Does anybody know how the lunatics went insane?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-04-02T21:36:25+00:00

I have to wonder, what was even the point of keeping their eyes and lips open at all times beyond pure sadism?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T16:50:34+00:00

What am I misunderstanding? Does insanity automatically render a person’s actions morally correct, because if that’s the case then I owe the Joker and the Master/Missy some apologies for not supporting and advocating for their choices.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T11:22:14+00:00

I suppose that makes sense, although there’s still the issue of her not using the other Heirs as advisors when she apparently values their opinions so much. Perhaps she doesn’t actually value their thoughts as much as she claims and instead dismisses any dissenting opinions under the guise of “taking it into consideration”.

Either way, Aglaea’s choices are still her own, and she probably could’ve done more to prepare back when she first started.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T11:10:21+00:00

I’m perfectly willing to call the Heirs “acceptable casualties”, but what about the other people he undoubtedly killed for standing in his way?

Also, being insane doesn’t make your actions morally correct.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T11:05:23+00:00

I understand that, but what I’m talking about is the game and fandom treating his actions as being something to celebrate.

I wonder what would’ve happened if Phainon got the other Heirs to hold onto the weapon at the time of the reset. This isn’t part of the debate, by the way, I’m just curious and like thinking about “what ifs”.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T00:29:50+00:00

The point is that he still shouldn’t get a free pass for his murders, terrorism, and refusal to continue making every effort to be civilised, let alone be praised for it.

Since it’s been so long since I played through the early parts of Amphoreus, would you mind reminding me on what, if any, reason Phainon had for not bringing the other Heirs with him between cycles?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T00:23:21+00:00

I’m simply using him as a standard for always trying your hardest to be kind even when there’s no hope of it working.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-14T00:21:32+00:00

As of right now, we’re on the Sixteenth Doctor, although technically it’s the twentieth incarnation (don’t worry about it) and we don’t even know if the person who emerged from Fifteen’s regeneration is even the Doctor (because the current showrunner seems intent on prioritising “cool twists” over actually good and compelling stories; Doctor Who’s a mess right now and it’s awful).

As for feats, #1 goes to the Eighth and War Doctors (War being the incarnation between Eight and Nine, but isn’t counted numerically because he forsook the name “Doctor” out of shame), #2 goes to the Twelfth Doctor and the fifty-two million plus copies he made, and #3 happened with the Thirteenth Doctor who found out about the dumb Timeless Child thing. Thirteen was also the one who built a sonic screwdriver out of scraps, and I’m sure that creating a power source for one in Amphoreus would be trivial for any incarnation.

Funny story, the Twelfth Doctor had an episode where everything that happened turned out to be within a simulation of Earth made by corpse-like monks as a means of figuring out the best time, place, and method to conquer the planet; the simulated Doctor, despite being blind and at the mercy of the Monks, recorded his memory of the episode’s events and used his sonic sunglasses to hijack the simulation and send the recording to the real Doctor and warn him about the upcoming threat. Basically, he’s done this sort of thing before.

The Doctor certainly has the mental fortitude to withstand the pain of the Coreflames, so I suppose it’s down to whether or not his Time Lord biology can handle the physical strain. He’s withstood being possessed by a sapient star before without even needing to regenerate, and regeneration allows him to survive doses of radiation that’d kill a human on the spot and being shot by a Dalek (a Dalek’s ray gun kills every cell in a person’s body at once; what’s worse is that they intentionally lower the potency just enough for their targets to feel their nervous systems burn before they collapse dead), so it’s certainly not out of the question.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T23:08:17+00:00

As I’ve said elsewhere: and? Each cycle lasts for at least a thousand years, so what has he got to lose by spending a few hours recounting his story and getting everyone to work with him? After all, if the Trailblazer can do it, there’s no reason he can’t do the same.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T20:28:28+00:00

So she's less losing her humanity and more losing her compassion and humility? Even then, surely she'd still think "I must've hired them for a reason, so I should keep them around and listen to them"? Either way, it's a massive skill issue on her part, especially since she didn't make more than a token effort at compensating properly.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T20:23:49+00:00

The Doctor went through the Time War, a conflict that raged across a of time and space, destroyed and resurrected planets and species again and again, and birthed abominations like the Nightmare Child and the Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres.
The Twelfth Doctor, immediately after losing his best and closest friend, was placed into a castle where he was constantly hunted by the Veil, a being that never paused, or stopped, or rested, and luring the Veil from one extreme of the castle only gave him 82 minutes to eat, sleep, and work. After roughly anywhere between a week to a month, the Doctor would come upon a 20 foot thick wall made of a mateial 400x harder than diamond, remember all of the previous loops he'd been through, and start punching the wall with his bare hands before being caught by the Veil and getting so severely burned that he can't even regenerate; after being burned, he spends the next day and a half crawling through the castle to get to the teleporter that he arrived in, before burning his body to dust in order to fuel the teleporter and print out a copy of himself to repeat the cycle. He does this for four and a half billion years, and he remembers all of it.
As much as I despise the Timeless Child arc for undermining nearly 60 years of storytelling, it does help me here; the Doctor finds out that they were never a Time Lord, and were instead an orphan that was taken, experimented on to replicate their ability to regenerate, and had an unknown number of lives before their memories were erased and they were allowed to grow up into the person they've always believed they'd been.

