Beacon of positivity is more frail than Magma Rager 
You guys have a point, I guess it’s just really really sad to see a person insult real people over their opinion of a fictitious character.
That said, I am not sure what else I can add to this particular discussion. There’s a finite set of facts and some conclusions one can draw. Past that, it’s a matter of personal interpretation, as I would argue is the case with all fiction. You state your opinion, which is fine, but you can only go so far before it becomes circular.
Well you haven’t exactly reacted to those parts about Evolution missions.
That’s our main focus. Infestation and attacking urban areas.
And comparison to Mengsk is irrelevant. You don’t need to compare evil of Charles Manson and Anders Breivik.
You are right about the interpretation of “Kaldir outcome” being left to personal opinion since she actively prevented it. But I think it’s important to note that she no longer had token force because of our knowledge of canon order.
Which I am not fan of even though it helps me drive my point.
I went Kaldir-Char-Zerus. Almost polar opposite. (Get important strains before I show Zag who’s the Queen Bi^ch, then Zerus.)
But one thing is for certain. Ghosting a facility might be much cleaner than Zerging it, but it is definitely slower. Especially since there was no nuke access. And cloaking module wasn’t present either. You got no mobile detectors in HotS, because there are no stealth units.
Eh, he wasn’t really even that abrasive if I browse my memory.
I mean I am getting super vigilant once Time becomes prickly, because THAT is unusual.
Usually the best way is to call Gradius prick, he calls you wimp and everybody just moves on.
Damn, wasn’t expecting that overblown reaction. Pretty thick skin you’ve got there. It was literally just meant to be an analogy. Ive got better insults than calling someone an F student, lmao.
Who am I hating on again? Mass murderers in video games? 
If all fiction was completely subjective there’d be no difference between Shakespeare and fan fiction, nobody would take classes to write better, and publishers would have no criteria.
If you want to have your opinion, cool. If you want to discuss it on a forum, you should do it objectively.
“Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18.” – Albert Einstein.
Your appointment of your own opinion as “objective” unfortunately puts your behavior under this observation because leaving it to yourself to define objectivity is an expression of “common sense.”
Fiction is subjective. All artistry is subjective. JS Bach in his lifetime was regarded as a mediocre composer lower than his eldest son, who was also a composer. He was forgotten, rediscovered in a church attic long after his death by great composer Felix Mendelssohn, and Mendelssohn realized this was pure gold and went on a giant tour through Europe to spread the word. This is when Bach became immortal. If it wasn’t for that, JS Bach would have been forgotten. JS Bach is one of the top 5 classical composers, period. Nobody right now would even entertain the notion that his eldest son holds a candle up to him. But in his life, he just wasn’t seen that way. How, exactly, is this “objective?”
Stephen King and JK Rowling got many rejection letters from literary agents when they were starting out who told them they were utter garbage and wouldn’t make it anywhere. Those literary agents ate crow. But, in the literary world, an agent is the gatekeeper that determines which writer will live and which writer will work as a janitor. The ones that represented King and Rowling made fortunes, but King and Rowling had to first approach them in the most polite and meticulous manner and convince them of the merits of their work, when equally competent agents saw absolutely no merit in it. Where is this “objectivity” you speak of?
The USSR and Germany under Adolf had political disciplines such as “German physics” which had no academic merit and wholly collapsed once the regimes fell. All those possessing degrees from these disciplines were essentially regarded as uneducated. But during the regimes, they had full academic standing, wielded power, and had prestige in society. If “objectivity” is in play, this would not be possible.
So yeah, history simply does not agree with your opinion because winners write the history and tons of very talented artists are either never discovered or die in obscurity to become prominent decades or even hundreds of years after they die. If artistry was “objective” this would never happen.
You’re answering non-hostile speech with hostile speech completely inappropriate as a reaction to it. This also seems to be the observation of other folks in here. If you like using hostility, that’s your choice, but I don’t think we should be talking to each other. If you do want to talk to me, please keep it civil or past your response to this I won’t read or respond to another post by you.
Her behavior in the evolution missions is to mercilessly kill her enemies as an experiment and she makes the Brood Mothers who wish to return to the fold go destroy at least one Dominion world as proof of their intent. So, it would be accurate to say that she is utterly ruthless to her enemies.
