Kontextmaschine

19th December 2022

Post reblogged from certified dejenerate with 1,104 notes

“On the one hand, my quest for revenge on the despot who destroyed my idyllic hometown bottomed out when I finally got him at my mercy and realized that his own horrific life circumstances had left him a bitter, unsatisfied shell of a person and that killing him could bring no plausible catharsis, only pointlessly adding another body to a growing stack. On the other hand, my initial impulse to seek revenge directly resulted in my piecemeal accruement of a found family with whom I found a positive feedback loop of character growth and moral maturation, which was in large part what made it possible for me to envision a life outside the narrow dictates of my shortsighted revenge quest. Also, we toppled a tyrannical government and ran every errand on this half of the continent. Honestly there are a lot of second-and-third-order positive effects of how badly I used to want to kill that guy. And obviously I’m a consequentialist now, since I didn’t kill that guy, so obviously I’d like to preserve those effects if at all possible. So I guess if I was to generalize from this whole experience, I’d say that we need to institutionally cultivate the impulse to seek violent revenge on wrongdoers, I mean it really gets you off your ass, but we also have to cultivating and elide the secret, load-bearing expectation that you should call it off at the very last second. We might need to train a whole secret corps of sleeper found family members, to inject themselves into organically forming epic revenge quest parties, prime the soil, so to speak, subtly draw the revenge party’s attention to, like, the material causes at the root of human of evil, or stuff like that, put the brakes on the pain train juuuuust enough to get us back in that sweet sp- fuck. Someone already had this idea, didn’t they. That’s what this whole thing was. This thing we just did. Fuck. I was going to make a fucking fortune franchising this. Fuck”