Aquillion wrote:Nnelg wrote:Stanley 2/10: extremely vain, possessing of barely sufficient intelligence and competence
I think that Stanley is the Peter Principle in action -- we know that he earned his position as an overlord by serving as a competent warlord, and he earned his position as a warlord by being a competent piker (before he found the Arkenhammer!)
I did say "barely sufficient", didn't I? It's the only thing keeping him from 0-1/10.
oslecamo2_temp wrote:Now if people count sacrificing everything you have just for the sake of pride as "good leadership", then yes Stanley is an horrible ruler. I would still choose to work for him any day of the week than any of the prideful royals that would sacrifice me in an heartbeat just because it's the royalish thing to do, regardless of survival odds or tactical advantage.
I agree with you there. However, the only person on Erf that we've seen do anything of the sort is Lord Firebaugh. (Jillian too, if you count shortsightedness combined with hotheadedness as a form of 'pride'.)
As for Queen Bea's infamous...
"abdication", I have mixed feelings on the matter too. Her deed amounts to a mass 'mercy' killing, in the face of a fate worse than death.
You have to understand how decryption looks from the RCC's point of view. How would
you feel if zombie Winston Churchill (or the heroic figure of your choice) came up to you and
begged you to ally with Hitler's undead army, while constantly spouting Nazi rhetoric to boot. Pretty unnerving to say the least, no?
To them, decryption is an unprecedented abomination on the scale of The Holocaust. Total and irresistible brainwashing, becoming a slave -a WILLING slave- to the will of callous sorceress. To become little more than a puppet dancing on strings woven of spite, a harrowing fate from which not even
death can offer deliverance. To suffer the forcing of others to this same doom, and even to do so with a macabre
*grin* on one's face.
Can it truly be a wonder why Queen Bea saw her last act as the only sane recourse left to her? Under no other conditions could she be excused for her actions, and perhaps she still cannot be; but moral dilemma aside, what she did was not stupid from a strategic point of view.
In a scenario in which one's fallen rise again as warriors for the opposing side, any battle with no more than a 1:1 kill ratio actually gives the enemy more forces than he started with. Even a 2:1 isn't good enough by itself, especially when you're already at a disadvantage. A scorched earth policy, while usually calling for a retreat and regroup, at least ensures that the next guy on the list (Jetstone) won't be any worse off because of you.
But the true effect lies in the shock value. For starters, it'll get the word out that something's up fast, even to people who wouldn't listen to words. It provides the tragedy necessary to halt petty squabbling. It galvanizes the defenders, and saps the enemy's morale. Most of all though, it delivers an ultimatum to both sides: there is
no middle ground in this one. (Whether there actually is or not is irrelevant for this purpose.)
They're deliberately rendered in 3D to make them look completely different from everything else in Erfworld. It makes sense in-world for them to be that, since they're special worldbreaking items supposedly handed down from the Titans. I don't know what you mean by somewhere else, but if you mean stupidworld then that'd require a huge tone shift where everything gets explained in relation to the real world, because they're items with stats and powers, why should real world pliers allow unlimited croakamancy? And if you mean 'not Erfworld', 'given by the Titans' is really the only instruction you need, because if Erfworld is basically a fictional world, then another world could be absolutely anything and it wouldn't give it much more meaning, because there aren't established other worlds with other worldy rules. 