probably less competent and yet more charismatic and in control. Its amazing how far looking like you know what you are doing can take you.

As for Tarquin himself, remember that from his own POV, he has already won, and won long ago. If this was a video game, he's already completed the story and achieved a high level- all that's left is maxing out his stats, completing all the side-quests, and the only challenge left is getting everything absolutely perfect. He was always an egomaniac, but now he's an egomaniac drunk on success and power.

And he's not incapable of admitting he was wrong. He's admitted failure in the past. He just tends to downplay or ignore it, because next time he'll do better, or just force it to work.


So after I started this thread, I laid down and thought about it some more.

I thought about how Malack, Laurin and Miron treated Tarquin. Malack, while close friends with Tarquin, treated most of his antics with disdain, possibly slight amusement, and/or a general lack of Patience. Laurin and Miron seem to outright not care about or respect Tarquin's goals, and military prowess (as evidenced in the dinosaur attack on the OotS). Which led me to the thought (that has been expressed here) that Tarquin IS the Elan of his party. All of his perceived competence from before joining up with Nale was due to of his knowledge of TV Tropes, and Nale's personality. (The Guard's handbook, knowing offhand that Elan =/= Nale)

As to the actual subject of the thread, I think I miscommunicated my point. I didn't mean to say that I thought that Tarquin was at all decent. He's a monster and has been throughout most of his time in this comic. Anyone who claims he wasn't an OBVIOUS villain just wasn't paying attention. What made him interesting was that he seemed to be more than that. He seemed to have things that he cared about outside of evil plots and being a tyrannical dictator. I guess I was a bit sad to see that go away.

THAT SAID: the Giant's comments throughout this thread have illuminated a lot into his character for me, and I truly appreciate them. The whole "Worst day of his life" concept really helps explain his backwards evolution into a 'frothing at the mouth boss battle'.

INTERESTING THOUGHT: Perhaps the things I found interesting in Tarquin can be found in Laurin (though she's not, and won't be, as fleshed out a character as him). Her comment in #921 about "doing this thing we do to keep her away" shows that while she's undeniably evil (Willing to murder half a dozen people for a favor), she has a life outside of being evil....or at least is willing to give one to her daughter.

ON THE NATURE OF EVIL: I think if you have the desire to do something, but don't act on it, it makes you the same amount of evil as those who act on it. Not acting on it means you're restrained, have respect for social obligations, or are just plain cowardly. But it means that just one push will bring you from model citizen, to a monster. It's the argument the Joker had in the Killing Joke. he thought that Evil was in everyone, and that 'one bad day' would bring it out. Gordon proved that such was not the case, because despite his one bad day, and the fact that nobody would blame (some would applaud) him if he did, he didn't kill the Joker.

I don't think they necessarily disrespect Tarquin or think he's completely incompetent (at least, I didn't until the Giant said so- even then, I don't think it came across that he was); its just that he annoys them in spite of that. Malack finds Tarquins antics annoying, even disrespectful, but he still likes him and listens to his advice. And his other teammates are still following his overall plan and working with him after 20 odd years.

As for evil, I don't think desire is quite enough. You can have a desire and not go through with it because you honestly think its wrong in spite of that, and / or because it conflicts with your non-evil / good desires. Acting on the impulse can also make a difference and change your character.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I've seen parallels between Tarquin and Team Four Star's version of Frieza. The story opens up with a cool and collected villain. I find it great story materiel because at first glance he is some sort of IFC unstoppable force. However outsmart his plan, deny him his assets, or just plain outmanuver him and the facade drops. He completely looses it and vents nothing but rage. The small, petty man inside it all is exposed for the viewer.

It's a wonderful character because this is exactly how many narcissists in our lives act. They act cool and collected when everything goes their way. Shatter their little world view and they becomes petty and vindictive.

[Killer Angel]

Except that according to Malack, Tarquin knew full well about that and was entirely fine with it.

I didn't say secret agenda. :smallwink:
The fact is: they're evil, and i doubt that, in the end, they're not ready to slit each other's throat, if this means "winning".
The fact that Tarquin is competent in playing some schemes and that he can play the leader's role, doesn't invalidate that the other ones may have planned to get rid of him, when it will be convenient.


No, Tarquin's normal self -- his "true" self, as far as I'm concerned -- is a jackbooted tyrant who murders the innocent, but is nonetheless charming. Strip away the stress, and you've still got a jackbooted tyrant but none of the charm.


IN this case, I believe we're on a similar boat (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16575131&postcount=69). :smallwink:

[Copperdragon]

The real me is not my instincts, because my instincts are not in any sort of conscious control -- most of the time -- and are in fact often humanly universal, like the reaction to anger. It says far more about a person what they do when they find that they have an instinct that they don't feel is them than that they have that instinctive reaction itself. So if you are a mean drunk, it says a ton about you if you decide that your reaction to that fact ought to be to stop drinking so that you don't react that way, and that you do react that way when drunk doesn't say all that much about you at all (ie that you really are an angry, angry person, for example).

There's a difference between the level of stress that breaks a character and the level of stress that reduces him to the reactions from his brain stam. So if you go for the second, you are right. If you go for the first, you still have nothing I follow in this regard.

I said here what I had to. Rather read the things Rich tried to explain to you than mine.

The [...] was all of it. I just re-read it and I still do not see how it contributes to this. I think we're having a much more fundamental misunderstanding or misinterpretation on what's going on with Tarquin or how that is "good and making sense". But as you seemingly have the exact same one with the author I am not too worried. I'm happy with what I see here and I think your concerns raised are totally not mine.

[Kish]

INTERESTING THOUGHT: Perhaps the things I found interesting in Tarquin can be found in Laurin (though she's not, and won't be, as fleshed out a character as him). Her comment in #921 about "doing this thing we do to keep her away" shows that while she's undeniably evil (Willing to murder half a dozen people for a favor), she has a life outside of being evil....or at least is willing to give one to her daughter.
Of course, it's entirely possible that she'd flip if her daughter wanted to be an adventurer.

"No, see...you're supposed to have an ORDINARY LIFE. No crawling around ruins, no trying to kill anyone and no one trying to kill you."

[Daimbert]

ON THE NATURE OF EVIL: I think if you have the desire to do something, but don't act on it, it makes you the same amount of evil as those who act on it. Not acting on it means you're restrained, have respect for social obligations, or are just plain cowardly. But it means that just one push will bring you from model citizen, to a monster. It's the argument the Joker had in the Killing Joke. he thought that Evil was in everyone, and that 'one bad day' would bring it out. Gordon proved that such was not the case, because despite his one bad day, and the fact that nobody would blame (some would applaud) him if he did, he didn't kill the Joker.

I have to disagree here, and think that your example proves it. The point is not that Gordon had, after all of that, no DESIRE to kill the Joker, because if he'd had absolutely no desire to kill the Joker then a) it wouldn't be a tough decision for him not to and b) we'd all have to wonder if he cared about what was done during that "one bad day". But if Gordon DOES have the desire to kill the Joker, but he doesn't because he knows that despite what happened in that "one bad day" it would still be wrong to do, then we can see why he had a hard choice, but made one that's morally praiseworthy, because the ONLY reason that he doesn't kill the Joker is that while he DOES want to kill him, he wants to be moral more, and that's what being moral is all about.


It's a wonderful character because this is exactly how many narcissists in our lives act. They act cool and collected when everything goes their way. Shatter their little world view and they becomes petty and vindictive.

Tarquin has indeed been presented well as always being petty and vindictive, from the start. He's just usually smarter about it. The big difference between him and Nale -- and the heart of the disagreement -- was that Tarquin would put vengeance on the backburner until the right opportunity came up, and even seemed to relish that sort of "when you least expect it" answer, while Nale couldn't put it off, even when it would make sense for him to do so, and even when he had other priorities that he should take care of first.

Tarquin's not doing that anymore ...

[Ceaon]

Tarquin has indeed been presented well as always being petty and vindictive, from the start. He's just usually smarter about it. (...) Tarquin would put vengeance on the backburner until the right opportunity came up, and even seemed to relish that sort of "when you least expect it" answer (...) Tarquin's not doing that anymore ...

That's because for perhaps the first time in is life, Tarquin fears that, if he doesn't act on his vengeance RIGHT NOW, he won't get the opportunity again.

[pendell]

ON THE NATURE OF EVIL: I think if you have the desire to do something, but don't act on it, it makes you the same amount of evil as those who act on it. Not acting on it means you're restrained, have respect for social obligations, or are just plain cowardly. But it means that just one push will bring you from model citizen, to a monster. It's the argument the Joker had in the Killing Joke. he thought that Evil was in everyone, and that 'one bad day' would bring it out. Gordon proved that such was not the case, because despite his one bad day, and the fact that nobody would blame (some would applaud) him if he did, he didn't kill the Joker.


I don't like that word desire. I think the better phrase would be "fixed intent".

I say this because desire can also mean temptation.

All human beings, good and evil, suffer temptation. The traditional definition of good and evil is not that good humans are not tempted. The difference is that good humans resist temptation while evil humans succumb to it. Or in Tarquin's case, dive headfirst into it while rationalizing it all away.

If anyone can sit at a tech support desk for weeks on end and NOT feel the urge to reach through the phone and strangle the person on the other end, they're not human. But it's only people who are both evil and courageous who actually go through with it. Most evil people just quietly sit and stew and endlessly spin out murder fantasies that will never, never happen.

Which is why real evil sometimes excites a certain amount of admiration. Because someone had the guts to do what we've all wanted to do from time to time, but we'd never actually do it.

I .. don't know if you'd call me a good person or not, and maybe the label's not really meaningful. But what *I* do is I experience the temptation, I let the fantasy run for awhile until it's running out of steam, and then after the stress is wound down, I remind myself that the person on the other end of the line is a person just like me, that I also am out of my depth, and I make an effort to wish them good and to think as well of them as I can. To do right by them in my heart.

I can't not want to kill them, and if I try to stop that train of thought before it's run it's course, it gets indignant and angry and expresses it even more forcefully. Like a fire that has gone out of control, I have to let the black rage burn itself out. Then, once it is gone, I try to pick up the pieces and love the other person, so as to prevent anger from turning into deep, long-lasting bitterness and spite.

This is getting a bit too real-life, so let's look back at Roy's supreme moment of temptation in the bandit camp. He was tempted to abandon Elan. Anyone would be. We saw in the prequel that Elan is so trying that even an actual Paladin would turn away from him. He even -- because he was weak and under stress -- gave into that temptation momentarily.

But after a time, he had a night to think about it, got some relief from the stress he was under, and now in a calm, contemplative state he considered what he was doing and why he was doing it, and made a deliberate decision to override that, and to act in love. He was tempted, he fell into temptation momentarily, and then he repented.

That, to my mind, is what good people do both in reality and in the very best fiction. Good people are not devas who cannot be tempted by evil and never make mistakes. Good people are ordinary two-legged apes who suffer all the temptations and desires every other kind of people do, but they either restrain those impulses -- both in their actions and in their hearts -- or, in time, repent if they fall.

Evil people, by contrast, yield to the impulse in heart. The evil and brave find ways to actually act it out rather than just stew on it. The evil and cowardly instead become bullies, petty jobsworths who make the lives of everyone who actually is in their power miserable. The man comes home and beats his wife, the wife beats the kid, and the kid tortures small animals. They can't do anything to the real problems, so they become mean, petty, small-minded beings of spite and malice in every avenue that IS open to them. Imps rather than archdemons.

So to me it's not about what you desire. It's about what you do in heart, and about what you do in mind. Doing something in heart isn't the same thing as experiencing desire or temptation. It's a fixed, deliberate intent, which is either going to be realized as-is or channeled into some other outlet.

Although, come to think of it, channeling unlawful impulses into lawful outlets, such as painting or writing, might itself be a good act.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Khay]

It'd be a great twist if Shoulderpad Guy turns out to be the Roy of the group, fed up with Tarquin's constant remarks about proper story structure and tropes. All Shoulderpad Guy wants to do is to prove to his dead father, Wizard Hat Guy, that fighters are just as capable as other classes by destroying the world. Wizard Hat Guy himself failed to accomplish that after swearing a Blood Oath to that effect. But his quest is constantly interrupted by Tarquin, the party idiot, who wants to do random side-quests like conquer a continent.

I have nothing to add to the discussion about storytelling and morality, but I do find this extremely amusing.

/EDIT: Except this, maybe: I am pretty sure that painting or writing is not inherently lawful. I guess they can be, but... expressionism? Trope subversion?

[masamune1]

I didn't say secret agenda. :smallwink:
The fact is: they're evil, and i doubt that, in the end, they're not ready to slit each other's throat, if this means "winning".
The fact that Tarquin is competent in playing some schemes and that he can play the leader's role, doesn't invalidate that the other ones may have planned to get rid of him, when it will be convenient.



