#but I can't justify his cost right now xP

[flickering-nightfall]

"unhand those shovels, fiends!"

"hmm... no"

Moon can't escape spiders no matter where she goes. Meanwhile, Pebbles gets sneef snorfed by another orange fella

they're helping

blue guy hangout

drawing a gift?

[andromeda3116]

all right fuck it let's talk redcloak

i will say it's been years since i read start of darkness, and i've since lost my copy of it, so i only sort of remember what happened in it, but i recall it establishing that redcloak is the king of the sunk-costs fallacy, and it really becomes clear with his brother.

he has to pull this off. he killed his own beloved brother for this, it has to be worth it. he has to make it be worth it.

and he has his moment of revelation at the battle for azure city, that he's been treating the hobgoblins as fodder -- the way that everyone else treats his goblins -- even though they're the same species. they're all goblins, tarred with the same brush.

and like... he's not really wrong. the goblins were fucked from the start, created to be nothing more than walking xp for adventurers, robbed of their chance to have their own lands or gods or homes. he is absolutely right to campaign for goblin equality. it's hard to blame him for taking every step necessary.

and then durkon meets with him.

and durkon negotiates, he argues pretty convincingly that following the plan, as-is, will destroy everyone, goblins included, and that -- while imperfect -- if they live and the dark one becomes a god on the same tier as thor, things can begin to improve for the goblins. it will take time, it will be a hard uphill battle, but they can make it happen. they can work this out.

and redcloak can't relent. he can't accept that. he has to make this all be worth it, and a generations-long war of attrition against speciesism to bring his people onto equal footing isn't good enough. and like. i get that. it's not the perfect solution he wants. it's not the glorious revolution where everything is magically better on the other side of it.

it's the exact same mindset of probably millions of online leftists right now: this "solution" you're offering, of clawing our way through incremental change to ultimately create a better world we will never see, as opposed to our "solution" of violent revolution now that puts our guy in charge who will somehow magically fix everything as soon as everyone realizes we were right all this time -- is unacceptable. redcloak is a bolshevik. he's a communist revolutionary, he's lenin. he's standing up for the oppressed, he's Fighting The Good Fight, he thinks the ends will justify the means, even if that means includes his own death, because it will mean that he died trying to make things better for his people.

he doesn't see that this "solution" is doomed to fail. if not because of flaws inherent to itself, because the world itself will crumble around him if he doesn't let go of this fantasy of a perfect ending.

and when he tries to kill durkon and casually asks, how many goblins have you killed? and durkon replies, carving redcloak entirely bare, straight to the core:

not as many as you.

redcloak is the arbiter of his own destruction. he's a walking sunk-costs fallacy. he had good intentions. he meant well. he isn't wrong, at the core. but he has to make this all be worth it. he has to justify the moment where he killed his own brother.

he's an incredibly compelling villain, magnificently well-written and deep, and it's like... he's beyond redemption, he proved that when he tried to kill durkon instead of taking his offer seriously. and that's a tragedy. because redcloak just wanted his people to be treated like people. but he hitched his wagon to xykon, and he kept spiraling down and further down, and now...

i honestly have no idea how redcloak's story ends. does he turn on xykon in the clutch and save his people at the bottom of things? does the dark one abandon him and force him to face the mirror, the fact that this hasn't been about his people for a long time? does he die screaming, cast into the rift or destroyed by the snarl? does --

i genuinely can't guess. and I don't know what the "correct" ending for him is. i do think the dark one is necessary to containing the snarl -- but what of what's inside the snarl? and what happened to laurin when she looked into it? and --

ugh, this story is so good, and redcloak is such a damn amazing villain. i admit that i'm a sucker for the sunk-costs fallacy villain, who started off with good intentions but kept going further and further down in the pursuit of their goals, until they no longer know just what they're fighting for anymore, except to make this all be worth it.

and redcloak is one of -- if not the -- best examples of that i've ever seen.