Villains, Accomplices, and Bystanders: Portraying antagonists and power systems
An interview with Brennan Lee Mulligan. Originally published in Horizons 3 on May 2, 2025.
Hannah Rose for Wildmage Press: Brennan, you’re the Dungeon Master for Dimension 20, Worlds Beyond Number, and multiple Exandria Unlimited miniseries. One thing we see a lot in these stories is that they’re about fighting evil and defeating bad guys but also about confronting systems of power and exploitation. So—at the risk of getting a little too real right out of the gate—can you tell us a little about why you’re drawn to these stories and where some of that inspiration comes from?
Brennan Lee Mulligan: Hell yeah. I’ve been telling stories since I was a little, little kid—it’s a primary impulse. When I was a very little kid, I wrote the words “be good” on the wall next to my bed. And so that kind of ethic—knights and heroes and good guys—that’s always been there. And then when I was fourteen, I started going to school at SUNY Ulster and I studied with this philosophy professor named Tom Davis and learned about this whole world of formal philosophy and the study of ethics. And every work of art that I’ve been a part of has tended to, in one form or another, be a meditation on some kind of ethical conundrum—which isn’t to say that I’m interested in just creating allegory or propaganda. When I say it’s an ethical thing, it’s something I’m [personally] wrestling with.
BLM: The webcomic I made with Molly Ostertag, Strong Female Protagonist (It’s been on indefinite hiatus—we got very busy, I’m sorry!), was all about taking the classic superhero qualities of invincibility and super strength and going, “Would that make you better at saving the world?” And [I was wrestling with the question that] if the [issues in] the world are systemic and complicated, is the problem that I’m not powerful? Or is that a cop out, because the real problem is “I don’t know what to do.” Like, what if you were powerful, but it’s like, “Okay, cool. Now you’re powerful. Now what?” Now fix it, right?
BLM: But within all that there’s a part of it that’s like, “Oh, if you’re telling a story, you should talk about your world and your life and the times that you and your fellow humans are in.” And there’s sort of a moral [question of], “Mustn’t we address the issues of the day?” But I actually think that horse and cart go both ways. Because similarly, I like telling stories. And it’s like, well, “What do you want to tell a story about?” “I don’t know, what’s on your mind?” And more often than not, what’s on your mind is going to be the shit you’re dealing with … like there’s like a polemic or a kind of rallying cry behind it. But also, I literally don’t know what’s more significant to talk about. This is the shit I’m thinking about, right? So why not talk about it?
WMP: So you’re taking inspiration, not as part of an agenda, but as part of “this is just the shit we’re dealing with,” from these real world issues, this evil and ignorance. And then you’re building up your players to tell really, really powerful stories about hope and friendship and solidarity, which are big parts of that fantasy genre. But [as the DM] you’re the one getting in the mindset of these bigots and power-hungry people. So what’s that like, being the one to get in their mindset and spend so much time—whether planning the game or playing it—figuring out what they would do?
BLM: It’s interesting. Something that helps me—even if it’s not psychologically true, it helps me as a performer and a writer—is [to think about how] a lot of people approach the question of “evil.” And that’s a word that scares people, I think. I don’t know why—it’s a useful word! It just means the worst excesses of cruel, antisocial behavior, right? Words don’t need hard and fast clinical definitions to be useful.
WMP: Maybe, dare I say it, it scares people because it is so subjective. And we have to start questioning our own actions. Do they edge into some territory of things that we would think are evil when we see them in others?
BLM: Totally. What’s interesting about it is that people use the slippery slope fallacy. They’re like, “well, if that’s evil, then is this evil? But it’s an interesting thing because, like on a spectrum—like if you’re in Photoshop and you have a slider going from like 100% brightness to 100% darkness, it’s funny because [someone might say], “Well, where does dark become bright? It’s a gradation.” And you’re like, “Wouldn’t you agree that if it’s all the way left, that’s pretty dark. And if it’s all the way right, that’s pretty bright? Mustn’t we also be reasonable, you and I, one another, here in the real world?”
WMP: If the slider is too far either way to clearly see the picture, then that’s still a problem.
BLM: Right. And sometimes it’s interesting as a thought experiment to be like, “Where does it change?” I have a big problem with the slippery slope fallacy, because people are like, “That’s a slippery slope!” [But] to continue the metaphor, we’re on the slope. We’re already slipping. We’re slipping, actually in multiple directions, all day, every day.
