CoDominium/YMMV

• Main
• YMMV
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Heartwarming
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

• Complete Monster: Skida Thibodeau, field commander of the Helot rebellion on Sparta, is explicitly called out by the Legion intelligence analysts as a sociopath. She routinely encourages - and in many cases, outright orders - her troops to commit war crimes including massacre of prisoners, massacre of civilians, torture, looting, and rape - fully intends to overthrow a functional constitutional monarchy with one of the best and most humane governments in the known colonies to replace it with a murderous dictatorship intended to grow wealthy via conquest and slave camps solely because it will vastly enrich her personal fortunes, and at one point deliberately murdered most of the families and children of a city's military garrison for the sole purpose of provoking the military into an enraged, unthinking counterattack that she could more easily ambush.

Skilly: Noncombatants. Am no such, just enemies with gun and enemies without gun.

• • And the most horrifying part of the Stora Massacre was not how calmly she planned or executed it, but her reaction when it failed to achieve her desired goal; a purely matter-of-fact acknowledgement that in hindsight it had been a bad idea and she should have listened to her advisors who'd argued against it. She didn't even enjoy the massacre on some kind of psychopathic level, which would at least have been some kind of sincerity of motive. All that slaughter was merely a means to an end, and when it didn't achieve the desired end it was written off as a bad investment and nothing more.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Horace Bury has a close encounter with a space suit filled with a decapitated human head and loads of motie miniatures trying to sneak aboard the other human ship. At that point most of his negative energies got redirected from other people and into Fantastic Racism towards the Moties, believing them to be the greatest threat humanity has ever faced and that they must be immediately xenocided. And this is before The Reveal that confirmed to everyone how dangerous the Moties were.
• Values Dissonance: After The Mote in God's Eye Pournelle was accused of supporting monarchism.