It’s not quite as ugly as when people were suggesting that Arthas be put in charge of her afterlife punishment.
But it’s pretty close.
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What do her choices have to do with whether or not Arthas has responsibility for his actions that made her what she is? This isn’t saying b/c someone did something wrong that shaped her into what she became that her guilt is lessened, it’s that Arthas has his own guilt for the abuse that went into creating the person she became. Sylv still has all her responsibility for her acts, but part of Arthas’ misdeeds are the ones that he did to her that at in part shaped what she became.
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That is based on a simplistic and absolutist idea of free will. If parents abuse a child so badly that he becomes a serial killer as an adult, they escape all blame then?
Free will as most people imagine it…doesn’t have much good reason to believe in. Heck much of the reason I’m posting is in reaction to posts, and so on. If we can’t be aware of our unconcious influences behind our decisions, who is to say that free will truly exists?
In “The Good Place” whether you got into Heaven or Hell was based on your relativebalance of positive and negative points.
You accrued points not only for your actions but for the consequences for those actions. Which is why with the world becoming more and more interrelated no one made it into the Good Place for over five centuries.
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They’re evidence that she’s acting on her own motivations, carrying things out of her own free will.
Arthas is not guilty for the actions of a person over which he has no control or power.
Just as a McDonald’s employee who denied service to a guy who refused to pay for his order is not responsible for said guy mugging someone for a bit of dosh.
What she became is what she chose to become.
You can sympathize with her reasons for doing it, but ultimately, as with all of us and everyone ever, what she would of herself make was in her hands.
They’re then responsible for being garbage parents and human beings, not for murder.
Because it was the child who decided to become a murderer and kill people.
And if you thought for a second about your hypothetical you would realize you’re necessarily disregarding every single person who ever rose above the travails of their upbringing – be it abuse, neglect, whatever – to impart good upon the world and become something better.
Then nobody is responsible for anything, because nobody has any free will and so none of this matters.
I am very disappointed to share a species with you people.
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Hmmm I can only think making Arthas the new Jailer and Jaina his Lich Queen as a happy ending.
As for the Mournblade we need to ask the Primus who the previous Jailer stole its design… Now that I think about it I don’t think we ever found out much about them… I know Sire D. or The Prince don’t use a Rune Blade… those seem different.
I’m still sour that DK din’t get any special reward for saving the SL… not even a cosmetic of a Mournblade… 
It means that assigning responsibility is more complicated than your need to enforce your misogyny.
And there are precedents for punishing parents for the misdeeds of their children.
People who “rise above” their bad beginnings generally do so… because they had help and support. We’re social creatures, it’s the increasing isolation of modern society which drives us insane.
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What the Hell is misogynist about insisting that a woman is responsible for the actions she performs?
Please, for the love of God and all that is, elaborate because I just don’t see it.
Do you think I’m saying Arthas isn’t responsible for making her an undead elf? Because I’m not nor have I ever been. But of that and her actions while enthralled by the Scourge are all for which he is responsible in her case.
Way to minimize the personal effort, focus and will required to move past such horrors.
I’d like to note that the afterlife in this franchise is cringe, boring and sucks so ceasing existence may actually be the happiest ending one can manage, and Garrosh is a gigachad for doing it to himself.
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And I’m talking about the things that Arthas did of his own free will to her.
Except she did not have a choice about being controlled and tortured by him, which did have a psychological impact that did influence her later actions. That is what he has responsibility for.
And I think you are giving excessive slack to the hypothetical parents and Arthas in the cases that don’t turn out better, in absolving them of guilt for their part in making that person into what they became. They may not have made the choices, but they normalized those choices to their victim in a way they may not have come to on their own.
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So like I’ve been saying, his actions directly upon her.
Not her actions after the fact, when she regained her free will and agency.
I was never asked what punishment I would upon said parents visit, only that they weren’t responsible for their child going on to become a murderer.
Maybe you should try asking that before extrapolating from thin air this fantasy about me.
When that standard is unevenly applied between two characters and the one that always gets the short end is the female one… its misogyny.
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What do you mean, I’m sure people have posted lots of torture fanfics about what they want done to Arthas like they have Sylvanas.
