welcome to the dragonhoard

Apokuna is an active soldier who was reassigned to Oakhurst. She is expected to "oversee" the territory of Oakhurst on behalf of some military force, which implies the presence of there being a political reason that the place needs to have at least some kind of token military presence. As a soldier, Apokuna is trained to fight and potentially kill other individuals. It is the way they initially respond to Scott threatening them -- he is marked as a "threat" in her mind and she responds to it "logically" with violence she is sanctioned to wield.

Because of this, Apokuna's violence is structurally justifiable. It is also unjustifiable, but not because violence is inherently wrong -- it is because she should not be the one wielding it (because she is also a marginalized person, narratively and metaphorically, and the marginalized are not "allowed" to be violent). Similarly, they are not "allowed" to kill Truffle, even though they're attempting to make a direct and pointed allegorical argument to Pyro about how both of them are being treated by Scott and Owen. This is because an animal is "innocent" because it is not capable of self-defense and cannot "fight back" like a person is allegedly always able to do.

And yes, Apokuna could not meaningfully "fight back" against Scott and Owen (and Pyro, standing by) any more than Truffle could against her. But that doesn't matter. She is categorically considered someone capable of violence, so acts against her are justifiable. The pig categorically can only have violence enacted upon it, and it is therefore more "wrong" to kill it than it would be to suffer in silence.^

^put a pin in that, it'll be relevant several more times.

She was unjustified. The violence is criminalized.

——

Cleo is seen the opposite way. Cleo is someone who follows a very strict and arbitrary moral code and attempts to enforce and impose it on the people around them, despite others literally not knowing those rules. She pushes for Avid to be ostracized because he is an "unpredictable risk" even though approaching him with kindness would completely eliminate that risk, because the rules of her coven's code were to mock or eliminate anyone who says vampires are real and to eliminate unpredictable risks either physically or socially. This code is what they consider to be the "law", so anyone acting in defiance of it is doing something "illegal" and should be treated accordingly in a similarly harsh manner. They are very literally "policing" other people in this way to follow a social code.

At the same time, she is also herself a victim of violence. They have killed a vast number of people, but this was done so under duress and even a physical incapability to do otherwise. They were, very literally, just following orders, and are not as culpable as the thing that created the orders to be followed and the system for following them. That violence is unjustifiable to her, but from an outside perspective she's read as no more capable of self-defense should they defy orders than any of the people they killed would have been.

She was innocent. The violence was legitimized.

——

Drift is the iffy one, so we'll go into less detail. In the real world specifically, private detectives are more or less independently funded cops. In fiction, the private detective is a diametrically opposed force to the police detective. If the cops can't do something, it is narrative expectation that she should be able to do it. At the same time, she is completely lacking in support systems as per the idea of private detective as rogue element and lone wolf.

All this is to say: Drift works on a serial killer case the police can't crack. The serial killer leaves her an orchid as a transparent stop or you're next death threat. Because she is not with the police but is working on the case, she is not granted the same level of protection as an "innocent" uninvolved with the killings would be. The private-detective-as-hero would use this a incentive to crack the case once and for all, valiantly persevering and narrowly dodging danger in the process. But Drift is also a fallible human person in this story, and she has two horrible choices. She can stay on the case and be brutally slaughtered by a serial killer that knows where she lives and will doubtless kill others after her, or she can at the very least guarantee that she will save a single person and may live to solve another case.

She flees. And she is innocent for doing so. But because she is on a technicality theoretically capable of continuing the case and staying alive, she is also guilty. Killing that serial killer in self-defense would be legitimate violence. Leaving, and by narrative association "damning others to die", is just as criminal and morally wrong as if she'd turned a gun on each and every one of those innocents herself.

She is... guilty? Innocent? It's unclear. The lack of violence under the logic of "saving others" is what is criminalized.^

^and, she's similarly seen as guilty every other time she chooses self-preservation over speaking up and risking getting herself hurt.

——

Legundo. Oh boy. This could constitute a full post in and of itself. We'll make it as brief as possible, and it's not going to be brief.