WMP: It’s not a two-dimensional graph or one-dimensional line—it’s a complex topography of evil.
BLM: [laughs] Yeah, exactly, the topography of evil. The presupposition that I hate about the slippery slope fallacy is that we are on level ground right now. That’s the error that I really can’t stand: “As we all know, we’re here on top of the moral mountain on a perfectly flat platform and a single step in any direction would [launch us] onto a slippery slope.”
BLM: We’re on a different—I’d consider worse—slippery slope right now [in the real world]. Let me be clear: we’re covered in oil scrambling around a weird slope in space and we gotta get somewhere that we need to get to.
WMP: And it’s the same fallacy as “Well, we should do things because they’ve always been that way.”
BLM: Yeah, totally. Like just defaulting to status quo. [So] within the question that you’re asking about, how to get in the mind of those characters—
WMP: —and how to get out of the mind of those characters, when you go home—
BLM: Yeah, absolutely. You’re dealing with character bleed and stuff like that. Really what’s interesting to me—and people are welcome to disagree with me—but this is just how I feel, less so as a person engaged in philosophy and more so as an actor and a writer—evil often gets treated by people as an alien thing, like a growth on top of your personality that makes you like, “What is that alien thing?”
BLM: And I actually think that to get evil you take things away. I think that it’s really not hard to understand bad people. We are animals. We are members of the animal kingdom. We can see other group animals, like chimpanzees, that will care for each other and love each other and then go find another group of chimpanzees and rip them limb from limb for no discernible reason other than wanting to engage in warfare. And if we don’t make ourselves [as humans] special and we try to look at behavior writ large, then it’s very clear that in lots of different groups and communities of our fellow creatures, there are prosocial behaviors and there are antisocial behaviors. Any time a group of animals develops intelligence, they almost always develop playfulness (hooray!) and cruelty (boo).
BLM: Within that idea of stripping things away to get to evil, evil people are engaging in impulses of cruelty. Like little kids step on ants—it’s not a hard impulse to understand. It’s like, “Oh, I’m big. You’re small. I’m going to hit you” or “I need more money so that I’m not as afraid. I want to be less afraid.”
WMP: “I want to be less afraid. I want to feel important. I want to feel included.”
BLM: All that shit. And all the weird romanticizations of evil are so funny to me because that shit is fucking dirt simple, and being good, being capital-G Good, is extremely complex. And especially when you begin to see the world through a lens of your behavior—personally, emotionally, socially, culturally, within your family group, within your neighborhood, within your global context, as an economic unit, as a spiritual unit, as all of these things—and thinking, “Okay, but now I have to think about utilitarianism versus deontology. [Interviewer’s note: deontology is the theory or study of moral obligation.] I have to think about “Is it worth doing something that is against one principle in the long run versus doing something else? Does principle matter? If I’m going utilitarian, do I have data that suggests that being principled produces the world that the principles aim to accomplish? Or is that an assumption?” And you just, you know, you can go ham on it.
BLM: So [when] anyone that tells me that being evil is more complex or nuanced than being good, I think [they’re] full of it. Being evil is just like, “I’m gonna hit that guy over the head, take his stuff, burn his house down.”
WMP: So when it comes to characters who are unilaterally bad guys—for example, in Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City we have Robert Moses, who is representing the worst of capitalism, dare I say—your villains aren’t caricatures. But you’re taking away and then you don’t need to “add back” to make them relatable or well-intentioned?
BLM: So let’s take Robert Moses. Robert Moses was one of the most corrupt, anti-democratic figures in the history of New York. His impact on the infrastructure of the city and the material, lived reality, especially of poor communities, communities of color—it cannot be overstated. The racist and horrifically megalomaniacal impact that Robert Moses had on New York City. And if you read The Power Broker, the things that you look at with Robert Moses are like, “Oh my god, look at all the shit that guy got done! What if I didn’t give a fuck what anyone said and I went and got shit done too!”
BLM: And I live in California, which is struggling year after year after year to get high-speed rail and the [cost] keeps ballooning. And there are many factors to that. And there are awful political opponents of high-speed rail. But one of the things that slows down the process is doing it the right way, like going through community feedback. But then you get in situations where you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want us to steamroll a small town. But what about these rich assholes who are just nimbying?” And I see rich homeowners in California being like “There will not be affordable housing in our neighborhood!” And some part of me goes like, “Well, what if I just did it without your fucking permission? What if we just built affordable housing.” And then you go, oh, yeah, that’s [like the Robert Moses] thing of “What if I just fucking did it?”