I think they might get rid of him if he becomes a threat to their plans, but I don't think they plan on offing him when it becomes convenient. But if their plans go smoothly- as they have been for the last twenty years, that day will never come.

The fact that their other agendas aren't invalidates the idea that he is just a puppet or whatever. They aren't just "letting him believe" that he is in charge; he is in charge, as long as his plans keep working at least.

[Ninja Dragon]

Giant: You say Tarquin without realising it convinced himself that he loved his family, when really he didn't love them enough to not murder them when they got in the way of his ego. What about his team? Do you think he actually cares for them as friends or is he delusional on that part too? He definitely seemed to have memories of good times with Malack that they reminisce about and they could work out their problems with each other because they'd much rather go back to happily co-operating than being angry at each other. But in the end, were they truly friends, or was Malack (and the rest of the team) just another bunch of assets to Tarquin?

Well, the way I see it, he truly cares about his friends, including Malack, but he is evil enough so that he is willing to ignore their well-being if that is necessary to fulfill his own ego. It's the same relashionship he has with his sons.

Just look at how he treated Malack during the entire Linear Guild thing. While he did care about Malack's feelings, they were not more important than his own ego, his own legacy, and his own goals for Nale and Elan.


Wow, Giant. Just the stuff you've said responding to the criticisms of how you portrayed Tarquin's character has been an eye-opener for me. I mean how you explain how people are under stress. Knocking down their "defenses" and making them choose between hard paths... that exposes who you really are.

For many reasons, I just can't comprehend how people can keep arguing with you about how your character in your story is somehow acting wrong...

Just because the Giant is the author doesn't necessarily mean he is the one who knows the best how his characters should be acting. There are many crappy authors out there who don't, they create great characters, but ultimately fail to make those characters develop in meaningful or engaging ways. Of course, in my opinion, he is a very good author who knows what he is doing, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't ever question the way he writes his characters.

And it's actually a pretty good idea for us to do that, since we're getting those cool posts explaining things about Tarquin. :smalltongue:

[Eulalios]

Somehow I felt this (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178019) was relevant to this thread.

[FlawedParadigm]

I think you'd be surprised- and probably disturbed- by how successful people like Tarquin can be in real life. The high-flying jobs of this world are filled to the brim with narcissists, psychopaths and attention whores like him, many of whom are probably less competent and yet more charismatic and in control. Its amazing how far looking like you know what you are doing can take you.

As for Tarquin himself, remember that from his own POV, he has already won, and won long ago. If this was a video game, he's already completed the story and achieved a high level- all that's left is maxing out his stats, completing all the side-quests, and the only challenge left is getting everything absolutely perfect. He was always an egomaniac, but now he's an egomaniac drunk on success and power.

Oh sure, people who have a *couple of things* in common with Tarquin are wonderfully successful in the real world. Charisma, sociopathy, a lack of empathy, a sense of style and procedure, sure. But they're not emperors, they don't hold gladiatorial games, and they're not killing everyone who disagrees with them or forcing women to marry them. Pick any one or two things Tarquin is doing and the right person could get away with them, but not _everything_ he's doing. That's my point; Tarquin gets away with his schemes so far because he's in a fictional world that caters (to an extent) to people like him. He's narratively interesting, so he gets some slack.

Life doesn't work like that in our world. No one would get away with quite everything that Tarquin has been getting away with.

[masamune1]

It doesn't work in modern times, but it has worked in the past. Or in the right time and place.

If Tarquin was in, say, the modern USA, he'd just adapt his style. Maybe become a mafia don. Or President of Warner Bros.

[Spoomeister]

Originally Posted by The Giant
And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

Late to the party here, but this bit stuck out to me, since I find Belkar, V, Xykon or Redcloak to be more interesting characters than say Roy or O-Chul is. I am one of those who have also bought into 40 years of pop culture, it seems.

Though Durkon is right up there, and he's likely the most morally upright of the entire story, PCs or "NPCs" alike.


Just because the Giant is the author doesn't necessarily mean he is the one who knows the best how his characters should be acting. There are many crappy authors out there who don't, they create great characters, but ultimately fail to make those characters develop in meaningful or engaging ways. Of course, in my opinion, he is a very good author who knows what he is doing, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't ever question the way he writes his characters.

Thank you so much for saying this. It's good to see forum folks here who respect and enjoy Rich's work and what he's trying to do, yet can try to find ways to respectfully disagree with him from time to time or not prefer some of his storylines, without getting drawn into lame "it's his story, go write your own" nonsense.

[SaintRidley]

It'd be a great twist if Shoulderpad Guy turns out to be the Roy of the group, fed up with Tarquin's constant remarks about proper story structure and tropes. All Shoulderpad Guy wants to do is to prove to his dead father, Wizard Hat Guy, that fighters are just as capable as other classes by destroying the world. Wizard Hat Guy himself failed to accomplish that after swearing a Blood Oath to that effect. But his quest is constantly interrupted by Tarquin, the party idiot, who wants to do random side-quests like conquer a continent.

Headcanon. And Shoulderpad Guy is now going to be referred to a Ruy in my head.

[Spoomeister]

Originally Posted by The Giant
Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.

The counterexample here (or corner case) includes anxiety disorders. As someone with anxiety disorders myself, I can tell you that stress absolutely makes me feel like I'm not me, or feel like there is a force acting on me outside myself.

Am I still responsible for my own actions? Of course. Should I try to learn from mistakes? Of course. Does management of it include identifying stressors and either putting them in the right context or removing myself from the stressful situations in the first place? Years of therapy told me yes, and yes. Is how I behave when I'm having a panic attack or otherwise extremely stressed, my 'true self'? No, it isn't. I don't wish it on you, wouldn't wish it on anyone... but it doesn't sound like you have personal experience with panic attacks and anxiety disorders when you put forth a theory that stress simply reveals who a person is at their core.

I don't get up in arms about your comments in this thread because the examples we're starting from are the psychology of tyrants, and the stresses imposed in a fantasy setting working at a macro scale. And they're also about characters who as far as I can tell, are mostly psychologically healthy (Belkar and Tarquin being obvious exceptions) and you're talking about how stress affects the average person, not someone with a specific clinically diagnosed disorder. And your previous points about people not being saints and trying to learn from things and not hiding behind things like 'well, I was stressed' - all very valid, all very true.

But I think the premise 'stress reveals who you really are' works as a narrative technique, or as an exercise for an author to try to get at character motivations... yet it has limited application in real life.

[Boring McReader]

Late to the party here, but this bit stuck out to me, since I find Belkar, V, Xykon or Redcloak to be more interesting characters than say Roy or O-Chul is. I am one of those who have also bought into 40 years of pop culture, it seems.


I find Roy interesting because he's a hero who's entirely average when he isn't off on a quest. He's just an ordinary, likeable guy with human emotions, human limits, and love-hate family relationships, who happens to be good at thinking on his feet (as opposed to spur-of-the-moment instinct). He finds his way into exciting stories and interesting things happen around him. Without Roy, there is no story for the others to populate. He's an everyman without being a boring, generic everyman or a wisecracking action hero with no other personality.

[SaintRidley]

Sorry, but serious analysis of literature definitely means saying what might have worked better, and in fact if someone identifies a problem and says how they think it would have worked better that, to me, is a sign of actual good analysis. It's easy to say "This didn't seem to work", but much harder to say how it could have worked better. In this case, everything I said could still be in there, but even if it wasn't saying that if it had gone that way we would have had a nice parallel to another main character AND provided a different and interesting take on villainy is perfectly acceptable. So it's only if you don't want actual analysis done that you can say that such comments are out of place, in my opinion.

Um, no. That is far from the only way to do a serious analysis of literature, and certainly not a common one. Generally we (i.e. people who do serious analyses of literature) take the text on its own terms, maybe speculate a bit about what we lack due to things like fires, lost pages, or absent visual components alluded to in the remaining text, but we don't ever go "If it was this way, it would be better." There's nothing substantive to that, no matter how much you talk about how it would be better or how much you change.

[Boring McReader]

Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

Ah. Ahahaha. I thought I had a handle on him, but you fooled me with this one.

I would go as far as saying you did not highlight this aspect of Tarquin clearly enough for an average reader to catch it. In the comic, he's been great at seeing through intrigues, keeping his empire secure and under control, staying on good terms with his partners, and still finding time to put it all aside and enjoy himself. He has a lot of people working hard to make that possible, but he's aware of that even as he continues to view them as inconsequential resources serving his needs. We've seen him make plenty of loopy dramatic decisions, but always in the context of him being in control and having the smarts to know what he can afford to spend a long way into the future. Emotionally he's a mess; as leader of his conspiracy he seemed to be doing just fine.

I've learned to trust what the comic presents as fact until there's a clear reason not to, and in this case Tarquin's other failings seemed like enough justification for his unraveling. There was no reason to suspect he was not a military and political genius, at least as far as he'd need to be with such a powerful core team available at the top. He dealt with his partners as friends and equals, and seemed to be competent at staying on good terms with all of them, within his obvious limits. But the comic hasn't caught up with Tarquin being less than he claimed. The average reader doesn't need to know that side of him yet. All of his actions continue to make sense viewing him as an indulgent despot who can lose control, yet nonetheless is controlled and competent enough to know his limits in normal circumstances. If I hadn't read your post here, I would be waiting for the next comic without second thoughts. So this is not at all a criticism of what you've shown us so far in the story. If we need to know more, I trust we'll see it eventually.

It certainly opens up interesting possibilities for the future of the story, whether or not Tarquin survives this round.


OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!

You're getting close to page 1000 of the best fantasy story on the internet. Whatever works for you works for all of us. :smallbiggrin:

[Scow2]

Well, if few people think that, then count me as among those few. You reveal who you really are under stress—stress doesn't magically turn you into someone else unrelated to who you usually are. The fact that you may not have ever known that this is who you were doesn't change anything.This is something I have to disagree with strongly, because everyone reacts to stress differently. A person is how they normally are, not how they are when forced into extraordinary circumstances - largely because there is frequently little consistency in how people behave when put under stress - One day might have them turn violent and aggressive, while another bad day could put them into debilitating depression, and a third high-stress event might turn that same person into an assertive hero. If "Who you really are" is never the same twice in a row, it can't be who you really are.

[Vaylon]

You're arguing against something I didn't say.

I am not, in fact. Here is what was originally said:


You can't be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home and turn your Evil Switch to the "off" position to spend time with your kids. It doesn't work that way. If you are the sort of person that can commit the acts that Tarquin does daily, then that will find its way into every aspect of your existence.

As I pointed out in my original response to this quote, it is an incorrect assumption that it's necessary for there to be an "Evil Switch" that lets Evil people spend time with their kids, as if Evil people can't genuinely love others or live normal lives when we have many examples -- in real life and in fiction -- of just that. The point of my original post and the point that I am making again now is that the quote above is flatly and simply wrong: you can indeed be a torturing, mass-murdering rapist and then go home to spend time with your kids. The fact of the matter is that Evil people are just as morally complex as Good people. As other posters correctly point out, the fact that Evil people can do these things then go home to spend time with their kids makes Evil all the more horrifying.


Being able to act like a good person some of the time does not make one a good person, it makes one a competent actor.

This is not an argument I have made. I never once said that acting like a good person makes one a good person, and I resent the implication that I said that.


It would have been entirely plausible for Tarquin to have never cracked his facade, to continue acting like a calm and collected person who separated his two lives, but I have no interest in writing that. First, it's boring, and second, it sends a message that you can totally commit atrocities and it's OK, that doesn't make you a bad person as long as you pet a dog afterward.

I'm sure that Tarquin could be just as scary and interesting and just as evil if depicted as a calm and collected person. It's not necessary to resort to caricaturization to depict him as evil -- we get it; he's evil. Anyone who would come away from such a characterization thinking "Gosh, the villain did some horrible stuff, but he was a nice guy to his family and so rational, too. Evil dictators are cool! The writer condones being an evil dictator!" is simply wrong and not worth addressing in the first place.


That is the message I am consciously conveying with my story, and if you disagree with it, that's fine, I guess. But I'm not going to take, "You conveyed the message you wanted to convey but I don't like it!" as a criticism that I need to pay attention to.

The belief that this is a message that needs to be conveyed is the problem. I'm not sure that "Guys, bad guys are still bad even if they occasionally pet a dog!" is a message that ought to be explicitly said. In my opinion, the message as presented in the comic is heavy-handed, preachy, and uninteresting.

I want to remind you that I have not personally attacked anyone in this post. I am posting my opinion.


