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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 6182541" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Most sources I've seen on the subject flip-flop over whether undead are inherently evil or not, despite negative energy itself being neutral and a perfectly natural part of nature. Meanwhile, Deathless are considered inherently good simply because they are literally nothing more than undead powered by positive energy, despite positive energy being no more aligned than negative energy is, and that's the only difference (there's nothing preventing the existence of deathless zombies, skeletons, wights, vampires, etc because it's just the polar inverse of negative energy but is otherwise identical).Most of the arguments seem to come down to these things:1) Desecration of a body. This is ridiculous because people in D&D have solid proof for the afterlife and therefore death holds absolutely no mystery or suspense for them. Therefore they shouldn't treat their dead the same way we in the real world do, because they know for a fact that corpses are nothing more than hunks of rotting meat that retains impressions of the memories of the soul that used to own it, but the actual soul has moved on to the afterlife and has no connection to the body other than for purposes of resurrection. Also, why isn't mind control considered just as evil, since it's still desecrating a (living) body and forcing it to your will?2) Negative energy is evil, positive energy is good. For one thing, enough positive energy will make you explode. For another thing, without negative energy nothing would ever be able to die and make way for new things to exist. (or else, why would these two planes even exist?) Positive and negative energy represent life and death, respectively. But because death is scary, people assume it is therefore evil and then we get things like various grim reaper monsters that simply carry out the natural workings of the cosmos receiving "evil" as their alignment.3) Undead are unnatural/It prevents resurrection magic. How is raising someone from the dead any less unnatural than raising them as a zombie? In fact, resurrection is MORE unnatural because it actually drags the soul from the afterlife and places it back in the body. Scratch that, raising it as an undead is just as natural as letting it rot, since both reanimation and the natural cycle of decay are caused by negative energy (otherwise, why would the plane exist?). Which is really inconsistent that the force responsible for natural rot also preserves undead bodies, but we'll ignore that little self-contradiction.4) Animating a zombie/skeleton/whatever tortures the soul inside it. For one thing, most undead explicitly do not have souls, as stated by any spells that can manipulate souls. The only undead that retain their souls are things like liches and vampires, whereas others are either mindless hunks of meat/bone or developed a simple intelligence to replace their original soul. For those latter undead, their souls are enjoying the afterlife, and nowhere near the reanimated corpse. Even for intelligent undead, their souls aren't being tortured, they were either evil to begin with or had an alignment shift (or were/stayed good for some reason), which still isn't soul torture and is usually reversible.Most of the arguments for undead being evil/deathless being good are nonsensical because they rely on premises that are explicitly disproved by the rules or rely on concepts that shouldn't exist in the game world because of differing physical laws/cultural beliefs.</blockquote>

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