There’s a point that I thought of this morning that I didn’t think of before. Despite her powers, Kerri is human in behavior, and in humanity, the more power you get, the worse a person you become. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The great leaders in history who do not fall to this pattern are very highly regarded, such as Churchill and Gandhi. But they’re rare.
When Kerri ascends to Xel’naga, she chooses to end the endless cycle to let everybody have freedom to pursue their own destiny. She then prepares some stuff for two years and spirits Jim Raynor away for a happy retirement.
If she was following the power pattern of most humans, she would have become Amon II. And since she was the only one who could stop Amon – the universe would end. Nobody could stop her.
I can’t really think of a counter to this. If she is the colossal scumbag that a lot of you believe her to be, why does she end her tenure at the utter apex of power altruistically? Nobody can stop her at that point, and the Swarm would willingly follow her if she wanted to conquer the universe, (Zagara even asks her if she wants to do this at one point,) but she considers what she actually does to be the counterbalance to her misdeeds in teh past, does the part Ouros asked her to do, and simply vanishes.
If she is a total scumbag with absolute power, this doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t. If she’s a scumbag and she wants to cause a lot of havoc and nobody can stop her – then she’ll go demolish her a universe.
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There are other types of Evil besides Chaotic.
We have a vastly different view on good evil.
…
I’d summarize mine through these quotes to keep
“A good act does not wash out the bad , nor a bad the good .”
(GRRM through) Stannis Baratheon.
You don’t get a pardon for a bad deed, just because you have done it with a good intent.
Yeah, yeah Macchiaveli said:
“For although the act condemns the doer, the end may justify him…”
If you take this up to eleven, then Mengsk saved the universe by getting Kerrigan infested, because it gave her the first powerboost.
Meh, there’s a difference between a heated debate and hostility. You’ll know when I’m being hostile.
I see how you could have misinterpreted my F student remark as hostile, so I apologize for that. It was literally just an analogy to make a point. Obviously I know nothing about you, so no need to get offended.
But asking you to put forth an argument instead of chalking everything up as subjective isn’t remotely hostile. From my perspective you’re using that as a cop-out/excuse to avoid defending your position even though you’re still here on the forum debating us.
There’s nothing more annoying than putting thought and effort into an argument during a conversation and then having someone ignore it all with “well, that’s just like, your opinion man”.
I’m open to being proven wrong though and attempt to make objective arguments. That’s way better than giving up and killing all chance of debate by pretending that your position is infallible just because fiction is subjective.
It’s not completely subjective though. Everyone can tell when a character is inconsistent, or there’s a retcon, etc.
If you don’t want to even do that, why talk to us? We already know your opinion. Do you just want validation for liking Kerrigan?
Yeah and what’s wrong with that. We’re discussing fiction not physics.
Objective doesn’t mean “mathematical”. You can be objective while discussing an art form.
So your argument is that popularity and objectively good writing aren’t correlated. Great! I agree. That’s why there are novels with crap grammar and poor writing that people gobble up.
The problem with SC2 defenders that treat criticism of the game as barbarians at the gates is that they can’t distinguish what is good from what they personally like. I like Transformers and Dragon Ball Z. But I’m not going to argue or disagree with people who trash its writing.
I literally never said fiction wasn’t subjective. 
That’s not how that works. I’m known for not sugarcoating and I definitely am not afraid to bring the heat in a debate but I’m I bear no ill will or hold any grudges from thread to thread. I don’t care enough about you to go out of my way to insult you.
Rather than me worrying about what other innocuous comment of mine will throw you for a loop, I’ll carry on as normal and you can add me to your ignore list. But since this a public forum I’m allowed to respond to your posts for whoever’s reading.
Gradius apologized. Non-sarcastically.
It’s a miracle! Praise The Emperor.
Final days are coming. Mengsk be with us.
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I’m a firm believer in only apologizing when you’ve done something wrong. In this case it was the way I framed my response.
Heh. Don’t worry I will let everyone new know when you are actually hostile. If they don’t notice.
Well, I very much appreciate your response and I hope we can talk in the future without snafus.
