On a more personal note, I ‘m still assuming this to be a friendly conversation about aspects of WC, not a heated debate, much less a knife-fight about who hates who. Regardless of what you might think, I don’t hate Tolwyn. I really enjoy this conversation, and the nice insights present here. It gave me a reason to look back to the story of WC and reflect upon it with some depth. I know I don’t always present my points in the nicest way, but if you make an effort and look past that, and past our past disagreements, you might see what my motivations are not some petty hatred of fictional characters.
Bandit LOAF said:
I certainly hope you appreciate the irony of the fact that you just vehemently argued that Seether must be a criminal despite never having been charged with or convicted of a crime. But, of course you don't - in your mind Seether is absolute evil and Blair is absolute good and everything is completely black and white. Still, I find it an exceptional arrogance to argue that Wing Commander 2 was somehow *not* about establishing that your character was not a traitor.
I said he was acting like a criminal, not that he was convicted of any crime. Killing potential witness to conceal illegal activities from being exposed is acting like a criminal. Doing so with the gusto of a sociopath and the villainous laughter of Agent Smith on crack just emphasizes this point.
Seether was not absolute evil, not even close. He’s just a chief evil henchman. Blair is not absolute good, and I never, ever said anything even remotely like that on this thread. It’s amazing that you have all this notions about what I think, and yet they have nothing to do with what I’m saying.
You know, back there I compared Blair to Jack Bauer, a guy who tortures suspects and kills innocent people, and is the farthest thing from a goody-good hero. How in the world you make up an argument that Blair is absolute good from there is quite odd.
What you said was that Tolwyn was the only person who claimed Blair was working for the Kilrathi... in the portions of my argument that you cleverly (har) removed I proved using proper quotations that this was *not* the case.
If you read back, you’ll actually be surprised that I actually said that I don’t think Tolwyn really believe Blair was working for the Kilrathi. He didn’t act like it. And I don’t think the WC2 troupe really thought he was a traitor. They didn’t believe his Stealth fighter story, but working for the Kilrathi? Would angel consort with a traitor? Unlikely.
No, the formal request, already made, Blair refers to was a request ("About my request...") -- insisting that Tolwyn deal with it personally in an unrelated meeting was a demand.
Colonels don’t demand to Admirals, they request. That’s how hierarchy works. “Sir, about my request” doesn’t sound like a demand and “Yes, that came as a bit of a surprise to me” is way too nice a response for a demand.
Since we are on the topic of requests, I would request you stop saying I hate Tolwyn and think Blair is flawless (but not demand it, heh). I don’t really mind, but it really detracts from my points, since every observation I make is treated as an indictment against Tolwyn’s character and an a praise to the noble aspects of Blair.
Besides, if this is simply an 'observation' about Tolwyn, then the fact that Tolwyn has nothing to do with Angel's whereabouts and that he can't reveal them anyway because they're top secret certainly comes into play. Besides, I don't see how you can possibly apply this situation to your adorable Tolwyn Hate Club and at the same time ignore the fact that Paladin who *did* know that Angel was dead in the previous scene had just outright *lied* to Blair and pretended to be his friend. But, of course, Paladin doesn't go on to be *evil* in the next game, so he's not fair game.
I didn’t ignore the fact. I mentioned it. What I did say is that Paladin did deal with the situation with slightly more humanity than Tolwyn, but both did essentially the same thing. I mean, just look on the man’s face or something, say a word or two, it’s not like it’s breaking protocol not to be a cold, hard rock. And I’m not saying Tolwyn was cold to everyone, I just said that he was cold to Blair on that specific occasion, and that was not even a critique, but an observation. And no, that doesn’t mean I think Tolwyn was being a jerk here. That he was not was a crucial part of my point to begin with – that they bump heads without necessarily being jerks.
And I know we’ve been partying like its 1995, but “Tolwyn hate club” is just ludicrous.
That's nonsense. Oh, I'm not stabbing someone *right now*, so I'm not a murderer anymore!
