Who is the most evil villain in CoX?

Tyrant is guilty of all of these too.

Tyrant also has a rather nasty predicatment that semi-justifies his actions:

Either he brings Praetoria in line

Or

Hamidon eats EVERYONE

Or he asks the heroes of Primal Earth for help.

You assume that was ever an option for him.

Except that by the time he knew Primal Earth existed he was already a dictator. And even at that point he would probably assume that the heroes of Primal Earth were no match for Hamidon since they can't even keep their own dimension under control (villains running rampant all over, citizens allowed to think for themselves, etc.).

Not to mention that Primal Hami still exists, and has eaten part of the city.

No. You are taking Tyrants stated goals at face value. Strange since there's no evidence that he has or ever had Praetoria's best interests at heart. But no matter, Tyrant enslaves children both psychically and corporally. He fully intends to do so. There is complete harmony between intent and action. I would note that he only allows this to be done to little girls and not boys. Although adding misogyny to his many crimes seems almost petty.

You must not have actually payed attention to the Praetorian storyline huh? Because that's EXACTLY what Tyrant does on a scale that makes Phipps look like an ant against an elephant.

Phipps deceives a shelter, Tyrant deceives a planet.

You mean how Tyrant projected his failures and evil on the super-powered beings of the Primal dimension and started a war to cover his own lies.

I would call a guy who claims to have created a Utopia while having secret terror camps to destroy anyone who even deigns to THINK differently a bit worse on this scale.

Are you serious? Cole's scope of this is massively more than Phipps.

Our Savior v. Nice Mr. Phipps at the shelter. Not equal sorry.

No, you're wrong. It's massively worse to have a conscience and reject it than to never have it at all. That's EXACTLY why this isn't a contest. Phipps is a cartoon. Tyrant has happened in the real world. Tyrant is happening right now in other countries. This is true evil. Phipps is bad fiction.

Again, I can only assume you haven't actually played the Praetorian arcs, since there is a whole conversation with Tyrant where he displays this behavior.

TYRANT EMPLOYS PSYCHIC SLAVES TO ENFORCE HIS WILL AND IMAGE. What the heck are you talking about? Phipps isn't even in the same zip code on this.

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This post just illustrates my point even more. I don't think people can internalize the scope of Tyrant's evils. Where with Phipps because it's more manageable they can. This has actually been studied. It's why we can cry at the starving of one family, but yawn at the famine of a country. The scope is too big. But folks, take a step back and it's abundantly clear that Tyrant and Phipps aren't even a contest. Hell Nemesis and Phipps aren't a contest.

Nonsense. That predicament means he should have alerted the populace to the threat and the deal he struck. He should have allowed a democratic government to decide what to do. That predicament doesn't justify his evils. Tyrant doesn't get to make these decision for everyone. He doesn't get to declare himself Emperor. He doesn't get to create terror camps. He doesn't get to enslave children. At a certain point the medicine is worse than the disease.

Much evil has been committed in history using this justification. I would hope we would have learned by now.

Well, based on the lore, he was made "Emperor" because the people wanted him to be. As for all the things done while he was in power, I'm fairly certain a good majority of it was done without his knowledge. I mean, look at what happened when he discovered what Duray did. He punched Duray's face into a fine mist.

I'm almost certain if he knew Tilman was slicing up people's psyches he'd had issues. He already had severe issues over her trying to mass-brainwash the populace after the TPN incident. I get the feeling most of what the Praetor did was taking place without his consent, or the reports he was being fed about their projects was written in a way that avoided mentioning the icky bits.

EDIT: I don't disagree that Tyrant is "evil", but compared to a fair amount of existing antagonists, he rates fairly low on the list in my opinion. There are far worse and more openly malicious people than him.

Fixed, for historical fun.

Also known as the "Wannsee Conference Extended Bathroom Break Defense".

...GG, that is dangerously close to Godwin, and you really can't make that comparison. Not even remotely.

Gotta say, I've never understood the almost religious awe with which people invoke Godwin's law on the internet. Hitler certainly doesn't belong in every conversation, but like it or not, he is an historical figure. Simply mentioning him shouldn't invalidate everything you have to say.

Though I obviously can't speak for the man, I doubt very much that even Godwin himself would apply his axiom so liberally as most people seem inclined to do.

In this case, in a thread the subject of which is the nature of evil? Uh, yeah. Hitler's an obvious candidate for analogy.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Except Recluse does exactly the same thing, and Phipps has you hunt down one of them who escapes.

you are right, he doesnt get to do that, people gave him that power, they did not want the responsibility. your faith in the rational actions of a democratic government to not overreact, abdicate responsibility, avoid petty partisan infighting, and stay within moral lines is not really justified by history.

The point is that constantly invoking Hitler is inappropriate. Usually the comparison is never appropriate or even close. The point Godwin made with his axiom is that constantly making Hitler/Holocaust comparisons diminishes the impact.

