the Master: was he evil?

R.Graves said:
All the best villains believe they're doing the right thing. Except joker... At the very least they think what they're doing is justifiable...
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Or the Party in 1984. They actually torture the main protagonist for saying that the brainwashing was for the greater good.
 
CerberusGate said:
I'm not saying his actions aren't evil, they are evil (or rather the actions of his subordinates). I'm saying that the man himself may not be completely evil or rather, is more a shade of gray on a black and white spectrum of morality.
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Well written character aren't completely evil. I am just saying just because a character has good intentions that doesn't make them not evil. The Master might be a dark grey. He was trying to get rid of people, by killing them or by forced sterilization.
 
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cordelionreaver said:
Well written character aren't completely evil. I am just saying just because a character has good intentions that doesn't not evil. The Master might be a dark grey. He was trying to get rid of people, by killing them or by forced sterilization.
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That is true. Regardless though, the Master is still a good villain with all these layers added to him. Giving a villain an actual reasonable motivation and giving characters other than the generic malicious evil adds more depth to the antagonist than a generic villain who is completely black on the black and white morality spectrum (though a thoroughly evil villain who commits atrocities for 'fun' can also be good if done right).
 
Genocide? Nah, The Master was aiming for the opposite - gene pool. (For those who haven't read short sci-fi story Gene Hive, written by Brian Aldiss half a century ago, there's protagonist who suffered basically the same fate as Richard Grey.)

Dr Fallout said:
The game has no clear political stance, and it doesn't seem to support any single party or ideology.
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Sure, there's a lot of faction though, including The Master and his army, and you can pretty much define their motives and goals - i.e. their long term policy. Fun fact: I've considered BOS to be post-apo right wing technocrats for instance. Unlike BOS, The Master was much more open and liberal, since he took everyone in his.. collective. The only criteria was whether they can survive the dipping or not.
 
Izak said:
Mass sterilization's, by definition, straight up genocide.
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The Fev dipping sterilization was an unknown side effect, so it was unintentional. If you use the legal definition of genocide, what (the sterilization) the Master has been doing cannot be considered as such.

Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
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Though, his action can be considered as genocide, as he was trying to replace the genome of humans, by the genome of supermutant.
 
valcik said:
I'm shocked how many of you guys can consider Fallout to be apolitical game. For me it was clear anti-war propaganda from the first second of its excellent intro to the last bit of ending slide-show. Not mentioning its main goal - to explore how the survivors of Great War would create new settlements, form new societies or factions, and raise new forms of administrative and government in their destroyed country.
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We don't consider Fallout to be Apolitical, it's just that you trying to explain The Master as being "The Archetype Liberal-Leftist" is blatantly not the intention behind him. Not to mention that your entire explanation as to why seems like you are turning The Master in to a Strawman Arguement.
 
valcik said:
Sure, there's a lot of faction though, including The Master and his army, and you can pretty much define their motives and goals - i.e. their long term policy. Fun fact: I've considered BOS to be post-apo right wing technocrats for instance. Unlike BOS, The Master was much more open and liberal, since he took everyone in his.. collective. The only criteria was whether they can survive the dipping or not.
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So? What political stances YOU assign to the factions aren't ones that were meant by or even considered by the developers. Rather then the creators trying to make points on politics with the factions, they went with what was cool and worked. Rather then being right wing technocrats, the developers thought that monastic technocrats was a pretty cool thing in the bombed out wasteland. Assigning political values in my opinion ruins the game, and brings the annoyances of modern day political ideologies to a fictional universe.
 
GlutinousRice said:
The Fev dipping sterilization was an unknown side effect, so it was unintentional. If you use the legal definition of genocide, what (the sterilization) the Master has been doing cannot be considered as such.
Though, his action can be considered as genocide, as he was trying to replace the genome of humans, by the genome of supermutant.
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No, not the FEV side effect. I meant his plan to sterilize all those that didn't want to join the Unity.
 
valcik said:
Sure, there's a lot of faction though, including The Master and his army, and you can pretty much define their motives and goals - i.e. their long term policy. Fun fact: I've considered BOS to be post-apo right wing technocrats for instance. Unlike BOS, The Master was much more open and liberal, since he took everyone in his.. collective. The only criteria was whether they can survive the dipping or not.
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It's still rather odd to assign modern political stances to factions that formed in a world where such stances bear no meaning in such a world nonetheless. What stances you assign to the factions is your own interpretation on the factions and not official so most of us who do not assign political stances would consider Fallout apolitical.

Besides, in my opinion it would ruin the games to link the factions in said games to modern politics since it would mean that every faction in the games is based on some opinion the writer had on modern political stances which would not add much to said games.
 