Treason depends on the current status and, unlike murder, is something that can be reversed by ulterior circumstances. It’s more like divorce. If you re-marry the same woman, you’re not divorced anymore. Arguably, he might’ve been a traitor in the past, but not anymore. You can’t be both a traitor and a loyal member of an organization at the same time, just like you can’t be divorced and married to the same person at the same time. That he re-joined Confed and was not found guilty of anything clears the record.
Oath? What are you *talking about*? He *left his post* on the *battlefield*. That's *treason*, regardless of whether it was good or evil. Soldiers don't go around with some giant moral Delance universe blob in their heads upon which they base all their decisions as to whether or not to follow orders. (And it's just icing on the treason case that Blair went and slaughtered Confederation men and civilians wholesale after this.) There's no "oh, but I was following a greater power!" in treason -- George Washington is still a traitor to the crown, regardless of how awesome the Revolution was. There's no 'think of it as something cute' to treason. It doesn't work that way. You take up arms against your nation you are a traitor.
It was treason, but Confed found it better to accept him back, and that made him not a traitor anymore, but a loyal member. No one can be both a traitor and a Confed hero at the same time. Had George Washignton switched sides and fought to restore the imperial rule of the Crown, crushing the rebellion and becoming the vice-roy of the British American Colonies, receiving the title of Sir, he would not be a traitor to the crown at that point, despite his past actions. He would be a traitor to the american revolutionaries, however. And yet, Blair is probably not considered a traitor to the Border Worlds. After all, there was no war, and yet not two, but three sides.
That's silly, humans have been ruling over each other for... well, ever. It has never been and never will be the end of mankind.
And that compares to alien cats enslaving mankind how? It’s a completely different thing. Look the Varni. Is that even desirable or acceptable?
Slave stuff already dealt with.
Not quite. Are you saying that it defeat in the Kilrathi war, or surrender to the Kilrathi, was at all acceptable, knowing what they do with the people they conquer?
That even opens up a different scenario. Thrakkath sums up nicely that he’s not at all interested on watery planets, and would have no problems destroying Earth. How is Kilrah more valuable than Earth in such a way that it morally requires humans to sacrifice their own homeworld by abdication the use of self-defense?
I would somewhat agree that there was a reasonable chance mankind would survive as salves to the Kilrathi empire, for some time. You know, slaves they have no shortage of. Neither of watery planets mankind likes to colonize. But that doesn’t really alter anything when it comes to justify blowing up the Imperial Palace and the planet it was in.
I don't think there's even such a thing as individual moral relevance.
I don’t know what this means. Do you believe in collective moral relevance?
I think Blair and Tolwyn are both terrible people who did things for a noble goal, but who we can't separate from their actions in the final analysis.
Isn’t thinking Tolwyn is “terrible” a requirement to the hating clube? No, I don’t think neither one is terrible. And I do understand what you are saying.
But please try to understand that I what I say has nothing to do with a hatred of Tolwyn, which doesn’t even exist. I know him and Blair did terrible things with a noble goal, which might have been justified in some circumstances. I simply don’t accept WCIV as one of them, for very strong reasons that are not something I made up.
There must be always a balance between means and ends. Most of the time we can say both Blair and Tolwyn wander into the moral gray zone throughout the stories that compose the tapestry of WCU, but Tolwyn takes a nose dive into the bottomless pit with the use of Bio-Weapons.
That does not means that destroying Kilrah is OK. I just dislike relativist arguments for moral equivalency. Each case is very different, and to say it’s the same thing is a gross oversimplification that serves no purpose.
It's not that he was "quite famous" among the Nephilim, it's that one of the goals of their first expedition into human space was specifically to find and interrogate him.
I used “famous” as an allegory, don’t take it literally. But he was famous, literally, with the Kilrathi, or at least some sources claim that.
It was signifigantly more apparent before you edited out the rest of my reply. I do not understand why you think it is at all insulting, unexpected or noteworthy that Tolwyn replaces Eisen but not at all that he replaces *everyone else* in the Victory's command staff and fighter wing two months earlier. Am I correct in assuming that your grasp of military structure is competant enough to understand that Tolwyn did nothing *illegal* or *wrong* in replacing Eisen?