Subjective interpretation is not an observation as cop-out. For example, in the last post I pointed out that Kerrigan, upon gaining absolute power, did not go the way Ouros (and the prophecies) meant her to, which was to continue the endless cycle. She went a step beyond this and ended the cycle so everybody could be free, and then she vanished.
My interpretation of this is she did this to atone for what she had done in the past and then did nothing bad with her absolute power, she set things right and just spent the rest of eternity in peace and quiet with Raynor, which is what she wanted before being captured by the Zerg on Tarsonis. My reasoning is that as Xel’naga she could do absolutely anything to absolutely anybody without any possibility of her being punished. The fact taht she took this limitless power, did not become corrupted by it and did not destroy everybody she felt like destroying is proof that she isn’t a bad person.
Since you want to test my subjective interpretation, let’s compare Kerri and her Xel’naga absolute power to actual historical humans who also gained absolute power. Adolf took Germany on a trip to enslave or gleefully murder the whole planet while throwing undesirables such as liberals, priests, gypsies and Jews in death camps where they were systematically starved to death and exterminated in gas chambers that used gas to kill people over 30 minutes in the most excruciatingly painful manner possible. Many millions were systematically exterminated in this way. Adolf’s head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, believed that doing that made one a “decent person,” which he explicitly stated in a speech to his SS. Adolf’s regime explicitly rejected thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition, stating that if you can take it, then might makes right; he openly embraced evil for no greater reason than because he was strong enough to take what he wanted by force, and he was PROUD of it.
Mao Zedong was and still is worshipped as a god by the communist Chinese. There are places in China with gold statues of him that people kow-tow to like idols. His personal physician was by mistake allowed to leave China with his family and wrote a book, “the Private Life of Chairman Mao” where he detailed what Mao was really like. Mao, for example, welcomed nuclear war and regarded the atom bomb as a “paper tiger:” “The Americans cannot afford to lose 350 million people. We easily can.” His political opponents were terrorized publicly, tortured, and executed. His most hated rival, he had brutally tortured to death, had the torture filmed, and repeatedly watched it. His policies caused vast suffering, for example his regime killed 60 million Chinese via starvation, there was tons of food literally rotting in the capital and he simply allowed those people to die. The descendants of these people worship him as a god.
Stalin starved 30 million people in a terror famine in the Ukraine, the world’s breadbasket. The victims were systematically isolated, so nobody even realized other people were being killed. During the course of his terror regime, people were dragged out of their homes in the night and never seen again. The net grew ever-wider, because in his increasingly psychotic paranoia Stalin regarded the families and friends of the people he killed as potential threats, also to be exterminated – and then THOSE people’s families and friends. The Siberian Gulag “housed” political dissidents and undesirables in the same way as Adolf’s death camps.
Pol Pot in his Khmer Rouge Cambodia murdered literally 1/4th of his country with an emphasis on skilled labor because he wanted to go to “Year 0” as an idealistic farmer’s utopia and this required murdering anybody who wasn’t a farmer, who maybe wore glasses or had smooth hands and such. The Vietnamese – who were themselves communists, like him – finally invaded and overthrew his terror-state. Cambodia even today struggles to recover from Pol Pot, because they have a chronic shortage of professionals such as doctors and attorneys.
That’s absolute power, and Kerri had even MORE absolute power because unlike these paranoid psychos she really WAS beyond reach. Nobody could touch her, the Swarm would back her, she could settle all her scores, kill everybody, and they could do literally nothing to stop her. Yet, in sharp contrast to the real “human beings” I listed above, she instead ended the endless cycle, killed nobody else and simply went into retirement with Jim.
That’s my subjective interpretation. Skehan (and I am guessing you) still firmly believes she is evil, simply in a different way than what I was pointing towards. I suspect even if I offered a whole novel of relevant facts, that STILL wouldn’t convince you guys, because in the end you simply believe what you believe. You don’t need to feel shame in this because this is completely normal.
Skehan concludes one thing, I conclude another thing, you conclude your thing, and there’s basically nowhere more to go with this point. We’d just keep re-stating the same thing with some variation and it would become circular.
So, as tl;dr, I am not sure how it is a cop-out to point this out, because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to go. We simply BELIEVE something about Kerri and are unable to go further.
