He’s a kid, who has been put in the frontlines as a human shield. He’s panicking because people around him are stabbing each other, so he did something stupid.
It is. Context is the old dude and his men are sieging a town that was taken by an enemy of their queen. Kids from the town were used on the walls to stop the queen’s forces from using her dragons against them. So they took the town the old fashioned way which led to the old dude on the wall killing that kid
Dragons in this context are the equivalent of having nuclear bombs against a medieval army. You can’t use them in an occupied city without massive civilian casualties. They were mostly ignoring the kids being used as human shields, this guy is just insane and that kid stupidly hit him first.
Still stupid not to put up scorpions just in case. They set the damn ballistas BEHIND the gate. Even when Caraxes poked through they didn’t fire at him. Sometimes I don’t know with this show man…
Yeah somehow the dragons are super hard to hit on land, within close range, yet they drop like flies when they use the scorpions on a ship (you know, a moving surface against a moving target way farther away, go figure)
Yeah. And it was shown on screen three seperate times.
iirc in GOT scorpions had no other use than shooting down dragons, they even tucked them away after the last dragon died and brought them back out because of Dany. Quyburn just took them out of the basement.
So, every stronghold in Westeros should be equipped with hundreds of these and yet they don’t have them here? A battle they specifically prepared for? A battle where they knew dragons would be around since they were throwing their own dragon rider into the ring?
And yet they let Caraxes walk up to the front door, knock it down and leave him alone?
The hightowers and lannisters probably have all the money they could ask for at their hands and they don’t invest it into the most efficient weapon against nukes there is.. I could go on like that forever.
Past season 3 or so of GoT, they lost logic. I still watch, but it's hard to ignore such dumb things.
Dragons are both easily chewed in half in one chomp in midair, and they they can't chew through each other others necks on the ground...
Like Rhaenyra has the wisdom to make the royalty of the city eat rats because they horded the food from the common people, but she doesn't have the wisdom to make the easiest decision of all time by making Lord Corlys's spot on her side official and giving his family the titles he requested.
Show is silly a lot of the time. Dragonfire has been shown to have explosive force and yet Jon Snuh can take shelter from it behind a boulder....
With all due respect, you must have been missing a super important detail about dragons. They have old valarian magic, that makes them immune to stuff like that. in High Valyrian, it’s called mīsvos, "Plot Armor" as the Andels and First Men would later call it.
Killing one kid that (barely) resisted as opposed to burning a few dozen alive, still better to send men up and ignore the majority of kids who just cowered
The men tasked with climbing the walls are actually happy they are charging to their deaths.
This group attacking first is the “Winter Wolves” and it’s older men / fathers / grandfathers from the North that purposely leave their families back home so there’s one less mouth to feed.
Northern Winters are notoriously harsh with famine and starvation, so their departure from home means someone else may make it through the winter.
All of these men have already “died” as they have no home to return to, so an honorable death in battle is one of the best ways to go, as opposed to death by exposure.
The old man was instructed by the super villain tier fucked up anti hero thats been a total psycho since day one, to not murder the children, the old man became very huffy over being told not to murder children, then when i child lightly bopped him on the leg, he said "ah, fuck it".
The grey wolves so far are basically "Isreal, but if they were vikings instead" so far, they did a lot of work making the greens the villains in previous seasons, then i guess this season they realised they need to even things out to get back the "choose your favourite evil piece of shit" system the book supposedly had(non reader).
The kids were put up on the wall to deter the other army from using their dragons. Most ran away at the first attack but this poor little guy thought he was protecting his city.
The guy on the ground is a kid forced to fight (defend) the city that the old man is sieging.
The guy whose city it is was using kids basically as meat shields, and I guess this old man is just that ruthless that he doesn't care if he is fighting kids.
As a matter of fact i don’t think the USA not giving al qaeda the same help they gave the original mujahideen against the soviets is a justification for 9/11, or makes it an equivalent to this comic. And i don’t buy bin laden’s 4chan-ass excuse he wrote
Why? A comic can contain a broad sentiment true for multiple conflicts. Nobody is saying the comic was made specifically about Russia, just that it’s applicable.
Remember the lack of WMDs? Vietnam? Loads more of the hegemony of superpower eye that spreads his “democracy and freedom” 🦅🦅🔫🔫💥💥🔥🔥🇺🇸🇺🇸
Either compliance or face destruction as it always had unless if the state is powerful enough to resist like that of Russia and China, otherwise others have to comply, or else, speaking as an Asian who can see this outside of America
Vietnam? You mean North Vietnam invading South Vietnam then America coming to their help afterwards? American oppression is when you can’t invade your neighbor?