This is again a case where you allowed your preconceived notions about my ideas mislead you to what I was trying to say. I didn’t find it either insulting or unexpected. There was nothing illegal or wrong. I was commenting about how external factors would make Tolwyn and Blair bump heads even if they were not necessarily being jerks towards each other. Tolwyn had his reasons to take over the command for a time, and so did Blair to be uncomfortable with this, Tolwyn seems to acknowledge this and isn’t a bit disturbed, both parties seem to get a long nice after the “get it off your chest, colonel” bit. It’s their longest interaction in the game, and the authors had to find some source of conflict, but it was actually done in a interesting manner, and not based on some petty rivalry. And I do think that, besides all this, Tolwyn did show respect to Eisein, especially when they were leaving. “Fight well, captain, it’ll only get harder”.
Most telling, to me, is that Tolwyn would put any past problems aside and entrust Blair with the protection the Behemoth. Not something done on accident, but something planned from early on, down to his assignment to the Victory. That, besides their differences, the two man did knew each other well, had high regards of each other’s competence and could work together very well. They didn’t have to be friends, or even like each other to do that, even thought I do think that, besides all that, they still had a level of affection for each other deep, deep down on the nether of their beings.
If you find all this is somehow a display of hatred against Tolwyn, I’ll be really disappointed my ability to express ideas.
And the other quote that you snipped? If you're going to disagree with my point you can't cut out half of it.
It’s not like our post isn’t big enough, and I was dealing with the issue later on. But all right, Tolwyn’s previous actions were directed at enemies of the Confederation, and more or less valid military targets, not people he deemed not worthy living for ideological reasons. There is a difference, regardless that you might not see it. He was selecting certain targets because they were some kind of threat or were strategically valuable, not for not having the right genetic markup. His previous actions against civilians targets are a valid precedent to the Behemoth and the T-Bomb (if he was involved in that), but not as to his actions on WCIV. He had never, to my knowledge, ordered attacks against innocent confederation military that were rightly doing their duty, like the escort wing on the intro scene of WC2, or the Orlando Depot, or any number of Confederation civilians and military that he slaughtered in order to blame the BW. While I might be mistaken about this, and I’m confident that you’d spare no effort to correct me on the spot, but that’s unlike something he ever did before, against the Pilgrims or the Kilrathi.
Presumably the original decision was to execute him and then his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Happens all the time.
Sure, but it’s very odd that they would have a TV newsperson saying he was going to be executed while he is shown dead, if he was to be commuted. I can accept if this is a retcon to a further adition, and I have no with wish to enter on a novel-game dispute, it’s just that I based what I said from my memories of the game, and I didn’t quite rememeber that part of the novel.
Did he? It seems to me that without acknowledging the very same evidence that Tolwyn had and was working towards dealing with (that the Nephilim exist) then mankind doesn't *have* any enemies.
The TCS Midway can be used against anyone, but the Gen-Select was made and programmed to be used against humans. It was not a weapon to defeat an enemy, but to “purify” the race purging those that don’t fit Tolwyn’s predetermined standards.
Even tought in the past you’ve claimed we don’t know the exention to which Tolwyn planned on using it, the information provided by the game has Blair station thousands have already lost their lives to ‘the project’, million mores would die in a way, and if the whole thing did go to it’s ultimate goals, it could mean the death of Billions. In response, Tolwyn did not question this factual information, or the numbers, but he corroborated them, and in fact started to defend the necessity and trying to justify why all this people should die, exposing his ideology, to the very much horror of everyone present. That’s not anything I’m making up, that’s a simple description of the Senate Debate. Now, the fact that 90% of the senators voted against it, and that Tolwyn was convicted, pretty much is a sentence not only against his action, but his ideology. No more in-game citation that his ideas were wrong is necessary than that.
And no, this is not about any potential threat. What was known of the future threat of space bugs is not entirely relevant to the issue. What was completely, absolutely wrong, both in the real world and inside the WCU, is that the very idea of genocidal eugenics trough bio-weapons.
