What Alignment is V?

[jester47]

I guess I'm of the mindset that some things can never be forgiven.

Everything can be forgiven, its just a matter of being strong enough to do so.
Only the weak withhold forgiveness, they are too afraid of being hurt again.

 

[jester47]

One incident of torture does not an evil man make.

Yes it does. When you torture, you have to ignore a part of your own humanity to do so. You cross a line. You are evil when your torture.

 

[jester47]

Comic V is chaotic neutral. He is insane, driven so by the toture he endured. He is driven by revenge and seeks to destroy the regime that destroyed him. No more no less. He simply knows that freedom MAY be a byproduct of his actions. But he really does not care about freedom. All he wants is the regime gone and the people that tortured him dead and he will do anything to get it. This is shown by his desire to die at the end. He really doesn't care if there is anything after the regime he takes down.

Movie V I would say is Chaotic Good. I think Moore sums up why more succinctly than I ever could:

Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

George Clooney's being attacked for making ["Good Night, and Good Luck"], but he still had the nerve to make it. Presumably it's not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere. It could have worked.

 

[Umbran]

I think Moore sums up why more succinctly than I ever could:

Avoiding discussion of the politics as stated in Moore's writing...

Moore has been known to have control issues with regards to his work. While I see differences between his work and the movie, I don't think they are as drastic as he paints them, and I'd believe that the aforementioned control issues are likely coloring his analysis.

 

[VirgilCaine]

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships. A neutral person may sacrifice himself to protect his family or even his homeland, but he would not do so for strangers who are not related to him.

Now, if I only had anything on alignment change...

Alignment Change is Gradual: Changes in alignment shouldn't be drastic. Usually a character changes alignment onlu one step at a time--from lawful evil to lawful neutral, for example--and not directly to neutral good. A character on herr way to another alignment might have a number of other alignements during the transition to the final alignment.
Time Requirements: Changing alignment takes tiome. Changes of heart are rarely sudden (although they can be). What you want to avoid is a player chaging her characters alignment to evil to use an evil artifact properly and then changing it right back when she's done. Alignments aren't garments you can talke off and put on casually. Require an interval of at least a week of game time between alignment changes.

This suggests to me, that one Evil act does not damn a character to being Evil immediately.

I'm still not seeing how V is evil for a single incident of torture of an innocent and torturing an evil person.

Yes it does. When you torture, you have to ignore a part of your own humanity to do so. You cross a line. You are evil when your torture.

The issue isn't whether torturing an innocent is evil, it's whether a person's alignment can change to evil as the result of a single incident.

 

[Umbran]

The issue isn't whether torturing an innocent is evil, it's whether a person's alignment can change to evil as the result of a single incident.

I view alignment as a sort of long-term tally or average of your actions. If you've done a lot of good, you've got some buffer there, and single small incidents won't wipe you out. But if you don't start out with a karmic buffer (and most people don't - they're neutral), or if it is a really big and nasty act, yes, it can flop you over in one fell swoop. But it probably has to be something pretty darned nasty.

 

[Felix]

I'm still not seeing how V is evil for a single incident of torture of an innocent and torturing an evil person.

Don't base it solely on that one incident. What we're shown of V is a cross-section. Good acts, Evil, Neutral. If there were no other acts this character took in his entire life we don't have enough to go by to set an alignment, and he was evidently doing something, so the only insight we have into the rest of his actions are what we see on screen. And a lifetime of all those actions in proportion would render someone most certainly not Good.

What that particular evil act tells us is that he is more than willing to be evil to someone he cares deeply for for weeks, if not months. Can you really only call that "one" evil act?

 

[VirgilCaine]

Don't base it solely on that one incident. What we're shown of V is a cross-section. Good acts, Evil, Neutral. If there were no other acts this character took in his entire life we don't have enough to go by to set an alignment, and he was evidently doing something, so the only insight we have into the rest of his actions are what we see on screen. And a lifetime of all those actions in proportion would render someone most certainly not Good.

What that particular evil act tells us is that he is more than willing to be evil to someone he cares deeply for for weeks, if not months. Can you really only call that "one" evil act?

I have NEVER claimed that he was Good. NEVER. I am saying that he IS NOT EVIL.

Furthermore, torturing Evey is not an everyday act, IMO, so in the end, he ends up Chaotic/Lawful Neutral.

 

[Stormrunner]

Fanatic does not automatically mean lawful.

To me, V is definitely Chaotic Neutral - "so much it hurts", as a previous poster said. His whole schtick is "one man against the system", 'make your own decisions instead of letting Authority run everything for you".

He's definitely not Good - he does whatever it takes to complete his mission, morality be d__ned. However, I don't see him as selfish enough to be Chaotic Evil. If he focussed only on revenge against the ones who hurt him (a la The Crow or The Punisher), and didn't give a d__n what happened to the common people, then yes. If he tortured Evey because he enjoyed torture, he'd be evil. Instead he tortures her because it's the only way he can be absolutely sure she won't break under torture if captured, the only way to be sure she has the psychological strength to pick up the mask and become the next V after he falls. Yes, it's still an evil act. V knows this, he's very much aware that he has made himself into a monster (morally as well as physically), it's one reason that he deliberately sets himself up to die at the end. (One of the other reasons being that otherwise people would be constantly looking to him, their savior, for direction, essentially replacing the Government with the Dictatorship of V instead of thinking for themselves as he intended.)

 

[VirgilCaine]

Thank you!