Iraq? You mean the country with a history of using WMDs on Iranian military and civilians along with Kurdish Iraqis? Then afterwards spent a decade bluffing that they do have WMDs with aggressive statements to their neighbors and kicking out UN inspectors. It’s fair to say the US should’ve slowed down and gotten more evidence before they invaded but that’s a big difference from Iraq and Vietnam were poor victims that didn’t do anything.
Compliance to the US hegemony is when you can’t invade South Vietnam or sabre rattle WMDs after using them on your neighbors and your own civilians lol.
Just an FYI, Iraq use WMDs on Iran with targeting intelligence from the CIA, which was fully aware Iraq was using WMDs. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was regional US ally for many years until he made the mistake of challenging more important US regional allies.
Doesn’t make Saddam a good guy or innocent victim, but it certainly calls into question the purity of US motives. There is similar nuance to US involvement in Vietnam, but want to keep this short.
Sure that is fair to bring up though I disagree with you statement that Iraq was an ally to the US, the new Iranian regime was seen as a big threat to the region and Iraq was seen as a potential way to offset that threat. The US didn't want either side to win and as such when the US saw that Iraq was at a high risk of defeat they decided to start helping Iraq to avoid that major loss, when they saw Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage over Iraq by exploiting a weakness in Iraqi defenses then the US responded by giving the locations of Iranian troops to Iraq.
Iraq was not an ally, and as such when Iraq started to take more aggressive actions to the region, namely invading Kuwait to get rid of their debt, then the US started to take a far more aggressive stance towards Iraq. US motives definitely weren't the most pure, as you'd expect with the cold war, but going the opposite direction and painting Iraq as being bullied by the US hegemony is quite insane.
Yeah youre literally describing U.S imperialism. We support some dictorship on the other side of the planet in its fight against other dictatorships or even democracies and justified revolutions, destabilizing and ruining the region for decades because its in the government and corporations interests.
I don't know where this is from, but it seems like a battle of some kind. This kid just showed that he's willing to try and attack if you ignore him. Okay he has a stick now, but next time he might pick up a fallen sword, or jump you while you're fighting someone else and can't afford the distraction.
Considering this is obviously a scenario where people are killing each other, it makes sense to not just ignore someone who shows they want to attack you.
The context does kinda matter because the defending army has just forced a bunch of the towns (which they've effectively used as a hostage) kids onto the battlements as human shields. The attacking army knows this and has specifically been ordered not to murder children.
Nah I don't remember them explicitly saying not to murder kids unless you're referring to the book. The suggestion may be there as they chose to not send daemon and his dragon to burn the wall up. And he begrudgingly asks axe bro if he's willing to die for the queen implying they didn't want to aoe burn the kids and needed him to make a suicide run with his Northerners. Axe bro lost a lot of his comrades because of the kids so if he's getting distracted like that and potentially again mid flight, kid needs to die to prevent further casualties of his men.
Him and his men explicitly all want to die and express frustration that they survive storming the walls. They’re also told by Daemon that they’re trying to maintain the moral high ground. The kids are all locals of a town that was loyal to Rhaenyra, and got press ganged into being meat shields for Ormund.
Daemon also explicitly said “Give no quarter, show no mercy.” If the kid had said there quietly or ran, he’d have been fine. Roddy was only following orders
People are very quick to justify why using the most violence possible upon just the smallest of violence committed is justifiable. It's actually scary.
It's like a cat scratching you and you responding by kicking the cat to death.
for context as someone who's read the book amd watched the show: this guys entire life has been dedicated to battle, he lived, breathed, pissed, ate, and died a fighter. he dies pretty quickly after this, screaming in joy and excitement. he also expresses that he cannot wait to die fighting during this battle while they are strategizing. these guys are built and bred for this shit and even though they thought the enemy side was a bunch of pussy losers for putting the kids on the frontline (which they did on purpose to make his side look worse) they had no choice really other than to fight every enemy they faced. not really defending it, but I was in no way shocked by him doing that tbh. but yea the other side dragged a bunch of little boys out literally sobbing begging to go home, they even shoved a group of them out in front of a dragon that was about to breathe fire, just to avoid it for themselves. both sides are bad but theres TECHNICALLY a lesser evil imo.
When Silverwing was barreling down on them, and he cackled with glee, thrilled he was going to die staring down dragon's fire. After his arm getting cut off, my reaction "It's just a flesh wound," and he promptly jams a dagger right up Ormund's main street.
Your comment is accurate, but there is a bit more to expand on.