And the point is that GG tried to "fix" my sentence by replacing Tyrant with Hitler as though the comparison between the two was appropriate contextually. The idea is that, at the point you feel you need to make comparisons to Hitler is about when your argument starts losing credibility.

Because usually the comparison isn't accurate.

And in this context, it's not.

wonder how Godwin came up with that rule.

But tyrant and hilter do have some very eery similarities.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

I tend to find that invoking the Nazi in socio-political debates (including such about a fictional world) generally misses the point. We all know that the Nazi are evil, yes, but we tend to turn over two pages at once and not really consider WHY they're evil. It's easy enough to infer that they're evil, therefore everything they're involved must be evil, too, but that's not entirely true, or at least not entirely accurate. When you bring up the evils of WW2, most of what that implies is the Holocaust and the other horrors of war, which honestly have no place in this game as far as I'm concerned. They're evil, yes, but the kind of evil I'd rather not have to deal with.

But when you're trying to discuss Tyrant, comparing him to Hitler and his state to the Nazi is missing the point and actually simplifying a rather much more complex point. If a comparison must be drawn, then I'd rather draw one between Praetoria and a fascist state. Right out of Wikipedia:

We can argue about the morality of fascism, and there is some leeway to argue, as certain Civilization games have used that as a legitimate national policy, but I feel the larger point here is how well this matches the world of Praetoria. You can, for instance, quote the Rogue Isles as a nation of evil, and it kind of is, but it represents a very different kind of social structure, one based more around feudalism if anything, and is not at all similar to Praetoria. Bot consider how good of an example Praetoria is of a textbook fascist state not too dissimilar from that of, say, Starship Troopers. While you CAN make a parallel between Praetoria and the Nazi, it's really not the connection most people infer when the Nazi are brought up. What people infer is a connection of violence and murder, whereas what's similar here is the connection of social structure, instead. We cannot forget that Nazi Germany was, at the end of the day, a fascist state not too dissimilar from fascist Italy.

That's the connection and I believe the intent of the comparison, but it's also a connection that gets lost in the shuffle when you drop the bombshell that is the Nazi. Goodwin's Law, to my eyes, is more to point out that bringing up Hitler and the Nazi in a normally unrelated discussion is akin to firing a shotgun to a projector board to point to a PowerPoint presentation item. Yes, you've accurately pointed to the item, but your audience is a bit too shocked at you firing a shotgun at a meeting to see what you pointed at. It's also largely pointless in that it's a roundabout way to say something that, ultimately, doesn't need bringing up the Nazi to actually say. In fact, the Nazi have no real relevance except to add shock value which, ironically enough, ends up hurting more than it helps as it detracts from the actual point.

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All of the idle philosophical ramblings aside, I actually have to applaud Praetoria's 1-20 game for pulling off a pretty faithful, pretty creative depiction of a functional fascist state, and for making it about as sympathetic and morally ambiguous as you can make a totalitarian military dictatorship. It's a pity 20+ Praetoria pretty much discards this and descends into a sort of goatee evil parallel universe full of scenery-chewing ********.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually makes a lot of sense, evn though I'm not sure mentioning Nazi is a shock factor or more so no one really wants to deal with it. Like a satanist and a devout christian at a PTA meeting when the question of "What is the best religion" question comes up. As with many Nazi based or inspiried enemy groups in this game, word Hitler here should of lost shock value long time ago from shotgun blast to maybe a spitball gun (5th, Reichman, etc.) Yet I use Tyrant and Hitler not for the murder dead, etc holocaust thing. More like the way the State was. It is pretty well known that that Germany under Hitler basically was fairly prosperous under his rule, and studies shown that the relative citizens felt safe. Hell, even Time made him Man of the Year in the 30s. Yet, while the facade of a single man saving a nation, not too much unlike Tyrant, wide range support in policies to the point of blind loyalty, hides a much darker sinister way to it that wasnt spotted until he was dug in deeper than an Alabama tick. Just like tyrant and his rule and the point where Primal Earth comes into play.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

This was probably Tyrant's SOP for 'saving' people. Wait until the situation is so desperate that it's either get behind Cole or become compost.

Yes, I understand Godwin's law. Leaving aside the inherent contradiction in your combining, "Usually," with, "Never," the above-quoted paragraph is a fair interpretation of the axiom, and a fair approximation of what I argued in my previous post, in fact.

Usually that's true. But to say that all allusions to Hitler are automatically bereft of credibility is to commit, in reverse, the very same mistake you're trying to correct. If it's true that casual allusions to Hitler diminish legitimate allusions to Hitler, then it's equally true that dismissing all discussion of Hitler -- effectively pretending he never existed, or worse, lending a clownish aspect to any reference to him -- is to diminish the tragic lesson that his rise to power and subsequent reign of terror represent.

If you truly believe that GG's analogy is inaccurate or inappropriate, then feel free to argue that position. My only objection is the idea that your position should be presumed correct simply because you made a vague appeal to authority (Godwin's law). To the extent that any Hitler analogy on a game forum can be appropriate, Tyrant seems a pretty obvious subject for such an analogy.

