silentassassin264 wrote...
You would make a great point except for the fact that those things you chose can be taken from Goneaviking right now. What if you lose your sense of taste or in the next 5 years or so they cure your migraines or lets say you win the lottery and no longer need your job. Did you all of a sudden stop being Goneaviking because obstacles that you had to face are no longer there? Certainly not. Your opinions and approach to life might certainly change if you no longer could taste your favorite food or have chronic headachess but it is still you making those decision just with new parameters.
You're steering clear of the important stuff. If a downloaded copy of my personality has no biological imperatives can it truly be me? I'm not talking a change of situation, I'm talking fundamental changes in a beings nature. To quote myself "no longer has to eat or sleep, no longer gets pleasure from (or presumably the biological imprerative to seek) sexual gratification". Removing the fundamental laws of a beings existance isn't the same as winning the lottery or not being able to taste what you're eating.
As far a societal expectations. What if you move from where you live now to somewhere else. Would you have the same rights you have where you are now? No. Would you be able to vote? Nope. Would your marriage transfer? Probably... But I am pretty sure you get the point already. Societal expectations can change for you now as Goneaviking if you just change country. Does the fact that you would not necessarily get the same reaction and rights as you get now if you go to say Lagos, Nigeria, mean you are a different person if you went to Lagos, Nigeria? Certainly not. Once again, parameters have changed and expectation of you from those around you have changed this time instead of expectations you have of yourself but it is still you who would be adjusting to them. You didn't all of a sudden become Nigerianviking just because expectations of you changed.
After transfering my identity into a robotic body it's place in society, and in the universe, is fundamentally and profoundly different from what I experience for myself as a human. It's not the same as moving to Africa, it's an entirely different existence.
Robovikings existence and self-awareness, the adaptations he would be required to make would leave an entity completely alien to and unrecognisable to myself.
Your summation is cute and sounds profound but I don't buy it. I know that there are some people who do what they do no matter the circumstances but reducing Morinth down to that seems to be cutting out a lot. Being hated, feared, and hunted because of something you are does not leave much choice to respond to. If only choices in response to her circumstance was being arrested for possible future crimes and forfeiting her life or going on the run where people would be chasing her not because of what she has done but for what she is. Killing people through sex was the only way she would gather enough biotic power to save her from say her mother. That is why I said earlier that I was willing to give her that one chance to be free without Samara hunting her down. Now she faces a real choice. She can put what she did to survive behind her and be a productive member of society (well as productive as Asari get ba-dum-tish) or she can return to her ways and get her head vented by me. Choices are not some abstract entities that are held separate from everything else in some aether. Choices are intertwined to circumstances. You can't disregard circumstance and analyze choices on their own.
Morinth had choices at every stage of her being, that they were often crappy choices doesn't erase her ability to affect her own life or make her own decisions. When she became aware that she was an Ardat-Yakshi she could have gone into seclusion where she would be no threat to anyone, that was the option taken by both her sisters. A lousy option but it was one that she could have taken.
Having escaped from potential seclusion and gone on the run she chose to start killing. She didn't have to do it, it was an option she chose. If she wasn't leaving a trail of corpses behind her then no one would have been able to find her, in fact no more than a handful of asari would have known she even existed. As intelligent as Morinth was if she'd chosen to live an abstinent she could have become virtually anything and never had her identity exposed.
Even if I were to accept the "had to kill to make her strong enough to fight Samara" logic, I would still be dumbfounded by the notion that her one life is somehow more valuable than all the thousands of lives she's destroyed in the last few centuries. I'd wonder how corrupting an entire town so that they offer up their pretty young things in sacrifice fits into the "it was that or death" argument because it seems pretty weak.
So yes, she's a serial killer. She chose to become a serial killer, maybe she wouldn't have been if she weren't a genetic mutation but it was never her only option. Morinth was never a victim, she was always choosing her own path and making her own decisions.
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