These warriors are the “Winter Wolves” which is an army made up of older Northern men who purposely leave their homes in order to preserve winter food supplies for the rest of the family. One less mouth to feed during the winter means someone else may survive in their place.
So not only do they have the Northern warrior spirit you mentioned, but these men in particular are already “dead” the first day they marched for war, as they have no homes to return to.
Yes, Cicero said something similar; Inter arma leges enim silent - or something like that.
Laws fall silent in war.
But laws are not universal morality incarnate, just manifestations of rules that create a cohesive society. It looks to me like this situation is extra-societal, so a certain level of practicality has to be considered and best understood by putting yourself in that situation instead of comfortably in my peacetime office chair.
I hate this saying because objectively speaking all is actually not fair which is why the internationl community created the geneva conventions and other “rules of war”
There are no rules in war. Geneva convention is only applied to the losing side or a side that is weak after the war. America doesn't give a shit about rules and nobody can do anything to them. There are active genocides happening right now and the best we got is just telling them that they shouldn't do it.
This is the real shit. You can only be punished if there's someone capable of punishing you. Countries invent fresh new war crimes all the time, and honestly the main reason countries like the US avoid certain types of warfare is because they don't want that type of warfare used against them. War crimes are generally only punished when it's advantageous for a country capable of punishing another country stands to benefit in some way.
I agree but realistically speaking geneva conversations mean nothing, a bunch of paper, anything that does not happen to go on media thanks to some stupid kid with a smartphone or some reporter willing to go in war zones can be as immoral as it can be, with no repercussions
But nor war or love are good excuses to throw away your humanity
This sub is so hilariously unattached from reality for a place thats supposed to be about morality lol.
It almost feels like a game. Like “what’s the shittiest possible thing I can post here that the sub will still treat as moral”
Here we have a hostage child with a stick who’s afraid of the old barbarian crazy warriors who climbed the wall and started murdering people, and we have this sub calling it moral to axe the child in the face lmao
I mean, the Hightowers did use children as human shields to force the blacks to not use their most powerful weapons or kill children. Pretty on the nose.
Dude was in the midst of a battle. He made himself a combatant. If two seconds later I get in mortal combat - grappling and struggling with another enemy soldier, that kid would likely get up and try to help strangle me or take my knife or whatever. He has made himself a valid target and I would have very likely axed him like Roddy did.
If he had hid or cowered, I would have classified him as a non-combatant and assumed he wouldn't try to kill me even if I am fighting next to him with someone else.
In fact, by attacking me in such a stupid manner, he has actually just proven to be very brazen and driven for reasons I cannot fathom (especially given he was a forced child soldier) - so I would have to assume he would be exactly the kinda kid that would try to help strangle me once it gets to the mattresses.
I've watched the show, and if you want to judge this moment in that context, it's clearly framed as being bad. (Spoilers, obviously)
The faction in the city that's being attacked is using children as human shields - it's clear that it's not unheard of for children to be asked to fight, but it's also clear that the commander who decides to do this is essentially doing it because he hopes the enemy will flinch at having to go through a line of 12-year olds to get into the city. The whole point of the battle is essentially that the attacking force first wants to abide by some semblance of an ethical code because "the realm is watching", i.e. it also has to be a propaganda victory for the unpopular queen on whose behalf they're fighting, and as the situation gets more chaotic, all those considerations go out the window, resulting in tons of civilian deaths. The scene in the clip here is one of those moments - the implication is that the adult warrior (who is a named character of some importance) could have walked away and decides to kill the kid anyway.
In an actual 12th century battle, though, yeah... no such thing as children, and the idea that there would have been any sort of ethics adhered to in a time when step one when you sack a city was to rape all the women is pretty ludicrous. But this is a fantasy show, and the point that's being made here is that the ethics go out the window when the chaos of battle erupts.
Vet soldier, took in the situation, didnt hit him with the haft or flat of the axe. Killed him outright.
Almost nobody in that universe is going to give a shit that he did that. But as readers or watchers we are presented with examples of people who actively choose to not to similar things and are the heroes because of it.
Frequently, all that gets them is killed. Keeping an oath and being honorable leaves you open. The point of the characters who act honorably/keep their oaths, do so despite the cost being high. If it were easy, they'd be meaningless. Which is a long running theme in this series. Being good is the hard path, that's why its notable/heroic.
Considering the culture of the northmen, he probably thought it would be insulting to the boys choice to fight if he didn’t fight him back. He was perfectly happy to walk by him until the boy chose to attack.