While this is getting really off-topic, I think especially the above examples, this is where we can bring in Mengsk and account for HIS success: the way you DO get convinced is when a charismatic politician gets on the podium and you get behind him because he impresses and inspires you. Ironically, the argument of a speech before a crowd tends to be much less logical and much more emotional, but that’s how you actually DO convince people.
This, unfortunately, is why guys like Mengsk get up on top. Listen to the end cinematic of the Terran campaign in SC1, he is charismatic as hell and the speech is excellent – and you can get wrapped up in it even though you KNOW Mengsk is utterly evil and he does not mean well for these people. The catch is, the people in the game – the Terran Dominion – do not know it, they just hear a brilliant leader.
Without that in play, you make your point, I make my point, we shake hands and we go and talk about something else in SC. I just have to point out that Kerrigan is hardly the only topic of discussion possible. It’s simply the point in this particular thread, and I am not sure the OP would have expected for it to go on this long.
I like Kerri’s campaign, but as a human being I severely dislike violence and Zerg is not my favorite faction at all. They are vicious, opportunistic and savage killers which by Zurvan’s statement kill or be killed and have no loyalty except to self. What I DO like about Kerri is she infused them with human concepts that ended up making them stronger than before. The thing I like about SCII is the Kerri-Raynor romance, and back to the very start of this thread, the reason he loves her is because he’s a man who loves a woman, and there have been women much worse than her that still had the guy hooked. In Elizabeth Bathory’s true, historic case, she preserved her youthful appearance by murdering virgins and bathing in their blood. This isn’t Starcraft but rather a real woman who murdered other real women and filled her tub with their real blood.
As far as art not being completely subjective, I am afraid I can’t agree. Stephenie Meyer is widely considered to be an awful writer (Stephen King decimated her) but she sold very very well because of her sparkly vampire gimmick. So, there are people who believe she is wonderful, and how do you convince a Twilight fan that the books suck? They’ll call you an expletive, and that’s the end of that. There are many writers much better than her that didn’t sell as well. Marketing and raw reputation in entertainment are the reason for this.
Going back to classical music, Google some Beethoven criticisms by his contemporary critics, that is, music critics from the time he was alive. If you were a music critic saying these things today, you’d become a joke and your career would end. But when Beethoven was alive and before his reputation cemented, they criticized him and were in the public’s eye valid for the same reason today’s critics can criticize an emerging artist and be valid, even if later his stature becomes basically beyond reproach. Success and reputation makes an artist more immune to criticism, because people “get on board” wtih a lot of other people; that doesn’t seem to be objective at all.
I am very sorry I did not directly reply to several of your posts, I had my hands writing out the giant one to Gradius. I do believe most of your points are addressed in it; if you feel otherwise, let me know.
Fun fact: Ouros asks her to continue the cycle before she ascends. Later he declares it broken.
She already has everything she wants and her story was over. It was during HoTS where she had to make harder decisions where her character really showed.
If Hitler took over the world and accomplished all his goals, he’d spend his time kissing babies and handing out trophies. Doesn’t mean he’s not a bad dude.
I mean, see above. She killed far more with far less too the last expansion. What is she going to do, kill Mengsk a second time?
I don’t understand why she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for going into retirement.
In SC1 her excuse was infestation warping her mind. That’s something that could convince me that it at least makes sense. In HoTS she doesn’t have that excuse.
Maybe if there was some lore stating that she was mentally insane the whole time and nobody called her out because they feared repercussion, I’d alter my stance. But really, there’s not much you can do to forgive mass murder.
She did that back in Brood War, but we didn’t have to deal with the conundrum of having her humanity back, yet out there murdering innocent people.
I like your history knowledge. However, I’m sure someone pointed out how f*ked their relationship was if she was taking baths in other people’s blood. Nobody really says anything to Kerrigan except her victims.
Here’s some concepts along the same vein from the field of science:
Lamarckism - the idea that an organism can pass on traits that it has acquired during its lifetime. Replaced by evolution.
Margarine - once believed to be healthy, now we know it causes coronary artery disease.
Classical physics - superseded by quantum physics & relativity.
Hollow earth theory, geocentric universe, etc. etc.