This has nothing at all to do Tolwyn’s character. We are debating the ideology behind the eugenics. There are people that I like who has ideas I disagree, and vice-versa. But, more than that, it’s a factual reality that eugenics is wrong, not only because it’s evil, but because it doesn’t work, both in real life and on fiction, and WCIV makes a very overt effort to reflect this, including not one, but two long and detailed scenes, one in the Senate of the Confederation, where they outright reject Tolwyn’s ideology used to justify his actons, and on a Tribunal. That’s much more evidence than it’s needed to know that his ideology was both wrong and rejected.
(And, of course, your claim is absurd to start with, because 'mankind' isn't a political entity -- the Border Worlds are a perfect example of an enemy nation upon whom new technology, be it Lance fighters or Midway carriers, would be used regardless of long range ideology.)
Tolwyn did care about mankind, not just Confed, and confusion between both concepts exist since the first line ever to appear when you ran the first WC product, “In the Future, Mankind is Locked in a deadly war”. Tolwyn has designed the Black Lance to be “humanity’s first line of defence”, so it’s not a matter of semantics that the Gen-Select was designed to be used against humanity. Of course some weapons have no intrinsic morality, like Megacarriers and Heavy Fighters, but some are arguably intrinsically immoral, like Bio-Weapons, or even Planet Killer weapons for that matter. I don’t mind stacking the deck against my case for the justification of the T-Bomb. Maybe it could not be justified, if it was intrinsically immoral. More on this on the other thread.
I’m not on this to “win” a debate against. The parts where you are not misrepresenting what I said and accusing me of hating Tolwyn actually contain very interesting insights on the game series.
But without *EVIDENCE* you can't make such a claim... and in this case, where the evidence is completely *opposite* what you say, you can't go on saying it. Tolwyn is evil in Wing Commander IV, but there is absolutely no (no no no no no no no) evidence that he is a coward - and plenty of evidence that he's still willing to fight on the front lines himself (which is really above and beyond for a general officer in any circumstance).
Evidence for the facts I mentioned? He was targeting people with iron poor blood, or for other genetic reasons, per the testimony of the good BW medic, and devising weapons specifically to be used against humans, in an effort to protect humanity and discard certain elements.
But allright, impressed by your evidence, and eloquence, I’ll concede this point and drop the idea that he displayed any signs of cowardice WCIV. I have no problems with that. I didn’t mean to offend you on a personal level, and if I did that I apologize.
It's a neat idea that Tolwyn is suddenly so evil that he's a different person entirely who we should *extra* hate because he's also X, Y and Z negative stereotype... but it's entirely something you made up because you hate the man, not something that's supported by evidence.
You really didn’t get any of what I wrote about this. Maybe I expressed myself poorly, so allow me try again. I never said anything about hating Tolwyn, let alone extra hate. I think he changed from WC2 to WC4. Even trailer says “this man, deranged by war, unleashes terror upon the innocent”, tough I’m not, in any way, shape or form claiming the trailer is or isn’t an official source, and I have no desire to entertain such a debate. What I am saying is that he changed quite a bit.
To begin with, I said this was my personal interpretation of the story, not a fact. I am allowed to have an interpretation and mention it, I hope. I did not try to pass it as a fact, since I made it know when I said it, and you can look back if you want. That doesn’t mean it’s something I completely made up out of nowhere. While you quite obviously disagree with, it is supported by evidence. He was considered a hero and a defender of mankind. He did, in fact, act in a heroic fashion and defend mankind against a terrible enemy. Later on, because the game designers decided that way, and there’s not something that can be ignored, or claim I’m making up, he became a villain. He was convicted of crimes against humanity. So he changed, at least from good guy to bad guy, if I have to put it on a simplistic way.
When I say he changed, it’s not something against him, but I his favor. It’s an argument that the heroic Tolwyn we knew and like would not commit such heinous crimes, and that something terrible have happened to him, and altered him in a way that it was almost as if he was someone else.
I know they go back in time and all and so on, but when do the characters face a moral situation like this? 