I'm not complaining that they love the villain as a character, I'm complaining that they love the villain as a person. I want them to love Tarquin as a well-developed element of the fiction that serves his purpose in the story well while raising interesting points about both the way people act in the real world and the way that stories are often constructed these days, and gets off some funny jokes in the process. I don't want them to love him because it's so cool that he can do all these horrible things and still be totally emotionally untouched by it because yeah, doin' evil is awesome and totally should be portrayed as just another lifestyle choice!

And I wasn't really complaining so much as saying I have no interest in making that easy for them. It undercuts the point I am trying to make, which is that evil isn't cool. Which is challenging the traditional narrative—at least the narrative of the last 40 years of pop culture which has told us relentlessly that the character who is more morally questionable is always cooler than the one who is more morally upright.

I fear punishment for responding to this -- despite it badly needing a response -- so I must sadly pass over it without comment.

[masamune1]

Ah. Ahahaha. I thought I had a handle on him, but you fooled me with this one.

I would go as far as saying you did not highlight this aspect of Tarquin clearly enough for an average reader to catch it. In the comic, he's been great at seeing through intrigues, keeping his empire secure and under control, staying on good terms with his partners, and still finding time to put it all aside and enjoy himself. He has a lot of people working hard to make that possible, but he's aware of that even as he continues to view them as inconsequential resources serving his needs. We've seen him make plenty of loopy dramatic decisions, but always in the context of him being in control and having the smarts to know what he can afford to spend a long way into the future. Emotionally he's a mess; as leader of his conspiracy he seemed to be doing just fine.

I've learned to trust what the comic presents as fact until there's a clear reason not to, and in this case Tarquin's other failings seemed like enough justification for his unraveling. There was no reason to suspect he was not a military and political genius, at least as far as he'd need to be with such a powerful core team available at the top. He dealt with his partners as friends and equals, and seemed to be competent at staying on good terms with all of them, within his obvious limits. But the comic hasn't caught up with Tarquin being less than he claimed. The average reader doesn't need to know that side of him yet. All of his actions continue to make sense viewing him as an indulgent despot who can lose control, yet nonetheless is controlled and competent enough to know his limits in normal circumstances. If I hadn't read your post here, I would be waiting for the next comic without second thoughts. So this is not at all a criticism of what you've shown us so far in the story. If we need to know more, I trust we'll see it eventually.

It certainly opens up interesting possibilities for the future of the story, whether or not Tarquin survives this round.



Looking over the story once again, I don't agree with the Giants' assessment. "
There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy"- just isn't true. Case in point:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0758.html

"When he first appeared on the continent, he conquered eleven nations in 8 months. It took a coalition of no less than twenty-six other countries to defeat him and drive him out".

Tarquin then admits that he underestimated the complex political divisions of the Western Continent, and that he would learn from his mistakes. Which he did. Even if he exaggerates / lied about being the leader of his adventuring band (and though his teammates don't always respect him, they seem to follow his lead thusfar, mostly, so that hasn't been fully contradicted), it was his idea and his conspiracy, and its worked, so the idea that he's really a military and political genius is entirely believable and backed-up in-story.

And later, he takes on the entire OotS, and holds his own. And he's shown that with just one or two other teammates, he can beat and kill them all. So he's a genuine badass as well, even if he is an evil one.

I think the Giant is actually making the same mistake with Tarquin that Tarquin made with Roy- he's making him look cool; he's showing he is somewhat cool, even if he is evil.

[Porthos]

Looks like I missed a lot overnight, :smalleek:

One thing that I feel should be noted (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0724.html):

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/Cats_Are_Aliens/Banners/Malack.png: Is yours like this all of the time?
:vaarsuvius:: Yes. Yours?
http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/Cats_Are_Aliens/Banners/Malack.png: Sadly.

That's in one of the very first Tarquin strips. Seems a pretty big clue on the, well, Elan-like nature of Tarquin and how the rest of the team views him.

[SaintRidley]

Looks like I missed a lot overnight, :smalleek:

One thing thatI feel should be noted (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0724.html):

:malack:: Is yours like this all of the time?
:vaarsuvius:: Yes. Yours?
:malack:: Sadly.

That's in one of the very first Tarquin strips. Seems a pretty big clue on the, well, Elan-like nature of Tarquin and how the rest of the team views him.

Yep. Add to it the way Laurin and Miron dismiss the whole story thing repeatedly once they come on the scene and it paints a very clear Elanesque picture and the varying degrees of patience they have for it.

masamune, there's a Xykon line about overwhelming force trumping tactics somewhere (too lazy to find it), as well as this strip (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0422.html) and this one (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html) which point out the role of mid-high level adventurers in a war. The role is basically able to steamroll the things that aren't anywhere close to your level, which is most everything in a typical war scenario.

It doesn't take Tarquin being a tactical genius to conquer the continent. It takes having a team and sufficient levels over the opposition. The actual armies of his three empires? Rather inconsequential, really.

[Kish]

I think the Giant is actually making the same mistake with Tarquin that Tarquin made with Roy- he's making him look cool; he's showing he is somewhat cool, even if he is evil.
I don't think making a character stupid as well as crazy and evil should be necessary to establish that he's not cool...

...or, contrary to what you say, is necessary. Every time Tarquin does something that costs him a few dozen fans and provokes a storm of screaming on the forum, it demonstrates that being intelligent and powerful is not enough to make him cool.

[The Fury]

masamune, there's a Xykon line about overwhelming force trumping tactics somewhere (too lazy to find it).

If it's the same one I'm thinking of it's from Start of Darkness. If not maybe you mean this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0416.html), or maybe this one. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0657.html)

[BlackDragonKing]

Yep. Add to it the way Laurin and Miron dismiss the whole story thing repeatedly once they come on the scene and it paints a very clear Elanesque picture and the varying degrees of patience they have for it.

masamune, there's a Xykon line about overwhelming force trumping tactics somewhere (too lazy to find it), as well as this strip (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0422.html) and this one (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html) which point out the role of mid-high level adventurers in a war. The role is basically able to steamroll the things that aren't anywhere close to your level, which is most everything in a typical war scenario.

It doesn't take Tarquin being a tactical genius to conquer the continent. It takes having a team and sufficient levels over the opposition. The actual armies of his three empires? Rather inconsequential, really.

Except, if Tarquin hit on the idea of getting his band back together and doing things the smart way AFTER an overt invasion failed, that means most of Team Tarquin was in all likelihood doing whatever they'd been doing while Tarquin got hitched and the team broke up when all this happened.

Tarquin completely lacking tactical insight just doesn't work; his tactical insight can be worse than you might think, but either his army was well-led enough that it conquered eleven nations with ridiculous ease and then required a united coalition to drive off, or Tarquin triumphed in spite of not having good tactics, which indicates he pulled an army that dwarfs Redcloak's several times over OUT OF NOWHERE.

Which sounds more plausible? That Tarquin knew what he was doing as a warlord and has gotten sloppy as his career has progressed into easy victory and excess, or that Tarquin was somehow able to pull a conquering horde that threatened an entire continent out of a hole in the ground and lead it to conquer eleven nations and fight 26 more despite not being a tactician?

He might overestimate his role in Team Tarquin, which is clearly a more equal unit than Tarquin presents it as, but I'm pretty sure Tarquin had to know a LITTLE about being a general for his backstory to make any sense.

[SaintRidley]

If it's the same one I'm thinking of it's from Start of Darkness. If not maybe you mean this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0416.html), or maybe this one. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0657.html)

Probably Start of Darkness, and a little of that first one. The power speech to V isn't quite there.

[Kish]

Probably Start of Darkness, and a little of that first one. The power speech to V isn't quite there.

"In any battle, there is a level of force against which no tactics can prevail." --Xykon to Dorukan, near the end of Start of Darkness.

[SaintRidley]

Except, if Tarquin hit on the idea of getting his band back together and doing things the smart way AFTER an overt invasion failed, that means most of Team Tarquin was in all likelihood doing whatever they'd been doing while Tarquin got hitched and the team broke up when all this happened.


An overt invasion by himself. The difference in tactic here is simple: bring more force than he did before, in the form of high-powered adventurers. Not advanced military tactics, but more dakka. That he split the group into three groups and came up with the shell game wasn't a matter of difference in actual tactic, but in making himself a less obvious target. It also means he can apply the greater force in three areas at once.

Tarquin's actual military tactics? Unchanged. He got smarter about how much firepower he needed to keep from getting his butt kicked, but not about actually employing a tactic.

Wherever he got his initial armies is, as I pointed out, incidental. Because the armies themselves are incidental. Sure, they keep the other armies kind of busy, but Tarquin's high enough level to just wade through a bunch of them and slaughter his way to their leader and kill that guy. And when that happens the battle's all but over.

[BlackDragonKing]

An overt invasion by himself. The difference in tactic here is simple: bring more force than he did before, in the form of high-powered adventurers. Not advanced military tactics, but more dakka. That he split the group into three groups and came up with the shell game wasn't a matter of difference in actual tactic, but in making himself a less obvious target. It also means he can apply the greater force in three areas at once.

Tarquin's actual military tactics? Unchanged. He got smarter about how much firepower he needed to keep from getting his butt kicked, but not about actually employing a tactic.

Wherever he got his initial armies is, as I pointed out, incidental. Because the armies themselves are incidental. Sure, they keep the other armies kind of busy, but Tarquin's high enough level to just wade through a bunch of them and slaughter his way to their leader and kill that guy. And when that happens the battle's all but over.

So you're suggesting one high-level fighter, pretty much BY HIMSELF, just power-walked through an army, killed their leaders, and won pretty much instantly?

I'm pretty sure war doesn't work that way in Order Of The Stick. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html) Tarquin would need an army that outnumbered the eleven nations he clobbered by an utterly ridiculous degree to get by without tactics, and if he didn't have any leadership chops, where the hell do the troops come from in the first place?

[Razgriez]

So, now what we've firmly established that Tarquin is a extreme control freak, I have to ask a question: What if the whole idea behind Tarquin, is that the Giant has written him to represent the stereotypically "bad" DMPC, but saved from the scrappy heap by being turned into a villain (That is to say, supposed to represent a gaming archetype/stereotype for our entertainment, not actually calling him a scrappy, as he's been pretty interesting to watch)? He meets the typical criteria for one doesn't he?

-Believes in a Single path, One way only, Railroad plot.

-Has designed himself (Read: Created by the theoretical DM in the OotS universe) to be able to counter most common Player strategies/occasionally seems to pull off feats almost on the scale of omnipotent knowledge. Every time the Order has managed to gain an advantage over Tarquin and his allies/Linear Guild, it's because they've pulled off fairly impressive combos, feats of ingenuity, cashing in on NPC favors from before, or calling in a Deus Ex Machina. And even then, it seems to only put Tarquin, and his veteran party members off balanced for a few rounds, then recover (though we're starting to finally see Tarquin and company getting worn down in basically a long series of encounters/a war of attrition)

-Seems to have at one point, acted as a leash to Linear Guild (albeit, briefly)

Factoring these points, and others as well, that perhaps maybe Tarquin is a re-purposed DMPC, I.E. a "DMPC done right"/Villain DMPC?

[masamune1]

Even if it did work like that, that would still make Tarquin at least a competent General by the standards of the OotS-verse. After all, if a group of high-level adventurers are all it takes to defeat an entire army, then he'd be foolish to not rely on that. And those Generals who did would be entirely professional military strategists by the laws of that world.

[SaintRidley]

So you're suggesting one high-level fighter, pretty much BY HIMSELF, just power-walked through an army, killed their leaders, and won pretty much instantly?

I'm pretty sure war doesn't work that way in Order Of The Stick. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html) Tarquin would need an army that outnumbered the eleven nations he clobbered by an utterly ridiculous degree to get by without tactics, and if he didn't have any leadership chops, where the hell do the troops come from in the first place?

If he has an army of reasonable size to run interference but be otherwise not have any utility in determining the outcome of the battle? Yes. Which is what O-Chul is telling Haley there. She can take out a ridiculous amount of mooks if she has her own mooks reinforcing her position, but she (as one of the good guys) has to recognize that they are actual people with lives. He's telling her that if she decides to just steamroll through another army without recognizing that she'll need them to die so she can keep steamrolling, those people's lives are on her head, because she thought "I"m high level, let's just make this quick and simple." It's not so much that she can't (there is an upper limit to her capabilities - she isn't epic, after all), but that she shouldn't and she needs to understand why.

If you're a good guy, you don't get the luxury of making it quick and simple - those are people you're sacrificing if you try to. Tarquin? Why should he care how many have to die so he can steamroll through and get the really cool scene where he decapitates the enemy leader after wading through the opposing army (conveniently ignoring the fact that he had his own people in there too). He doesn't need a big army to start with - just enough to distract a number of people in the other army. Then he can recruit the old army and swell his numbers - he's got that bardic knack for storytelling and persuasion, and enough sense to at least make it look like what he's doing might benefit his army as well as himself. He also has money (see Gift Jeraff below).

