In Response... · 8:56am Mar 14th, 2014
(Because of some unknown site hiccup, I can't make this post here (http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/297594/on-heroes-violence) so I'm putting it here instead.)
First, are the bandits bad? What if they’re just trying to get food? Provide for their families.
Or, to step outside of the information known only to characters, are the bandits aware of Arbu's cannibalism and see them the same way Littlepip does: unworthy of life and thus, a just target to be stolen from? Littlepip later murders the entire town in a fit of uncontrolled rage; if she had then gathered everything of value in the town, distributed it among her party's saddlebags, and went on, she'd be the precise moral equivalent of the bandits--except the bandits planned to rob a single wagon and Littlepip killed the entire town. I come down on the side of being absolutely certain of your target and the situation (Calamity shooting Littlepip because she was in raider armor comes to mind as a situation where this would have worked) before you take action, and then taking only as much action as needed. In the Batman pic, Batman takes the thug's knife and disables their arm with it; if Batman was acting like Calamity, he would have simply snapped the thug's neck as a first action.
Possibly, but Calamity didn’t see that option; his mental framework for dealing with a clear and imminent threat to a mare’s life didn’t include “maim the monster then sit around and talk about it while the monster’s still alive and armed” – to the point that he was seriously confused when his companions reacted in dismay. His choice may not have been the most right option, but in that situation, it was by no means a wrong one.
Or, more succinctly:
“It was a child!” Velvet Remedy hissed, giving a stomp.
“It was a raider, Velvet, And it was preparing to attack a wounded, terrified, and innocent pony.”
The above picture is one of the most famous photographs in history: the execution of a Vietcong guerilla by a general during the Tet Offensive. The general was South Veitnamese National Police Chief Nguy?n Ng?c Loan. The prisoner was Bay Hop, a mass-murder whose death count included slaughtering the wife and six children of a South Veitnamese colonel that very morning just up the road from where this photograph was taken. Loan remarked immediately afterwards that the execution was an act of justice, stating “They killed many of my men and many of our people.”
Additionally, the man that was shot was an enemy soldier in civilian clothes in South Vietnam. The Geneva Conventions classifies such a person as a spy, subject to summary execution.
A small number of people have attempted to re-interpret Littlepip as a Villain Protagonist – mostly people with a vested interest in tearing down the story, or whose opinions were derived from such sources.
Or who've read the story in its entirety and see something in her character that the author didn't intend: a thoroughly broken individual whose capacity for alternatives to bloodshed seem to disappear awfully quick for a protagonist the reader is supposed to identify as a hero. Such a reader cannot help but note that of the many, many ways that Littlepip might have reacted when she snapped upon seeing evidence of Arbu's wickedness, her knee-jerk reaction was "kill them all" instead of breaking down emotionally or having some other less lethal reaction. What you do when you aren't taking time to carefully consider your options, when you're reacting on pure instinct, says very important things about you and the important thing that Arbu said about Littlepip is that "kill them all; God will know His own" is what she reaches for in crisis. To come to this conclusion ignores nothing; it just interprets the facts in evidence in a way that the author really and truly wasn't aiming for.
Will you be a villain or a hero? A hero or a good pony? The wasteland is calling, and it will demand an answer.
Ante up.
To ask whether you will be a hero or a good pony is to assume that the two are inherently mutually exclusive.
Verde grimaced and turned away. “There’s no more than a hundred ponies in that entire building. There’s millions of ponies in Manehattan. It’s a fair trade.”
“Killing innocent ponies is a fair trade?” He gaped. “What’s the matter with you? Since when do a hundred lives mean nothing?”
“When those hundred lives are the price to save millions,” Verde snarled, although Golden noted that she wasn’t looking at him as she said it. “Sacrifices have to be made, Golden Shine, and Four Stars’ employees…”
“That’s not fair!”
“Buck fair!” Verde whirled around and took a step, thrusting her face up against Golden’s, her emerald eyes literally glowing with anger. “Thousands of loyal zebra citizens have had their minds ripped up for being zebras! Mare Applejack had her beloved older brother shot because he took a bullet meant for Princess Celestia! Tens of thousands have been killed in a totally pointless war! The bucking zebras are fixing to put a bucking megaspell on a commuter train and destroy a city of millions! You want fair Golden Shine? Tell me how anything about that is bucking ‘fair’!”
Golden cringed before her. “It… it… it’s…”
“It’s not, is it?” Verde backed up a step. “Well, neither is killing a hundred ponies to save a million. Or two hundred, or five hundred, or a few thousand, all of which are crumbs compared to multiple millions. I don’t have a choice, Golden Shine; this is a call that must be made to save as many as I can. By the end of tomorrow, any pony outside a city will be dead or locked in a STABLE. It’s not fair, it’s not pleasant, and it’s not right but it is the hard fact we have to face up to. I have to accept the truth and move on if all those that can be saved are saved. I’m sorry you have to get a sledgehammer in the face and find out that ponies who did nothing wrong will die as a direct result of my decisions, but there’s things infinitely worse that could still happen.”