askthebosspony:

We’re all here to have fun, right?

Well you know what’s not fun?

God-modding, Magic!Anon abuse, and player harassment.

God-modding is forcing another player’s character to do things against the wishes of the player. This differs from Magic!Anon in that players can choose to respond to a…

asksolidus:

Yes. I was a pawn. Since birth, i was a weapon of the patriots. I was raised that way. I was created for the sole purpose of being an image of their Big Boss that they could control. And as i was raised under nothing but their word, I had no choice, or alternative thought to whatever they asked of me. It wasn’t until the nightmares that i began to question things.

And now you admit that? Quite the change of tune from what you were saying earlier about how you were working against the Patriots right from the start.

You don’t think i feel shame? Yes, there is pride in me, at his abilities as a Soldier. That will never leave, just as my father would be proud of him, had he been in my position. But there was guilt for what i did, and shame for what i caused in him. Anyone can be shaped into a perfect soldier outside of the conditions he was forced to live in. I did not want him to suffer. If i had, i wouldn’t have tried to get him out of Liberia. So don’t talk down to me.

Play the fool with you? The Patriots took him. I didn’t find that out until the Big Shell, but all the same. And i have felt guilt over what has happened to Jack since i met with him in 2009.

I’ll talk down to you all I want, as long as you insist on spitting these pathetic lies at me. Felt guilty since you met him at Big Shell, did you? So guilty that you tortured and tried to kill him, is what I suppose you’ll try to tell me next?

What did you expect me to do, lock him in a basement, and keep him hidden? The Patriots were watching everything i did. If they saw me do something like that, they would have gotten suspicious if i didn’t put him in the rank with the others. Had i the chance to just get him out, i could have, instead of putting him in a child army, raised him on 200 acres of private property, taught him everything i did in a safe, and unhostile environment. But i did not have that opportunity. Would you have rather i just killed him, along with his parents? Would have saved you a lot a heartbreak, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t that sound a bit greedy of you?

And there we go, back to pinning the all ultimate blame on the Patriots. “I only made Jack into a child soldier because the Patriots left me with no choice! It’s not really my fault!” is all I’m hearing from you, no matter how you try to throw in a half-baked admission of personal guilt every now and then. And now you’re trying to make me share in the blame as well? How pathetic.

I already tried to help Jack. Through my love, and guilt, i made myself up to only value him as a tool. A soldier. I made myself out to be what the patriots thought of him, but with the past we had. I made him absolutely hate me. And then, i let him kill me. No, i didn’t make it easy. But my superior combat experience, and with the enhancement of an exoskeleton, i could have easily killed him. But i loved him too much. And i wanted him to be free of his past. I wanted him to free himself of the Patriots control.

That’s right, he didn’t originally want, of his own free will, to kill you - you had to make him want to kill you, using a combination of emotional manipulation and the threat of death by your hand if he didn’t. Making Jack want to kill someone he otherwise wouldn’t by manipulating his emotions and threatening him with death if he didn’t; does that sound at all familiar to you? No matter how you try to paint it, there’s no hiding the fact that even in your last alleged attempt to “free” him, you once again enslaved him to you will. You made him kill you; you didn’t give him the choice to do otherwise, anymore than the Patriots did. And do you know what everyone except possibly you calls a lack of choice? The antithesis of freedom. So talk all you want about trying to free him; even if I believed that was your true intent, your actions speak for themselves: regardless of whatever genuine desire you might’ve had for Jack’s freedom, all you ever did with that desire was take away even the most basic of his freedoms - his freedom to make his own decisions for himself. And I have no doubt that’s what you’d continue to do right now if you had half a chance.

Now, i’m dead… but alive again. I’m no longer under control of, or fighting The Patriots. I can dedicate my time to Jack, and TRY to be the father i couldn’t be.

Besides, who are you to lecture me? From what i’ve heard, you’re not even on speaking terms with Jack. I’ve talked to him twice in a week, and i let him know how i truly cared for him. Aside from mourning your lost past with him, and patronize me on my past deeds, what have you done? Can you even answer that?