[Gift Jeraff]

Tarquin would need an army that outnumbered the eleven nations he clobbered by an utterly ridiculous degree to get by without tactics, and if he didn't have any leadership chops, where the hell do the troops come from in the first place?

Mercenaries bought from cash made from stealing precious artifacts. (See second-to-last panel (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0816.html).)

[Heksefatter]

Just out of curiosity, who was it that told the story about how Tarquin was a tactical genius and the mastermind behind his party's plot? Was it…Tarquin?

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?



I honestly have to admit that I bought into the picture of Tarquin as a very capable strategist or chessmaster for other reasons than this. Because I felt that I've seen a good deal of evidence of him being highly competent, evidence which did not only come from Tarquin.

One other example was when Ian and Geoff told the tale of how Tarquin first showed up, and how it was necessary for twenty-six neighbouring countries to band together to beat him. That does imply that he was skilled at leading armies, even if he overreached himself. But he does adapt to that situation quite skillfully.

Also, he other characters do regard him as competent. Haley expresses that she agrees with Nale for once in keeping knowledge of the gates out of the hands of the significantly-more-competent Tarquin. Another time, she mentions the possibility of "if Nale is smart or - as far more likely - Tarquin is running the show" showing respect for Tarquin's skills.

We also see the competency several times, for example in the guard protocol and we see Tarquin being more clever than Malack in that Tarquin realizes that the Order is working together far more clearly than Malack does. He seems to be in charge with Malack, and still be reasonable when Malack is angry with him.

I can see the alternative interpretations well enough: His narcissism preventing him from understanding Elan and his role in the party. His occassional goofiness (the most magnificent pair of perky round eyes, the jugglers and clowns juggling tiny clows). But some of it I took to be "the rule of funny." There are also several instances of where Roy and the Order behaves weirdly due to the same rule (their treating Shojos wizard like nothing, due to him being an NPC, for example).

Honestly, I would have preferred a more able Tarquin than a foolish egotist. He is more dangerous and frightening that way. But ah well, I can't have it all, as Tarquin may have to face.

[rbetieh]

And to cast the above point into your metaphor, is it The Box, or Tarquin's Box?

I am sure we can both agree that; to Tarquin, his box is the only box that has ever or will ever exist. From his point of view, his box is The Box. The reader gets to decide Tarquins level of delusion, of course.

[factotum]

I'm pretty sure war doesn't work that way in Order Of The Stick. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html) Tarquin would need an army that outnumbered the eleven nations he clobbered by an utterly ridiculous degree to get by without tactics, and if he didn't have any leadership chops, where the hell do the troops come from in the first place?

Gift Jeraff has answered the question of where the troops came from, and you're over-estimating the size of the army he would need--he only needs an army big enough to overwhelm *one* of those eleven nations, because we know that working together is not something that naturally happens on the Western Continent; therefore Tarquin no doubt picked those nations off one at a time. Considering there had to be at least 37 extant countries in play on the continent at that time (the eleven Tarquin conquered, and the 26 others who combined to take him down), the armies of each nation were probably not that large.

[Sunken Valley]

I know Mr Burlew said Tarquin was the "Elan" of the Order but does anyone else also see him as the "Roy" of his team.

A leader who makes good plans and who his team respect and follow (most of the time) but at the same time will stop him if they consider his plans flawed. Roy had lots of arrogant and pompous elements to him before development. Rich described him as "a good person raised by a pompous jerk". But what if Roy wasn't Good? An Evil Roy wouldn't develop and would still be pompous and arrogant, but I think he'd still be tactically sound and have a team who'd follow him. That's sort of like Tarquin.

I have always seen Tarquin as sort of a portmanteau of Elan and Roy (similar to his son Nale), combining all their best elements into a dangerous but unstable being (which is unlike Nale who suffers from some of the worst elements of the pair). Anyone agree?

[Nerd-o-rama]

Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?

I'm very late to this, but:

"Pff. Attempted murder! Tell me, do they give Nobel Prizes for attempted chemistry?"
-Sideshow Bob


OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!

And we appreciate it.

[Grey Watcher]

Just out of curiosity, who was it that told the story about how Tarquin was a tactical genius and the mastermind behind his party's plot? Was it…Tarquin?

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?

I think that came about in part because in the strip where Tarquin lays the whole thing out, we switch back and forth between Tarquin telling Elan and Ian telling Roy. This seems to confirm Tarquin's version of events, but then it must be remembered that Ian's almost as obsessed with Tarquin as Tarquin himself. And if that bit of misdirection was intended, then I tip my hat to you. Which looks silly because it's a ski cap and not a bowler or something.

Also, to be fair, I only put this together myself like yesterday, so bravo to me for falling for Tarquin's Miles Gloriosus shtick. :smallredface:



Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

Again, kind of embarrassed that it didn't occur to me earlier than today that Tarquin's initial conquest ended not when he threatened to overwhelm everyone and they banded together in self-defense, but merely that his empire got big enough that it became a tempting target. That "alliance" of 26 other countries may have just been that all 26 happened to decide to invade at the same time, rather than any coordinated effort to combat a serious threat. Heck, how do you even border that many nations unless you do something that even I know not to do, like extrude your controlled territory out like a spaghetti strand?


OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!

Well, I like to think of it as being passionate about your work and assertive enough to defend it. :smallamused:

EDIT:
...we see Tarquin being more clever than Malack in that Tarquin realizes that the Order is working together far more clearly than Malack does.

To that point specifically, I think it's important to note that Malack's barely spoken to any of the Order other than Durkon, much less seen them interact with each other. Let's face it, they did kind of make it obvious, like Elan addressing Roy by name before being introduced. But Malack wasn't around to see any of that.

[Daimbert]

Um, no. That is far from the only way to do a serious analysis of literature, and certainly not a common one. Generally we (i.e. people who do serious analyses of literature) take the text on its own terms, maybe speculate a bit about what we lack due to things like fires, lost pages, or absent visual components alluded to in the remaining text, but we don't ever go "If it was this way, it would be better." There's nothing substantive to that, no matter how much you talk about how it would be better or how much you change.

You miss the point, or at least are taking the other person's point as being what I was saying instead of what I was saying. I'm not saying "Hey, let's invent a new story!", and wasn't, to my mind, adding anything to the story. What I was talking about was pointing to a problem or an issue in the work, and then saying "Now, if they'd done it this way, they could have avoided the issue". And, done well, the suggestion accomplishes everything that the original work intended but just avoids the problem.

Note that I'm not even saying THAT here. My comment was about Tarquin really caring about his friends and family, but caring about himself more, and choosing his own legacy over them, and then seeing him sacrificing things that he really and legitimately cared about into "sunk costs", so much so that now he has to make sure that he gets his legacy out of it or else it wouldn't have been worth the cost. All of this, I maintain, is perfectly within the bounds of the comic AND has an interesting mirroring in Redcloak. No one, as far as I know, has addressed that in any way.

EDIT: Put better, I think that in most cases in a situation like this Tarquin would stop, take a step back, reassess, and select the way to proceed that gives him the most things he wants, even if that wasn't the thing he wanted at the start of it. Here, because of what he's sunk into his new main antagonist legacy, he simply CAN'T, because he might lose what he's sunk into this. He's deep in the sunk cost fallacy, even though it's killing him. Perhaps literally.

[Lamech]

OK, this has been fun, guys, but I need to turn the internet off for a while. Because it turns out who I am under stress is someone who will sometimes spend hours engaged in a conversation about his work rather than doing his work.

But I'm trying to be better!
See stress turns wonderful people into people caught up into internet arguments! Its awful. :smallfrown:

[Daimbert]

Looks like I missed a lot overnight, :smalleek:

One thing that I feel should be noted (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0724.html):

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/Cats_Are_Aliens/Banners/Malack.png: Is yours like this all of the time?
:vaarsuvius:: Yes. Yours?
http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/Cats_Are_Aliens/Banners/Malack.png: Sadly.

That's in one of the very first Tarquin strips. Seems a pretty big clue on the, well, Elan-like nature of Tarquin and how the rest of the team views him.

I don't think that anyone denies that Tarquin is the genre-savvy one, or that most people in the OOTSverse look at people who are genre-savvy and talk as if they are as being insane. But Tarquin always came across as smarter than Elan, and so could use that knowledge and plan it better, and so have that knowledge work in his favour more of the time. Tarquin was what you get if you took Elan's genre-savviness, Nale's ability to plan, and removed Nale's overcomplication tendencies (which the comic demonstrates he got from his mother, while still keeping Nale's desire for often petty vengeance.

[Porthos]

I don't think that anyone denies that Tarquin is the genre-savvy one, or that most people in the OOTSverse look at people who are genre-savvy and talk as if they are as being insane. But Tarquin always came across as smarter than Elan, and so could use that knowledge and plan it better, and so have that knowledge work in his favour more of the time. Tarquin was what you get if you took Elan's genre-savviness, Nale's ability to plan, and removed Nale's overcomplication tendencies (which the comic demonstrates he got from his mother, while still keeping Nale's desire for often petty vengeance.

I, nor Rich for that matter, never said Tarquin was incompetent. :smallwink:

What I do think is the case though, and seeing the reaction of Tarquin since Malack went bye-bye, is that the rest of the team (esp Malack) put Tarquin something on a leash that helped keep some of his more self-destructive tendencies in check.

====

To move a bit more into the general thrust of the thread:

As for 'military strategy'? Pffft. He just cribbed what happened in 1984 and applied it to OotSWorld. :smallwink:

What he is able to do, I think, is able to read people and manipulate them to serve his own ends. Well, when his ego doesn't get in the way, that is. :smalltongue:

[masamune1]

^Ahem.


Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

I think that suggests that Tarquin isn't very competent.

Yet I don't think he's correct about there being no evidence that he had any understanding of military or political strategy, either.

[runeghost]

Does that make Malack the Durkon, Laurin the Vaarsuvius, Miron the Belkar, SPG the Roy, and Jacinda the Haley? And if Jacinda is the Haley, does that mean she's attracted to Tarquin?

Nah. Miron, with his off-handed attitude and obsession with money is the Haley. Jacinda is likely the Belkar, given her apparent glee at murder.

[sam79]

It doesn't matter either way (and I have no intention of exploring it further). It's attempted rape regardless, and someone who repeatedly attempts rape is a rapist, even if he never succeeds.


Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?



Sure. Competence at achieving one's goals is not really relevant to the morality of those goals.

I cannot claim to have read all of the (incredably interesting) discussion on this thread, so I apologise if I'm making a point that has already been addressed. This pair of quotes from the author jumped out at me as...well, problematic; morally, juridically and grammatically. Someone who hasn't killed anyone isn't a killer, IMO. Pretty much by definition.

There is it seems to me a differnece between intending something, attempting something, and actually doing something. Both good and bad things. If I intend to give money to help people whose homes have been destroyed by a typhoon, that might make me a nice person. If I attempt to give some money, but somehow get lost on the way to the bank or something, I'm still a nice (but probably incompetent) person. But in neither case am I doing anything to help these people with no homes, and should not be able to claim any credit for doing so. Intentions are incredably important, but it is our actions which really define us.

[masamune1]

I think his point was that if you pull the trigger, and the gun happened to be empty, that's different from pointing the gun but deciding you just can't shoot someone.

And its not really about "taking credit".

[SaintRidley]

I cannot claim to have read all of the (incredably interesting) discussion on this thread, so I apologise if I'm making a point that has already been addressed. This pair of quotes from the author jumped out at me as...well, problematic; morally, juridically and grammatically. Someone who hasn't killed anyone isn't a killer, IMO. Pretty much by definition.

There is it seems to me a differnece between intending something, attempting something, and actually doing something. Both good and bad things. If I intend to give money to help people whose homes have been destroyed by a typhoon, that might make me a nice person. If I attempt to give some money, but somehow get lost on the way to the bank or something, I'm still a nice (but probably incompetent) person. But in neither case am I doing anything to help these people with no homes, and should not be able to claim any credit for doing so. Intentions are incredably important, but it is our actions which really define us.

Going with that example, if you attempt to give money to people in need, you are a charitable person, regardless of your actual competence therein. If you only intend to do so but make no effort to do so, you might become a charitable person if you make the effort, but until then you're just an adjectiveless person. The moment you try to exercise your desire, competence aside, you are doing and being the person that that desire represents.

