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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2307422" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't have much to say except that the idea of fiendish spawn that are only partially evil but somehow still have a strand of good in them is utterly unappealling to me.  This is not like dealing with a half-orc child.  It demotes the concept of fiends from that of incarnations of evil to that or mere monsters.   It smacks of 'fiends are people too'.   I could just as well use people if I need something to stand in for people, or orc if I needed something to stand in for 'generally ugly savage person'.   Once you start appealing to the symbolism of demons, you are by definition talking about 'incarnated evil', and if incarnated evil is only partially evil its like saying that evil isn't evil.   If evil isn't evil, then evil doesn't exist which judging by the complex moral problems you seem to be trying to put into your stories doesn't seem to me at first glance what you are actually trying to say.In the case of the half-fiend spawn you may think you are getting around that, but water down ultimate evil is still ultimate evil.  Even if you start talking about 'half-fiend'/'half-celestial' you are talking simply nonsense as far as I'm concerned.  Regardless of your cosmological justification, there can't be 'half-fiend'/'half-celestials' because the two symbols aren't misible.  It's like having something be half matter and half anti-matter.   What is it that is half matter and half-antimatter?  It's nothing.   The whole thing just goes 'poof' whether we are speaking literally or metaphorically.I'd just kill it.  In order for a thing to be redeemable it must possess some degree of free will.  Fiendish things have no free will in the matter.  They have to be fiendish.About the only way I could see making this thing redeemable is if it turned out to be two things inhabiting the same body, one of which was all fiend and the other of which was all something else.   Then perhaps it would be redeemable under the loving breath of Bahumet, who could perhaps burn away the part that was irredeemable cleansing body and spirit.  But trying to redeem a half-fiend without unmaking the half that is fiend is to me a completely impossible concept - and its quite beyond the power of any mortal to unmake the body and spirit of something without killing it.   A more serious question is whether its even in the power of a god to unmake the body and spirit of something - changing its essential nature - without defacto killing the thing itself.   Is personality death the same as death?Putting it into another concept, let's say this is Hannibal the Girl Child Dragon?  Is Hannibal redeemable in any fashion other than death?  Charismatic and attractive are not aspects that make him redeemable.   Just because the evil thing evokes sympathy doesn't mean mean that its any more redeemable.  In fact, this just means its all the more dangerous and less redeemable.   Hannibal exists as a literary character solely by his capacity to kill and terrify.   That's the reason he was created.  He can never stop being that.   If you ever thing he is anything else, then you've forgotten what he is.   And Hannibal is supposed to be merely human, not literally an incarnation of evil.</blockquote>

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