You did WHAT?! I-I… I was there for him. And then I let him go, because unlike you, I’m capable of loving someone enough to do so. Unlike you, I can see the pain that even my most well-intentioned actions caused Jack, and unlike you, I’m not selfish enough to try to keep myself in his life when I not only can’t help him, but actually hurt him more every time I try. You, on the other hand, seem to be just fine with continuing to manipulate his every thought and action “for his own good,” when in reality you’re doing it purely for your own self-satisfaction. I can only hope somewhere, somehow, Snake is still looking out for him.

asksolidus:

No, you’re right. In the beginning, i had no quarrel with it. It was what i was brought up to think was right. If The Patriots wanted it, it was what had to be done. and i fully believed that at the time. But over time, i started having nightmares. The children that i had executed coming back to kill me. I started to realize what was wrong with it. But i did my best to ignore it, because they told me it was right.

Half truths coated in emotional rhetoric? The Patriots were telling me WHO to kill, WHEN to kill. What persons they wanted attacked, what villiages they wanted raided for the largest public impact in America, to get news of child soldiers on the forefront of the battlefield spread as fast as possible. I was driven mad by the simple object of not being able to think for myself, so i attacked someone who wasn’t a target in rage, at my self. If it seems like i’m a bad liar, it’s because i’m not lieing in the first place.

Well then, I apologize for calling you a liar. You’re not a liar, bad or otherwise; you’re a pawn - and a good one at that. You played right into their hands, letting them drive you mad until you were incapable of thinking for yourself, so that you did just what they wanted under the delusion that you were acting against them.

I encouraged Jack because i wanted him to become a great Soldier, as my father was, and all those he took under his wing. I saw significant progress in his abilities, and encouraged that. I admired that in him. His natural adeptity for combat was astounding. i taught him all that i knew about combat, More than i taught any of the other children. He would do things not even a veteran soldier would consider doing in their right mind. I did scold him for doing what he’d done, but that doesn’t mean i wouldn’t tell him he did a good job at what he did. And i’m not ashamed for promoting him to a rank he earned. Because i knew he could handle it at that point. He came back from entire battles, raids, everything, without so much as a scratch on him. I was confident in his abilities as a soldier. So i gave him what he had earned.

Then you don’t deny that he did what he did only because you made it clear that such things were what you wanted him to do. Now that I’ve finally managed to get some consistency out of you, I suppose shame would be asking too much. I can only imagine how proud you must have been of how completely you were able to replace every last vestige of his innate compassion with your will, especially when the latter manifested in him as an unrelenting, single-minded drive to up his daily bodycount quota.

What are you juxtaposing? The fact that The Patriots took Raiden, and also shaped him into a soldier, and the fact that i claim guilt for the effects i had on Jack? That’s hardly a contradiction to itself.

Don’t play the fool with me, Solidus. You know full well that you never intended for that fact to stand on its own at face value; your mention of the Patriots’ abduction of Jack was just one more brushstroke in the bigger picture you were trying to paint of yourself as the martyred loving father who merely wanted the best for his son, such that the Patriots were the only ones ultimately to blame for any less-than-loving actions on your part. I saw you spout the same maudlin rigmarole at EVA about how you couldn’t help it and how the Patriots forced your hand. Why would you say such things unless you wanted to absolve yourself of blame, or at the very least deflect some of the blame that’s rightfully yours onto the Patriots? And then, after all that, you suddenly turn around and try to claim the lion’s share of the blame and guilt for yourself?

I had influence on him. I shaped him into a great soldier, whatever that means to you. And then, i tried to liberate him from those conditions, by putting him in the Refugee camp. I tried to give him a new life, Free. And then The Patriots turned him into their own soldier.

You tried to free him after raising him to be a mindless killing machine with no concept of, let alone desire for, freedom? That’s rich. Don’t tell me the man who masterminded the incident at Big Shell actually believed that a boy who spent most of his childhood unable to have a single independent thought under pain of death could become free with just a little change of scenery? Do you know the real reason the Patriots chose him out of all the boys whose wills you broke and subsumed under your own? The real reason, not the garbage you tried to feed me about how he was chosen for his soldiering prowess. They chose him because at the time he was still such a slave to his past, to his life as your puppet, that in order for him to continue living after all that was taken away, he had to pretend it never even happened. By the time you were through using him as your weapon, there wasn’t even enough of him left to face down the things he’d done. In fact, he was so trapped by his past, by what you made him do, that even denying it ultimately couldn’t save him. I watched him struggle in vain against the shackles you put on him as they pulled him apart night after night, even before I knew what they were or how they got there. And by the time I knew, there was nothing even I could do for him.

As i said. I claim guilt for what i did to him. I haven’t lived a single day without regretting all of it. But the past is the past, and it is undoable. Stop focusing on what i did in the past, because none of it can be changed. Focus on what i’m willing to do now, in order to help fix the damage i caused.

