The Twelve Kingdoms Forum

I wouldn't way that he went wrong. I'd say that he was wrong from the start. He's not a man led astray by the trappings of power; he's a man who never should have had power in the first place.

He can't be trusted to act on his own, as we saw. And he'd be a terrible subordinate, for all his capability. He's too unscrupulous, ambitious and manipulative.

If he wasn't a sociopath, he'd be a very good ruler. However the former outweighs the latter.

What if his sociopathy is the cause of going wrong in the first place?

There must have been events in his life causing his nature to be like this. is corrupt father's influence, for one. If he struggled harder, got a sword like Kei-ou's or something like that, he might have gotten over his problems.

Perhaps his father was too strict, making him rebel. Perhaps he was too liberal, allowing him to get away with anything. Perhaps he had a repressed inferiority complex, leading him to over compensate. perhaps he was just an arrogant little git from the start. There's no way to tell.

You can't really talk about someone's sociopathy leading them astray. If someone's a sociopath, they're already about as astray as you can get.

A major part of his problem was his inability to accept that he wasn't perfect, that he did have problems. He'd have to have already gotten over his problem to develop the self awareness to know that he had a problem. Youko is well aware that she is flawed and weak, she can frankly be rather irritatingly whiny about it. Shoryu is aware of his tendency to play games and push boundries. Shushou is aware that she can be bad tempered and arrogant. Atsuyu, however, believes in his own infalibility.

I wish we could really tell what made him so arrogant, by getting a novel about Atsuyu and Kyo-ou(the En guy, before Shoryu)'s reign in general. But I personally want to believe he wasn't absolutely condemned to be an arrogant perfectionist.

I dunno, if he had gone some hellish psychological thriller like Kei-ou or Shoukei, he might have gotten over it.

Dunno. When he was stressed and being challenged, late in the arc, his flaws got more apparent, as he was being defensive and stubborn. He didn’t think about what was going wrong and engage in self-reflection. He blamed everyone else. He was faced with a psychological challenge, and rather than learning from it, he blamed everyone else; destroying the good he’d done in the process.

But what if instead of dying, Shoryu somehow managed to constrain him and lock him up? Then he could learn in prison...

...And what if he had a friend like Rakushun? :3 Surely things would go well for him: talking to Rakushun was shown twice to be a life-saving experience.

Possibly. I doubt it, but we just have different interpretations of the character. Personally, I despise Shokou, who you apparantly like, not because he challenged the system, but because he killed and tortured a lot of people doing so. It's just that a lot of them were off-screen. You think Atsuyu would have been redeemable. I think he's too self centered to ever admit that he was wrong and would respond to imprisonment with indignation and blaming others. He may even respond to Rakushun with anger that a peon dares lecture him.

We're never going to know which of us is right.

Atsuyu is imprisoned and receives a horrible mental blow. At a new low, you think he wouldn't listen to anyone? Why are you so sure that the "villains" cold never learn and change? Shoukei was as close-minded as Atsuyu before, she showed she could change...

And I'd still love Shokou if he killed more people on-screen. I don't think he is right to kill them, but I can sympathize with his cynical views of the world, and understand why does he give so much low value to human life. I'd like to learn more about his personal life, too.

Atsuyu does recieve a number of mental blows during the arc, as Shoryu brings his plans down around his ears. Instead of learning from them and realised that he made mistakes, he gets crazier and crazier and blames everyone else for failing him.

Shoukei was never as close minded. Massively ignorant, yes. Selfish and spoilt, yes. Loved her father, hated hearing bad things about him and made excuses for his behavour, yes. However, she was ignorant of the sufferring her father cause, she wasn't responsible for it. Even at her worst, she knew that a ruler had to work for the good of the ruled. She had a very warped idea of what the good of the ruled was, combined with a strong sense of personal entitlement, but she did think that a ruler should care.

Her mother, however, was grade A scum.

I guess it's more that I think that when you've brought pain and suffering to others in job lots, you don't deserve to change. You shouldn't be able to change you mind and thus escape responsibility for what you've done. Shokou hunted people for sport. It'd take more than a tearful confession and some community service to erase that from his karma. At the end, he appeared to think that what he did wrong was challenging the will of heaven, rather than, you know, torturing people to death. It was all about him.

Redemption is possible to everyone. Atsuyu has done bad things, but not on the level of Shokou(or Chuutatsu's wife) either. Shoryu was not planning to kill him, he did say he would be very forgiving...Shoryu wanted Atsuyu to think about his crimes and change, and he could...it's not like there was a immediate need to kill him either(like killing Chuutatsu and his wife, to ease the populace).

Shokou accepted death by the will of the heavens as soon as he found his answer, when he figured Kei-ou was after him. That's why he is honourable after all: a man coherent to his ideals to the bitter end. Shokou's actions shows us that even the most despicable actions can have good intentions. He even commended Kei-ou for being a great ruler, a ruler that makes the will of the heavens be fulfilled, instead of sitting around and hugging her puppies. A man who realized that much surely deserves a second chance...everyone does. There are always reasons behind evil acts: no one is inherently evil. On a side note, do you support death penalty? I personally don't.

Yes, Shokou went some way to redeeming himself by accepting death for his crimes. However, that doesn't count for much if he doesn't actually, you know, die. I've actually got a fic on fanfiction.net, where his testimony condemns many of his allies and allows Youko to legally clean up many of the corrupt courtiers - as well as sending himself to the gallows. It includes much of my views on him. He deprived many people of their first chance to make something of their lives, it would be unfair to them to give him a second chance.

