{"id":10364,"date":"2011-01-13T07:29:07","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T12:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10364"},"modified":"2011-01-13T07:31:42","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T12:31:42","slug":"spoiler-warning-s4e23-lawful-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10364","title":{"rendered":"Spoiler Warning S4E23: Lawful Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shamus went to bed early (or late, or something &#8211; he shifts his waking hours so often I&#8217;m not even sure <i>he<\/i> can keep track of it) so Uncle Josh is here again to post the episode this morning.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Schq_MifxRg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Schq_MifxRg'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Despite the implication I make with the title and description of this episode, I actually don&#8217;t think Samara&#8217;s a bad character. She&#8217;s certainly more interesting than&#8230; well, basically anyone who works for Cerberus at the very least. And she has the second- or third-best loyalty mission in the game.<\/p>\n<p>The real problem I have with her is that her &#8220;code&#8221; really is, quite literally, <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/LawfulStupid\">Lawful Stupidity<\/a> codified. &#8220;My code does not allow me to be detained, so if you attempt to hold me for longer than 24 hours I&#8217;ll kill you. Even though you&#8217;re a cop. And trying to stop me from killing all of your suspects in this investigation. And you don&#8217;t actually <i>want<\/i> to hold me anyway.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t care what hoops the BioWare writers jump through to try to justify this attitude as &#8220;good&#8221; or &#8220;noble&#8221; or, and this is the kicker, &#8220;just.&#8221; I just can&#8217;t get over this point &#8211; the writers are asking us to respect someone who follows a strict moral code to the letter when that moral code says to <i>kill everyone that acts contrary to your moral code<\/i>. How can that possibly be considered a <i>good<\/i> thing? It just doesn&#8217;t work in any universe that is actually <i>trying to make sense<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Which apparently isn&#8217;t Mass Effect 2 so I guess that&#8217;s perfectly fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shamus went to bed early (or late, or something &#8211; he shifts his waking hours so often I&#8217;m not even sure he can keep track of it) so Uncle Josh is here again to post the episode this morning. Link (YouTube) Despite the implication I make with the title and description of this episode, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}