On a fundamental level I’m okay with that, if say the main character was Zagara or Dehaka, but Kerrigan is a Terran. We can’t divorce human morality from the equation when the main character is a human.
I think Kerrigan comes to identify as zerg again extremely early in the story. Especially given the canon order of Char-Zerus-Kaldir, its pretty explicit that she considers herself inextricably tied to the Swarm.
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Well, heck, you’re right. I thought for a long time that Hitler was friends with Wagner and attended Wagner’s funeral. I need to look into this more. Was there another Wagner or something?
I can’t quite agree with this. Had Hitler been assassinated before World War II began, there would have been a localized limited war, but nothing like what happened. Hitler took over control of Germany’s army and made the command decisions. While later in the war this was to the Allies’ advantage because he was being an idiot, at the outset of the war Hitler made – and won – a number of spectacular gambles and made enormous conquests through Blitzkrieg. He executed Anschluss to take Austria, bullied France and the UK into a number of treaties he broke, and got Czechoslovakia handed to him, and that’s significant because they were armed and fortified to the teeth and even Germany would have had issues taking them. Then, he spectacularly took all of Europe. This wasn’t as much his General Staff but him as an individual.
The situation on the ground was that only the UK was left to stand against the monster, and everybody expected Western civilization to go the way of the dodo. Churchill is widely believed to have saved the world by leading the UK to resist Germany. Without Hitler’s actions up to this point, the situation would never have been as grave. So, I can’t agree that Germany was the problem and not Hitler in particular. Had he been neatly shot in the face in a back alley, the horror that was WWII would not have happened.
This is a point I addressed in my last post to Gradius. The explanation is quite extensive, so I request that you read it and decide if it answers the point you’re making here. If you believe I have not adequately addressed what you’re saying, let me know and I’ll answer your remaining concerns.
In order to smash an enemy you need to take out their means of producing armaments agaisnst you. Destroying the Dominion war machine was as essential as it was essential in WWII to destroy Hitler and Japan’s factories which produced tanks, machine guns, armaments. This is because if these factories are destroyed, the enemy cannot attack you with what the factories produce.
I know that in the game itself, a Marine’s Gauss rifle essentially has infinite bullets. But in greater realism, those bullets have to come from somewhere. Siege Tanks have to be maintained, and those shock cannons shoot shells that have to come from factories. Destroy the factories and the enemy has nothing to fire. It seems bizarre to me that you believe that Kerri could fight a more efficient war without getting rid of Mengsk’s military production and storage than with it. She has every reason to get rid of thsoe things to hamstring her opponent, and in the real world this is a staple of every conventional war.
This is kinda like the Battle of Britain where Churchill’s Brits successfully prevented Hitler from landing on and conquering the UK: All Hitler had to do was get his foot in the door by taking a bit of beach and his forces could land and conquer the UK and all the world would be cast into darkness. The battle was aerial, and the Brits successfully prevented Hitler from establishing the position.
I am essentially arguing the reverse by sides, because Mengsk is the tyrant and Kerri is the person fighting the tyrant but to take Korhal, Kerri had to take a bit of Mengsk’s beach so she could deploy her whole forces. Just as Hitler had to hit the UK with everything to take that bit of beach, so did Kerri have to hit Mengsk with everything. That is because the enormous losses to take that bit of beach led to the deployment of the rest of the army, which was absolutely essential to victory.
He would have killed everybody in his current undesirables list, then turn his psychosis onto a new undesirable enemy and killed everybody of them. For example, I am sure that he would have stuck the Indians into the concentration camps because of their brown skin. There were 350 million of them back then.
Hitler was a monster with no humanity in him. If you think he’s too squeamish or merciful to kill tons of people when it’s within his power to do so, unfortunately that’s not what he was.
Okay, but I hope you see the difficulty for me in addressing your concerns. You believe that Kerri is a monster becasue she killed tons of people, but the game writers don’t even seem to care enough about the numbers to keep the numbers straight. Your point is the casualties she caused was enormous but the writers sometimes say millions of casualties, sometimes it’s billions of casualties. You’re saying that
But how do I address your point of large numbers when the numbers are not kept straight?
My point for the last several posts has been that yes, she committed atrocities but she knew she had to take responsibility for her actions and ended up saving the universe. With absolute power, a human monster will never make that choice. It’s something a person does when they’re not a monster. I realize I am repeating this point, but it all sort of goes back to it.