We are discussing the nature of evil in this thread. The whole thing is an implicit analogy to various historical figures who have earned that characterization. Some of the game villains discussed here might be analogous to Charles Manson, some to Jack the Ripper, others perhaps to Ratko Mladic or Saddam Hussein. And yes, I think one of them is at least tenuously comparable to Hitler.

We cannot divorce our understanding of fictional evil from our experience with and perception of real-world evil. The same thing is true of goodness, love, friendship, sadness; fiction only succeeds to the extent that the reader/viewer can relate to it.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

See, this is a straight-faced attempt at an argument as to why the nazi comparison shouldn't be used. I don't necessarily agree with Sam's argument, but ironically he's made a decent case against Godwin through his rational approach to the topic, even though his goal was superficially to argue for Godwin.

Yes, absolutely the nazi social structure is at play here. So, too, are the circumstances of Hitler's rise to power, which is pretty close to Tyrant's if my understanding of the game lore is correct. Both leaders used an external threat or threats as a scape goat against which to rally the populace and consolidate power. (In Hitler's case, the Treaty of Versailles -- which was legimately punitive to post-WW-I Germany -- and the Jews. In Tyrant's case, the Hamidon.)

Both leaders made liberal use of propaganda and indoctrination to maintain their grip on the populace. Both leaders declared (and subsequently lost) wars that they didn't strictly have to declare. (In Hitler's case, he shouldn't have committed to war with Russia when he did, and in Tyrant's case, it's at least arguable that he didn't have to make war on Primal Earth at all.) Both leaders were (effectively) removed forcibly from power by external forces, as a direct result of their arguably careless war-mongering.

The parallels are almost too apt not to mention them. This isn't simply a matter of carelessly invoking Hitler's name for shock value.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Honestly, I'm not trying to argue for or against Goodwin so much as I feel bringing Hitler up is sort of like bringing out a loaded gun. You may only mean to show how it works, but the danger is still there. I prefer to not bring these sorts of tragedies up because despite our desensitisation to them, they're still emotionally charged and that tends to detract from the actual point made. All of a sudden we're discussing WW2 history instead of City of Heroes and it kind of goes sideways from there. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just something I wouldn't do unless either Hitler himself was specifically relevant or something specific to the Nazi themselves were the subject matter.

And considering your clarification, my above "unless" actually seems to be the case. To me, invoking Hitler as a historic person whose own life parallels that of Tyrant seems like a legitimate call, as does bringing up the history of the Third Reich to bring parallels between that and the history of Praetoria. To be honest, despite being fairly well-versed in WW2 history, I myself hadn't really made the connection. I'm not entirely sure the person who wrote Tyrant's life story was, either, but you're right that the similarities are uncanny. Perhaps the fate of Hitler's Germany has been cemented in popular culture as such a strong lesson of the folly of the Nazi way that people are unintentionally and unconsciously producing stories like it when they reach for the folly of an aggressive, warmongering totalitarian state.

That's actually a pretty good observation, thank you.

I do have one comment to make, though, and I can't source this information since it comes from what I've heard about the stories in iTrials that I haven't done. SPOILERS to follow, so proceed with caution.

While it seems like Emperor Cole didn't need to invade Primal Earth for strategic reasons and did so out of irrational ideology, I'm told that's not the case. What I'm told is Cole never actually defeated the Hamidon, and instead made a deal with it - keep people in line and they can leave. Let them run about and destroy nature and the Hamidon will kill them all. When people from Primal Earth start showing up, it's the Hamidon who forces Cole's hand into invasion, demanding the subjucation of the Primal People as well as those in Praetoria, hence pushing Cole into a war he himself never wanted.

As I said - I don't have a source for this and there's a wide margin of error where I could have read wrong, interpreted wrong or just plain remembered wrong. If you can source this through the Wiki or through experience from Trials or if anyone can correct me, I'd appreciate it. However, per chance I'm right, this would make Cole less of an evil character and more of a tragic one, somewhat straddling the line of being put in charge of humanity for its protection and yet firmly believing he was doing the right thing. Then again, Praetorian morality has flip-flopped so many times I don't know where we are right now.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Although locked in a stalemate with one enemy, he chose to open up a 2nd front against a more heavily populated neighbor, relying on the technical superiroity of his forces to achieved a quick victory.
Once conquered, the new territory would become part of his larger empire, while any "undesirable" elements in the conquered population would be eliminated.
The invasion caused quite a lot of damage, but failed in its goals, and once the more heavily populated neighbor organized its forces, the invasion became a full-scale retreat and counter-invasion.
As his armies were systematically dismantled, and the futile search for a super weapon to turn the tide of the war failed, the enemy forces closed in, leaving him skulking in his bunker in the heart of his besieged captial, wondering where it'd all gone so wrong.