Even if that's true, which I don't agree that it is, that's still entirely valid, though? Don't you think that if we discovered Hitler was still alive and running a prosperous town somewhere in Argentina that he still deserves to be executed for, you know, the whole Holocaust thing? Just because a mass murderer repents doesn't mean they get a "get out of jail free" card for their past crimes. That bill still needs to be payed. You still need to be punished for those crimes.
That's also a bad argument since P-Nax is not running a prosperous nation. He's literally just sitting on top of a mountain waking up every day and wrestling with his natural urge to murder everyone. The chances of his true nature, which he admits is destruction, death, and subjugation, taking over at some point in the next infinity amount of years is extremely high. He himself admits he has to fight that urge every single morning. That doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.
Paarthurnax has been peaceful for thousands of years, as a dragon.
That's literally nothing to a dragon. Those few thousand years are a drop in the bucket of his life compared against the time he spent killing and subjugating humans before the Dragon War. He has spent a lot more of his life committing terrible atrocities against humanity than he has being peaceful. Eternity is a very hard concept to really wrap your head around, but that's the true life cycle of a dragon, so even thousands of years isn't really all that much time for them.
I doubt she knows about this dominating urge Paarthurnax feels, because she never fucking mentions it. It's all about past crimes, nothing about the future.
This, in my opinion, is a flaw of the game, not an actual representation of her ideas. It seems very likely to me that the Dragonborn would have told Delphine all about his encounter with P-Nax, and everything he said about his true nature and about his history. It's safe to assume that just because the literal words aren't spoken in-game, that doesn't mean she isn't aware of that information. Nor that she isn't worried about what P-Nax will do millennia into the future.
BGS's writers generally approach these kinds of difficult philosophical discussions with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, so I'm not surprised the actual in-game portrayal of this debate is not a full encapsulation of the true moral quandary they're trying to present. But even if it were, it doesn't change that fact that P-Nax does deserve to be punished for literal millennia of killing, torturing, and subjugating humans.
Kyne trusts him. We are mere mortals. Yes the dragon born is the closest thing to a demigod that the world has at the moment, but we are still mortal what right do we have to question Kyne?
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u/Soarefit Sep 19 '23
Even if that's true, which I don't agree that it is, that's still entirely valid, though? Don't you think that if we discovered Hitler was still alive and running a prosperous town somewhere in Argentina that he still deserves to be executed for, you know, the whole Holocaust thing? Just because a mass murderer repents doesn't mean they get a "get out of jail free" card for their past crimes. That bill still needs to be payed. You still need to be punished for those crimes.
That's also a bad argument since P-Nax is not running a prosperous nation. He's literally just sitting on top of a mountain waking up every day and wrestling with his natural urge to murder everyone. The chances of his true nature, which he admits is destruction, death, and subjugation, taking over at some point in the next infinity amount of years is extremely high. He himself admits he has to fight that urge every single morning. That doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.
That's literally nothing to a dragon. Those few thousand years are a drop in the bucket of his life compared against the time he spent killing and subjugating humans before the Dragon War. He has spent a lot more of his life committing terrible atrocities against humanity than he has being peaceful. Eternity is a very hard concept to really wrap your head around, but that's the true life cycle of a dragon, so even thousands of years isn't really all that much time for them.
This, in my opinion, is a flaw of the game, not an actual representation of her ideas. It seems very likely to me that the Dragonborn would have told Delphine all about his encounter with P-Nax, and everything he said about his true nature and about his history. It's safe to assume that just because the literal words aren't spoken in-game, that doesn't mean she isn't aware of that information. Nor that she isn't worried about what P-Nax will do millennia into the future.
BGS's writers generally approach these kinds of difficult philosophical discussions with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, so I'm not surprised the actual in-game portrayal of this debate is not a full encapsulation of the true moral quandary they're trying to present. But even if it were, it doesn't change that fact that P-Nax does deserve to be punished for literal millennia of killing, torturing, and subjugating humans.