: Re: Painting ritualistic murder in a "good-guy" light? My good guys murder people. They slowly carve runes onto them to help defeat the bad guys. Sure they try to use "society's worst" people for

@Speyer920

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The way I see it, it isn't about forcing the issue that the good guys are good. If you instead look to the avenue of dehumanizing the victims, it's far easier to rationalize the actions of the good guys, even to the point of supporting them. There have been multiple examples in history of where this technique has been used against a group of people. But, on a lighter note, this technique is used in all sorts of books, tv shows, and films. Look to examples where, as an onlooker, you exclusively support the good guys as they kill. even killing humanoids:

Supernatural, they kill vampires, werewolfs, etc, and despite them being human-adjacent, with a lot of shared characteristics, you don't think less of the MCs for killing them.
Firefly, Reavers "Human's gone mad on the edge of space". They're human, you feel nothing when they die.

Of course, another avenue is, they're preventing something so profoundly bad, that they only can be good guys. They are sacrificing these people for the good of all life. If spun properly, this can have the same effect, especially if you explore the psychological toll it takes on these characters. Show them haunted by their actions, or a flashback to a past where they cared, and they become identifiable as good.

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