Dr Fallout said:
So? What political stances YOU assign to the factions aren't ones that were meant by or even considered by the developers.
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I thought I was pretty clear about this, read my posts again.

Rather then being right wing technocrats, the developers thought that monastic technocrats was a pretty cool thing in the bombed out wasteland.
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Funny, the only faction I considered to be monastic was The Children of the Cathedral. Which is not surprising at all, I'm pretty sure they are heavily inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz, where post-apo U.S. fell under heavy theocracy.

Assigning political values in my opinion ruins the game, and brings the annoyances of modern day political ideologies to a fictional universe.
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Well, I think the opposite. This whole „War, war never changes” sentiment is just timeless, drawing very close and realistic ties between the fictional game world and our real life reality. The preserved cold war fear, amazing! That's what makes Fallout classic, it's excellent science fiction based on very real fears and history. Anyone trying to strip it off just don't see the most important thing about this game.

CerberusGate said:
It's still rather odd to assign modern political stances to factions that formed in a world where such stances bear no meaning in such a world nonetheless.
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No, it is not. Think about this - let's say our whole knowledge of mathematics, language, or alphabet would have been wiped out for good in the Great War. Don't you think that the survivors would invent it again? The numbers and letters would have been named differently for sure, but their value or meaning would be exactly the same as before. And the same goes for politics, it's only lexical problem how you'd call the motives and ideology in post-apo world. Use old names or invent some new and plaster it over something, the context is still the same as before. (FNV did excellent job by expanding on this most serious matter, IMO)

Okay, back to The Master guys. I don't care whether you see him as interesting lovecraftian monster or as a leader driven by certain vision and aiming for certaing goals, and obviously you can't change my opinion on this. Thanks for your input anyway, I find it interesting.
/flame off
 
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valcik said:
I thought I was pretty clear about this, read my posts again.
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I read them again, and you still assigned political stances on the Master and BOS.

valcik said:
Funny, the only faction I considered to be monastic was The Children of the Cathedral. Which is not surprising at all, I'm pretty sure they are heavily inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz, where post-apo U.S. fell under heavy theocracy.
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Except the BOS in the original fallout was monastic, with it's various orders, robes and initiation trials, not to forget the isolationist and above it all view of the Wasteland.

valcik said:
Well, I think the opposite. This whole „War, war never changes” sentiment is just timeless, drawing very close and realistic ties between the fictional game world and our real life reality. The preserved cold war fear, amazing! That's what makes Fallout classic, it's excellent science fiction based on very real fears and history. Anyone trying to strip it off just don't see the most important thing about this game.
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Except the creators of the game have mentioned that the backstory was merely an excuse to explore the events of a nuclear apocalypse. The emphasis on the cold war fear is only found in Bethesda's games, and was barely mentioned in the original two. In fact, there's very little mentions of pre-war US, the Great War, the government apart from scattered connections like the military bases and Vaults.
 
Dr Fallout said:
I read them again, and you still assigned political stances on the Master and BOS.
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And I'm also pretty clear that these assigned stances are my own opinion. (With devs trying to make me think about this, not devs pointing their finger at factions and saying what it is.)

edit: I'm very glad to see you thinking about the political motives/stances with me! I think BOS can't be monastic though, despite their inner structure and rituals, since they are not focused on religious aspect solely (if any) and certainly they are doing much more than spiritual sessions only.
 
valcik said:
And I'm also pretty clear that these assigned stances are my own opinion. (With devs trying to make me think about this, not devs pointing their finger at factions and saying what it is.)
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But they're not... they've described the factions perfectly. All you're doing is putting modern politics into Fallout.
 
How don't devs make you think about politics in post-apo world, when they place strong anti-war intro right in the start and various power grabbing factions all across the game? Oh FFS guys.. :smile:
 
valcik said:
How don't devs make you think about politics in post-apo world, when they place strong anti-war intro right in the start and various power grabbing factions all across the game? Oh FFS guys.. :smile:
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Anti-war? Wrong. Anti-Nuclear. It doesn't actually disparage war, mentioning expansions for resources and slaves, though it does disparage nuclear war because of it's destruction. The closest and only thing we have to be anti-war is the 'War, war never changes' though that can be considered a blanket statement on the fact that war always has a resource/protection/taking out a rival justification behind it.

Also, they're not power grabbing in FO1... FO2 yes but that's it.
 
I don't think it's anti-nuclear only. There's whole human history mentioned - ancient wars waged by Romans, industrial wars waged during twenty century, and future nuclear wars purely fictional.

As for factions, The Master is clearly power grabbing, trying to unify and rule whole continent/world. Khans are power grabbing too, on much smaller scale limited by their manpower only. Hub merchants are power grabbing and slick as feck too.
 
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