WMP: Good is also extremely complex. How far do we go [to do good], how much do we work outside the system?
BLM: I think that’s what we love in villains. They’re competent, they’re decisive. They’re not riddled with guilt. They’re not frozen in inaction. And those qualities can be tantalizing.
WMP: Do you think that also might apply to a lot of player characters?
BLM: [laughs] Well, I think so. And I think there’s an interesting thing where the degree of morality that is present in a game has to do with the level of texture and richness in the worldbuilding. And it has to do with the level of consequences. In other words, think about the amount of 1970s cop movies where they smash through a fruit stand in a Camaro as they’re chasing a bad guy. All you have to do to totally change the tone of that world is just leave the camera on the fruit stand after the Camaro goes through it. As some guy is like, “My life, my life is ruined!”
WMP: “My cabbages! How am I going to feed my family!?”
BLM: Yeah, totally. You just have the fruit stand guy calling someone being like, “Sweetie, an absolutely beautiful lunatic police officer with a mullet and a denim jacket has destroyed our lives. We have to rebuild from the ground up.” You see that and it recontextualizes everything. [So] I think PCs get more murder hobo-y the more two-dimensionally their world is rendered.
WMP: Though most of the time you aren’t making your player characters pay taxes and, you know, [face legal consequences for] murdering the evil people after they do so.
BLM: Yeah, but I think a lot of the fantasy of the adventurer [also] has to do with—well, it’s what happens to Bilbo, right? Like he’s in his little hobbit hole. And then he’s like, “I’m going to leave,” but we don’t see the thing where Bilbo doesn’t have a job.
WMP: He doesn’t have a family that he needs to support.
BLM: Yeah, totally. I think a lot of the power fantasy of the adventurer is about “What if all of the people that you cared about were also errant wielders of magic and violence?”
WMP: So,speaking of playing out those fantasies, the player characters usually succeed in their goals of saving the people they care about, saving the world—saving New York City. And the NPCs and the world reacting to their actions. How do you balance having NPCs react realistically—knowing [so much] about human nature—to those actions while also not making the player characters fight an uphill battle against all of the apathy and misinformation and denial [that exist] in real life?
BLM: I think that there’s two things that work here. Number one, you want characters to act grounded, but number two, grounded is relative. Like Eioghorain and the other shapechangers in Worlds Beyond Number are these freedom fighters fighting a secret war under another war in the Shroud Mountains. So they’re sleeping in caves, they’re traveling around, they’re living a life of extreme danger. So their “grounded” is different.
BLM: And what’s important to remember, too, is that whatever crazy thing is going on in a game of D&D, those people do exist in the real world. There are people that are special ops soldiers in the real world. There’s someone out there right now who is literally hunting for treasure. There’s someone in a little boat who’s looking for shipwrecks and has decided to be a treasure hunter. And those lives might not be common, but I think that for most of it, the reaction that NPCs give to the players is contextual based on what their normal is. And neither in our world nor in worlds of fantasy is there actually consensus on “normal,” right?
BLM: And then if [the player characters] are very weird too—well, I think that a lot of times there’s an improv tendency when someone’s being unusual to be like, “You’re being unusual, I’ll alert the guard!” But like in real life, more often than not I try to white knuckle through the interaction to end it as fast as possible without rocking the boat.
WMP: And that [NPC response] can be very fun for player characters, particularly if they take advantage of it. Okay, so you bring in whatever [moral conundrum] you’re wrestling with. And then you also have three to seven other people at the table. How do your players shape those stories? And what do you love about telling these stories collaboratively?
BLM: So they are the story, right? The cool thing about these tabletop games is that the story is—[laughs]—it feels pejorative to say “byproduct.” But in playing together, the game becomes an organic process, which produces story in the way that a tree produces fruit. The story comes about by the process of what we’re doing together.
WMP: “We play games to make stories out of sound.” That’s the Worlds Beyond Number Patreon tagline.
BLM: Yeah, exactly. We play games to make stories out of sound. And by the way, the more a [TTRPG system] moves away from organic play that creates the story as a byproduct, [the more it] becomes an earnest invitation towards a writer’s room with prompts that encourage you to be creative. I tend to want my slider at a 1 or a 10, between either a game that is producing story as a byproduct or going all the way over to “let’s do an improv show” or “let’s go write a script together.” Like if we’re gonna tell a story, I’m down to go tell a story, but let’s just go tell a story—unless we are excited to play a game and have a story be what happens as a result of that.