Even now there’s a reproducibility crisis in science. There’s too many studies that wouldn’t give you the same results if you repeated, and too many studies funded/influenced by non-objective third parties. Half of researchers will admit it too.
Science is supposed to be one of the most objective areas of study we have. Given that it has so many pitfalls, are you really going to criticize when this happens in the area of art?
There’s a whole host of explanations for critics disagreeing with each other. The most obvious one being that they’re evaluating for taste and what they like vs. what’s actually good.
Think about it, if writing was completely 100% subjective, then, nobody would take classes to learn to be a better writer, publishing companies wouldn’t have standards/criteria, IMDB ratings would all be homogenous/random.
Why are there TV shows or books that are universally agreed upon as being good? Sure, you’ve got popular crap like Twilight, but there are also popular shows and movies that are pretty much universally accepted as being well-written.
Provoking an emotional reaction is ultimately the goal of writers and will help determine its popularity, but people can still tell the difference between whether it’s good or not, like I can with Transformers & DragonBall Z. Writers that subvert tropes are given more accolades that writers that are formulaic (unless said formula is new). Writers that build worlds, create rich characters, make interesting plots are usually rewarded, provided the marketing is there too.
It’s clearly not just marketing though. Countless films have failed at the box office because the writing didn’t hold up even though they had the $hit marketed out of them. Most people agree that Avengers is a better movie than Batman vs. Superman even though it got a ton of marketing. It’s not all completely random.
Well, she didn’t go into retirement, she spearheaded war on an evil god, his evil god servant, and their countless minions to save the universe and THEN went into retirement after putting his tentacles in the ground.
In the real world, Yasser Arafat was co-awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for almost concluding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Except, he started a war before the peace process was complete to gain leverage, it backfired on him, everything fell apart, and the two factions are still warring to this day. The people I’ve talked to think when the process is eventually re-engaged, the Israelis will be only able to offer what Yasser Arafat was offered; all the blood spilled since the last process will have been for nothing.
If we’re going by Nobels, since Arafat got to keep his Nobel for that, I think Kerri safely deserves hers for at least completing her version of the process. She DID rescue the universe, whatever atrocities she might have committed.
I am very sorry, the prophecies Zeratul was going by are over my head. I never really fully got the sense of those.
I am afraid he would have done no such thing.
Hitler’s intent was to enslave the entire world as lebensraum for his blond haired blue eyed hordes and brutally rule over them and complete his extermination of undesirables. Had he won, civilization including the sciences would have been snuffed out or perverted, we would have had a second Dark Age and the whole planet would have turned into one big Auschwitz as he and his merciless minions massacred all undesirables. All the Jews, “mud people,” “brownskins,” you name it. If you aren’t an ubermenschen, you’re a slave or dead. Hitler wasn’t really hiding this. Read Mein Kampf if you don’t believe me, and get ready for many-page rants about syphilis.
I just have to point out again that Kerri gained her absolute power and instead of going psycho iwth that power she ended the cycle, gave everybody their freedom and went into retirement. NOT what Hitler was planning after subjugating everybody. What the two did with absolute power was polar opposites. He was not atoning for anything ,but she was.
Thank you for the bit about the history.
He actually temp-dumped her because he thought that her second stint as the QoB was the same person as the first. When she told Valerian that she would do her best to allow him to evacuate the civilians so that millions wouldn’t die, Raynor realizes she actually still IS his Sarah and takes her back in the course of feeding Mengsk his teeth.
I know that high quality is different than low quality. I know that War and Peace or Shakespeare are not Meyer’s Twilight. I am not trying to bust you up with this, i am simply pointing out that all sorts of variables go into accepting or rejecting art as excellent. In Hitler’s Germany you couldn’t listen to Felix Mendelssohn because he was a Jew. Didn’t matter how good he was. In Israel, when Wagner (very evil Hitler-lover composer whose music was nevertheless spectacular) was first played by the symphony, it was a national uproar and literally half the audience walked out. Wagner and Mendelssohn were not being judged based on their art but who they were, though in Wagner’s case his sheer putridity as a person has made that an enduring legacy. More broadly, lack of marketing or popular caprice can keep an excellent person from being discovered for a while.