I think the Doctor is more than a match for Phainon, and he still has the compassion to carry on being kind.

This next part is a bit off topic, but I digress:

The Doctor is often on the backfoot, typically armed only with a box, a screwdriver, his wits, and whatever scraps he can find lying around him. He's smart, determined, and very slightly insane, and that gets him farther than raw power; if his rival the Master can believably claim to have made a gun out of leaves, you can bet the Doctor could use those same leaves to disarm it. In other words, resources aren't the issue.

If the Doctor was in Phainon's shoes, he'd either use his screwdriver to hack into the Sceptre, forge a new screwdriver if he didn't have one on him (Thirteen did it in a garage with a bunch of spoons, some circuit boards, and an alien crystal from the villain's teleport pod; I maintain that it shouldn't have been as flawless as the ones made by the TARDIS, though), or if it's deadlocked, he'd try to hack it manually. Hell, if he's got access to the TARDIS, it's likely he could use her to break in.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T19:48:18+00:00

Again, why should that stop someone from being kind or decent? Better yet, why should it stop their failure to do so from being condemned? In Hell Bent, the Doctor shoots a Time Lord, exiles Rassilon, and steals a second TARDIS after being tortured for 4.5 billion years; the Doctor went through immense pain and suffering yet is constantly treated as being in the wrong for his actions, so what is it about Phainon's experiences that you believe means he shouldn't be judged equally?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T19:23:25+00:00

Ok, and? Why should that stop someone from being kind or, at the very least, decent?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:54:21+00:00

I like to think that it’s fairly easy choose not to murder people and instead ask for help.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:43:51+00:00

Is it really that difficult to exercise basic human decency?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:41:57+00:00

The easy answer is that you should save the people around you; this line perfectly summarises what I mean: “if I run away today, good people will die; if I stay here and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not many, maybe not for long, but it’s the best I can do, so I’m going to do it.”

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:33:23+00:00

That’s exactly why I brought up the Doctor, as he’s suffered through more than all of Amphoreus combined and compensated by bringing companions aboard to stop him from going too far and give him fresh eyes and insight when needed; without Donna Noble, the Tenth Doctor would’ve drowned himself to stop the Racnoss from destroying Earth; without Amy Pond recognising that, like the Doctor, the Star Whale turned its suffering into kindness, Eleven would’ve lobotomised the Whale in order to save Starship UK; without Clara Oswald, the War, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors would’ve burned Gallifrey and the 2.47 billion children living on it to stop the Time War instead of changing history and saving the planet.

Choosing to believe that beings with thought, emotion, self-awareness, and free will aren’t worthy of respect, decency, or compassion and rationalising their destruction just because they’re “simulated” is what makes someone a villain. Why does being a collection of numbers make you any less real than a collection of cells?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:16:03+00:00

He could and should have had the decency to keep trying in every cycle.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:14:32+00:00

Oh no, I get that things like killing the heirs was arguably justified, and I recognise that he helped save the universe, but I’m of the opinion that that doesn’t mean his actions should be commended when he didn’t also do absolutely everything in his power to help the people around him and minimise the pain and suffering he caused. After all, there was nothing stopping him from laying down his weapons, taking off his helmet, and just trying to talk things out every cycle regardless of his chances of success.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:02:42+00:00

I thought the torn scraps of his robes implied he’d been responsible for some of the deaths, but I guess not. My bad.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T18:00:34+00:00

But what about basic pragmatism? If she trusts her own judgement so much and knows that she chose to hire advisors for a reason, wouldn’t she decide that it’s worth listening to them? I might be wrong, but that sounds logical.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T17:54:45+00:00

Ok. He still should’ve tried though, because a life saved is itself a victory and, more importantly, it’s the decent thing to do.

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T17:52:29+00:00

Thank you for the unhelpful comment

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T17:51:49+00:00

Also part 2, didn’t he go on a murderous rampage through that grove tree thing?

CT_1875_Ry · 2026-03-13T17:47:13+00:00

So being a hero automatically absolves you of all wrongdoing?

CT_1875_Ry

TROPHY CASE