Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Examining the Cassians of WildStar


Imagine, for a moment, that your self-esteem has been validated completely by an external force. In fact, let's turn that up a little more -- let's say it's been validated by every single person you've ever idolized. Imagine that they all showed up at your front door and said you were awesome and that if you would just give them your cat, you would be granted a marvelous dominion over everything.

First of all, it would be time to say goodbye to the cat. Second, it would mean that from that moment on, your future actions would all be entirely validated no matter what you did. Seriously, how could it ever be otherwise? Every authority you respect came around to tell you that you are supremely awesome, and you are apparently the last person any of them talked to.

This should give you the barest hint of what it's like to be one of the Cassians in WildStar. You are born into greatness, into a legacy of being the greatest thing ever, and you don't just have to live up to that legacy -- you have to outdo it.

The point cannot be stressed enough that whether or not you like the Dominion, as far as the upper leadership is concerned, what citizens of the Dominion are doing is helping everyone. Absolutely nothing the Dominion has ever done has been done out of malice. It's always justified by the needs of the galaxy as a whole, even if sometimes that means being nasty in the short term.

No one would argue that any of this was nice, but you don't always get to operate based on nice. When you're trying to build a stable galactic empire that makes the galaxy better for everyone, you're going to occasionally wind up excising some parts. It's unpleasant, maybe even heartbreaking, but it's the necessity.

This is why it's so easy to say that the Dominion is evil or villainous: It's a faction willing to go to extremes. The Dominion is Ozymandias, Lex Luthor, the Borg, SHODAN, Garrosh Hellscream -- any character or group willing to go to any length for what is perceived as the greater good. What's missing is the fact that it's also the faction of martyrdom, of self-sacrifice, of giving up everything in pursuit of an ideal bigger than yourself.

If you believe you have a moral imperative, what do you do when you have to start questioning whether or not that imperative is valid?

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