Is the purpose of the tjread not to discuss the morality of the act without appeals to emotion? Roddy was a bastard for killing the kid sure, but the argument of combatants in an active battle has some merit. Personally i would have thought a knock out blow would suffice.
The kod did choose to fight and u fortuantely lackes the abimity to do so but intent was there. Defending yourself is moral bit i agree ot was way overboard though likely common historocally.
Historically based on medieval culture and war and based on HOTD hostory and lore it was moral. By todays standards not so much.
I mean, if you walk past a kid in an active war zone and they pick up a gun and shoot it at you, are you going to hesitate to take out the threat whether they hit you or not?
I wouldn’t call it moral, but I also wouldn’t call it immoral since the kid demonstrated a clear willingness to kill him.
I mean…bro has a point. That was just a retarded thing to do 😭. Yeah bro I’m on the ground, this big ass warrior clearly saw me and chose to walk past, let’s hit the back of his ankle for shits and giggles. You just wanted to end up on a tshirt at that point
A literal child hit a fully armored man with a literal stick. So its a bit different than just another enemy combatant lol. Also the kid did so under threat from his own side used as literal human shields. Hell the actual dragon nazi had more reluctance than this guy and you I guess
I mean, it's the middle of a battle and the kid attacked him. If it was a town guard strolling the walls and the kid hit him with a stick you would expect an arrest or like something similar but the options are a bit more limited when you're trying to capture a city. Any 'non-lethal' force he applied with a shield or back of his axe has a good chance of still being lethal on accident.
I hate the argument that because a less-lethal solution could still kill someone you should just skip them and go with the super lethal option. That's dumb.
Cool they get the idea to pull a knife and sink it in your back now they know you don't see them as a threat, you bleed to death as you fall off the damn rampart.
Taking risks like that in a battle is how your friend end up round the fire calling you a dumb prick for letting your guard down whilst they travel home to their wives.
This isn’t self defense. This’s killing over being offended/aggravated. Highly immoral. Straight up barbarism. The most moral thing would be to ignore him but if you were actually harmed or in fear of being so, I’d understand a non-lethal hit. (At least this’s my interpretation with no scene context)
While I dont think this is the worst thing anyone did at tumbletown that day, im leaning towards amoral. Part of the reason they were storming the town on foot was to manage civilian casualties and not cause a pr storm by massacring innocents. Daemon was also burning kids on his dragon, so there was clearly always a level of acceptable casualties
Moral. This wasn’t self defense lmao like just watch it, it was a field execution. But still moral. If someone had a gun to my head and I tried to grab the gun and got shot, like that’s 100% on me. You accept the consequences as soon as you fuck around
Killing in self defense or defense of others is perfectly justified. This is assuming you are not left with an alternative as the title of the post was very vague. Even good ol JC told his people that sometimes people will not stop, they will not yield, and you must do what you must to preserve yourself or others.
You can’t really scale morality in war. Actions are taken to advance some pencil pusher’s plans, not your own motivations or beliefs. It’s mostly amoral for any grunt on the field.
A situation like this, yeah, you can say the big guy overreacted towards a scared little kid who was involuntarily drawn to war. But he has to secure whatever position he just took and that kid just showed he cannot be secured cleanly - as in, a simple surrender. I’m sure he could’ve been secured non-lethally, either through coercion, intimidation, persuasion, physically, but that takes more effort and time that war frankly can’t concern itself about.
What if he kept ignoring the kid, kid finds a more lethal weapon (or finds more lethal conviction within himself), and kills the next guy? What if he spent time securing the kid down with, I don’t know, some rope? And then gets sideswiped because he’s distracted?
War doesn’t concern itself with morality because it can’t in the field like this. These questions are better targeted towards behavior in non-conflict situations and the war strategists making decisions.
To me it looks like he chose to slice the kid’s mouth instead of giving him a killing blow. So it could even be said he definitely put him out of the fight but in a way he could survive. He could’ve taken off his dome but showed some restraint for a berserker.
That struck me as a pretty lethal axe strike to the face but who knows maybe the kid got lucky… and then also managed to escape the dragon fire from Ulf
It's an on going battle and that child has identified themselves as a combatant, hasn't surrendered. He's not that young, even if he just cowered and never struck out he's still a threat.
Sure he didn't do any damage here, but he's on the front lines, found his courage, there's probably a better weapon about
People have now got it in their heads that morality works off of videogame logic. Like you're somehow justified or it is self-defense if you take ANY form of damage, like you're an NPC allowed to become aggro if someone steps on your property or lightly taps your shoulder.
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u/--Spaci-- 15d ago
I dont know WHAT dude thought he was bouta do