Not a fucking lick. Not one.

They could've gone to Mexico or Canada. They could've dusted their TI at boot. They could've blown their CO away at the front. They could've just defected and tried to blend into Vietnamese culture. Instead, they chose to murder people they'd never met at the behest of people they'd never have a paygrade to stand in the same room as.

There's always a choice. They chose wrong. I have no sympathy.

Black nb. I used to think it wouldn't happen to me anymore all the time, because I don't live south of the Mason-Dixon anymore. There's a such thing as 'being lucky'. You just haven't had cause to see it yet.

Settlers are the same the world over, regardless of what nation they're illegitimately holding.

Look, they sold me on the concept when they gave me an electric guitar and amplifier that literally bursts eardrums and melts faces. Chaos Noise forever.

But it'd be just like a disciple of Metamorphosis to feign fealty to the Lord of Pleasure while still carrying out the aims of the Lord of Change as subterfuge. For all we know, it could be a ruse specifically to flummox OP, and they'd never know.

Post Tournament of Power training, maybe. That def skews it; 'cause now Roshi is the closest human to UI (according to Beerus and Whis iirc at least)

Top corner when I'm feeling regular; bottom right when I'm in my Oscar Wilde duffel

You just described me and my primary's co-op Baldur's Gate 3 save. Half-orc ranger, forest gnome druid; we've got a straight man/funny man dynamic going that feels like bard-and-rogue but two steps to the left

In the slave empire, trying to show people the way the nuggets are made the way Upton Sinclair would gets you tried under the same statutes that they justified torturing "terrorists" under

HALF-TIME ENTERTAINMENT!!

If you just ship every dick that shows their ass to the marsh, you're gonna start fuckin with the pH balance, man.

is it too much to ask to want others to validate/affirm you

Hardly. External recognition as what you feel you are, even if just from one person, can be the foundation of the identity's formation/coalescence. It doesn't make you lesser; especially not for vocalizing that need.

"Let's not disturb the marshland" sounds like a particularly witchy thing to say for some reason

It requires a bit of finagling; I won't bullshit.

Firstly, most of my fantasy settings have tangible, undeniable presences of divinity; some of which have those concepts of subjective honor and what have you as full-on domains. So you get the ones who are theologically zealous about it, but you also get the ones who are brash and loud for no real good reason.

Secondly, my settings tend to caveat that regardless of whether it's used or not, all sapient beings have some manner of thaumaturgical current (be that arcane, divine, psionic, what have you) running through them. Even in those who don't actively manifest it through evocations, conjurations, your typical wizard/cleric/sorcerer shit, it still winds up giving them the endurance to tank through it as a fighter or a paladin; or dexterity their way around it ala rogue or ranger-- so you wind up with a lot more of those types surviving what would typically be a very quadratic wizard anywhere else than you'd expect. (I can't have a setting be ALL nerds whipping around Maximized Fireballs and Twinned Thunderbolts.)

EDIT: It's just now occurring to me how much that sounds like 'instinctive magic'-- which I very much believe would evolve into a populace that evolved any manner of thaumaturgical manipulation in their ancient pasts.

tl;dr the more brash, ignorant, and loud about 'honor' types are still wrong about it when their subjective sense of honor is predicated on "whether or not the foe is 'using magic'" as the commons would call it-- they just don't know how or why they're wrong yet bc I have an aesthetic bias toward turn of the century steampunk/clockwork/magitek vibes; and I like leaving room for named-character innovators.

Haha welcome to modern kindergarden/daycare and the commodification of child rearing.

Like that, you just described why I haven't had kids and frankly don't plan on 'em, at least in part lmao. Like... If against all odds, we still lived in the same America that we did when my mother was running me through kindergarten? If I lived in a neighborhood where most of the people that lived there looked and lived in the same general rung I do? It'd be less of an issue; but even theoretically knowing where the offenders in my city are, I can't trust that 1) offenders are actually made to reveal themselves 100% of the time anymore or that 2) that the faculty isn't that way and just ain't been caught yet.

Een beyond predation, you bring up ANOTHER salient point as to why I'm not; see, it hit me a few years back before my personally-childfree philosophy really crystallized was that your child is only really yours maybe the first 5 years of their life. After that, your child will spend more time at their school than they do around you. Effectively, at the age of six, your child is a ward of the state and at hazard from whatever fuckery their peers get into-- never mind the Amerikan-exceptionalist brainwashing from the teachers who will end up shaping their lives more than you will. You'd end up spending more time trying to undo the rot they're learning with no real surety that what you're trying to teach your seed will stick in the face of teachers and peers. Hell, the only reason it halfway worked on me was because my mother's boyfriend was an abuser for the first ten years of my going to school; so if you're actually a well-adjusted parent, you're only really swimming harder against the current our system orchestrates.

I pray you luck in guarding your own in this day and age, my man.

Sounds like a Unique

What section of the Library of Babel did this come out of?

Agriculture and hydroponics research.

I tend to try and 'explain that' in my settings as 'concepts of pride and honor are both a lot more prevalent and a lot more subjective. "Honor" to one warrior might mean steel and spells, the next might think the one that came before him is a mewling milksop for the one or two cantrips they'll throw in a fight'; et cetera.