I don’t care as much about Kerrigan’s mental issues as the fact that the story was so poorly thought-through that none of the characters acknowledge this problem in universe.
Horner never says anything about Raynor dating the deranged queen of the bug monsters. Valerian never calls her out for slaughtering whole planets, he’s just happy with the scraps that Kerrigan gives him. Swann & the rest of Raynor’s crew should be disgusted tbh.
Metzen explicitly wrote Raynor as a good guy, so you can’t resort to the he was in love excuse:
“I love the idea of Raynor as the one honest man in the universe and this kind of honest cowboy dude being swept up in these events, and to some degree his sense of justice, sense of right and wrong, just inanimately who he is, factoring into these larger events.”
https://youtu.be/PrZ7ETUvzb8
“Metzen introduces “the one honest man in the universe,” Jim Raynor”
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/tricia-helfer-starring-in-starcraft-ii/1100-6216009/
Saying “he was in love” is a disservice to who he is as a character. He’s had a frickin wife before. That he lived and had kids with. Hanson threw herself at him. He’s not so whipped that he’s going to ignore Kerrigan’s heinous actions. He betrayed Arcturus for killing ONE planet, whereas Kerrigan got several during HoTS.
All because he fought with her for a couple months. At which point she turned into queen of the bug monsters and murdered his best friend along with a bunch of innocents. At that point the “love story” was over.
Then we get to human Kerrigan herself:
“I just don’t think anyone deserves to have the Zerg unleashed on them.”
~Kerrigan, SC1
During the intro she has nightmares about being the queen of blades and is supposed to have regret for her past actions. So then we’re supposed to believe that just because Raynor died she picks up where she left off and uses zerg against humanity once again.
Way to get every character wrong. HoTS is just a cluster-fu** of lazy writing & execution.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the atrocities you insist she must have been committing off screen where we couldn’t see them, weren’t actually there? If your assumptions cause the story to stop making sense, the problem is in your assumptions, not the story. Kerrigan isn’t out to murder civilians, overrun cities and eat entire planets. Insisting that she must have done so because she’s evil and that’s just what the zerg do is unsupported. The zerg do what she wants them to do. If that means fighting war in a more conventional manner, by ignoring targets with no military value even if theyre nearby, then theyre going to do it.
Well, he dumped her at the end of HotS because she went to being the Queen of Blades. He didn’t want to be with what killed his best friend.
Then took her back when he realized she was trying to keep the civilian casualties down, so though she was queen of the bug monsters again, her personality was that of the human woman he loved.
I think Mengsk had to be overthrown for everybody’s sake, especially since he was in cahoots with Narud to manufacture hybrids. Yes, Kerri spilled blood to take him down, but so did Raynor. A lot of people died in his campaign against Mengsk, I didn’t see it as out of character for him to finish the job.
As far as her spilling blood, that’s beyond dispute, although she knows early on she wants to answer for it, and going up against Amon after killing Mengsk was how she chose to do taht.
Edit: As to your point that Horner never says antyhing, technically that’s not quite true. In the non-canon Nova mission to kill Tosh, Horner asks Raynor, “Don’t you know any NORMAL girls?!” Admittedly, this is non-canon, though.
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I’m not assuming anything, you’re just ignoring evidence. We already know her attitude towards saving civilians. She has to be asked to do it, or else she won’t. Or Raynor has to be watching her in the background.
Valerian : Promise me, you’ll avoid the civilian center.
Kerrigan : I can’t do that. Arcturus would see that pattern in my movements and use it against me.
Valerian : You’re right, Kerrigan, they will. If I’m to be that leader, I will ask only one thing for you. Bring your Swarm down outside the city. That will give us time to evacuate.
Kerrigan : Korhal is going to be the most difficult battle of my life, and you’re asking me to make it harder?
And we already know she attacked civilian targets. Planets with military industrial complexes are going to have a crap ton of innocent people. There’s cocooned colonist doodads, etc.
Plenty of evidence that Kerrigan killed civlians. You have to provide evidence of your own to counteract that. Can’t have a rational discussion if you just deny my evidence the whole time while providing none of your own.
