Paragon City is evil?

If I understand correctly, Tyrant did not actually conquer the world; he became leader by general proclamation.

Of course, that may be propaganda, and in the best case scenario, I'm sure he's had to put down some dissidents somewhere. But that in itself is not inherently evil.

On another note, whether or not someone is evil is completely orthogonal to whether or not they are a villain.

A person whose goals are good, but uses unconscionable methods can be rightly be called a villain (see Watchmen, Kingdom Come, etc). The road to hell, as it were.

The questions that come to my mind are: at what point does government become tyranny (in the moral sense) and is tyranny ever justifiable? Should Emperor Cole be ousted even if the cost is the lives of all of the innocent civilians he governs over? Is slavery a fate worse than death in this case, even if the 'slaves' are currently happy?

A slippery slope indeed.

Why? To watch her pole dance. We've already gone over this, Brand.

Also: Taking into account only the current in-game storyline, there is no clear distinction whether Primal Earth or Preatorian Earth attacked first. There's a non-arc mission (Tina MacIntyre, I believe) that has Anti-Matter attacking our dimension with his clockwork, and you may or may not get that mission before going to υ β 9-6. If you get the one-off mission first, then the Praetorians started it. If you get the story arc first, then we started it.

There's always a dichotomy between freedom and safety. To have the latter, you wind up giving up some of the former. There is a line there where you cross over from something our culture considers socially acceptable to something that it consider tyranny.

Just where that line is different for everyone, to a greater or a lesser degree.

In fiction, especially super heroic fiction, the general line as to why someone like Superman doesn't take over the world is because of the loss of freedom of choice. That is to say, it would be wrong for Superman to substitute his own moral values for those of the rest of the planet and enforce his will on the general public.

The thing about that line of reasoning, though, is that it presupposes your existence is fairly decent and has an element of choice and freewill to it already.

If you're a mother watching her children starve to death in a country that has no government to speak of, where the strong take from the weak and you never know if you're going to be alive from one morning to the next, I'd wager that the amount of restrictions you'd be willing to tolerate would be quite different from a millionaire in America or Europe.

Granted, there's a lot we don't know about Praetoria yet-- and MMOs don't really go much for subtlety-- but from the outside, which society do you think a normal person would rather live in? Praetoria or the Rogue Islands?

Heh, interesting. Generally I would agree with the tag that someone just added to this thread, but posts 165 and 167 are hard for me to refute.

Also: For anyone who read that particular comic, remember that Luminary actually has a neural network patterned off of a male hero, and a body patterned after his wife. First time I read it, I didn't know . . . but now it suddenly makes so much more sense.