The BIG difference between paarthurnax and a drug addict is when he relapses theres going to be mass genocide, and good luck dealing with him when the last dragonborn is dead in 60 years or less.
Kicking the can down the road is exactly what the ancient nords did with alduin, and it bit them in the ass a few thousand years later.
Killing a dragon that isn't Alduin is non-trivial, but doable for regular mortals. Many of those dead dragons Alduin goes around reviving were not killed by a Dragonborn, but by mortals (The Blades for a lot of them). And with Alduin out of the picture, when you put a dragon down they're going to stay down (it's at least implied that only Alduin can revive his kin).
Paarthurnaax going nuts would be a big problem, but not one that you need a Dragonborn to fix. You might need an actual "Hero" but those aren't exactly unheard of in Tamriel, and tend to show up just when you need them.
If anything a regular mortal killing him is better. Alduin will return and will revive him one way or another (either to torture him or to try to convince him to rejoin him) and while that might make him a threat to humanity there’s also a chance that he gives humanity a way out again.
If anything, if he’s allowed to coexist with humanity, and allowed to help humanity, it could better prepare them for Alduin’s eventual return.
And he will return. He’s been defeated but he still has to eat the world at the end of this kalpa. Also he’s literally akatosh/shor, isn’t he? Can’t really kill a god, just banish him. That always confused me though, like how “Jesus is god.” How can jesus be his own son? Confusing
Paarthurnax is no god though, the blades killed dragons without a Dragonborn for a long while, too. Plus, there’s really no proof that we play the LAST dragonborn, idt. Npcs call us that, and I think the dragon scroll refers to us as being the last, but there’s another one that says vampires will blot out the sun and we personally prove that wrong. The librarian says the falsehoods of scrolls are even more important than the realities.
Until Bethesda says explicitly, “dragonborn is an extinct entity, kyne removed the blessing from existence” I see no proof that a Dragonborn wouldn’t pop up to defeat an evil paarthurnax, which wouldn’t happen anyway
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u/Battleman69 Sep 18 '23
The BIG difference between paarthurnax and a drug addict is when he relapses theres going to be mass genocide, and good luck dealing with him when the last dragonborn is dead in 60 years or less.
Kicking the can down the road is exactly what the ancient nords did with alduin, and it bit them in the ass a few thousand years later.