fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #499 ]

⌈ Secret Post #499 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 18 pages, 445 secrets from Secret Submission Post #072.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 - too big ], [ 1 2 3 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

61. Well, now you have.

Different people have different ideas of what kind of life is worth living and what kind of death is worth dying. The only person who has any right whatsoever to decide whether or not a person is 'suffering too much' and would be better off dead (even if- or especially if- they're disabled or terminally ill) is the person themself. Unless the victim was openly begging for death, it's murder. End of story.

I thought it was pretty clear Mary wanted to die. The only reason she kept going was the hope that she could somehow salvage her relationship with James (which would never happen because she was too angry and desperate).

Barring all that, even if he made a mistake, he did it out of love, thinking it would be for the best, so I find it really hard to call him a murderer.

I didn't think it was unambiguous at all, on either aspect. She said she wanted to die, yes, but immediately afterwards she also says she wanted to live. James says he acted out of love, in order to spare her suffering, but he also says immediately afterwards that "that's not true", that he hated her and killed her because he "wanted his life back". And my impression from the game is that in both cases, there's truth to both sides. She was suffering and she wanted to die and she wasn't ready to give up hope and she wanted to live. He loved her and he wanted to spare her pain and he hated her and wanted the burden of caring for her out of his life.

The thing is, though, many people who kill people who they love (both when the victims are ablebodied and healthy and when they aren't) were "thinking it was for the best". It's a thought pattern that comes out of desperation and clinical depression, sometimes as a result of desperate circumstances but sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. And there's evidence that treating that kind of thought pattern as acceptable or even praiseworthy in some circumstances can be dangerous (http://www.phen.ab.ca/materials/het/het12-01c.asp) to others in similar circumstances. People teetering on the edge of violence need help and support, not reassurance that their homicidal feelings are okay and that acting on them wouldn't be blameworthy.

I'm not saying you're wrong or a horrible person to sympathize with James (even though my own sympathies lie with Mary), but "sympathetic" is not the same as "not murder", even if you sympathize so much that you would have done the same if you were in his place.
James loved Mary, but what he did was an act of desperation, not an act of love.
And it was wrong.
And it was murder.
And when similar cases happen in real life, that's murder, too.

Alright, whatever. I'm not going to argue with you. I'll just say that, while I'm not excusing what he did or encouraging people everywhere to kill their dying loved ones, I wouldn't throw James in the same camp as Jack the Ripper or something. I think there's a big difference between a murderer and someone who only could have done what he did in the situation he was faced with (something else that I thought was a great element of the game-- the idea that maybe we are all killers, under the right circumstances).

I'm not throwing him in the same camp as mass murderers or serial killers, either. Or disagreeing that part of what makes SH2 such an emotionally involving experience is the idea that average, ordinary people can kill, too, too, if they reach their breaking point. (None of us are as unlike the them as we'd like to think we are- you don't have to be a monster to become a murderer.)

I just disagree that people who would never have killed if they weren't in extreme psychological distress aren't murderers. It may be a difference in degree, but not in kind. That's all.

Thanks for making an effort to hear me out rather than flying immediately into kneejerk defensiveness. I've had discussions along similar lines about nonfictional events that were a lot less civil.

Normally I'm a lot less passive, but I guess I love this game way too much to have a knock-down drag-out over it. I love it for its ambiguity, after all. :P

[ SECRET POST #499 ]

Re: 35, 38, 61

Re: 35, 38, 61

Re: 35, 38, 61

Re: 35, 38, 61

Re: 35, 38, 61

Re: 35, 38, 61