Legundo is a former soldier who has killed people in wartime. That in and of itself should be considered neutral given that he was not in a commanding position and it cannot have been a later war than WWI. However, he specifically killed innocent people in an indirect manner. And, despite this likely being analogous to at latest WWI, despite the fact that chemical warfare would be considered completely legal and "legitimate" at the time, despite the fact that the town would have been similarly devastated by being shelled, this method was poisoning -- was something that would at the end of the second World War be classified as a war crime. He came to realize that this indirect violence was illegitimate and morally wrong even though it was fully justified within the system he worked for. He spends the rest of his life trying to undo the damage he caused.

Doctor Legs is weird because of one primary thing: participating in military action in the 21st and even late 20th century is radically different from participating in military action in the early 20th or even late 19th century, and that is really hard for the average person to conceptualize. Statistically speaking nearly everyone who reads this post will have a completely different idea of what the USA waging war looks like, because generously speaking the earliest example anyone here would've been alive for is the first Korean War. To be blunt, the USA has specialized almost exclusively in imperial and colonial violence for the entire time most people on this website have been alive. It's really, really hard to decouple an understanding of the modern US military as an inherently heinous organization whose members are choosing to work for a violent and bloody system from an understanding of an earlier time where, though often overly romanticized, there were a lot more legitimate reasons to participate in military work and doing so was not automatically participating in a vast and despicable military-industrial complex.

And. Okay. Where the hell does that leave Dr. Legs, both canonically and fanonically and in our personal opinion? It's really hard to parse. We are personally of the belief that being a veteran even today doesn't make someone inherently evil and deserving of scorn, because plenty of people participate in systems that they then choose to leave behind and advocate against. A lot of veterans end up taking stances against further military action in similar or even more direct ways than the doc did.

The real-world Legundo seems by our best estimation to have taken the stance that the violence enacted by Dr. Legs may have been completely legal (and legitimized by the state), but was wholly unjustified and amoral. something that cannot have been more than an act of sheer convenience, an intentional choice of cruelty over any other possible avenue. We're... not entirely sure we agree with that stance. From our personal view, it seems a little bit shaded by a modern politically active understanding of the kind of wars the US currently chooses to engage in. Fanon frequently goes the opposite way, attempting to fully legitimize everything Legundo did under the grounds of self-defense and/or penitence for his past sins.^

^foreshadowing is a narrative device in which--

Materially and bringing it back around to how canon itself deals with those themes of how violence is justified, the doctor's past is clouded with the weight of violence that was morally wrong but completely legal in the eyes of the state, and his present is colored by that past to varying degrees depending on how charitably you read him. It's probably the POV that has the third most relevance to this theme and is definitely the one that's the most obvious and intentional about drawing on it. We'll, uh, get to the others later. Let's get the standard stinger line out of the way now:

Legundo is a soldier, not a criminal. The violence was legitimized and even valorized by the state. Legundo did something unforgivable to a group of people incapable of defending themselves against that act. The violence should have been criminalized.

——

Scott is actually a fast one. He's a literal feudal lord, guys. He is a rich fuck who gets to decide what kind of violence is okay because he said so and what kind of violence is bad because it was against him and that's mean :(.

Tongue-in-cheek explanation aside, it really could not be plainer. Scott was in a position of power that very literally allowed him to make laws about who could and could not be violent under different circumstances, a privilege which he abused as a tyrant for hundreds of years. He was the state through which violence was deemed either legitimate or criminal. He keeps that "rules for thee, not for me" attitude in Oakhurst the entire time. Him and Owen hunting and killing Pyro was totally fine, Owen and Pyro killing Avid was "wrong". If Legundo wants to sacrifice himself^ to get a few more people out of town, that's good. But him dying so that Apokuna could cure herself and both Drift and Cleo had agency over whether or not they had to stay vampires? Unthinkable. He feels bad and says he'll do better from now on. What more could you ask from him?

^Foreshadowing is a narrative device in which--

Scott gets the last word, like he always has. The violence was legitimized because he says so.

——

Pearl and Abolish work best as a pair. What do we mean when we sort them into the category of "only as perpetrators"? Simple. They are the primary reason we identified the theme we're discussing as being policing and the justification of violence. They're both cops.

Okay, well, it's a little more complicated than that, because it does require a little bit of understanding of how the institution of policing works on a mental level for the people within that institution, and this is why we've categorized them together. Pearl's the one that's less obvious and more vague. Abolish's POV is the second most relevant one to this theme, arguably even the most relevant if we weren't setting up a secondary point you might be able to see coming by now. Also, ironically, this means we need to cover Abolish first so we can get through Pearl smoothly -- we'll establish concepts with more clear and distinct parallels there that you'll see echoed a little more quietly in Pearl's section.

