Annotated 15-10
If you’re concerned that these clothes-wearing, tool-wielding creatures might be intelligent beings Frigg and Scip are killing for points, I’d say you should dive into the comments on this page, where I and others get into the issue at great length. TLDR: I don’t think there’s firm evidence one way or the other in the text, but to my mind, making kobolds sentient would give the story intractable problems, so to me, they’re not.
As I said in my initial notes to Phil, the “Highs, Scores” title is there not just because of the number scores here but because “the connecting thread for this chap, as I see it, is achievement, exaltation, success, whether it’s the Iwatanis reveling in their power, Byron re-accessing his own, Scipio getting one up on Frigg… or the others enjoying a higher state of mind. Even Frigg feels like she can even the score eventually. Everybody’s gettin’ fat, ‘cept Mama Cass: the only one who’s not really feeling like he’s reaching heights/scoring well is Mr. Dedalus.”
sadly I would say this would be confirmation for me of their state as “Intelligent Beings” only intelligent creatures are dumb enough sacrifice so many of themselves on a fight they are clearly losing. Dumb animals tend to run.
Then again the infrequency of the kobolds and their absence at the end lets me interpret it as a bit of underlying horror and commentary on how even good people can commit atrocity so long as their worldveiw sufficiently dehumanizes the target group. I actually find it makes the characters and their world more believable and presents no intractable problems. Arkkera was never meant to be a perfect world and not all its problems are solved.
Agreed. While it’s troubling just how gleeful Frigg is about killing them if they are creatures that continuously attack what else can you do but kill them. I would rate them as less intelligent than orcs and landsharks.
The actual definition of sentience being the ability to sense its environment and respond to it, it’s hard to argue that any animal isn’t sentient. Heck, plants are sentient too, as we have discovered. Sentient robots are commonplace now!
I blame Star Trek for using “sentience” when it should have used “sapience” and getting people to confuse the terms.
This. Sentience is responding to emotional or sensation based stimuli (Touch, sight, smell, sound, taste). All life with a brain structure at all is sentient. Sapience is specifically responding to intelligence or reason. You’re not going to win an argument with your dog or cat, because they are not sapient. They can’t reason, they’re not going to follow a logical path. You can train them, because response to emotion or sensation stimuli allows for that (Pavlov and all), but that’s it.
Kobolds appear to be just shy of the sapience threshold.
Intractable problems are largely in the eye of the beholder, I think.
For my part, I don’t at all find them in “the six protagonists have committed atrocities,” and do find them in “in this world, a character who says ‘those human-shaped, tool-using, clothes-wearing creatures are not actually people, just vermin who bleeding hearts could mistake for people’ is not a horrible racist.” Because that phrase, or something equivalent, has been said about a whole lot of racial groups in the real world.
This does mean that in some ways, I don’t think I was ever reading the comic the way it was intended–that is, I never, not for one minute, saw the protagonists as all that heroic.
So just to be clear, you are saying, “Because racism against many different cultures has been perpetrated in the real world, Arkerans can not be racists?” Or are you saying that they would be mundane, culturally normalized racists, as opposed to “horrible racists”?
Because it sounds like you’re saying that the fact that de-humanization of the other as an excuse for genocide occurring multiple times in our world somehow makes it ok or excusable.
Pretty sure you got the exact opposite of what they’re getting at- they’re saying presenting the kobolds as non-sapient vermin despite being humanoid tool-users is a big problem because that’s been used as justification for horrible real world acts against real human cultures.
I have no idea how you got that from what I said.
And Aydr is right.
well thank goodness.
I can see were Riotllama might have made the mistake as I too thought that was what you meant before a second read of you comment. Perhaps it could have been phrased better, I don’t know.
I love how mad Scipio’s indifference makes Frigg. I have known more than a couple of people like that in my life. Heck, I’ve probably been that person once or twice in my life.
The Kobold thing is a cop out. Your better off pointing out the Kobolds are attacking Frigg and Scorp than giving us the half ass excuse of none sentient. D&D and the like are all about murder and pillaging, acknowledge and move on.
No offense, but I think a big part of what Phil and I did with Guilded Age was to break away from genre conventions when they were in direct conflict with what we wanted to say about the world. The self-defense thing works up to a point, but it’d be a bigger cop-out to my eye to just say “Wellp, this is how D&D does it, murder and pillage are part of the deal!”
I suppose… But at the same time did you really break away from it? HR, the savage races, and Gastonia all use murder and pillage as the primary tools of their trade. Having the adventurers who work for any of the above somehow magically be free of it would be, well, an oddity.
