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Shabazik — Juggling Ilithid
#chat #flayer #ilithid #juggler #juggling #mind #randomness
Published: 2018-09-29 20:34:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 1510; Favourites: 59; Downloads: 49
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"See? These aren't only useful for Mind flaying!"A sketch that originated from the chat back in the April 4, 2017
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Comments: 12
I'd say juggling is better than mind flaying. He might be a disappointment to his parents, however. "Why do you have to do that stupid thing? Why can't you mind flay like everybody else?" Or, he just might not be a good mind flayer. I prefer that he is just relaxing and having fun, however.
Great job!
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It's nice to see a Ilithid with personality, most people seems to reduce them just to their diet in some sort of extremist vegan moralism or neo-macrobiotic logic: "they eat human brains, they are brain eaters: that's all anyone must say about each and every one of them!". As if a person could not have individual goals, aesthetic opinions, sense of humor, political perceptions based on reasonable arguments, ...and nice hobbies like that; all just because this person has special dietary needs.
Fantasy authors sometimes use sensory metaphors to shorten the path, and make clear that a race place or character is evil just describing it smell or the shadows around it as evil. I am a big fan of that fictional gender but that particular card feels almost always as cheating to me. Define a Ilithid as evil because it eat talking animals, humans included, feels almost as cheap as say they are evil because they are ugly and smell badly. If some character get his nourishment by killing and eating humans that can make this someone a dangerous character for humans (or not, maybe it only eats enemies or convicted criminals and you are his friend and a honest fellow), but be dangerous for humans does not makes any specie or individual "evil".
If you have a choice between eat or not eat intelligent animals, and you choose to eat humans just because you like our taste, then maybe would be fair to consider you as "evil". Maybe: because be good or evil should have something to do with the choices one make, and choices are always made inside a particular context. Now, call something evil just because it is doing the necessary to keep it's existence feels wrong, and is obviously unfair, precisely because most of us would neither expect nor wish that our beloved ones did anything less than what they need to do to keep existing.
When a hero sacrifices it's existence to safe others that's commendable, but no one should be called evil just by not choosing to make the same sacrifice: then why we expect the Ilithids to starve themselves, and their nests, to death ? Are they evil just because they don't agree to do just that?
Kill the Ilithids before they kill us, that's all right. Make sense. Describe them as evil just because they would keep our human villages as slaughter animals, on the other hand, is unfair and uncalled for.
Let them free to have fun and be happy, like the nice fellow here.
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Its also the fact that they're not in their own timeline, having come from the far future. Or the fact that they reproduce via tadpoles from the elder brain pool to then be forcibly inserted into a human brain culminating in the spiritual annihilation of the host creating a new Illithid. Or that they are slavers who keep a large stock of slaves for sustenance and new hosts.
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Well pointed Lordofchange, I agree. This people are refugee immigrants from a distant future making their best effort to adapt and fit into a very different reality, therefore deserve respect and empathy.
Their costumes and biological cycle are different to the others we know, and may seem exotic from our point of view, but that does not mean they are worse than ours; nor that we can't find points in common with them. As you mention they do have great respect for their elders, like many human cultures do; the old large brain on the pool bottom can not move or feed for himself of course, so he is protected and provided for by the younger. All community contribute to keep their elder as comfortable as possible, while the lager brain share his wisdom and experience with the younger ilithid.
However, I still think human communities should (under most circumstances) keep their distance from ilithid circles. Moving away if possible, destroying the old brain if necessary.
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