Musings on Morality Plays, Like Ogre Battle

Thinking about the Ogre Battle devil ending and moralizing.

Summary: in the devil ending a demon destroys your soul and steals your body. Problem: the punishment of real evil is far more subtle. When you oversell your story like this, it functions as an invitation, rather than discouragement.

Story: "If you do Outgroup things, you will literally die horribly."
Reality: most outgroup things are fine. They're outgroup, not inherently defective.

I don't know if you know this, but children test boundaries. When you forbid them something, they immediately want to try it, to find out why it's forbidden. What do you suppose happens when it's not forbidden for any good reason? It's not entirely restricted to children either.

Story: "If you do defective things, you will literally die horribly."
Reality: In the short term, you're actually rewarded. Only extremely stupid people suffer any kind of immediate punishment. Crime and Punishment is very much a scam story. Even the medium-term issues tend to have solutions. In the case of Ogre Battle, don't hand a literal devil the means to betray you. The lord isn't being destroyed for being evil, he's being destroyed for catastrophic idiocy. Broken Aesop. 

If someone offers you a deal which is, "Let me betray you later," then it's not a good trade and you should turn it down. 

Shocking, I know. To Yasumi Matsuno, it would seem, yes, very shocking.

Anyone pushed into rulebreaking for whatever reason will naturally conclude that, since they were lied to, the opposite of what they were told is the truth. Rule-breaking is good and discipline is bad. The alleged pro-virtue message is a trap.

When you lie in support of virtue, you support lies, not virtue. If you think you have to lie to defend virtue, you become a liar, not virtuous. Narcissism is not completely wrong: you in fact become what you do.
It's also showing lack of faith. You're saying you don't think virtue has rewards, and as such to gather any virtue we have to fake rewards. "Virtue isn't virtuous enough for me" would be Satan's motto.

Anyone lying in apparent defence of virtue should be assumed to be acting maliciously, not incompetently. They are behaving exactly the way a tempting devil behaves. You will find this is consistent. They do not accidentally support virtue in any situation, or at best they will revert the moment you point it out. "Oh gee that was a mistake, thanks!" Openly, not even hiding it.