(no subject)

 apparently the time from  “sci creates new blog” to “sci has an enthusiastic rant about animal genitals” can be measured in hours.

I wish this revealed something about myself I did not actually already know.

ego the living planet: best name, or best name?

 Sevi007 said:

"You know, I’m a really peaceful, pacifistic person and consider myself rather forgiving and patient…

 

But everyone who reads my tags under every last post that has Ego the living planet in it will probably disagree with all of the above. Um."

 

I don’t know, at some point peacefulness and pacifism have to have a limit or else you run into other moral questions about inaction and tolerating injustice. If there is no limit past which pacifism is no longer viable, that raises questions about whether the moral desire to remain clean of anger or violence cancels out the sin of allowing evil to proceed unmolested.

 

And if you look at Ego’s actions actually are, he kind of personifies evil deeds borne of entitlement. Let’s start with raping a woman–because what he did with Meredith, having sex with her for a reason she didn’t have the opportunity to give informed consent to, that is actually rape. He did that a lot–almost certainly many times for each of the skulls on that cairn of bones.

 

Then let’s talk about the fact that he did this multiple times for the sole purpose of impregnating women, probably not with their informed consent re becoming pregnant at that time. Whatever you think of pregnancy and parenthood, it’s a major life decision and ideally should only be embarked upon with eyes open and a thoughtful choice. Add on that he did that having zero intention of helping to parent or even financially support the resulting offspring that he chose to “put inside” those women. Peter’s mom clearly loved him and didn’t resent him for suddenly making her life a lot more difficult, but that’s…. Not how every woman who unexpectedly has a child in very stressful and precarious situation responds, so he’s also deliberately leaving children in situations that are poorly equipped to look after them.

 

Then we can talk about how he did all this explicitly planning to abduct these children from their actual parents, the adults looking after them, once the hard work of raising a child was over. He did it but planning to steal the wills and, effectively, life force of any and all of these children at the equivalent of age eight if he could–assuming that of course they had skills useful to him. If they didn’t, he simply killed them. He didn’t bother to return them to whoever might have missed them; easier to murder a child and discard it, absorbing it into your cavernous body.

 

And then we return to the reason he did all of it in the first place, his Glorious Purpose: replacing all life with extensions of himself like a kind of pan-universal cancer. It’s no wonder he killed Meredith with a brain cancer, because Ego is himself as much a form of cancer as anything else. There are in fact independent cancers in nature that spread from affected individual to individual, in at least three species I know of: and at least one of them, that lives mostly in feral dogs, is at least a thousand years old. Ego is simply the same thing on a larger scale, except worse: Ego is sapient. Ego had a choice about who he was and what he intended to become, and he chose that.

 

If Ego does not break the line at which one can no longer tolerate peace or pacifism and must act to stand against him, those words are meaningless. He is never shown or even implied to take the personhood or consequences to anyone else into his account when he considers any potential action. 

 

Ego is a fundamentally irredeemable character. He makes an excellent villain, but the sheer scale of the harm he perpetuates in the service of his ultimate goal of universal genocide makes him nothing more and nothing less than pure, absolute evil. And he’s all the better as a villain because his evil explicitly stems from the same fundamental petty self-centered entitlement as all the little evils we encounter around us, every day.