There’s nothing for you to fix, nothing that you ever would or could do for Jack that your brother Snake didn’t do already and do better than you’d be capable of during even your best attempt at masquerading as a caring father. Because unlike you, Snake knows that you can’t tell someone what to think or do and then still expect them to be capable of seeking freedom; the only thing you can tell someone in order to set him free is that he should make his own decisions based on his own personal convictions, and that’s what Snake did. You enslaved Jack; Snake gave him the chance to be free. There’s nothing left for you to do but to stay out of Jack’s life for good.

asksolidus:

You don’t know half of it… The Patriots saw the liberian nation getting unstable. When rebellion broke out, The Patriots wanted something horrible, They wanted to make the american public outcry for military interference in the war. So, they demanded a child army.

I was outraged… disgusted by that concept. But i had no option but to follow their orders. I wanted to grow in power… wealth. So i could make a move against them. So i did as commanded, and made their Child Army.

If you’re trying to convince me that the ends justify the means, I could easily argue that the means you used to achieve your ends were sub-ends in and of themselves. And if we want to bring intent into the picture? Neither the consequences of your actions nor the intentions behind them fit any consistent moral standard: if you intended to oppose the Patriots, why did you at times choose actions with no foreseeable anti-Patriot consequence? Surely you’ve read up on consequentialism and deontology, Ex-President Sears? They’re only the most rudimentary of ethical frameworks.

I went mad with grief over what was happening. And in a mad fit of rage, i killed an innocent woman, and husband, in order to assert to myself that i was still my own man… that i was still in control of my own actions. When i found Jack in the closet, watching… i broke into tears. The emotional impact of what i’d done was devestating.

Half-truths coated in emotional rhetoric may have worked on your campaign trail and while you were in office, but they won’t work here. Firstly, you’re full of self-contradiction: if you were so outraged over being made to murder innocents at the behest of the Patriots, how would you ever come to the conclusion that murdering more innocents would prove you weren’t their stooge, especially when you knew those innocents were a married couple, and therefore probably had at least one child whom the Patriots could use? You may be a monster, but you’re not illogical or stupid, whatever “fit of rage” you might be under. You are, however, a bad liar. Getting a little rusty at your game?

It was at that moment, i decided to adopt Jack. I wanted to get him away from all of that. To get him away from Liberia, and War… but i didn’t have a way of getting him out of the country… so i did the only thing i could do at the time. I set him at the back lines.

I hated every minute of what i did, ordering children to kill eachother for insubordination… it was horrible. But they were direct orders from The Patriots. They told me exactly how to run the child army, to the T. They were watching me.

Jack didn’t stay at the back very long… he showed a high capacity for wanting to impress me. He ran to the front lines, and killed of his own volition… all i did was teach him to do it, and he jumped to it as though it were a natural reflex to him. I wonder, now, if it were just for my approval, or out of fear… I always scolded him for putting his life in danger, but gave him my appreciations for a job well done, no matter how sad it made me.

I don’t believe for a moment that someone who spent so much time manipulating so many children to do his bidding would fail to comprehend one of the most easily-observable empirical facts of child psychology, which is that a steady stream of positive reinforcement - especially when it is the only consistent positive reinforcement received and the child is otherwise under immense stress, as Jack and the other boys were - is the single most effective means of getting a child to continue or even increase a behavior. Neither Jack nor any other child, no matter how much they want to impress someone, intrinsically knows what actions will be deemed impressive; they have to learn which actions to do to impress whoever they want to impress, and they learn it most effectively when positive reinforcement such as praise is consistently given to them following a particular action. Jack wasn’t born with a natural innate urge to run to the frontlines and kill as many as he could despite your orders; he learned to do so because of your orders and especially your praise. Can you deny that he would’ve have stayed in the back lines if you had never praised and maybe even actively punished him for being a good soldier and an effective killer, because then he would’ve gotten the message that you approved more of him staying safe than of him heaping up bodies? Either way, you never let him have a thought of his own if it didn’t square with your own goals, so don’t pretend you never ordered him to kill well and kill often, that he thought it up all by himself in the hopes of impressing you.