If I try to give my brother a gift, even if I fail so badly he doesn't know anyone tried to give him a gift, I am still a gift-giver (who sucks at it). Likewise, if I try to kill my brother but fail so badly that he doesn't even know anyone tried to kill him, I am still a killer (who sucks at it). I'm still a fratricidal maniac. I should be arrested and put in jail. Attempted murder is a valid charge because competence be damned, if you try to kill someone you are a killer and it's illegal. The fact that you suck at it isn't much of a mitigating factor.

Honestly, I don't see anything problematic in Rich's words there. He's not saying intent is equal to doing, but that competent and incompetent exercises of that intent are equal. If you suck at poetry but keep writing, you're still just as much a poet as Seamus Heaney was. If you only ever think about writing poetry, you're not a poet, but you could be if you tried. If you suck at killing people but keep trying, you're still as much a killer as Ted Bundy was. If you only ever think about it, you're not a killer, but you could be if you tried.

[Raenir Salazar]

I'ld like to post that I slightly disagree with the notion we can't love an evil person as a person. Insomuch as I understand Ender's thinking from Ender's Game, Ender could only completely grind an enemy into dust when he could love them as they loved themselves, understood and emphasized with them to the point he could brutally crush them to the point they could never threaten anyone ever again.

Maybe this is still compatible but cross referencing this with the 'lesson' from other fiction, specifically Ender's Game I don't think it's wrong per se to love an evil person for who they are, at least that in the context of Ender's Game its an important prerequisite to defeating them.

[masamune1]

I'ld like to post that I slightly disagree with the notion we can't love an evil person as a person. Insomuch as I understand Ender's thinking from Ender's Game, Ender could only completely grind an enemy into dust when he could love them as they loved themselves, understood and emphasized with them to the point he could brutally crush them to the point they could never threaten anyone ever again.

Maybe this is still compatible but cross referencing this with the 'lesson' from other fiction, specifically Ender's Game I don't think it's wrong per se to love an evil person for who they are, at least that in the context of Ender's Game its an important prerequisite to defeating them.

Well, if you love them for who they are, that might be a problem. You can love them in spite of who they are, or because you love the non-evil part of them....but if you love the evil-ness of them, then I can see a problem with that.

You seem to be confusing empathy with love. Understanding how a person thinks, being able to feel and imagine as they do and put yourself in their shoes...that isn't the same thing as actually caring about them. You can empathise with and love an evil person, but I can see an issue with loving the fact that they are evil.

In Enders Game, if I recall

The enemy in question weren't actually that evil after all.

[Porthos]

^Ahem.



I think that suggests that Tarquin isn't very competent.

Yet I don't think he's correct about there being no evidence that he had any understanding of military or political strategy, either.

That's not how I read Rich's statement. He's saying he's not a great military tactician, which is certainly true. But that doesn't mean he is incompetent overall. It just means his strengths lay elsewhere.

After all, if you put Elan in the same situation as Tarquin, flipped his alignment to match Tarquin's but did not change anything else about Elan's strengths and weaknesses, I don't think he would have done nearly as well as Tarquin did. See, what I was getting at is that Tarquin's very success is proof of his competency.

Just not as a military genius. :smallwink:

[masamune1]

That's not how I read Rich's statement. He's saying he's not a great military tactician, which is certainly true. But that doesn't mean he is incompetent overall. It just means his strengths lay elsewhere.

After all, if you put Elan in the same situation as Tarquin, flipped his alignment to match Tarquin's but did not change anything else about Elan's strengths and weaknesses, I don't think he would have done nearly as well as Tarquin did. See, what I was getting at is that Tarquin's very success is proof of his competency.

Just not as a military genius. :smallwink:

I think saying that Tarquin might not even "(have) a passing understating of either military or political strategy (or personal relationships)" isn't giving him a good reference. He said elsewhere that the only reason he's been successful is that a) Tarquin happens to live in a world where his insane ideas about narrative and story structure actually work....but he relies on it too much (paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it); and b) Tarquin has competent allies who act as a restraint on him.

In short left to his own devices, Tarquin would fail. Embarrassingly. He's a delusional madman who was lucky to be born into a world where that could work. So its a question of how adaptable he can be- it seemed like he could adapt to almost anything except when it came to his sons; but the Giant is saying that he actually can't, and its only because of people like Malack that he hasn't totally screwed up yet.

The stuff about his military and political un-genius appears to jive with his backstory, which we got not just from Tarquin but also Ian Starshine and his brother-in-law, especially since the conspiracy really was his idea. I can get that Tarquin might be exaggerating, but the idea that he's completely incompetent (in those fields) is harder to swallow. Especially since we know he's at the very least an excellent and high-level Fighter.

As to him being the Elan of the team, well he said that wasn't a perfect analogy, so that begs the question of whether its like "He's Elan if Elan was Lawful Evil", or "He's Elan is Elan led the OotS...and was Lawful Evil. " Because thusfar the story has leant towards the latter, and there has indeed been evidence for it.

[Porthos]

As to him being the Elan of the team, well he said that wasn't a perfect analogy, so that begs the question of whether its like "He's Elan if Elan was Lawful Evil", or "He's Elan is Elan led the OotS...and was Lawful Evil. " Because thusfar the story has leant towards the latter, and there has indeed been evidence for it.

Those aren't the only two questions that could be raised. Another could be:

What if Elan was smarter and more ruthless?

Don't forget, Elan and Tarquin aren't the only compare/contrasts we have here. Nale was also the Elan of the Linear Guild. And aside from his rotten luck (and his inability to compensate for unexpected developments), he didn't do too badly.

[Boring McReader]

Just out of curiosity, who was it that told the story about how Tarquin was a tactical genius and the mastermind behind his party's plot? Was it…Tarquin?

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?


Having thought about your comments some more, I'm curious about a single detail, if you don't think it's too spoilerific or irrelevant to discuss.

Is Tarquin a brilliant man whose ego and obsession with drama keep leading him down paths his companions must save him from? Did he arrive at his basic understanding of the universe through observation? He may have exaggerated his overall competence, but is he fundamentally a strong thinker?

Or is he closer to Elan in intellect, but skilled enough in drama to have stumbled upon the secret to doing well for himself by sheer coincidence? Did he, like Elan, grow up trusting implicitly in the power of narrative logic in his universe, and he just happened to be right about it? Is his apparently brilliant foresight and planning all a manifestation of his thoughtless, arbitrary adherence to things like Evil Villain lists? He bases all his predictions and decisions on how they fit into a narrative, never gives them a second thought, and looks like a genius when things fall into place neatly?

[ti'esar]

Those aren't the only two questions that could be raised. Another could be:

What if Elan was smarter and more ruthless?

Don't forget, Elan and Tarquin aren't the only compare/contrasts we have here. Nale was also the Elan of the Linear Guild. And aside from his rotten luck (and his inability to compensate for unexpected developments), he didn't do too badly.

Nale was actually his group's leader, though. Tarquin doesn't even seem to be the first-among-equals he had presented himself as.

[facw]

I think that suggests that Tarquin isn't very competent.


My reading is not that Tarquin isn't competent, just that his competence is more narrow than Tarquin would have us believe (or than he believes himself).

Regardless of anything else, he did manage to build a kingdom, lose it, and then return to build an empire. Even if he is overstating his own role, and diminishing that of his allies, I don't think that could be done without a great deal of skill on his part. The Giant is quite right to say that we haven't seen Tarquin show direct evidence of strategic or tactical prowess (mostly we've seen him win by being stronger than his opponents), but being incompetent in those regards does not make him incompetent in every regard.

[Ridureyu]

A surprising amount of this discussion boils down to:

"Waaaah! This character did not act in a way I expected him to! I'm mad!"

[Jay R]

... but until then you're just an adjectiveless person.

Even if you made it up yourself, it's modifying a noun, so it's an adjective. So the putative "adjectiveless person" is not in fact adjectiveless.

[Ridureyu]

Anyway, more on topic...


Concerning Tarquin's knowledge of tactics, tell me this:

Whenever the OotS pulls off a major victory, it is through creative tactics and strategy. They know how to use what they have to pull off a win (example: Durkon and the treant-destroying sonic boom).

So far, has Tarquin in the comic used strategy... or just brute-forced what he wanted because his level is obscenely high and he has an army? Because I see people complaining that he seems invulnerable because of his high level and awesome equipment, but nobody saying that he's outsmarting anybody in this current fight.

[sam79]

Going with that example, if you attempt to give money to people in need, you are a charitable person, regardless of your actual competence therein. If you only intend to do so but make no effort to do so, you might become a charitable person if you make the effort, but until then you're just an adjectiveless person. The moment you try to exercise your desire, competence aside, you are doing and being the person that that desire represents.

In that example, I may be a good person, and my heart may be in the right place, but the statement "I gave money to charity" would be false. Attempting and doing are not the same.


If I try to give my brother a gift, even if I fail so badly he doesn't know anyone tried to give him a gift, I am still a gift-giver (who sucks at it).

I disagree.



Likewise, if I try to kill my brother but fail so badly that he doesn't even know anyone tried to kill him, I am still a killer (who sucks at it).

Again, disagree.


I'm still a fratricidal maniac. I should be arrested and put in jail. Attempted murder is a valid charge because competence be damned, if you try to kill someone you are a killer and it's illegal. The fact that you suck at it isn't much of a mitigating factor.

Here I agree; you should be but in jail for attempted murder. But not for murder. The two things are not the same. I would have grave reservations about any justice system which didn't make that distinction. Your brother is alive. You didn't murder him. To jail you for his murder would be monstrous.



Honestly, I don't see anything problematic in Rich's words there. He's not saying intent is equal to doing, but that competent and incompetent exercises of that intent are equal.

No, and I never thought he was. That would be REALLY scary. But he (and you) are arguing that attempting a crime (and failing) is the same thing as commiting the crime. This goes beyond a step beyond saying attempting to kill makes a person just as Evil as an actual killer.



If you suck at poetry but keep writing, you're still just as much a poet as Seamus Heaney was. If you only ever think about writing poetry, you're not a poet, but you could be if you tried. If you suck at killing people but keep trying, you're still as much a killer as Ted Bundy was. If you only ever think about it, you're not a killer, but you could be if you tried.

The difference between attempting to do something and doing it is unclear in some of your examples. Anyone who writes poetry (good or bad) could call themselves a poet, just as anyone who plays football is a football player. That's a distinction between doing something well and just doing something; there's no 'attempt' here. If someone attempts to play football (perhaps by buying the requistite clothing) but never actually picks up a ball or sets foot on a pitch, they are not a football player.

[Math_Mage]

Here I agree; you should be but in jail for attempted murder. But not for murder. The two things are not the same. I would have grave reservations about any justice system which didn't make that distinction. Your brother is alive. You didn't murder him. To jail you for his murder would be monstrous.
I think there's a useful distinction to be made here.

The justice system is not primarily concerned with what kind of person you are in your heart of hearts. The impact on society is paramount. Thus, the distinction between failed and successful murder is legally significant--one represents much more damage to society than the other.

However, when solely considering a person's character, the success or failure of the act is less significant. To the extent there is a difference, it is the stain the successful act leaves on the person's soul. So in fact, in this perspective, the difference between an attempted murderer who knows he failed and an attempted murderer who thinks he succeeded is greater than between the latter and a successful murderer.

I'm not arguing that attempted murder and murder are equivalent (nor am I arguing that they are not). But the legal system is not an especially good jumping-off point for such analysis. (Remember, you can do more time for drug possession than rape in many places!)

[Fish]

I agree here, but wouldn't call it "breaking" a character.
I find it apropos. You break a character as you would break a bronco: you take away his freedom of choice and see how he reacts. For most of the bronco's life he's a peaceful horse who eats and sleeps. But the day you put the saddle on... that's the part you write about.

[Red XIV]

Because quite frankly Tarquin is winning. The OotS has been on the run essentially this whole fight. This is not a fair fight. The only real victory they have had is triggering contingencies. Worse their is a very good chance scarf guy is healing up to teleport back. And if the OotS ever does start winning Laurin can just port out with Tarquin.
Miron wasn't interested in pursuing this in the first place. He considered it a waste of time and resources, and refused to go along until Tarquin called in that favor. It strikes me as likely that he'd consider what he's already done enough to tell Tarquin "I paid off the favor."

[rbetieh]

I don't get it, if the Giant intended the reader to perceive that Tarquin is not a competent general, then why does he have Malack claim that he is one? And for that matter, I can accept that Tarquin is bad at nourishing relationships, but it seems to me that his calming down of Malack and the celerity in which Laurin went from wont help to helpin over the promise of a favor do show that Tarquin is skillful at managing relationships.

I wonder if Malack in particular was willfully blinding himself to the nature of his partner, and what that might mean for Malack in particular.

