• assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    If you think that’s a myth, you have a terribly myopic taste in fiction. The Witcher series has a great short story aptly called “The Lesser Evil”, where Geralt refuses to do anything bad on the principle that evil is evil. A wizard wants Geralt to kill a girl because a prophecy says she’ll destroy kingdoms, and he wants to examine the entrails. The girl says she was ostracized and raped because of the prophecy the wizard follows, and wants Geralt to lure out the wizard for her to kill.

    Geralt chooses neither, and is then met with a problematic situation. The girl and her gang will confront the wizard outside his tower, and kill the townspeople ceaselessly until he turns himself into them. The wizard however is a selfish bastard and has no intent to do so. The town of innocent people will be massacred, and neither side wins. And so, Geralt acts – he chooses the lesser evil, and kills the gang, and tries to defeat the girl without killing her, but she chooses to fight to the death. Geralt refuses to give the wizard the body, threatening to kill him in turn if he touches her, and the townspeople throw stones at him and call him a butcher.

    It really isn’t hard to see this play out in real life. Replace the girl and her gang with a terrorist group from a country destabilized by the West, and the wizard with a corrupt politician who helped destabilize the country but is a cornerstone of the community. What would you choose to do?