Necromancy

[beccaelizabeth]

You know how sometimes you just wake up grumpy?
Today I woke up grumpy about necromancy always being considered automatically evil
when death spells of other colleges aren't.

Like, okay, animating the dead is icky and scary, and the whole slave labour gig wrecks the economy, I just read a whole epic fic about that in Avengers fandom, and there's legit health concerns about rotting flesh, that's a problem.

But it's like an amped up organ donation problem? I mean some of the spells pretty much are donation, just, you know, typically portrayed as unwilling. And I know some of the problem is that if you've got healing spells that work without a donor then it just looks like assault to take it from someone, but, really, why do you have healing spells that work without a donor? Use necromancy to talk about organ banking and the kind of justice that's literally an eye for an eye, why not?

And the labour problem is just a drippier version of the oncoming bot problem. I mean, there's already a massive impact from robot labour, later we're going to have to deal with the boundaries of sentience and what the line is between tool and slave.

In zombies the line is the spirit, soul, personality, whatever the setting wants to call the unique essence of an individual. You can have a completely unaware zombie whose spirit has already been reincarnated. I was just reading the spells for that in D&D 2e, you just bring your boy back as a different individual or possibly different species, it's no problem. Well, they lose a lot on the way, but they've had the most epic possible brain injury, so. So if the person-ness is somewhere else, why not use the meat?

And then you can set the zombies to doing all that salt mining that was so dangerous, as also seen in that Avengers fic, or any of the jobs too advanced for tech but too hazardous to humans. You can do underwater mining. Send skeletons down to bring stuff up. Zombies and bots are functionally equivalent once you've got the biohazard bit out of the equation.

And you can use zombie armies, which have their problems, but involve far fewer of your own people dying for the first time. Plus you can use old people bodies and still have zombies that are just as useful. Not shipping all your young people out to fight instead of building a future. Where is the down side? And, okay, zombies are stupid, so down sides definitely exist, but then you're kind of off into drone problems, and a lot of the AI stuff I've been reading lately about next gen drones with basic reasoning capacity.

Also with Control Zombie being a thing then what would happen when you get two zombie armies on the battlefield? Their necromancers would fight by grabbing each other's zombies. You'd have a basic contest of wizardly strength going on, whoever stole each other's zombies would win. You could probably formalise the whole thing at a bunch of levels of insult, you'd have to be really angry to just up and risk your necromancers too. Because you'd be trying to recruit the other guy, if he's any good at all, or maybe study with him. It's a tough area of study.

But apparently it's an evil area of study. Because it's evil. To make the already dead meat take all the risks.



But then one spell further along in the book you've got your basic poison gas weapons, and they're not inherently evil at all! The hell? That's an effect banned by international treaty as too nasty for war, the spell equivalent should probably be pretty damn illegal too, why does the book not think it is evil? Fireball hasn't exactly got peaceful uses either! I mean, some fire spells, sure, you can do some serious smelting with those things, but fireball just blows shit up and then there's screaming and dying and woe. Why is that not evil?

What's with all these Good alignments that kill people anyway?

Why is Peaceful-Violent not an actual alignment axis?



And then there's the Charm spells. Which creep me the hell out. At least GURPS calls a spade a spade and calls the college Mind Control. But D&D has these sort of things listed for neutral good priests, and for priests of love. It actually suggests using love spells ffs. Love spells are the creepiest things ever devised. I mean, 90% of the time they're rape spells, lets get that straight up front. If they're inducing 'romantic' love then that's the other thing they're doing, setting up a victim for rape, who would not have agreed to that sex without that spell. Creepiest things. That's why the whole college is epic creepy, the lack of consent, the override to free will. But love spells are the worst, because they don't just make you feel a thing, they make you think you feel a thing no matter what. And real love, you can't fake that. God is love, love is the most real, faith hope and love time. But a love spell is a tacky tawdry imitation, because it'll keep going no matter how they're treated. It just relabels whatever feels they actually have as 'love'. It's domestic abuse, one round to cast.

*shudders*



And yet 'charm' spells are 'good', and animating meat is evil?

They have their priorities so very backwards.




Of course they also have unhelpfully fuzzy definitions of good, evil, order and chaos, that don't match the working definitions in other books.

I was also thinking about how our definitions of evil are heavily shaped by our reproductive strategy. Mostly I think this when trying to figure out goa'uld, but, we have one child at a time and look after them intensively and for a long time, and we call that Good. But the goa'uld have thousands of spawn. If they picked one to look after for a long time then how would that be more Good? What is Good to a species with the exact opposite reproductive strategy? Probably something about the greatest good for the greatest number, personal is not the same as important, changing the whole feeding ground for the better rather than individually nurturing. Needs thinking through.



Or, possibly, I could find something useful and productive to do with my day.