This doesn’t mean they’re not excellent, but it effectively snuffs out their career until like 50 years after they die and they die thinking they failed when they didn’t. This is a horrible pattern with all the arts, and it just sucks because who knows how many Shakespeares instead got a job as a plumber because they were afraid their wife and kids would starve.
There is also the difference between what a person tries to get out of art. Some people want light-hearted stuff, other people want tons of hidden meaning and advanced points, which dramatically increases quality but usually makes the work more intellectually draining and dense. While a Nobel Prize for Literature might be awarded to an excellent writer, he or she will likely never be known as well as JK Rowling because her books are not written to be compete with something like War and Peace, which takes I think 3 months to read and your head will be splitting open.
As far as the scientific examples you’re providing, I am unfortunately not versed in the sciences. I am not ignoring your points, I simply don’t for example know what classical physics have as a difference from quantum physics and relativity.
Back to the original point, I thought up some answers while watching 6 hours of streams for the current Overwatch event.
In the cinematic that begins HotS you see the creatures by scale in comparison to each other: how big a marine is, how big a zergling is, how big a Viking is, how big a Siege Tank is, how big a Leviathan is, how big an ultralisk is, how big a defeated battlecruiser crashing into the city is. By this cinematic, we can see the size and scale of these units in a realistic setting, against each other and against a human city.
A single battlecruiser, despite its supply of six marines, is essentially the size of a small town. If you look at the pictures of battlecruisers in space, the size of the lit-up windows also attests to this. The swarms of mutalisks and scourge drawn in loading screens make it look like there are millions of them. The numbers in this game in proportion to numbers of people on earth make it really seem that a “planet” in SC is a “city” in the real world. So, for the sake of this we need to view “core worlds” and “fringe worlds” as “Terran cities” due to the scope of the army sizes, the size of the battles, and the size of population centers.
I think these numbers have to be established because we’re skipping around with that. Frankly, so is the campaign. The size of the battles, the size of the militaries, the numbers of civilians lost are shrunk or expanded between the lore, the cinematics, and the actual battles you fight. If you carefully listen to Raynor, Kerri and the news in canon describing how many lives Kerri took, they literally sometimes say “millions” and sometimes say “billions.” Go through the WoL campaign and pay attention to that, it’s there. The number of people lost is VERY different between “millions” and “billions.” You can have 999 million and that’s less than 1 billion. One would think they’d be consistent with such a thing. The fact that there is so much voice-recorded discrepancies regarding this strongly suggests to me that this is part the writers’ snafu, and part the campaign writers themselves not even caring about the exact numbers of Kerri’s casualties beyond simply trying to impress on the player that they were enormous.
This is at the center of the problems you have with this fictitious character, so I think we need to establish that the people actually writing the story didn’t seem to be stuck on that part of her concept, or the discrepancies wouldn’t have made it to the point where the voice actors and actresses recorded them into the game. I think the central point to Kerri is:
“This is someone who got a very bad hand dealt to her in life, did a lot of very bad things both voluntarily and involuntarily, and ended up doing something extraordinary to atone for what she did. Something so extraordinary that no one else could do it, and if she had died everything else would have died too. She both spoke of the need to be held accountable for her actions ,and acted upon that self-expressed need for accountability.”
There actually is no real compunction by a lot of military entities in the real world to keep civilians away from combat. This is because you have the terrorists and tyrant rulers, who DELIBERATELY keep the civilians there, both as human shields and for propaganda reasons. It is a standard tactic by scumbags in the Middle East to use mosques, hospitals, and schools filled with small children as sites to launch attacks from. Tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Bashir Assad do this, as do terrorist entities like Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad. When you have no choice but attack anyway, the deaths of these human shields and the destruction of the sites are used as propaganda about how terrible the scumbags’ enemies are. If you do not attack, they use these sites as staging areas to kill your men, until you do attack.