WMP: Well, it seems like—to state the obvious—you have really honed your skills at both ends of that slider.
BLM: I appreciate that. I think that’s also part of why I like those extremes, right?
WMP: When you really know how to do two different things, if you’re going to combine them you want to be very deliberate about it.
BLM: Exactly. And then, in that collaboration with the players at the table, the thing that I have become adamant about, season after season after season of [Dimension 20], that every season I’m like, “I can do that even a little bit more than I did it last time,” is above-the-table checking in about the themes present in the story.
So now, when I’ve done [Exandria Unlimited:] Calamity, Downfall, [and] Divergence, I approached them with player documents that started with art and poetry and talking about the themes of the game, way before standard array, level 1, one Common magic item [stuff]. And often as a Dungeon Master, what I’ll do is start with theme rather than story, because I think [that’s better] for players. I don’t know about you, but I get stressed and anxious when I’m going to play a game and a DM is like, “Make any character you want.”
WMP: I’m like, “I want to make a character that’s going to be interesting in this world!”
BLM: Yeah, I want to know what we’re here to do. So I think some GMs might find it pushy [to go], “Oh, I’m going to set the table for what the themes are.” And it’s like, you agreed to host dinner, you should set the damn table.
WMP: Don’t give your dinner guest something they’re allergic to, but then prepare your meal.
BLM: Totally. So I think that setting those themes out is very helpful. And especially because I play with people that I know tend to have a degree of interest in the areas of my own interest. So you lay those themes out and then people can make characters for it. And then once you have their characters, you see the story start to come to life there. That’s my ideal. So I tap the baton. I hit the key on the little mini harmonica to be like, “This is the key we’re going to be in.” And then everyone starts playing their instrument. And then I go, “Aha, there it is.” And then I come in and do the story work.
WMP: Where do you start with the worldbuilding? Where in that process? And also, when you do start worldbuilding, is it taking those themes into the systems and factions—like the Empire or Gaothmai in Worlds Beyond Number—or something other aspect that brings those themes to life?
BLM: Well, worldbuilding is a neverending process. Worldbuilding continues ad infinitum. Every session you play in a world builds it a little more, right? So if the point is to get to the table and start playing, what is the necessary amount of worldbuilding? Because you can gild the lily for days and days and days. For example, if you have a 300-page setting sourcebook, and I have a 600-page setting sourcebook, is my setting twice as good as yours?
WMP: And is it twice as useful?
BLM: Yeah, a great point. I used to say, “If there’s a world in the darkness and every place I create”—and that “place’” can be figurative; it can be a faction, a person, a location, whatever—“every place I create is putting a little lit candle on that board that illuminates not only itself, but some of the things around it. I don’t need the room to be well lit. I just want enough candles that you can guess whatever’s in the darkness.” Does that make sense?
WMP: Yeah, for sure. And then when the players ask, “What’s there?”—
BLM: —you can instantly get to it. So in other words, you’ve done enough worldbuilding when you can’t get stumped by a question of “What’s on the other side of those mountains?” Which is not the same as saying you have to know what’s on the other side of those mountains. [It’s knowing] enough about your world that if someone asks you, you have a good idea.
BLM: So let’s say we want to play a game and we know that we want it to be a brand new world. I go, “Great, I’ll email you guys next week with some stuff about the world.” And the first thing it’ll be is like, “We’re doing underwater. It’s a merpeople game.” And then I’ll include a handful of details to start getting people thinking. And normally it’ll be like, “What are the tropes that I don’t want to get rid of?” Like Atlantis. We love Atlantis. “And what are the things that I do want to change up?” Where it’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s have sharks actually be good guys, but it’s squid that are fucked up bad guys down here. So there’s weird freaky vampire squid that are trying to destroy all the merpeople or whatever.”
WMP: I want the vampire squid now.
BLM: Gimme that vampire squid! So that’s an essential part of it for me, that idea that you create a few baubles and toys—and then, as people make their characters, you worldbuild around the characters. Someone’s like, “I’m a member of an order of knights.” Well shit, I should probably come up with some people in that order, right?
WMP: So your players inspire a lot of the factions and societies.
BLM: Totally. Because I also think there’s a lot of connective tissue there. Sometimes when you take these enormous pre-established settings, you get into trouble because if the worlds are so expansive, someone’s like, “I want to be a member of the Harper’s Guild” and someone’s like, “I’m someone who’s getting revenge against the Red Wizards.” You end up going through this thing where the world is so big with so many plot hooks that you might create a group of adventurers where the DM’s like, “Why are you guys even friends? You’re all on different sides of the world from each other!”
