Ahhh. I understand now. And yeah, that...must've been awful for you. You want to believe the best of someone you love, that if they have done horrible things that they were somehow misguided, or the circumstances justified them, or it was some one-off mistake...that it doesn't mean they're a horrible person. But then, if you find out they've done something so horrific that no excuse could ever be good enough...then naturally you'll end up wondering how you could have let all the other stuff slide.
As I said, though, I don't think this is too comparable. No, I won't go so far as to say Dimitri was possessed, but...as far as conscious control of his actions goes, I don't think that the end result was too far off from that, even if the cause wasn't at all the same. Dimitri's been...traumatized beyond all belief, really. I don't want to lay out his whole history for you, even though he doesn't keep it secret or anything; it feels a little invasive, all the same. But when I say it starts with that massacre I mentioned earlier, and that the hits just kept on coming after that...I'm putting it mildly. Anyone would have broken under that, and Dimitri did. He was actively hallucinating the dead speaking to him for a lot of the time he was on a single-minded revenge mission. And the revenge...wasn't even for him, which is maybe the saddest part. His country has a pretty horrific religious belief - that if a person dies with regrets, they go to a fiery pit of torment until the living either recompense their sins or ease their regrets. So those friends and family that died in the massacre...Dimitri was taught they were burning in hell until he avenged them. That their souls couldn't rest easy until he killed who was responsible. And those voices were in his head, blaming him for their deaths, demanding he seek vengeance on their behalf...
Dimitri wasn't possessed, but he was absolutely not in his right mind. And it's hard to look at a man who suffered so much that he went temporarily insane and blame him for the things he did when life had broken him entirely down. Nothing he did was a conscious choice made in his right mind, that's for sure. And that doesn't make the things he did any less heinous, I know that, but...I can't exactly say that the Dimitri who's in a healthier state of mind bears even the faintest resemblance to the Dimitri who'd been driven into the pit. I don't know whether you consider that an excuse or not.
As for Dirk, my guess it's that it's a mix of all of them.
[Blaming Andrew Hussie for nonsense is rarely a bad plan.]
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Date: 2021-02-24 08:30 am (UTC)As I said, though, I don't think this is too comparable. No, I won't go so far as to say Dimitri was possessed, but...as far as conscious control of his actions goes, I don't think that the end result was too far off from that, even if the cause wasn't at all the same. Dimitri's been...traumatized beyond all belief, really. I don't want to lay out his whole history for you, even though he doesn't keep it secret or anything; it feels a little invasive, all the same. But when I say it starts with that massacre I mentioned earlier, and that the hits just kept on coming after that...I'm putting it mildly. Anyone would have broken under that, and Dimitri did. He was actively hallucinating the dead speaking to him for a lot of the time he was on a single-minded revenge mission. And the revenge...wasn't even for him, which is maybe the saddest part. His country has a pretty horrific religious belief - that if a person dies with regrets, they go to a fiery pit of torment until the living either recompense their sins or ease their regrets. So those friends and family that died in the massacre...Dimitri was taught they were burning in hell until he avenged them. That their souls couldn't rest easy until he killed who was responsible. And those voices were in his head, blaming him for their deaths, demanding he seek vengeance on their behalf...
Dimitri wasn't possessed, but he was absolutely not in his right mind. And it's hard to look at a man who suffered so much that he went temporarily insane and blame him for the things he did when life had broken him entirely down. Nothing he did was a conscious choice made in his right mind, that's for sure. And that doesn't make the things he did any less heinous, I know that, but...I can't exactly say that the Dimitri who's in a healthier state of mind bears even the faintest resemblance to the Dimitri who'd been driven into the pit. I don't know whether you consider that an excuse or not.
As for Dirk, my guess it's that it's a mix of all of them.
[Blaming Andrew Hussie for nonsense is rarely a bad plan.]