Talk:Foresight/@comment-9398371-20180815204027/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180816232318

Naw, killing them was murder, sure.

But it was still clearly a triumph of emotion over logic, rather than the opposite. Ultimately, Ainz decided to kill Igvarge because the guy was being an obstructive jerk, and that was that. It's not really any different from his decision to kill the fake knights attacking Carne Village. He let his emotional reaction commit him to doing something and then had to follow through as best he could.

Of course, killing someone for being a jerk is murder, and killing them for massacring villagers is not...unless you happen to believe that they are doing it for a legally justified reason like suppressing rebellion or preventing the spread of plague (both possibilities that Ainz considered at the time). But the actual moment of decision was identical in each case, Ainz's emotions got the better of his rational considerations.

For me, Ainz hasn't reached the point of not acting on emotion, but the closest he's come is when Hekkaran tried to con him and Ainz went ahead and let go of it once his emotions got suppressed a couple of times. He even went ahead with the sparring practice, though he didn't allow them an honorable death in battle. I don't know that I could have let go of something like that so easily.

Even the Katze Plains massacre, the problem is that he fails to think of what his actions look like to the Empire knights, because he's forgetting the whole "I have a terrifying undead skull face thing going on." But that's just the same mistake he made when he first appeared before Enri and Nemu. His own detachment about unleashing the Dark Young on an enemy army defending the claims of what he fully knows to be an utterly corrupt and tyrannical government is completely normal for a sane human. Don't forget, he got the full report on Eight Fingers and their activities and connections with the nobility in the Kingdom.

And he's willing to make use of them, but the condition is that they be tortured to the point where they themselves acknowledge that it would have been more merciful to just kill them. There's some feelings there.