WMP: “And you all want to do different things but none of you have read the twenty pages of official lore about your organizations.”
BLM: There you go, exactly. So within that, I think there’s a big component of [doing just] enough worldbuilding to get a conversation started. There will always be more to do. You’ll never be done, right? And as people make characters, you start to think about how those braid together. You know that you want an adventuring party. So how do you make it so the factions and places of origin, the character relationships and backstory, all start to braid together to create momentum.
WMP: And where do antagonists come into that?
BLM: I think antagonists come in at very different places depending on the type of story you’re telling. Sometimes the antagonists are known right away. In a lot of classic myth and folklore, the antagonist makes themself known to disrupt the life of the protagonist. For whatever reason, I don’t often worry about antagonists [when first worldbuilding]. I think antagonists and love interests can be similar in that they don’t always work if you pre-plan them. I populate a world with bad people, but whether the PCs choose to oppose those bad people or not is up to them.
WMP: They may or may not be the final boss, or a mini boss, or the player characters might never encounter them.
BLM: Yeah, totally. In Worlds Beyond Number, Will Gallows is a freaky crime boss. He’s a scary guy. He ended up kind of being a friend of the party by the end of it, but it didn’t have to go that way. He menaced them. He was really threatening. He threatened to kill them!
WMP: But Guildmage Morrow was never going to be a friend of the party unless they were blackmailing him or something, right?
BLM: Well, Guildmage Morrow—I mean, yeah, he was doing something heinous—but is there a world where the PCs free Naram and escape [without confronting Morrow], or they do it sneakily, or they find some way around it? Yeah, potentially! So it’s just one of those things where, especially in longer form campaigns, I try to [make] the real villains the people who are out there doing evil, but [also] to make them feel truthful. For some reason, I’m never really drawn to [dramatic evil villain voice] “Well, well, well, it’s me, your nemesis. [Brennan] wrote me from the ground up to be the bad guy you’d fight in this campaign.”
BLM: [Instead I have] some guy who’s just gleefully clubbing unicorn [foals] over the head to drink their magic blood and the PCs go, what the hell? And the guy goes, “Hey, I’m just drinking unicorn blood. You can keep it moving.” And it’s up to the PCs to get in there and stop them. And then the guy’s the villain.
BLM: I strongly believe in worlds where if the PCs kept their heads down and never tried to be heroic, they would probably avoid the attention of a lot of villains. But what makes them heroes is that they say “you may not club a baby unicorn.” And then that’s where the story starts.
WMP: And then consequences they face for that heroism are generally fantastical and part of the story.
BLM: Hell yes. And I love the consequences that they face there. You don’t ever want to punish someone for doing what you want them to do. But also, there has to be a price to pay for doing the right thing. So you have to have those moments where the PCs are heroic. It cheapens it, and it makes it impossible to take that lesson back to real life, if there are not consequences for rocking the boat and being heroic and doing the right thing.
WMP: So speaking of real life, at the risk of once again getting a little too real, what’s something from fantasy stories about fighting evil—whether your [campaigns] or the ones that people are telling at their own tables—that you think people can or should carry into real life? What’s something you’ve taken away from your own stories?
BLM: I mean, [I think the real question is] “Are there things I’ve taken away from other people?” Because the things that I bring to my stories, I already have, right?
WMP: Sure! Things you take away from your players, from the player characters’ actions and what they’re doing—especially if you might not have expected it—or how they deal with the subsequent consequences.
BLM: I think Aabria [Iyengar] is so masterful at playing a character who is united in perspective and clarity of personhood, who nevertheless is creating friction in themselves and of themselves—with themselves. And I think that her eye for that moral dimension in life is so profoundly keen.
BLM: And Lou Wilson—I admire his patience so, so, so much. And I love watching his character [Eursulon] in Worlds Beyond Number. He plays a spirit and one of the ways I think he embodies that is that his character is so un-petty. And even when he opposes people, everything is seen through the lens of action and doing what must be done. So, like, he’s in a city with the Empire and he’s opposing them. And there’s something human where you’re like, “All of you are motherfuckers and I’m going to oppose you!” But he just goes and opposes them. There’s no, like, “Oh, I’m off on my way to go do something heroic.”