If you think I am unfairly singling out the Middle East, this was also done in World War II and many other wars. When the end was near for Adolf’s Germany, they “recruited” small children to fire at the Allied troops, both because they had no soldiers left and to diminish Allied morale by forcing them to shoot five year olds. Stalingrad, the site of the deciding battle of World War II, was deliberately not evacuated by Stalin before the battle, and considering that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the ground was only a few minutes long and the fighting was so intense that dogs went mad and commited suicide by jumping into the river, yeah, almost all those civilians died. These soldiers were killing up a bloodbath fighting with howling-mad intensity for literally every yard with anything from machine guns to shovels, and the bastard didn’t bother to evacuate the civilians.
So, that’s definitely where Mengsk is written to get that from, and no, Kerri really can’t pull her punches any more than real world people could when the Megsks of the world shoot their rocket launchers out of elementary schools. We could not have defeated Adolf without shooting at 5 year old children. This is a real-life fact. So, how do you expect the Queen of the Zerg to defeat Starcraft’s Adolf without shooting the civilians he’s hiding behind much like we the Americans had to?
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Mengsk ain’t space Hitler, he persecutes people to retain his power, no because of some monstrous ideology.
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Wagner died before Hitler was even born, and while he did have anti-semitic opinions, it was more complex than Hitler’s “destroy them all” view on it.
There is a big difference tho : WW2 wasn’t fought with the only intention of killing Hitler, it was fought to crush Germany, eradicate her militaristic and nationalist components rooted in Prussian history, make sure that no jingoist movement may rise again in this nation who was already accused of causing the First World War. Hitler was in the Allies’s eyes a symptom of German nationalism and mindset, the Sonderweg, not the root of the problem, so simply killing him with an assassination (which was feasible) was useless because it wouldn’t hinder the German War machine, on the contrary it would put a more competent man in charge.
Kerrigan isn’t fighting a war against the Dominion, she has a personal vendetta against its leader, and decided that instead on relying on assassination, something she can do, she will use an alien force to wage war all to get to one man, which is gross overkill.
There’s also the differences in terms of warfare between WW2 and HotS :
1- Kerrigan doesn’t need to destroy several civilian worlds to reach Korhal unlike the Allies who had to cross Germany to reach Berlin.
2-Her army is made of mindless drones who are bred to die and are easily replacable, so she doesn’t have to care about casualties like the Allies had with their soldiers (she can sacrifice millions of pods during the initial attack just to have a few land on the surface and it doesn’t affect her ability to wage war), and furthermore she doesn’t need to actually destroy the Dominion’s war machine because it will never compete with the Swarm in terms of production rate, especially since the actual attack of Korhal is short and she has a blockade around the planet : the attack on the industrial worlds was entirely pointless on a strategical level.
TL:DR : She doesn’t need to start a war to kill Mengsk, and even if she does there are still paths with less civilian casualties that she still chose to use.
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No one did. Those who say that do either lie or are high as a kite.
Had Hitler won, the whole world wouldn’t turn into Auschwitz. Because if he had won, the death camps would eventually succeed in their horrifying purpose.
Regarding the numbers.
There is something called gameplay and lore segregation.
Also sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. In Starcraft time and population are the most glaring examples.
Also, everything Marsaro said.
In HotS it boils down to Mengsk, because you don’t fight an ideology. It is popular trope in fantasy and sci-fi.
You beat Sauron/Voldemort/Galbatorix/Sith Emperor and you win.
But as much as some softies nowadays want it to be different, Allies had to beat Germans to a bloody pulp, because they were not mindless drones. They were complicit. It wasn’t just Hitler.
Meanwhile Kerrigan doesn’t go after Dominion, it’s Mengsk. She even lets Valerian keep the name.
There is a reason why Germans are extremely apologetic (rightfully so) for all that happened and Soviets (Russians etc.) are not.
Because the ideology and the mindset were truly beaten, not disassembled from within.
Kerrigan doesn’t have an ideology, she could not care less about the well being of the average Terran or the ethics of thier government structure. it’s about her personal revenge on one dude.
Which, ironically is the exact line of thinking that WoL rejects when it has Raynor spend his revenge bullet saving Kerrigan.
HotS is a thematic mess.
I mean, HotS is about the Swarm, not the terrans. To that end, everything revolves around Kerrigan in a very literal way, with individuals not existing below the leadership level. That’s just fundamentally how the zerg are and how they see the world. Species are collectives, and the terrans are poor stupid things for not working like that.
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