There may well be reasons behind evil acts. However, they are often not GOOD or remotely sufficienty reasons. You can't forgive murders by the poor and deprived without condemning the vast magority of the poor and deprived who don't commit murders.

It's not really relevent, but I do, in theory, support the death penalty for cases where 1) you are dealing with worse than simple murder crimes and 2) the case has been proved not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but to the point that you'd have to be pretty damn unreasonable to think that the guy might be innocent. I don't support the kind of screwed up mess where they try to do the initial trial on the cheap, assign a godawful and lazy lawyer to defendants who can't afford to hire their own, then spend 15 years and vast sums doing endless appeals, mixing both good arguments and bad ones until nobody can tell which is which, until the defendant has probably died of old age before the execution.

Shokou himself is accepting death as punishment, even in jail. This accounts more for his honour and coherent character than anything, but let us judge this as Kei-ou: blood needs to be spilled to keep a good kingdom, but the rebellion is over and things have calmed down. If we continue the killing apree even after the rebellion is over, we're going to end up with a horrible Chuutatsu-esque regimen, killing people for the most small things and even out of false accusations.

The countless lives Shokou has taken won't be brought back if he is also killed: instead of answering to a killing spree with another killing spree, let us set a positive example for the citizens by showing them anyone can recover from their sins, rather than setting a negative example by killing them. In other words, let us rule by goodness rather than rule by fear.

Really? And the same for the dozens of other mass murders who then claim to have similarly repented? There is a large gap between thinking genuine criminals should be punished and Chuutatsu. As we've seen the anime we "know" that Shokou is truly repentant. How can we be sure that's he not just a good actor trying to worm his way out of an untenable situation? How can Youko? How can anyone else in Kei who hears about the story?

Shokou needs to be treated the same as everyone else in the same position. He should not get a special exemption from the law just because he's a cool, good-looking character in an Anime.

There are a large number of reasons to punish criminals. The salvation of their souls is not really a good one of them. It either leads to excessive lenience or excessive severity. I'll leave out the procedures used to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, which are a whole different kettle of fish and not relevant to this discussion. I'm also going to leave out the idea of "justice demands" except to note that the vast majority of people strongly believe in this.

1) To prevent them from committing further crimes. Someone who's dead, in prison, or sincerely repentant is not going to be committing further crimes. However, without telepathy, we're never going to be able to tell if someone is sincerely repentant. I'm not arguing that the sincerely repentant should continue to be punished, but the impossibility of determining who is REALLY repentant from those who merely know the right words to mouth.

2) To deter others. Shokou was a fairly important lord in a position of trust. He abused that trust in every way he could think of. His treatment of the people whom he was responsible for was utterly abominable. What message would it send to other officials who are tempted towards abusing their position if someone who so flagrantly abused his is let off?
If you go overboard you get counterproductive laws like Chinese legalism (which is what Chuutatsu practiced and resulted in rebellions in reality) or the old British bloody code (when you could be hanged for stealing something worth more than five shillings just as much as murder, killing someone to cover up your theft can get attractive).
You appear to believe that if the law is kind and forgiving people will take it's example and be nice to one another. IMHO, you have a hopelessly sunny view of human nature.

3) To satisfy other people's need for justice, or for vengeance if you're feeling cynical. Endless psychological experiments have been done, showing that people sincerely believe that when someone violates the unwritten social contract that they should be punished, even if they have to make a sacrifice of their own to do so. How do you think someone who'd lost a child to Shokou's rampages would feel to hear that he's not been punished?
THIS IS IMPORTANT. It's not that people should be punished because it's popular. If the government does not punish criminals, the government will lose the support and trust of the people. One of the functions of the legal system is to prevent blood feuds, vigilantism and lynchings. If people don't think they can get justice from the government, they will take "justice" into their own hands. Especially if they know that they won't get punished for it.

Not punishing the criminal does not lead to peace and light and everyone holding hands and singing Kum-by-ya, it leads to chaos and darkness and a war of all against all.

Punishing Shokou may not bring back the people he's killed. It will, however, prevent future deaths.

I also dislike the way you characterised your idea as "rule by goodness". What we're arguing about is what way would be better, more good. It’s rule by kindness and mercy versus rule by peace and justice. I think you’re naïve, and I don’t know what you think of me, but if you characterise your views as being "good", you've characterised the other side as "evil". And, of course, if I'm evil, a demon sent to tempt you astray, there's no reason to listen to anything I say, is there? While there have been cases where the other side is plainly evil, I really hope that’s not the case here. Twirling a black moustache while tying debutantes to a railroad track would severely affect my social life.

And the number 1 reason he should be punished.

a) He is guilty of multiple murders, high treason and a large number of other extremely serious crimes.

b) Kei has the death penalty.

Youko would have to override or change the law of the land to spare him.

lavender_wind wrote:I don't think that is Taiki. Actually, I think he is the second prince of Sou. He appeared in Tonan no Tsubasa and played a role in helping Kyou-ou ascend Mt Hou. He is also friends with Shoryu shown in one of the stories in Kasho no Yume (Kizan, if I remember correctly) where they talked about the prospects of Kingdom of Ryu.

I'll buy this one.

At firt I though he's the boy who can talk to youma. Anyway yours beat mine.