[Heksefatter]

I don't get it, if the Giant intended the reader to perceive that Tarquin is not a competent general, then why does he have Malack claim that he is one? And for that matter, I can accept that Tarquin is bad at nourishing relationships, but it seems to me that his calming down of Malack and the celerity in which Laurin went from wont help to helpin over the promise of a favor do show that Tarquin is skillful at managing relationships.

I wonder if Malack in particular was willfully blinding himself to the nature of his partner, and what that might mean for Malack in particular.

Malack, Geoff, Ian and to a degree Nala (he mentioned Tarquin's "unstoppable army" back in the really old days - I didn't read it just as a huge one). Also members of the order mention his competence, though not exactly as a military leader - but they do regard him as competent.

In any case, Malack does say some interesting things about Tarquin: He also mentions that Tarquin can be a fool and how he would make cracks about going blind from bolstering himself. That struck me as Tarquin being skilled, but also a bit childish. Someone his friends laughed at, at times, but was still respected.

[sam79]

I think there's a useful distinction to be made here.

The justice system is not primarily concerned with what kind of person you are in your heart of hearts. The impact on society is paramount. Thus, the distinction between failed and successful murder is legally significant--one represents much more damage to society than the other.

However, when solely considering a person's character, the success or failure of the act is less significant. To the extent there is a difference, it is the stain the successful act leaves on the person's soul. So in fact, in this perspective, the difference between an attempted murderer who knows he failed and an attempted murderer who thinks he succeeded is greater than between the latter and a successful murderer.

I'm not arguing that attempted murder and murder are equivalent (nor am I arguing that they are not). But the legal system is not an especially good jumping-off point for such analysis. (Remember, you can do more time for drug possession than rape in many places!)

I agree with most of this (though I'm going near that rape/drug possesion thing!). I have no problem with the statement some one that who attempts to rape is as Evil as someone who succeeds in rape; this speaks of their inner character and intentions, not their impacts. I don't necessarily agree with this position, but it is totally intelligable and good grounds for a debate.

To say some who attempts (and fails) to murder is a murderer seems to me to be making a factual claim about a person's actions and their consequences in the 'real world', and not their character/inner voice/soul; and is (IMO) non-sensical. Legal systems are obviously imperfect to varying degrees, but it seems to me a basic and fundamental distinction.

[ChristianSt]

I agree with most of this (though I'm going near that rape/drug possesion thing!). I have no problem with the statement some one that who attempts to rape is as Evil as someone who succeeds in rape; this speaks of their inner character and intentions, not their impacts. I don't necessarily agree with this position, but it is totally intelligable and good grounds for a debate.

To say some who attempts (and fails) to murder is a murderer seems to me to be making a factual claim about a person's actions and their consequences in the 'real world', and not their character/inner voice/soul; and is (IMO) non-sensical. Legal systems are obviously imperfect to varying degrees, but it seems to me a basic and fundamental distinction.

I think it is more or less a matter of semantics/word definitions.
Repeatedly trying something and just failing is in my eyes nearly the same as succeeding with it (at least it says nearly the same thing about that person). Sure on a factual level there was no murder so technically there is no murderer. But if someone repeatedly tries to murder other persons and fails while doing his best to actual kill someone (maybe because of bad luck or maybe there was a dashing hero who stopped him doing so) the motivation of that person is the same.

For example compare two Persons A and B:


A has loaded his gun and shoots at C, but misses because C stumbles. (And because he shoots poorly he already missed several other guys he wanted to see dead.)
B thinks his gun is a toy-gun and shoots at D to prank him. He hits and D dies.


While B actually did kill someone, imo it is pretty clear who is the bad person.

And as a Deva said (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0490.html): "You're trying. You're trying to be [something]. People forget how crucial it is to keep trying, even if they screw it up now and then. They figure that if they can't manage it perfectly every waking second, then they should just pick [something else] because it'll be easier". (ok, obviously you shouldn't keep trying to murder people :smallwink: - but I think the quote says that intend is important)

[pyrefiend]

I think it is more or less a matter of semantics/word definitions.

Philosophical discussions usually turn out that way, I think.


I think it is more or less a matter of semantics/word definitions.
Repeatedly trying something and just failing is in my eyes nearly the same as succeeding with it (at least it says nearly the same thing about that person). Sure on a factual level there was no murder so technically there is no murderer. But if someone repeatedly tries to murder other persons and fails while doing his best to actual kill someone (maybe because of bad luck or maybe there was a dashing hero who stopped him doing so) the motivation of that person is the same.

Yes, that's true, but the distinction between a murderer and a non-murderer is not about motivations. The murderer committed murder. The non-murderer did not. Insofar as that distinction is concerned, motivation is irrelevant. The non-murderer may very well be a despicable person, and hell, they may even be an attempted murderer. All that, however, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not they actually committed murder.

This is what Rich says on the subject:



Does this mean someone who tries to kill people but never does so is a killer?

Sure. Competence at achieving one's goals is not really relevant to the morality of those goals.

I don't know how anyone can think the word "killer" is an appropriate label for someone who has never killed anyone. Competence is irrelevant in this regard, yes, but so is the morality of the matter. A person is a killer if they kill someone. Otherwise, they are not a killer.

Of course, this all goes out the window if we define "killer" as something other than "one who kills." This may be the rhetorical move Rich is making. But if it is, it is a very strange one. The conventional definition seems straightforward.

[sam79]

I think it is more or less a matter of semantics/word definitions.

Yes, agreed.


For example compare two Persons A and B:


A has loaded his gun and shoots at C, but misses because C stumbles. (And because he shoots poorly he already missed several other guys he wanted to see dead.)
B thinks his gun is a toy-gun and shoots at D to prank him. He hits and D dies.


While B actually did kill someone, imo it is pretty clear who is the bad person.



Again agreed. But I would not call either of these people murderers.

ETA: if words mean anything, then person A is not a killer, and person B is. Regardless of which we consider the worst person morally.

[Scow2]

I don't know how anyone can think the word "killer" is an appropriate label for someone who has never killed anyone. Competence is irrelevant in this regard, yes, but so is the morality of the matter. A person is a killer if they kill someone. Otherwise, they are not a killer.

Of course, this all goes out the window if we define "killer" as something other than "one who kills." This may be the rhetorical move Rich is making. But if it is, it is a very strange one. The conventional definition seems straightforward.But the term in question is not "Killer", but "Murderer" (Or even "Mass Murderer" or "Terrorist" or something similar), which is more a moral description than a legal/technical one.

Our theoretical person's job/hobby is murdering people. He just hasn't been successful at it yet.

[pyrefiend]

But the term in question is not "Killer", but "Murderer" (Or even "Mass Murderer" or "Terrorist" or something similar), which is more a moral description than a legal/technical one.

Our theoretical person's job/hobby is murdering people. He just hasn't been successful at it yet.

Where I quoted Rich, he's discussing the word "killer," not "murderer."

I don't think there's anything to be gained by debating what the most valid definition of "murderer" is. I'm fairly sure the majority of people use the term only to describe someone who has committed murder, but there's nothing to stop you from using it otherwise.

[pendell]

I think there's a distinction that needs to be made between the philosophical aspect of 'being a murderer' and what would stand up in a court of justice.

Say a person absolutely loathes another person and wishes them dead, fervently, every day. Suppose the person is in the position of this character from Lewis' The Great Divorce:



"Murdering Old Jack wasn't the worst thing I did. That was the work of a moment and I was half-mad when I did it. But I murdered you in my heart, deliberately, for years. I used to lie awake at nights thinking what I'd do to you if I ever got the chance. That is why I have been sent to you now: to ask your forgiveness and to be your servant as long as you need one, and longer if it pleases you."


Murder in the heart is a matter of the heart, between oneself and one's own conscience. As well as anyone else we choose to let into that secret place. A psychologist or a spouse, say.

The justice system doesn't and shouldn't concern itself with this -- if it locked away everyone who wanted to murder someone else, even for a fleeting instant, there'd be no one in the world NOT in prison.

"Justice" shouldn't be about making perfect people. All it's about is keeping the peace -- the referee that blows the whistle when someone goes out of bounds and pulls a red card when someone kicks another player in the jewels. It is necessary to keep the "game" of society from degenerating from a sport with rules to an all-out brawl, also known as civil war or anarchy.

So no one is going to go to jail or be hung for murdering another person in heart. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, rules of evidence all dictate that no human can be brought to jail unless a crime can be proven, and goodness knows it's hard enough to prove actual crimes, not just the thoughts and motives of a man's heart.

So "murder in heart" is , in a sense, an almost-perfect crime. It cannot be detected, and it cannot be punished. So a human can indulge in it all day without fear of any recriminations from human authority.

The reason it's not perfect is that it doesn't affect the victim. Just you. It's like swallowing poison and waiting for the OTHER fellow to die. It's just going to ruin your life. And possibly the lives of those around you as well, because you can't plant that seed deep in your own character and expect it not to bear fruit somehow.

ETA : Link for relevance and laughs (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill).

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Vaylon]

This is insane. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is no one else seeing how insane any of this is?


Malack, Geoff, Ian and to a degree Nala (he mentioned Tarquin's "unstoppable army" back in the really old days - I didn't read it just as a huge one). Also members of the order mention his competence, though not exactly as a military leader - but they do regard him as competent.

Exactly! Absolutely no character at all even hints at the possibility that Tarquin is delusional and that he in actuality lacks understanding of military or political strategy. Even if we ignore everything Tarquin says, the things he does -- up until the most recent comics -- point to strategic competence. From the gladiator matches to the fighting inside the pyramid, there are dozens and dozens of examples. Furthermore, as you correctly observe, Heksefatter, other characters act as if Tarquin's competence is a given. If Tarquin is genuinely incompetent, you might expect Nale of all people to bring it up -- while he was screaming at Tarquin (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0913.html) would have been the perfect opportunity. If Tarquin is under a delusion, it's one that Malack shares:

Malack: (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0874.html) "You don't spend time with a general of Tarquin's calibre without learning a few things about attrition."

I'm flabbergasted. Frankly, it all smacks of retconning to me -- and, I suspect, of something darker, too: the audience had to be punished because they liked the wrong character. There. I said it. That's what I really think. I think the audience is being punished because they liked Tarquin, and they weren't supposed to like Tarquin. It wouldn't be the first time the audience was criticized for liking an evil character (see Tarquin's fourth wall-breaking comment on Thog (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0788.html)).

It didn't go right, so we're doing it again. And we will continue to do so until the audience finally hates Tarquin.

[Kish]

Malack did pretty unambiguously say Tarquin is a high-caliber general.

I thought that Tarquin is insane in a number of crippling ways was pretty obvious from nearly the first time he opened his mouth, but I am a little surprised that Rich also said he didn't have even a passing understanding of valid military strategy.

[The Giant]

Wow, you guys find the weirdest things to argue about.

I meant "killer" in the sense of "someone who has the moral weight of murder on them." I assumed the question being put to me was discussing the morality of the situation, not the literal facts or the legal standing, which would be fairly clear-cut.

And yeah, I mentally substituted "murderer" for "killer," because almost every living thing kills other things some of the time, even if only microscopic lifeforms. "Killer" isn't an especially precise term therefore; "murderer" is. And since the topic spun out of the rapist topic, it seemed especially useless to consider the word "killer" because someone who kills in self-defense is still a killer, but likely not a murderer. No one rapes in self-defense, though. So within the context of the conversation, it seemed obvious what was actually being asked was not exactly what was written.

OK? OK.

Now can we all please get back to ripping apart my writing in the comic, not my writing on the forums? Thanks.

[Shale]

Malack: (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0874.html) "You don't spend time with a general of Tarquin's calibre without learning a few things about attrition."

To be fair, that would make sense as a sarcastic comment; i.e. Tarquin's "caliber" of military strategy is to have more soldiers than the other guy so when you smash them all together he runs out first, and that's why Malack would learn about attrition from him.

But I agree that Tarquin has been portrayed as a competent general and battlefield commander - for instance his initial conquest of a substantial portion of the continent, his management of the OOTS in their initial fight, his sussing out the trap (and knowing when to run) in the second. None of that is great strategy, especially if he had a big manpower advantage, but it's hard to buy him as incompetent as opposed to merely okay.

[AKA_Bait]

If Tarquin is genuinely incompetent, you might expect Nale of all people to bring it up -- while he was screaming at Tarquin (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0913.html) would have been the perfect opportunity.

Because Nale was such a stellar judge of competently executed plans?


If Tarquin is under a delusion, it's one that Malack shares:

Malack: (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0874.html) "You don't spend time with a general of Tarquin's calibre without learning a few things about attrition."

