Quote Originally Posted by hroşila View Post
I think you're completely misreading V's motives to hold onto the soul splice AND to fight Xykon. It wasn't about saving the world, it was about solving every problem and defeating Xykon personally. V didn't put what they had to do over what they wanted to do - they simply did what they wanted to do, paying no heed to what their loved ones wanted.
I agree with factotum and NontheistCleric (although I guess I'm not sure V "loved [hir family] more than anything else in the world"). V was certainly expressing far less empathy and love than s/he should have, yes. And the desire to fight Xykon was absolutely about pride and being drunk with power as much as it was about being genuinely pragmatic. But I don't believe that V actually preferred holding on to the soul splice over staying with hir family at that point. S/he is clearly enormously stressed about every single moment that hir soul remains indebted to the fiends, and clearly wants to absolutely minimize the size of hir debt to them. Without a very, very compelling reason indeed, I very much doubt that s/he would have held on to the soul splice one round longer than necessary to protect hir family and punish the dragon.

Also, I don't buy that it wasn't about saving the world at all. V isn't a psychopath like Belkar; s/he doesn't kill unprovoked (I say "unprovoked" because Familicide was about a wildly disproportionate response to an actual threat, not the sort of random massacre that, say, Xykon might have begun. I say this to clarify the specific motivation for Familicide, not to say that this makes it any better, morally speaking). V is all about overcoming obstacles through the application of arcane power - if Xykon wasn't an obstacle in the sense of being a threat, V wouldn't have wanted to kill him.

Basically, I don't see the idea that "it was about saving the world" and "it was about solving every problem and defeating Xykon personally" as in tension with one another. My read on someone like V is that s/he has both pragmatic instincts and personal desires, and hir instinct is to try to satisfy the latter by following the former. Maybe I'm projecting a bit, because that's similar to how I tend to operate, but that's my take on hir character, anyway.