WMP: It’s not about morals and ethics, because for him it comes from a place of instinct.
BLM: Yeah, it comes from that place of like, oh, “I got to go get these kids. So, that’s what I’m going to be doing.” And the specificity of it is, I think, really beautiful.
BLM: And kind of a nice thing for people of conscience feeling overwhelmed by a lot going on. And maybe you take a lesson from, “Hey, pick the thing you’re going to do and go do that,” rather than constantly being like, “What am I going to?” You don’t need to count all of the things that you feel like you can’t do something about. Pick something you can do something about and go do it. Which is a great Eursulon lesson.
BLM: And then Ame, Erica [Ishii]’s character, just being so profoundly kind and getting knocked down and getting back up again. And maybe even to some degree being like, “A strategy can fail and that doesn’t necessarily mean we throw that strategy out if that’s based in principle.” So, the idea of [giving] people the opportunity to be kind, even if I suspect they may take advantage of me, because [being kind] is more important. Like, I could be shrewd and think the worst of everybody. And I would never get taken advantage of in that way. But in the long run, that is deleterious to the world.
WMP: Those three characters are such a good contrast to each other. Because Ame is working hard to be kind, but witches are all about that pettiness. Her character mechanics are “You hurt me, I curse you.”
BLM: Yeah, absolutely. The incredible Witch class that you [Hannah] and our awesome team at Worlds Beyond Number—Mazey [Veselak], Brandes [Stoddard], Dan [Dillon], Ruby Lavin—all worked on. Erica plays it so well.
WMP: Speaking of your players, when you get a chance to take a break from forever DMing, what kind of characters do you like to play? What do you get to do when you’re fighting evil instead of portraying it?
BLM: I like playing paladins.
WMP: I can’t say I’m shocked.
BLM: No, not at all. I like paladins a lot. And there’s a lot of people that say they’re goody two-shoes, or, you know, altruists or [stereotypically] heroic or whatever. [But] I like the heroic aspect. Sometimes I think shapes and forms in storytelling are so received that they become like the air we breathe or the water we swim in, and we forget that they’re there. But the idea of someone who’s like, “I’ve sworn an oath to do good. I’ve sworn an oath to fight evil and help the oppressed and do everything in my power to make the world a better place” … I don’t know, man, that doesn’t feel irrelevant! That feels cool to me. I like that shit!
WMP: Would you ever go for a paladin storyline in which your character goes a little too far with that, or would that just not be as fun to explore?
BLM: Sure, potentially. But I do think that it’s interesting to point out the reaction we have to characters whose aims are purely selfless, altruistic—although I could talk about altruism, too. If altruism is defined as “doing good for you at my own expense,” then I actually think there is a higher calling than altruism, which is “doing good for you that I also love and enjoy.” Or what do you call it when something is good for everybody? When someone comes and is like, “I’m defending my community.” And [the response is], “You’re just doing that because you’re in your community.” And you’re like, “No? It’s all of us. I’m doing it for me and everybody. Like, I don’t choose to make a false delineation about the fact that I’m included in us. I’m doing this for us, of which I am a unit.”
BLM: There is a classical beat of storytelling that has really been dogging on utilitarianism for a long time, whether with like fixation on the trolley problem or all of the villains, these Ultrons and Thanoses, that are like, [self-important villain voice] “I’m trying to help. Nothing’s more evil than trying to help.” And they have these weird labyrinthine arguments for what they’re trying to do or how they’re trying to do it.
BLM: And we criticize the hell out of that. We shit on utilitarians because we say “‘the ends justify the means’ is so fucked up! You can’t do ‘the ends justify the means’!” And hey, let’s say you’re right. By the very same token, ‘the means justify the ends’ is very fucked up. The means justify the ends, meaning, [in a stressed-out tone] “I did the thing I was told was right. And it absolutely did not work. But, uh, the means were good!”
BLM: So I think that in terms of taking a Paladin too far, I rebel against that—I think it is part of a tradition of holding moral characters to a burden of proof that is actually a kind of conservative reaction. Someone’s like, “We have to change.” And someone else goes, [annoying contrarian voice] “If you try to change, you’re responsible for every single outcome of that change. And if one of them’s bad, then aren’t you the worst asshole who ever lived?” And you’re like, “Well, if we keep things the same, are you going to own that same level of responsibility for every bad thing happening now?” And then they go, [whiny voice] “What am I supposed to do?” And then you go, “Something!” And then you punch them with a utilitarian smite. ❧