This past weekend, I was wondering on just how many routes were available when ending the Cheesemonger’s storyline. I certainly felt like there were less magnanimous options to go with, but the others seemed more morally ambiguous at best. I was mostly satisfied by the ending, no doubt, but I never felt fully comfortable with mine. So, that got me thinking. How did everyone else decide to seal the fate of our favorite spymaster?
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 6/15/2016
[quote=Sir Joseph Marlen]This past weekend, I was wondering on just how many routes were available when ending the Cheesemonger’s storyline. I certainly felt like there were less magnanimous options to go with, but the others seemed more morally ambiguous at best. I was mostly satisfied by the ending, no doubt, but I never felt fully comfortable with mine. So, that got me thinking. How did everyone else decide to seal the fate of our favorite spymaster?
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 6/15/2016[/quote]
Sealing her fate? There were few ways it could end- involuntary imprisonment or death. The best i could do was enact her plan- and i believed in it, and believe still that killing spies in the game is no more morally wrong than killing the vake would be, or destroying a spider-council. They can think, but enact more harm than the average citizen, and will hurt more people by being allowed to persist than they would help. I am aware of the element of hypocrisy in this statement.
edited by Grenem on 6/15/2016
Perhaps there should be an option on the poll along the lines of "I did what I did, and that was that" or something? For those of us who finished with the Cheesemonger a while ago, and don’t remember what we did.
(Because I honestly haven’t the foggiest what the Cheesemonger’s fate was, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s forgotten what they did.)
Edit: Knowing me, I probably did whatever garnered me the most profit, whatever that is.
edited by fallingkitten on 6/15/2016
Well I know I betrayed the Cheesemonger but I’m not precisely sure which option I chose.
…
Freakin’ irrigo, am I right guys?
I blew the whole place up. Fond memories, in the sense that this was the moment my character realised just how much she likes explosions and setting stuff on fire…
[quote=Grenem][quote=Sir Joseph Marlen]This past weekend, I was wondering on just how many routes were available when ending the Cheesemonger’s storyline. I certainly felt like there were less magnanimous options to go with, but the others seemed more morally ambiguous at best. I was mostly satisfied by the ending, no doubt, but I never felt fully comfortable with mine. So, that got me thinking. How did everyone else decide to seal the fate of our favorite spymaster?
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 6/15/2016[/quote]
Sealing her fate? There were few ways it could end- involuntary imprisonment or death. The best i could do was enact her plan- and i believed in it, and believe still that killing spies in the game is no more morally wrong than killing the vake would be, or destroying a spider-council. They can think, but enact more harm than the average citizen, and will hurt more people by being allowed to persist than they would help. I am aware of the element of hypocrisy in this statement.
edited by Grenem on 6/15/2016[/quote]
Yeah, I can get behind that. I was referring to options such as blowing the lot of them up or just walking away as the slightly more "wtf hero" options. Though, since the more seemingly philosophic ideals involve slaughtering a bunch of people or just letting them off scott free, there’s a pretty fair case to be made that just leaving them to their business or stopping the madness before it goes any further could be seen as a good thing to do. Not my personal cup of tea, but oh how I love to play devil’s advocate.
That’s the thing that always got me on this story. My character doesn’t like spilling blood unnecessarily but still wants justice, and they would also want the Cheesemonger to let go from her revenge so that it wouldn’t consume her but also doesn’t want to just let amoral killers who control the world with their actions go mucking around without punishment. Basically what I’m saying is I’m an indecisive prick who just wants justice without worry of the whole "stare into the abyss" guilt trip. If only you could act it out like in Dishonored where your targets live but are put out of commission/punished in ways so horrible that death probably would be a more merciful option. Still, though, can’t really blame people for killing the Game players or replacing Alice. Or any other choices, really. There’s a (more or less) reasonable argument for why each route could be considered the "better option". Within reason, of course. I’m sure you could come up with one, but it’d be more difficult to defend selling a justice-seeker out to literal Hell or just whoever is willing to pay as just and moral. Not impossible, but strikingly more difficult.
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 6/15/2016
I always thought it was most fitting that her grandiose plan ends in a whimper in a random church. Everyone is listening intently for an epic twist or a touching ending, then it suddenly goes "Alice threw a temper tantrum so I got her daughter to put her in a church to calm down."
Yeah, this story was a very long time ago for me - I can’t really remember what I did at all.
(Might end up scouring the wiki later and see if anything feels familiar, then edit this afterwards.)
Absimiliard turned out to care deeply for Alice. They were horrified at her plan, and after much discussion with my Particular Friend Absimiliard chose to strangle her with their own two hands and replace her with Catherine after shipping her out to a tomb-colony. It was an agonizing choice for me, the player, even with good advice from my friend. Following it Absimiliard got terribly drunk with Appolonia hoping to forget, to no avail.
Alas, like Lady Macbeth, there is no way to wash those stains from my character’s hands. They even now still look in horror at them, recalling what they’ve done.