——

So. Abolish Veylocke is a cop -- well, technically he's a fed. Those aren't always the same thing and different ones are worse at different times, but right now the functional output is the same.

The story a lot of police officers have drilled into them, the thing that primes them for violence that is then legitimized by the state, is this: there are good people, and there are bad people. The good people are like sheep, incapable of defending themselves in any meaningful way, needing structure and oversight to keep them from falling into wickedness. The bad ones are like wolves, hiding among the sheep and preying on them, forces of intentional malice that are ontologically evil and categorical predators that must be stopped and often cannot be reasoned with. (They might be capable of redemption through punitive justice, but it's never the police's job to do so.) The police officer is a noble herding dog, one which wields much the same violence as the wolves but does so only to kill those wolves and keep the sheep in line. As an officer of the law, you protect and serve the good people, and you apprehend and rid the world of the bad people. You are not like either of them, but a force that is separate, a pure agent of the law. Whatever the police do, it is lawful, because it is their job to make others follow that law. Their violence is the primary example of something made justifiable through political structure.

Abolish's parents were killed by a vampire. He was brought up into an organization of underground monster hunters consisting of both vampires and humans and likely other supernatural creatures, one which works secretly to protect the innocent and uncomprehending public from the creatures of the night who would otherwise surely take advantage of that ignorance to prey on... hm. Uh oh.

Again. He's a cop. More broadly speaking he's paramilitary, which is somewhat different from being a cop, but not in any ways that would make him look better. His job is not to help people with their problems. His job is to hurt the people that cause the problems. He doesn't have to give a rat's ass about Avid while he's alive but he can kill Shelby for slightly getting in his way when he's attacking the castle. He can burn down an entire forest to stop the vampires from having tree cover, but if Scott claims to have turned over a new leaf then it's no longer his concern what the man does.

Abolish is the embodiment of the law. The violence was always legitimized.

——

Pearl is a bounty hunter (or at the very least some form of mercenary). She kills werewolves. She's also a cop.

Both she and Abolish, at some point in their lives, decided to take up a job that would necessitate the "moral burden" of deciding who lives and who dies. Abolish may have been somewhat pressured into it by the nature of it being a family business; Pearl willingly chose to hunt werewolves knowing that many of them were sapient people in a situation they could not fully control. She did her best to minimize how often this happened -- she was a "good cop" -- but she didn't actually have to hunt werewolves. She could've picked any other career path. Started a humble farm and grown vegetables, worked as a miner or lumberjack, become a literal shepherd and made textiles, worked at another craft like forgesmithing or glassblowing or weaving or making clothes or creating jewelery.

Instead, she chose revenge. Instead, she made the decision of her own free will that she knew what was right and what was wrong, and she would help those who could not defend themselves. A figurative shepherd, then, whose flock is the common populace and--^

^do i really need to spell it out at this point

Okay. Fine. We're getting to it. Pearl is allowed to kill people because it is her noble mission to defend some and murder others. The violence was legitimized. Moving on.

——

At this point we're really hoping anyone still left reading this after we just called Pearlescent "allegedly the most moral person in all of Oakhurst" Moon a cop is someone completely fine with how we feel about a certain pair of diametrically opposed vampires.

So let's talk about Owen.

In isolation, ignoring the finales for a moment and even ignoring the fact that we have called Owen some very colorful things (an ecofascist, allegorically a white ass vampire, functionally identical to a spree shooter in ideology) in the past, we really do think it is as clear as day that Owen's got the most to do with the legitimization of violence. He practically spells it out himself when he isolates Avid in front of the entire town, tells a largely fabricated story about how some local church invented vampire hunters and then used them to brutally massacre their political enemies and anyone else that dared criticize them. It is a made-up story intended to enact actual social murder -- ostracizing and isolating Avid from everyone else, cutting off his support systems and turning the others against him, and forcing him away from town and into the wilderness where he can be easily picked off by anyone or anything that feels like doing so.