Non-sapient kobolds is fine. There are many species of tool-users on our world which are very definitely non-sapient. Assuming something is sapient merely because it’s vaguely humanoid would be just as “racist” as assuming it’s not because it’s not a perfectly average human being. It would have been interesting to see more of what people thought about the kobolds in-world. Or if they were maybe something that HR added when he turned Arkerra into a game and maybe that’s why they have the trappings of sapience but no souls.
I think it’s pretty evident even at this point in the story that our protagonists are considerably better people than their enemies and employers. There wouldn’t be much point to the social change that gradually becomes central to the story if it was just “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
It’s wierd to see Frigg as being diminutive compared to Scipio in this picture. She’s generally among the bulkiest members of the main cast, so even though I understand that Scipio’s a big guy I kind of think of them as being roughly equivalent (which is helped by the fact that they’re rarely compared so directly).
Also, her expressions on this page are great.
Frigg may be bulky, but she’s not tall. Scipio is bulky AND tall. He’s a BIG GUY.
Even if they are sapient, there is nothing wrong with what Frigg and Scipio are doing imho, as the kobolds are just relentlessly attacking them on sight here, and making no attempt to communicate, make peace, or run away.
This is basically like swatting flies. Very large, life-threatening flies.
This is why people have their “populous menace” be something that doesn’t wear clothes or use tools.
Might still be sentient, but the question will only tend to pop up if the author cues it with hints.
However, in a fantasy world, it’s easy enough to offer ways in which there is not much moral impermissibility about this page.
1) All kobolds share a (fairly small) mind. And since kobolds reproduce via spores, there is no real risk of extermination.
2) Kobolds are self-replicating constructs. The tool use and rudimentary clothing are part of the design. They also reproduce at a completely uncontrollable pace, making their dismantlement comparable to hazardous waste cleanup. I wonder which Gastonian family’s request for a self-reproducing servitor species ran awry?
3) Kobolds (once again) reproduce very fast, and cause ecological breakdown due to some biological feature of theirs. Keeping them contained to areas already wrecked takes priority over their limited sentience.
Not very difficult.
People tend to overcomplicate morality.
There’s no perfect formula for it, close enough is OK.
So, for instance, abortion isn’t great, but it also not TERRIBLE.
Killing animals for food isn’t great, but although some forms of husbandry are in fact terrible, there are others where impermissibility isn’t certain – and there are some people with allergies that are fully justified in not complicating their already challenging and expensive dietary regimens with going vegan.
Not difficult. It’s arithmetic, not algebra.
The original argument in the comments seemed to be sentience vs not. And every time I read that originally and even now I think ‘dogs are considered sentient.’ Sentience is basically the ability to feel.
Sapience was probably what was intended as the argument. Lot of writers got those two mixed up back then, I think, because some more popular media used ‘sentient’ as the one where you can reason.
Semantics out of the way… Ultimately as a lover of both fantasy and sci-fi the idea that anyone could consider a creature capable of using tools less then halfway between sentient and sapient is a little crazy. Dolphins, apes and the corvid family are all great examples of animals that shouldn’t be eaten or killed simply because we don’t know where they fall on that line. And that’s not to mention the chance of us (hopefully) meeting alien life one day… Us as a species, I think. I doubt it’ll be happening any time soon. Right now it’s all on them if they even know of us or are capable of interacting with us and I doubt they’d want to get involved in our drama right now. But anyway, it’s hard to fathom growing up on Star Trek (or enjoying the general principles involved) and ever think to myself ‘well of course they’re sapient… at least enough to respect as unique forms of life’.
The line for that reasoning is always ‘self defense’ though. These guys are highly aggressive and deadly to unarmed individuals. There is an argument to be had that Gastonian expansionism has the kobolds losing hunting grounds and being forced to fight for food, as wildlife doesn’t propagate as much in the ruined woods and even farmland can basically terraform an area enough that the balance is fucked in that area. But then it takes on a very ‘colonial’ tone to it, harkening back to how colonists viewed native americans.
The ‘they’re not sapient’ (replacing sentient with sapient because sentience is a definite thing) arguments definitely seem to sound off like a mistake was made and you guys were aware of it but didn’t correct it. You wanted to eat your cake and still have it, so ‘they’re not sapient’ and the fact that they happen to very much fit a similar mold of Native’s of various countries and your metric for sapience was farming… Big oof there. Not every tribe had the ability to do agriculture successfully as far as I can find, though I could be wrong there. Heck, that argument’s pretty bad when you consider a lot of ancestors on all continents come from tribes that definitely didn’t do agriculture but still developed enough society and culture to survive and become what we are today.
Obviously you don’t intend these connotations and honestly I didn’t think at the time any of this. It’s a lot of retrospect. But the more I become aware of this sort of thing in media the more I like to write contrary to it myself. Really, the fact that they appear so little is your saving grace here. Or was. Your arguments against their sapience actually hurt your cause more then their depiction does.