I think that might have been the first step on the path that has led Absimiliard to becoming a true monster, since then there is something broken in them – something capable of savage, vicious, violence.
{edit: because my pronouns are they/them/theirs, not "his" or "hers", forgive authorial error.}
edited by absimiliard on 6/15/2016
As a fan of Shakespeare, I thought “Get thee to a Nunnery” was the appropriate choice.
– Mal
Of course Passionario sold her to the Masters. Passionario would sell everyone to the Masters, given the option.
Even you.
Especially you.
I know, right?
I just to enact her plan - because Dirae Erinyes understands nothing else but pain and revenge at the time.
There was a reason I didn’t really RP until well after this character got married. They would’ve been a bloody menace to deal with until they become more stable.
My idiot of a character couldn’t go through with her plan, didn’t want to murder her, didn’t want to put her poor daughter in her place, and didn’t want to betray her to anyone. He wanted to turn her in to the police. But that wasn’t an option. So he decided the Masters were at least authority figures, so maybe if he told them, they would send the police after her to stop her.
Yeah…she probably would have had a less horiffic fate if he’d chosen literally any other option :P
Another death that haunts him…
I forget what my main did, but Madison faked her own (permanent) death to escape that mess. It was the first time any of my characters had died.
Professor Strix worked for her finding Rubbery Men for a while, then kicked her butt as an employer when she asked for a kill. My alt didn’t notice how serious things were until that point. He did the kill because he was afraid, but it haunted him. I doubt he will go much further.
edited by Professor Strix on 6/15/2016
edited by Professor Strix on 6/16/2016
I’m pretty skeptical of calling Alice a "justice-seeker". That’s certainly one way to put it, but her "justice" involved mass murder and wouldn’t do anything besides create a power vacuum of international proportions.
I was somewhat endeared to her personally, but a lot of the things she wanted me to do I found extremely dubious ("start a gang war between children" tops the list) and again, the last task was "enact mass murder". So I gave her to the Masters, I suppose because I figured they were the only ones who could really judge a crime like this (which may have been influenced by playing Sunless Sea and hearing "the Game goes all the way up to the stars", a line that’s stuck with me even though I still don’t really know what it means).
Okay, I’m going to be completely honest here. I expected most people to have either killed her enemies or to have replaced her. Some would betray her to private employers. A few might even blow them up for the heck of it. But I only put the walk away option as a technicality. I didn’t expect anyone to actually click the damn thing. Like, I can’t understand why you would go through a story just to drop out right before the ending. I don’t know why, but I have some strange amount of respect for you and your inability to care.
Put Catherine in charge of the operation, of course. Also learned how…athletic she could be. Mutually thrilling, on all counts. A good end had by all.
I’m pretty skeptical of calling Alice a "justice-seeker". That’s certainly one way to put it, but her "justice" involved mass murder and wouldn’t do anything besides create a power vacuum of international proportions.
I was somewhat endeared to her personally, but a lot of the things she wanted me to do I found extremely dubious ("start a gang war between children" tops the list) and again, the last task was "enact mass murder". So I gave her to the Masters, I suppose because I figured they were the only ones who could really judge a crime like this (which may have been influenced by playing Sunless Sea and hearing "the Game goes all the way up to the stars", a line that’s stuck with me even though I still don’t really know what it means).[/quote]
Bloody justice is still considered justice, no matter how many bodies have to drop to do it. That doesn’t make it definitely right or justified, per se, put I’d like to think that the story is so morally vague (what with the most popular options being killing countless people in a power grab to punish the wicked or helping someone let go of hate by letting horrible people continue to be able to do horrible things without punishment) that none of the choices are the "best" or "good" ending. And while I could see why you’d think she needs to be reigned in by people of order, the Masters are more or less FAR worse than her. Compared to what some of them have done, her orphan wars are comparable to jaywalking.
[quote=absimiliard]I think that might have been the first step on the path that has led Absimiliard to becoming a true monster, since then there is something broken in them – something capable of savage, vicious, violence.[/quote]All shall be well and all shall be well, friend. Morality is relative, monster is but a word, and no one is above forgiveness. No one.
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 6/16/2016
The thing is: if it’s "justice" then it’s "justified." The words can’t be meaningfully removed from one another. This is more then whether or not they share a root, it about how we define them. "Nice" may not always be a part of "justified," but it means that no unreasonable harm was done. If disproportionate or unreasonable harm was done: then the word no longer applies.
I’m sorry if my objection comes across as… well cross, but, having lived through nineties comics I’m not eager to resume them.
On another matter entirely, I feel like the Game gets a bad rap in this story. The only person who asks you to do such terrible things is Alice. Throughout most of the nineteenth century espionage was mostly used to maintain the status-quo. The status-quo may have been pretty much crap pretty much of the time, but that’s neither here nor there. Information gathering and dissemination is inherently deceptive, but rarely so bloodthirsty as the conquests of Great Powers were. If nothing else such flashiness would increase the heat on you and get you killed.