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I think there’s a second have guilt for that in the sense that if he hadn’t done what he did to her she would not have done what she later did. Nothing that takes away from her responsibility, just an additional level of responsibilty like say someone who sells says nerve gas to whoever can pay. You don’t know what they’ll end up doing with it, but they couldn’t have done that without your participation.
The only problem is that’s not something we can cleanly declare with any certainty. Would that person have thought to go violence as a solution if it was not taught to them as something normal by their parents?
They may not have done the killing, but there’s a good chance they put the idea that it was an acceptable solution to a problem in their child’s mind.
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And he did it “FOR THE HORDE”… Jeez that last scream, really hit hard more than it should have after all that he did (when I first saw that scene)… but man the Horde does need leaders like that… um, without the mass murder and all those crimes… IF even possible!
Not in this venue which is the only one I care about for the purposes of this discussion. We’ve had numerous posters for Sylvannas to be given the absolute fourth degree and that Arthas be put in charge of her punishment. Not ONE has been the reverse. And I’m not calling for that.
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Where is it being unevenly applied in this conversation concerning a female character and a male character, both of whom I have held as responsible for the actions they performed???
If you want an example of me applying it evenly, then here:
Doesn’t matter that Guts went through the Eclipse, he’s still a jerk for telling a young woman to kill herself.
A better one:
Doesn’t matter if a female Forsaken happens to have been a thrall under the Lich King during the Third War, she’s not responsible for her actions while of the Scourge’s forces a part.
Just as it doesn’t matter if a male Forsasken happened to have been a thrall under the Lich King during the Third War, he’s not responsible for hiss actions while of the Scourge’s forces a part.
In this hypothetical she wouldn’t have turned into a different person, she would just be dead. Arthas’ actions, while ultimately abominable, are still the only reason she’s even “alive”, insofar as an undead can be said to so be.
The difference being we’re talking more about personal character than we are selling lethal pathogens to all-comers. The resultant state of the pathogen will always be the same, a dangerous chemical compound; the resultant state of a person is not so concrete, as she of her own volition could seek aid from others from among her factions ranks in pursuit of a less destructive and monstrous means of coping with her dire situation.
And she still could have been a monster had she been left alive after the defilation of the Sunwell, unlikely as her surviving it at all is. Because ultimately, whatever she was to become is still in her hands, and she still has in her the capacity to seek aid for her mental anguish.
It is.
If they didn’t kill anybody, then they aren’t murderers.
Violence, despite what society would like you to believe, is always an option. It’s not always the morally good one, it’s not always the morally negative one, nor is it always neutral, it simply is.
And he’s not an animal bereft of the capacity for higher thought, he’s still a human, still capable of rationality, of logic, and so him coming to the conclusion that he must murder is, barring some form of developmental disability or other shortcoming of mental faculties, his own.
His parents are not free of guilt, however. They are guilty of the abuse they put upon him, of all that they did to him while they raised him, and for the crime of so disabusing a child of the capacity to exist in human society ought they be punished.
But guilt by association the likes of which would pin murder upon others who neither facilitated in some way nor had any active part in the act is entirely foolish, and serves to promote a culture of lacking personal responsibility, of weakened interpersonal connections, and isolation.
So we’re pinning murder on them because there’s a chance they could have put the idea into his head.
I should not need to tell you how ridiculous a notion that is.
You take out Arthas from her story she wouldn’t have been in the position to be killed.
But that’s not what is being argued.
The argument is that they shaped someone into someone who would go on to murder.
Missing the point.
There’s a difference between violence being an option, and someone who thinks of it as a normal tool in interpersonal interactions, as opposed to something that is reserved for extreme situations.
Since you keep arguing points I’m not making, yeah, it is pretty ridiculous.
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Yes, and I’ve never said Arthas isn’t responsible for killing her and raising her as a banshee.
And this necessarily ignores that there are people who undergo similar abuses and yet do not become murderers.
Hence my position.
The only meaningful difference being one is more likely to act upon it than the other.
Here’s what you said word for word:
Which is pinning some portion of responsibility, thus guilt, upon people who did not perform the action on the basis that there was, and once more I quote:
It’s exactly what you’re doing, whether in whole or in part, and in either case as foolish.
If it sounds stupid to you the way that I put it, then you should take that as cause to reflect upon your own beliefs and statements rather than waffle at me about people being responsible for, thus guilty of, things that they didn’t do.