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    Dmitri Yuriev - A Complete Monster?

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    Nikkolas


    Posts : 71
    Join date : 2013-03-09

    Dmitri Yuriev - A Complete Monster? Empty Dmitri Yuriev - A Complete Monster?

    Post by Nikkolas Thu Aug 14, 2014 12:18 pm

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompleteMonster

    I just want to see if any of you would agree with my assessment as to why he didn't qualify?

    His entry on there used to be:
    "Dr. Dmitri Yuriev. A man who created an army of clones of his own child and then sent them off to battle a deity, knowing that doing so would likely cause a reaction that would incinerate a planet, children, innocents, and combatants alike. He was already planning to use this genocide as political leverage to increase his own power. He held back one of those clones, though not out of mercy. No, he planned to use that one to assassinate any of the boys he grew up with as brothers who might survive and then take over his body in order to continue living forever. Once he finally takes over the body of said clone, he used that appearance to get close to a very sweet girl who trusted that clone implicitly, and then shot her in the stomach. Then he went on to murder a starship's crew, including civilians."

    My Response:

    All of this is true - he created nearly 700 kids out of his own DNA to blow up a planet. He has also been stealing bodies for centuries, a pretty terrible and utterly unique sin to the Xenosaga verse.

    However he does have a Freudian Excuse (a substantial explanation for why he is evil). This is from the third game's database, basically the most impartial and omniscient source of information in the game:

    "A test subject in a living matter transportation experiment conducted in the earliest days of the U.M.N., he made contact with U-DO during the experiment and was contaminated. The terror he felt at the time resulted in trauma which later motivated him to assemble the URT Vs in the hope of obliterating U-DO entirely."



    Another character exposed to "U-DO contamination" had this said about him: "He developed a mental instability as a result of U-DO waveform contamination"

    "His half-mad personality was the result of U-DO contamination"



    So Yuriev was possibly driven insane by what happened to him and at the very least he had terror driven into his very soul. This terror is the entire motivation for everything he does in the series.

    He's also kinda - KINDA - a Well-Intentioned Extremist, at least in his own mind. He's a very selfish prick of a character but his misunderstanding of the aforementioned U-DO being (a completely alien consciousness with no real ill will towards anyone) led him to believe it was a hostile threat to all existence:

    Jr.: You knew if we confronted U-DO, it might've destroyed Miltia! How could you do that?!

    Yuriev: Oh, please. I don't recall raising you U.R.T.V.s to be idiots. If we could save the star cluster at the cost of a single planet, I'd say that's a small price to pay.

    And that's all I got. We are not meant to sympathize with Yuriev - he excels at Kick the Dog and is ultimately in it all for himself. But he didn't just decide to do all these evil things one day for no reason at all.
    Yikari
    Yikari


    Posts : 403
    Join date : 2013-10-29
    Age : 33

    Dmitri Yuriev - A Complete Monster? Empty Re: Dmitri Yuriev - A Complete Monster?

    Post by Yikari Fri Aug 15, 2014 3:00 pm

    While the good doctor has certainly earned his villain credentials, I don't agree with the TVTropes label Complete Monster being applied to him, if for slightly different reasons.

    (That trope's description makes me think anyone outside of old comic book antagonists or characters like Bugs Bunny would not fit by definition, by the way.)

    Someone having a Freudian Excuse does not make a character inherently more or less monstrous. More relateable, more believable, more fleshed out, more alive in our eyes? Yes. But that's about it.

    Someone knowingly setting somebody else up to die to combat (what they think is) an extinction-level threat on the scale of star systems does not earn them kindness points even if they are honestly not doing it for any other purpose.

    Someone having actual reasons to blow up planets or kill people beyond 'just because' or 'for teh lulz' make those planets and people no less blown up and dead.

    But 'evil'? 'Complete Monster' at that?

    There is no indication of him deriving pleasure or some kind of material prize from the lives he ruined. No ambition of power for the sake of ruling over others - he just advanced through the political heirarchy as means to the ends he sought.

    In fact, if not for Dmitri's overly extreme obsession over U-DO and lack of information (and maybe his ego) leading him to actively increase the chances of said extincion event instead of decreasing it, nobody would've batted an eye at what he was doing. Because that's what a country's leader or a military commander have to do to prevent the country from going completely tits up on a regular basis. People are usually commended and praised for what Yuriev did.

    Sure, he is a cold-blooded and extremely ruthless bastard whose death would benefit pretty much everyone else in the setting, but that doesn't make him Complete Monster material.

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