As you yourself have said, civilians die in war. Its just an unavoidable truth. Your assumptions are that she’s going around deliberately murdering them just for being there, rather than some die because her ability to limit collateral damage is finite without risking victory entirely.
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But in both the conversations you list, the conversation concludes with Kerri agreeing to assist in the evacuation efforts to the extent that she can.
Well she did murder a whole planet of civilians just for being there. They weren’t Terrans, but still.
Assuming you refer to Kaldir, I dispute that. Lasarra was clearly not being entirely truthful to Kerrigan about what they were doing there, since their ship had a heavy Templar presence and their biomass samples are not at all consistent with their stated goals of altering lunar orbit for terraforming.
Plus, you know, they were all trying to have her brutally murdered by the Golden Armada, so it definitely wasn’t “just for being there”.
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Things Kerrigan could have done differently without risking civilians:
- Use assassination, not warfare.
- Leave the sector.
- If she has to take command of zerg, don’t go around slaughtering innocent colonies, go attack the city that Mengsk is in. Raynor did it just fine in WoL and beat back Mengsk’s best General’s strike teams.
- Don’t cocoon/infest colonists.
- Don’t infest entire planets.
Yes, I addressed that:
“We already know her attitude towards saving civilians. She has to be asked to do it, or else she won’t. Or Raynor has to be watching her in the background.”
It shows what her go-to stance is. It’s nice she was begged into it at the end of the game, but informs us of what happened the whole rest of the game.
Kerrigan didn’t know that though when she started invading. Would have been nice & more justifiable if she did. From her perspective, she’s waging mass warfare on an effective government that’s currently at peace.
All of these amount to “don’t wage war at all”, so if your definition of being a monster is “being a military commander” then I feel no need to engage you on this, because youre being entirely unreasonable.
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-_-
Only the first two amount to “don’t wage war”.
But ultimately that’s what it boils down to. Knowing that you’ll kill thousands/millions just because you hate one guy and then proceeding with it anyway is kinda evil.
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Don’t get me wrong, if I listed every curse I have for Hitler, I’d be banned on Blizz forums for eternity.
Just saying that in this horrid scenario eventually all undesirables would have been killed (including my Slav a^s). At some point in time there would be only “Aryans”.
I think in this particular case you might be reading into it too much.
I didn’t get the sense that this story has depth and obfuscation to little things like this. My guess is, she had her hands full with the big push and didn’t note this detail until it was pointed out to her.
There are many other cases in the campaign where she is uncomfortable with the pointless loss of life. For example, she asks Abathur to put failed experiments out of their misery and refuses Zagara’s request to destroy the Hyperion now that the humans have served their purpose. I am not saying there are plot holes, but I didn’t get the sense that Kerri was written to only care about people when someone begged her.
I am not sure Hemingway’s “tip of the iceberg” applies to this story. It seems to be more pop culture/comic book than an attempt at those heights.
She destroyed Skygeirr Station after Stukov called her to there and he explained everything that Narud did, with Mengsk’s help, if I recall correctly. Stukov listed Skygeirr as the second most fortified place in the Dominion, and you’re up against the Dominion military in taking it down.
I am pretty sure that’s exactly what the psycho would have done, sadly. I am very relieved he was defeated.
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I mean, I for once give you a pass on number 1 being war as well, because you muster forces.
I mean… in every timeine where she opts for assassination, Tosh is like…
“I am in, whether you want me or not.”
Well former Eastern bloc didn’t really change the management for something that was much better, but hey we got the reds out as well. Mostly.
So you think that the Allies in WWII were evil because they were fighting to usurp Hitler?
Kerrigan doesn’t claim any particular moral high ground, but neither do you have any actual evidence that her actions go any further than, say, the SoK did in Rebel Yell (sans the emitters). She’s waging a war of personal vengeance, but also because Mengsk will commit the entire Dominion to her personal destruction, and she isn’t obligated to take that.
As for assassination, that’s been tried, with backing from the Umojan government and elite enhanced ghosts and a super one-of-a-kind elite AI that he never really got around. It still didn’t work.
MarSaro explained it best:
We’re fighting against a corrupt system in Rebel Yell, not one guy. We also evacuated civilians in Rebel Yell. Kerrigan isn’t actually concerned with fighting a corrupt system in HoTS, and doesn’t give a crap about civilians in HoTS.