“Scolded him for putting his life in danger”? You really expect me to believe that? Or maybe you did do so, only when he was properly sedated from the toluene in the gunpowder you ordered to be put into his food, so that he wouldn’t register this alleged “scolding” and would instead fixate on the nonstop influx of stimuli - both from the movies you had the boys watch and the words you told them from your own mouth - convincing him that killing was good, killing was great, killing would make you from a boy into a man, killing would keep you alive and maybe, just maybe, even give you just a tiny illusory morsel of the love you still want deep down because ultimately you’re still a lost and broken 10 year old child.

And let’s not forget who promoted him to leader of the Small Boy Unit after ceaselessly praising him for his stellar performance as a killer over the years. Last I checked, being on the frontlines is part and parcel of leading a platoon. Even if you claim complete ignorance of child psychology, I’m fairly certain you can’t claim the same of soldier psychology, and therefore you must know that no battle-hardened soldier, child or adult, would obey the orders of a captain who always kept far from the thick of action - especially when that captain was younger and smaller than the vast majority of his subordinates. So how does wanting to keep Jack away from the worst of the fight square with promoting him to a position where he was obligated to be in the thick of it?

I made getting out of Liberia my first priority. And when the Americans finally set up a Relief effort, i got him to it, as soon as i was able. But, before i was able to adopt him as my son in earnest… The Patriots took him… his performance had garnered their attention…

Miss. I don’t claim that i am innocent… no, the opposite. I’m more guilty for his nightmares, and what he’s become, than anyone. Even the Patriots, for turning him into a killing machine. All i claim… is that, had i been more able, i wouldn’t have let any of this happen to him.

I’ve juxtaposed these last two paragraphs here for a reason. Notice how you ended the first by putting no blame on yourself and heaping every last thing on the Patriots, only to suddenly, at the last possible moment and in direct contradiction to everything you’ve written before - not just that one paragraph - claim maximum personal responsibility for what happened to Jack? It’s like you don’t even know what point you’re trying to make anymore in your desperate bid for sympathy.

And here’s one last thought: if you claim most of the responsibility for turning Jack into who and how he is today, then you admit that you shaped him, that he is who he is and does what he does because you made him that way. Tell me, how well does this match up with your claim that all you ever wanted was for him to be free? Or do you really think you can teach someone to be free by controlling every aspect of their life, down to the very nature of their thoughts, for every last one of their most formative years?

I never thought I’d have to tell a master manipulator and expert liar this much, but if you’re going to concoct fabrications, you should be able to match them to the empirically observable facts, or at least to each other.

asksolidus:

askevasboobs:

consult-dr-rosemary replied to your post: You’re the closest thing i have to a mother. I know the things i did were bad, but at the time, i was under the control of the Patriots… it was their suggestion, their plans. Not mine. I didn’t want things to end up that way. But i had to do it.

I see he hasn’t changed since the last time he was here. Asking for forgiveness he doesn’t deserve, and passing the ultimate blame onto anyone but him. I guess he really took to heart all those tactics he learned as a politician.

Don’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. I was never a politician. The Patriots gave me that office, wrote my speeches. i was using them at that point, as much as they were using me. I used my office to gain funds, so i could bring them down. I wanted Peace… Liberty… for everyone. And to leave behind some sort of legacy. That’s all i wanted. So don’t talk like you know me.

I know more about you than you think, and much more about you than you’d ever care to admit.

I know that in your bid for a legacy, you made hundreds, maybe thousands, of children into your personal marionettes, tore out every last shred of the humanity that was their birthright and replaced it with your own orders to kill, kill, kill, the bloodier and bigger the body pile, the better.

I know that you controlled every aspect of these children’s lives, that they literally lived or died by your hand or even just your word. I know you ordered boys to execute their fellow unit members - the closest thing to family these children had left - for nothing but “poor performance” in the field. And those who couldn’t bring themselves to do so were then lumped in with the “poor performers” and executed by the more “adequate” of those whom they had seen as their their brothers-in-arms. “Brothers-in-arms” who, of course, did not reciprocate such feelings because they’d long since learned that they had to reject even the faintest twinges of their natural empathy in order to live up to the standards for ruthlessness that you used to determine whether they were still fit to live until their next battle. 

And do you know how I know these things? Jack told me everything he could remember, at incredible personal cost to himself. He told me, because the only thing that ate away at him more than dredging up those atrocities for me to hear was keeping them locked away inside him, festering and spreading their psychological decay to the deepest parts of his mind and personality.

I spent the better part of 2, nearly 3 years watching a part of Jack die - slowly, agonizingly - from the gangrene of the mental wounds you, personally inflicted on him. So don’t talk like I don’t know you.