Violence, Owen claims, is always legitimate in the hands of the people with the most power to enact it and the best excuse to do so. And he is, as far as he knows or cares to acknowledge, the person with the most power. He either believes himself to be in the right or cares more about enacting violence than he does about his own justifications -- those are little more than token grievances. His enemies are always strong, capable of destroying the proper way of life if left unchecked. His enemies are always weak, easily removed from the world with righteous violence. All 2,799 inhabitants of Oakhurst deserved to die because he deemed it so, and because the town itself and the humans of Oakhurst as a class were inherently rotten -- the acts of the few damning the many -- and so he purged them from the world without a second thought.

Owen was once marginalized and disaffected himself, growing bitter about his treatment over the years. He was offered a way out by a man whose patience was practically infinite, someone who was forgiving above all else, a kind man who cured a lifelong ailment when all medicine had failed before, someone willing to refrain from violence and would rather sacrifice his life for the sins of the people he watched over--^

^https://youtu.be/4H3ZgR0EESM

——

Yeah, Louis is part of this, too. A big part.

Much like Pearl and Abolish are the reason "policing" is part of this theme, Louis specifically is the reason we add religious justification to the list. He doesn't look a thing like Jesus, but he talks like a gentleman.

In Vampires SMP as a whole, violence is narratively legitimized by fanon (and to a lesser extent, canon as well) under a very specific set of circumstances:

the victims of the violence cannot be "more innocent" than the ones perpetrating it

AND/OR the would-be victim turned aggressor didn't have the ability to turn the other cheek and "do the right thing" in letting further harm befall them

AND/OR the aggressor has acknowledged the sin they committed and resolves never to do so again

AND/OR the aggressor has committed no sin but chooses to absolve themself of guilt by dedicating their life and wellbeing to the betterment of others until there is nothing left of them to give

AND/OR the victims were an ontologically evil Other and the killing was for the greater good

AND/OR at the very least it was a righteous crusade against the forces of wickedness

There's something distinctly fucking culturally Christian about all of this and you know it's bad when the hardline agnostic Jewish person is able to tell you that.

(A brief digression: We're not saying Christianity is bad. We're not saying other religions are good. There is no religion whose principles are completely irredeemable and without the slightest shred of merit, and there is no religion so wholly pure that it can never be weaponized as a tool to subjugate others. It's a belief, and a belief is a neutral thing in a vacuum, a tool and a lens through which one views the world. However, Christianity is also sticky. Not uniquely so, but notably so in this case -- if someone is considered religious, the default assumption is that they are Christian specifically. And, critically in this case, if someone follows a moral code, even if it is not a religious one, it is presumed to be Christian by default. And this leads to... weird situations when that doesn't get unpacked. A lot of it tends to fly over our head because the closest thing we've ever experienced to organized religion was some New Age quack bullshit, but sometimes we end up catching things like this when they're obvious enough. Y'know, like two polar opposite characters literally going to Heaven and Hell respectively.)

And, yes, we are saying a good portion of the cultural Christianity in Vampires fanon happens to be centered around Louis as the ultimate force of good, the moral paragon by which all the other characters are judged against. Perhaps somewhat ironically for a vampire, he is a Jesus figure -- or is at the very least an archetypal martyr, someone who dies for the greater good despite being fully capable of self-defense should he choose to defend himself with violence. And in being a martyr, he gives Owen a reason and rationale for every single atrocity; one that has nothing to do with who he was in life and everything to do with the fact that Owen is a bitter and hateful person who was radicalized by his treatment as a lower-class citizen. Also, Owen was then given an automatic-

Uhhh we mean. Vampirism. Owen was also given vampirism, a literal miracle cure from Louis for his otherwise lifelong disease. One which gave him the ability to kill a bunch of people for their perceived slights, doing so in a relatively public space really really fast without giving them any way of defending themselves. This is definitely not an allusion to any real-world atrocities that have happened. We would never covertly assign Owen any real-world ideologies. Ignore the part earlier where we obliquely referenced Italian philosopher/novelist/semiotician Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism in reference to him.

There's your third-act derailment. It ties back together though: all of these POVs have something to do with how violence towards others and self-preservation in the face of violence is treated; how those acts are legitimized or criminalized depending on the perpetrator, victim, and their relative access to structural power; and the ways and means by which people enact and then retroactively justify their own violence.