Depends on the game’s treatment of it. If in WoW’s case, and I can’t seem to find any info firmly supporting either school of thought, it seems to frequently be. Because it often forces the corpse’s conciousness or soul to be along for the ride. Obviously making someone watch as a helpless passenger in their own body as you puppeteer it against their will is so evil there’s not a law on the books IRL to even describe it.
But seeing as there are Death Knights who are framed unambiguously as noble characters stuck with an ignoble circumstance I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think you can come in orbit of the word hero if you are somehow fusing rape and slavery into a combo crime against humanity every time you use half your spells.
So let’s just say for now, within Warcraft, it is totally feasible to make a zombie or ghoul or skellington or what have you that’s just meat and bone and whatever’s left of the brain to help operate it. The soul of that corpse is already in the Shadowlands and is not imprisoned, enslaved or tortured by this magic.
In such a case what would make an abomination different from any given golem? Yeah they’re made out of skin - and that’s a touch unsettling but even dirt has feelings in this world so it’s not like it’s really any more depraved than standard rock golems.
Or, what about raising a bunch of skeletal farmers to work fields and construct buildings? If it’s just bones animated through magic - what’s really the difference between that and an enchanted cleaning broom? People can talk to trees in this universe, and some trees can talk and walk and ruin your day if you make them mad. So how’s using lumber different from using humanoid bones?
And then of course there’s the Forsaken option. Where the soul is the corpse and now they’re just a person again. Which doesn’t even feel like necromancy that’s just unkilling a person. They still gotta deal with the side effects of being stabbed to death but, they’re not dead at least.
So what’s your take? Is using dead bodies as tools an inherently evil thing? Or if you’re just bending meat and bone to your will in the same way you’d use earth and water is it basically okay?
If it was a body without the soul animated by magic, I doubt many people in WoW would mind too terribly. A few raised eyebrows from some, but probably no real opposition.
The Forsaken option on the other hand is a pretty hard sell. I think I’d personally prefer to be raised into undeath if I were to die to natural causes, if for nothing else to sort out of affairs before just killing myself somehow, but I can see arguments about the ethical nature and morality of it being commonplace.
There’s an okay book called Mogworld, basically set in WoW, but I love the opening. The Forsaken are essentially created by a bad necromancer- and instead of them being loyal zombie servants they’re just people who have to be sold this job as a dark lord’s minion.
And several keep trying to kill themselves but it just results in the exasperated nurse sticking them back together again, because leaping from a tall building as an undead just means your head got blasted underneath a wagon from the impact and now you’ve to be pieced back together again.
The scariest thing about it which is not visited by WoW or that book is theoretically you could be crushed and trapped. And would just have to wait there for however long it took for someone or thing to free you.
In my RP stuff I’ve one Forsaken terrified of ocean travel. Because he got pinned onto the sea floor by a bit of sinking boat and it quickly dawned on him he’d be stuck there forever. Managed to escape that scenario but that idea never left.
I guess it depends on how one feels about the sanctity of remains. most communities probably aren’t going to be cool with a rando necromancer coming in and messing with their dead, regardless if you are enslaving or torturing somebodies soul.
Having remains to do some kind of magic on them, or perform some ritual is probably going to be seen as bad, unless you are some socially approved Soulpriest, or maybe a shaman doing traditional things for your tribe.
Objectively it isn’t good. Someone’s soul is being poorly attached to a body and bound to it. It may be a greater evil, lesser, middling, but evil’s evil.
Was bringing back calia or zelling evil? i do not think its inherently evil, evil is the person that uses it for selfish reasons, necromancy is just a tool, isnt necromancy whatever baine used to talk with papa cairne? its in the name necromancy, communicating with the dead, it doesnt matter if its a shamanistic ritual or if he was high on shrooms when he did.
I guess it really all comes down to consent over use of the body after death. If people were like “yeah sure, go for it” it wouldn’t be a problem. Like when people donate their bodies for medical students to use. Ever played Dead Space? Unitology has an entire thing where they keep bodies in mausoleums for the day convergence comes. Same principle, less monsters.
In WoW, it’s probably is politically incorrect, after the whole “Hey guys, lets enslave all life on Azeroth to a dude who chills on a ice throne” thing. And Dalaran wasn’t keen on it prior to that, as I recall from Kel Thuzad’s short story.
But, there’s enough examples of it just being a force of magic, and used for either good, or evil, that probably most worldly/experienced types don’t see it as inherently evil. Bringing back a loyal but misguided orc general to help save the world from the Burning Legion? Good. Raising your neighbor’s dead kid to mow your lawn for you while you sit in a lawn chair and give him your best “howdy neighbor” wave?
Assuming this is true, and you do not do anything evil with the animated corpse, unless one considers disrespect and/or desecration of a corpse evil, this is at the very least probably rude.
Problem is, almost no Necromancer would practice their craft for completely altruistic reasons… And there’s a little matter of how the obtain their “materials”, which is never come by honestly.
Most cultures don’t want to spend an eternity as some mad-man’s indentured servant OR willing to allow them to use their remains for experiments/fodder.
So, there’s just very little benefit for the well-meaning Necromancer in using his craft for the benefit of others… And it takes an Egomaniac to have the hubris to decide that he has the right to another person’s remains… so the craft kind of attracts those who doesn’t do it for altruistic reasons.
I dunno, necromancy could have practical uses. Like animating piles of infected bodies remotely and sending them into incinerators or creating constructs to walk into inhospitable locations to retrieve things or work in them.