You know, considering how Tarquin squanders his men outside the pyramid, it occurs to me that this phrase could be read both ways. In other words, Malack could learn a lot about attrition by watching a bad general who just throws rank after rank of troops at a position until it is taken, regardless of whether that's the best strategy or not.


But I agree that Tarquin has been portrayed as a competent general and battlefield commander - for instance his initial conquest of a substantial portion of the continent, his management of the OOTS in their initial fight, his sussing out the trap (and knowing when to run) in the second. None of that is great strategy, especially if he had a big manpower advantage, but it's hard to buy him as incompetent as opposed to merely okay.

I think it's also fair to say that most of the "portrayal" of his competence was either a result of his own narration or of those who might have psychological reasons to picture him as more competent than he is (e.g., Ian Starshine).

[The Giant]

Malack did pretty unambiguously say Tarquin is a high-caliber general.

I thought that Tarquin is insane in a number of crippling ways was pretty obvious from nearly the first time he opened his mouth, but I am a little surprised that Rich also said he didn't have even a passing understanding of valid military strategy.

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.

EDIT: This is why I'm sorta starting to hate the out-of-context quoting; because I tend to exaggerate when speaking extemporaneously and describe things out of proportion to what I really intended when I wrote the scenes. I should learn to just stop talking about it, because everytime I say something I end up changing everyone's view of the events in the story, and I would be better served letting the story stand on its own and ignoring the critics.

[Kish]

Or, for that matter, Malack could think it was excellent strategy where a less-monstrous person would see a problem. "I see...if you have enough soldiers, trading their lives for something your enemy values is a strategy with no down side, just like if I can make Durkon spend actual spells to counter my unlimited vampiric gaze!"

[jere7my]

Malack did pretty unambiguously say Tarquin is a high-caliber general.

I thought that Tarquin is insane in a number of crippling ways was pretty obvious from nearly the first time he opened his mouth, but I am a little surprised that Rich also said he didn't have even a passing understanding of valid military strategy.

In the OotS world, someone who understands storytelling tropes at a high level can succeed at a lot of things they're not actually masters of. Tarquin can appear to be a masterful general for a long time, using the kind of genre knowledge Julio showed by arriving at exactly the right moment.

[AKA_Bait]

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.(emphasis added)

Doing my best not to run over to the CL&G thread to claim Tarquin has an NPC class... :smallwink:

[sam79]

I meant "killer" in the sense of "someone who has the moral weight of murder on them." I assumed the question being put to me was discussing the morality of the situation, not the literal facts or the legal standing, which would be fairly clear-cut.

[snip]

OK? OK.

Ok. That makes a lot more sense to me. Thanks for clarifying your views for us.

ETA:

(emphasis added)

Doing my best not to run over to the CL&G thread to claim Tarquin has an NPC class... :smallwink:

10 gold says someone's already over there doing just that...

[Shale]

Or, for that matter, Malack could think it was excellent strategy where a less-monstrous person would see a problem. "I see...if you have enough soldiers, trading their lives for something your enemy values is a strategy with no down side, just like if I can make Durkon spend actual spells to counter my unlimited vampiric gaze!"

Plus he might just be inclined to hold his friend in higher esteem than he really deserves -- in the same way he gave Tarquin the benefit of the doubt by believing that he really was okay with Malack's plans for the unified continent, when he was really invested in the whole heroic-rebel-versus-evil-empire endgame.

[zimmerwald1915]

10 gold says someone's already over there doing just that...
It's been done, literally years ago, when Tarquin was first introduced and the only thing we knew about his combat prowess was that he had sky-high defenses and access to an absurd abundance of magic items. At that point, he could have been a Commoner.

[Fish]

Tarquin strikes me as the kind of villain who has memorized the what-not-to-do handbook of evil overlord cliches without bothering to learn something useful like "Art of War." He knows from storytelling what to avoid and when to strike ... but when it comes to knowing how to solve a problem before him, it's usually brute force that wins the day. Allosaurus vs commoner, legion of archers vs two gladiators, army vs Order. His arch-enemy is all about style.

He's really not that clever. Betraying the bounty hunters was incredibly petty and made no sense. When Malack was angry at Tarquin's showboating, Tarquin took a moment's pause, which I found telling. It was almost as if Tarquin were trying to decide what story this was. What would Hans Christian Andersen do? Ah, now I know my next line.

I agree with the line about "a general of Tarquin's caliber." He didn't say high caliber...

[masamune1]

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.

EDIT: This is why I'm sorta starting to hate the out-of-context quoting; because I tend to exaggerate when speaking extemporaneously and describe things out of proportion to what I really intended when I wrote the scenes. I should learn to just stop talking about it, because everytime I say something I end up changing everyone's view of the events in the story, and I would be better served letting the story stand on its own and ignoring the critics.

So, basically, he does have an at least basic understanding of political and military strategy?

He's average to above-average, at best / worst, or maybe better but for his fatal flaw of narrative fanaticism?

Because that's all I ask.

[Orm-Embar]

To be fair, that would make sense as a sarcastic comment; i.e. Tarquin's "caliber" of military strategy is to have more soldiers than the other guy so when you smash them all together he runs out first, and that's why Malack would learn about attrition from him.

But I agree that Tarquin has been portrayed as a competent general and battlefield commander - for instance his initial conquest of a substantial portion of the continent, his management of the OOTS in their initial fight, his sussing out the trap (and knowing when to run) in the second. None of that is great strategy, especially if he had a big manpower advantage, but it's hard to buy him as incompetent as opposed to merely okay.

Excellent point. If Tarquin wins by attrition, that may be an outstanding attribute for a skilled fighter (in a world of hit points based combat, anyway), but not for a skilled general. It's probably fair to read Malack's comment about attrition as sarcastic. Managing to win when he's got the advantage of numbers and a high-level/low-epic party isn't impressive, it's barely meeting expectations. In other words, average, though probably not scarily incompetent. I don't see how that's really inconsistent with Giant's comments.


You know, considering how Tarquin squanders his men outside the pyramid, it occurs to me that this phrase could be read both ways. In other words, Malack could learn a lot about attrition by watching a bad general who just throws rank after rank of troops at a position until it is taken, regardless of whether that's the best strategy or not.

Ninja'd by AKA Bait and others. :smallsigh:

[ORione]

(emphasis added)

Doing my best not to run over to the CL&G thread to claim Tarquin has an NPC class... :smallwink:

The Giant was likely using the word "warrior" the same way Belkar uses it here (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0058.html). Basically, as a term for any fighter-like person.

I mean, maybe Tarquin is actually a warrior, but I'd hesitate to consider that statement proof.

[AKA_Bait]

The Giant was likely using the word "warrior" the same way Belkar uses it here (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0058.html). Basically, as a term for any fighter-like person.

I mean, maybe Tarquin is actually a warrior, but I'd hesitate to consider that statement proof.

You missed the wink emoticon, I take it?

[pyrefiend]

Wow, you guys find the weirdest things to argue about.

<More stuff>

I really don't understand the dismissive tone. I'm not critiquing you out of maliciousness, I'm honestly doing my best to understand your comments. I even pointed out that my own interpretation of your comment would be incorrect if it turned out that you were using alternative definition of "killer." As it turned out, that is what was going on, so I'm glad that the confusion is cleared up.

I don't know how anyone could be expected to respond to you in the forums except by agreeing or disagreeing with you.

[Scow2]

Wow, you guys find the weirdest things to argue about.
Welcome to the GiantitP forums. Are you new here?:smalltongue:

[runeghost]

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.


Now that makes sense to me. I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around Tarquin being an incompetent general, strategist, or tactician. But him being mediocre, and chiefly succeeding via his knowledge of story conventions and tropes fits observed events quite well. Even stuff like his trap detection in 858 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0858.html) seems based more on his sense of drama than any game mechanic.

[rbetieh]

Or, for that matter, Malack could think it was excellent strategy where a less-monstrous person would see a problem. "I see...if you have enough soldiers, trading their lives for something your enemy values is a strategy with no down side, just like if I can make Durkon spend actual spells to counter my unlimited vampiric gaze!"

I dont know....Homer claims Odysseus is a strategic genius, and Tarquin is, in normal mode, all about Trojan Horse strategies...

The idea that Malack has no value for life at all and therefore expending soldiers is ok, may be valid, but Malackalso does seem to have some level of respect/admiration for Tarquin, and that has to come from somewhere. For all of his inefficiencies, Tarquin is still accomplishing the set out goals.

[rbetieh]

So, basically, he does have an at least basic understanding of political and military strategy?

He's average to above-average, at best / worst, or maybe better but for his fatal flaw of narrative fanaticism?

Because that's all I ask.

Well, on his own, he blitzed the continent and managed to step on enough toes to get defeated by "The Allies". So he had a successful first strike but didn't know how to consolidate his gains. The thing is, on this continent, everyone is of this level.

[Heksefatter]

Because Nale was such a stellar judge of competently executed plans?



You know, considering how Tarquin squanders his men outside the pyramid, it occurs to me that this phrase could be read both ways. In other words, Malack could learn a lot about attrition by watching a bad general who just throws rank after rank of troops at a position until it is taken, regardless of whether that's the best strategy or not.



I think it's also fair to say that most of the "portrayal" of his competence was either a result of his own narration or of those who might have psychological reasons to picture him as more competent than he is (e.g., Ian Starshine).

Nale could actually put some pretty good plans together, but let his ego get in the way. That said, I will clarify and expand on what was said earlier:

- It is not just Ian Starshine who describes Tarquin as a good general. It is also Geoff. Let me quote Geoff:

"When he first appeared on the continent, he conquered eleven nations in eight months. It took a coalition of twenty-six other countries to defeat him and drive him out."

This is Geoff, who appears far less Tarquin-fixated and far more reasonable than Ian, describing Tarquin as a bona fide military genuis. You do not conquer so many nations in so short a time without being a true genius. The only counter-argument I can see is if Tarquin had a ridiculously huge army, when he arrived on the continent. That doesn't seem plausible that you can sail to a continent with such an army, especially since Geoff attributes the achievement to Tarquin himself - he does not say "Tarquin arrived with the hugest army in the history of the continent and started overruning everything." Also note how Geoff says that Tarquin was only defeated by a vastly superior coalition: Twenty-six nations. If Tarquin just relied on superior numbers, he would most likely not have conquered a single nation, nor would it require a huge coalition to take him down.

After this, they also attribute the playing of all sides to Tarquin and not his allies. Again, it is Geoff speaking ("He plays both sides at the same time..."). In fact, it is Geoff who does most of the speaking, not Ian.

I post the link here:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0758.html

If we look at Malack's comments, I suppose that you could take it both ways: Tarquin is a bad general, whose obvious mistakes I learn from, or he's a good general, etc. But there's been nothing to imply that Tarquin was outright incompetent as a general, and shortly after Malack uses another trick that Tarquin taught him (the tail-grapple), a trick which is very useful. So, Malack would be using two different understandings of learning from someone in rapid succession, while saying that Tarquin "taught" him both.

In both cases, it is possible to reconcile Tarquin's lack of ability with the presented facts. Geoff could simply be mistaken regarding Tarquin's role in all this: Maybe someone else did all the brainwork during Tarquin's conquests or maybe those conquests never really happened that way.

But it definitely not true that Tarquin is our only source of his skills as a general.

It should also be added that there are some references to Tarquin's competence from the Order, though strictly speaking not as a general. Haley assumes that Nale will do something if he's smart, or - if what was more likely - Tarquin was calling the shots. Essentially she's calling Tarquin smart.

Another time, which I've not been able to find, someone in the Order spoke of agreeing with Nale to keep the story of the Gates hidden from his significantly more competent father.

I will not say that Tarquin being (more or less) a fool has been completely ruled out by these comments, but I do think we have several statements from many different characters, not just himself, implying the contrary.

[pendell]

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.

EDIT: This is why I'm sorta starting to hate the out-of-context quoting; because I tend to exaggerate when speaking extemporaneously and describe things out of proportion to what I really intended when I wrote the scenes. I should learn to just stop talking about it, because everytime I say something I end up changing everyone's view of the events in the story, and I would be better served letting the story stand on its own and ignoring the critics.

Actually, I prefer you to comment. We should just add the above as a meta-quote and put it in pride of place in the comments thread.

In fact, I'm begging you. Please don't stop commenting just because the rest of us sometimes misunderstand you. We'll just have to take on board that you're an artist, not a computer programmer for whom the literal, logical meaning of words is life and death .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[The Giant]

I really don't understand the dismissive tone.

Ah, that's nothing. I can get a lot more dismissive than that.

Here's the thing: I find it creepy that everyone pays so much attention to every word choice I make outside the comic. Whether or not the original sentiment was 100% crystal clear in wording or not, the ultimate truth is that it was a throwaway comment answering a direct question that had nothing to do with the actual content of the Order of the Stick. It was a tangent, and then the thread started pulling apart my off-the-cuff word choices in that tangent when I only didn't take the time to write a more nuanced response because it wasn't important in the first place. Why is that a thing that gets debated? Why does anyone even care? I find that weird. That's all I was saying.

[masamune1]

Well, on his own, he blitzed the continent and managed to step on enough toes to get defeated by "The Allies". So he had a successful first strike but didn't know how to consolidate his gains. The thing is, on this continent, everyone is of this level.

Then he learnt from that, came back, and presently has been running a shadow dictatorship spanning the continent for the past twenty years. So he has learnt since how to consolidate his gains.

And his own assessment isn't that, but that he simply misunderstood the broader political situation. Regardless, I don't think either example suggests that "everyone" is on this level. "It took a coalition of 27 nations to stop him" doesn't suggest he was an easy enemy to beat.

[Shale]

- It is not just Ian Starshine who describes Tarquin as a good general. It is also Geoff. Let me quote Geoff:

"When he first appeared on the continent, he conquered eleven nations in eight months. It took a coalition of twenty-six other countries to defeat him and drive him out."

This is Geoff, who appears far less Tarquin-fixated and far more reasonable than Ian, describing Tarquin as a bona fide military genuis. You do not conquer so many nations in so short a time without being a true genius.

Unless you have an army described as being of overwhelming size (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0816.html), anyway.

[pendell]

With respect to Tarquin's competence, how about this:

Tarquin was once the general of a nigh-unstoppable army. He did indeed succeed in conquering almost the entire continent, only to have it undone because he made enough enemies that his brilliance and skill were not enough to overcome the military forces arrayed against him.

That's a political error, not a military one, and it's one that was made in the twentieth century by certain other military dictators who bear some resemblance to Tarquin :smallamused:.

So how about this:

Tarquin IS a highly competent, highly successful general and military leader.

However, his own personal estimate of his capabilities far exceed the reality. HE may think he is Grosse FeldMarschal Alle Zweitung (Greatest General of all time) , but in fact he's only in the second or third tier of famous generals. A Grant rather than a Rommel, a Pompey rather than a Caesar.

This allows him to achieve great things in the military sphere, but because he's not as good as he thinks he is, he tends to take on challenges out of his depth and get slaughtered, if his more levelheaded allies aren't around to bail him out.

Y'know, like going alone with only one companion onto an enemy ship occupied by a full adventuring party.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Gift Jeraff]

But do we know where Geoff got his information from? Anyone who lived through Tarquin's reign probably barely remembers him as one of the many would-be conquerors that have come and gone. If his information about Tarkie's first empire came from some spy who got their hands on top secret documents, then there may have been some muddying of the truth by Tarquin himself.

[rbetieh]

Then he learnt from that, came back, and presently has been running a shadow dictatorship spanning the continent for the past twenty years. So he has learnt since how to consolidate his gains.

And his own assessment isn't that, but that he simply misunderstood the broader political situation. Regardless, I don't think either example suggests that "everyone" is on this level. "It took a coalition of 27 nations to stop him" doesn't suggest he was an easy enemy to beat.

The "everyone" is at that level comes from two things. The mapmaker in Sandsedge saying that would-be conquerors pop up all the time and are deposed within the year, and Tarquins own admission that he came to this continent because he heard stories of how easy it was to conquer yourself an empire here....

[CoffeeIncluded]

Ah, that's nothing. I can get a lot more dismissive than that.

Here's the thing: I find it creepy that everyone pays so much attention to every word choice I make outside the comic. Whether or not the original sentiment was 100% crystal clear in wording or not, the ultimate truth is that it was a throwaway comment answering a direct question that had nothing to do with the actual content of the Order of the Stick. It was a tangent, and then the thread started pulling apart my off-the-cuff word choices in that tangent when I only didn't take the time to write a more nuanced response because it wasn't important in the first place. Why is that a thing that gets debated? Why does anyone even care? I find that weird. That's all I was saying.

Because in this case it's really important to Tarquin's characterization. First we thought he was quirky. Then we realized he's got an insane plan. Then we realize that it's not just his plan that's insane, Tarquin himself is and has always been several thousand miles over the madness horizon and accelerating. And now the question is, how well has he been masking it? How well has his intelligence compensated for his madness? Has even his sense of control been a delusion this entire time? Do his teammates listen to him at all, pay him a lip service of, "Yeah, yeah, that's nice Tarquin," and mostly go along with their own agendas, or somewhere in between? And has it always been like this? How much is Tarquin actually competent, and how much is he a sad deluded evil old man?

[AKA_Bait]

It is not just Ian Starshine who describes Tarquin as a good general. It is also Geoff. Let me quote Geoff

But Geoff has (1) been spending quite a bit of time with Ian who may well be his information source, and (2) has the same emotional motivation to believe Tarquin is extremely competent (i.e., wouldn't it suck to be imprisoned by someone who wasn't even good at what they do?).


In both cases, it is possible to reconcile Tarquin's lack of ability with the presented facts.

If the only evidence pointing to a high level of competence can be interpreted both ways and there is evidence to the contrary (e.g., the way his party members treat Tarquin) that's not much of a leg to stand on, especially if the claim is that the author retconned a character out of some spiteful desire to punish the audience.


It should also be added that there are some references to Tarquin's competence from the Order, though strictly speaking not as a general. Haley assumes that Nale will do something if he's smart, or - if what was more likely - Tarquin was calling the shots. Essentially she's calling Tarquin smart.

Haley had no exposure to Tarquin and even at this point is not in a position to say much about his competence.


Another time, which I've not been able to find, someone in the Order spoke of agreeing with Nale to keep the story of the Gates hidden from his significantly more competent father.

Not saying much, really. Not only does the party have no experience with Tarquin, Nale had been beaten several times by the party while Tarquin appeared to be in charge of a nation.

[Kish]

Because in this case it's really important to Tarquin's characterization.
I defy anyone to explain how it is really important to Tarquin's characterization, whether every one of the women he has planned to rape and put forth his best effort to rape has somehow gotten away.

And yes, that is what started this whole long pointless argument about whether someone who attempts murder and fails is "a killer"--Rich saying that Tarquin is a rapist whether he's ever actually raped a woman, or just tried a whole lot.

[jere7my]

Because in this case it's really important to Tarquin's characterization. First we thought he was quirky. Then we realized he's got an insane plan. Then we realize that it's not just his plan that's insane, Tarquin himself is and has always been several thousand miles over the madness horizon and accelerating. And now the question is, how well has he been masking it? How well has his intelligence compensated for his madness? Has even his sense of control been a delusion this entire time? Do his teammates listen to him at all, pay him a lip service of, "Yeah, yeah, that's nice Tarquin," and mostly go along with their own agendas, or somewhere in between? And has it always been like this? How much is Tarquin actually competent, and how much is he a sad deluded evil old man?

Rich was talking about his usage of the word "killer" here. That had little to nothing to do with the content of the comic.

[masamune1]

The way his party treats them is that they find his antics and obsession with story annoying...but they are following his plans and still being his teammate after twenty-odd years. And he seems to be roughly on par with them in battle. There is little to nothing to suggest that they think he knows next to nothing about political or military matters (and running a nation for decades- even if the name and government of said nation changes whenever its convenient-, that itself suggests political competence).

I don't think that choosing to assemble a large army before taking on enemies, gathering together an elite team of your old buddies as allies and advisors, or going to the Western continent because you heard carving out an empire was easy makes him not-that-good either. It sounds like pretty sensible military planning to me- make sure you have enough resources and pick off the weak links. It might not require an impressive imagination, but it works and it did work, and it all suggests he knows what he was doing.

The main is that the Giant said that Tarquin was the only source of info we had that Tarquin was a great general, and that was simply wrong. And the way his party treats him is not much different from how the OotS treats Roy, and should further be considered in the light that everyone in Team Tarquin is arrogant, selfish and evil.

[Ridureyu]

Sometimes I wonder why a lot of the people here don't go on and try to write their own stick-figure comics, in which their personal canons all fit in and they can ignore the main one.

[CoffeeIncluded]

I defy anyone to explain how it is really important to Tarquin's characterization, whether every one of the women he has planned to rape and put forth his best effort to rape has somehow gotten away.

And yes, that is what started this whole long pointless argument about whether someone who attempts murder and fails is "a killer"--Rich saying that Tarquin is a rapist whether he's ever actually raped a woman, or just tried a whole lot.


Rich was talking about his usage of the word "killer" here. That had little to nothing to do with the content of the comic.

I thought he was talking about Tarquin's supposed competence.

[Vaylon]

I should learn to just stop talking about it, because everytime I say something I end up changing everyone's view of the events in the story, and I would be better served letting the story stand on its own and ignoring the critics.

The work should speak for itself.

[Scow2]

The work should speak for itself.

No! The index must be forever filled with new quotes!

[CoffeeIncluded]

Please don't stop talking about it. Your extra commentary is invaluable. Not to mention sometimes hearing the voice of the author is extremely useful. And it just makes me happy too, that you listen and respond.

[AKA_Bait]

And the way his party treats him is not much different from how the OotS treats Roy, and should further be considered in the light that everyone in Team Tarquin is arrogant, selfish and evil.

It's really not though. The members of OotS have not required to be bribed or cajoled by Roy into doing things in quite a while. That scene where he tears up the contracts actually does mean something. Frankly, Roy doesn't even need to explain himself most of the time.

Laurin and Miron on the other hand were outright dismissive of Tarquin's goal, insulted his plan, and only went along with it when he compensated them in the form of wiping out a past favor and agreeing to owe one. That is not being treated the same.

Also, we don't have evidence that everyone in Tarquin's party is arrogant or selfish. Evil, yes, but not necessarily those other two.


I thought he was talking about Tarquin's supposed competence.

So now we are picking apart the Giant's statement about how it thought it was weird that we pick things apart? Is it me or is it getting pretty meta around here?

Edit:

Please don't stop talking about it. Your extra commentary is invaluable. Not to mention sometimes hearing the voice of the author is extremely useful. And it just makes me happy too, that you listen and respond.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Hearing the voice of the author is often useful, in part because reading the Giant's posts sometimes spotlights for me something in the work that I had only recognized subconsciously or not at all. Not to mention how helpful it is for the CL&G type speculation when taken in context.

[jere7my]

I thought he was talking about Tarquin's supposed competence.

Follow the quotes back up.

"I meant "killer" in the sense of "someone who has the moral weight of murder on them." I assumed the question being put to me was discussing the morality of the situation, not the literal facts or the legal standing, which would be fairly clear-cut."

[deworde]

Eh, hyperbole on my part. He's probably average for a warrior his level, just not nearly good enough to pull off the things he's done strictly through military strategy.

EDIT: This is why I'm sorta starting to hate the out-of-context quoting; because I tend to exaggerate when speaking extemporaneously and describe things out of proportion to what I really intended when I wrote the scenes. I should learn to just stop talking about it, because everytime I say something I end up changing everyone's view of the events in the story, and I would be better served letting the story stand on its own and ignoring the critics.

Also, it cuts into the added value of the books. I mean, I'm still going to buy them, but the fact you get insights into Tarquin's character in a single, well-thought out article is an AMAZING added value.

To be honest, I generally only visit the forums for your comments, but if you'd rather have a contextual, thought out platform for your comments, the books seem like the perfect place.

People who are wrong on the internet is not a problem you can solve with facts.

[masamune1]

It's really not though. The members of OotS have not required to be bribed or cajoled by Roy into doing things in quite a while. That scene where he tears up the contracts actually does mean something. Frankly, Roy doesn't even need to explain himself most of the time.

Laurin and Miron on the other hand were outright dismissive of Tarquin's goal, insulted his plan, and only went along with it when he compensated them in the form of wiping out a past favor and agreeing to owe one. That is not being treated the same.

Also, we don't have evidence that everyone in Tarquin's party is arrogant or selfish. Evil, yes, but not necessarily those other two.

They didn't need to be bribed or cajoled because they aren't Evil; and being arrogant and selfish is usually part of the deal with Evil. That they are secretly orchestrating wars and running dictatorships for their own personal gain pretty much seals them in the arrogant and selfish as well as Evil departments in my book.

And it is being treated the same- from the context its like the trade favours. They only insulted his plan to kill Roy to make Elan stronger for the purposes of the story; they still continue to go along with his political conspiracy. They insulted less his skill than his or ability than his insistence on doing this thing in this certain way (Mirion was initially surprised that he wasn't simply offing Roy in a more tactically sound way and seemed to think that Tarquin would normally send an assassin to kill him in the dead of night, so that implies that normally he is pragmatic and competent).