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EP. REVIEW: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 2

No one said, everyone was one note, just that there wasn't enough of them to make a difference. The Falmuth army was there to commit murder, rape, torture, and in the end, genocide. I feel no need to feel sorry for them or care about them that much. They knew what they and their fellow soldiers were going to do.

No one feels sorry for the Nazi's, the Imperial Japanese army, the soldiers of Myanmar, the Hutu's, Pol Pot, the North Korean government, and the Serbian soldiers. i am sure I have forgotten some from the last 70 years or so. All a devil's brew of evil.

I am sure I wouldn't want to be one of the few soldiers in the Falmuth army that actually had a soul. That I would have to stand by an watch the rapine, torture, and murder of all the women and children, you know 'genocide'. Yet, if I was indeed there and was not killing my fellow soldiers in a gleeful raging insane rampage, to punish them for destroying my soul, then I would deserve to die. A good person could never go home, because how could you look your family in the eye.

Also, there is a difference between civilians and soldiers, a big difference.

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Also, there is a difference between civilians and soldiers, a big difference.

Not really, you don't stop being human when you join the army. I know you have trouble with this concept, but civilians are not the only ones who have rights in a war.

I just mean, in the anime’s case you might be 100% correct, but in real life telling people to slaughter in cold blood without guilt has more often been used to instigate genocides than prevent them. At the least it’s a very dangerous mindset to get people into.

You're backtracking again. @everydaygamer made the point that it was unrealistic to make the entire Falmuth army irredeemably evil and you tried to counter with "well there are many real-world examples of irredeemably evil armies". That is 100% you saying that everyone in the army is that one-note. The real point here is once again that you are making allusions to real-world history to justify your take, and the "real-world facts" you try to pull from are just non-existent.

You also keep falling back on the "well I don't feel anything for bad people" argument which just highlights how juvenile your perspective really is because this is not about you or how you feel. It is about recognizing that even bad people are still people and that they have certain inalienable rights, even in a conflict that they started. I don't need to feel anything for a bunch of flat animated characters that I know next-to-nothing about. I can still understand that killing them after they have already surrendered is still a war crime, that war crimes are always bad, and that the MC who committed this war crime should be held accountable for it in some way. The point is that bad things are bad no matter who does them or to whom it is done. "Well they should lose their human rights if they are bad enough according to my own arbitrary standards" is a morally reprehensible stance. Period.

Mostly though, I am fascinated by how utterly hypocritical this entire line of thinking is. Because holding people to a moral standard is basically the entire base for people thinking Rimuru has crossed a line into full-blown evil here. Good people do not commit [expletive] war crimes, no matter how righteous they may feel, but whenever someone suggests that this should apply to Rimuru you can't stop listing off all the circumstances that supposedly make his soul ok.

Sven Viking wrote:

I just mean, in the anime’s case you might be 100% correct, but in real life telling people to slaughter in cold blood without guilt has more often been used to instigate genocides than prevent them. At the least it’s a very dangerous mindset to get people into.

The fact that in fiction we are often able to see not only actions but also reasoning of the characters makes big difference in how we judge morality. In real life, many people will agree that's it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer, and so we craft our laws accordingly, but in fiction we often know with 100% certainty who the guilty person is, which is why we can cheer for e.g. parent of murdered kid getting revenge on murderer that avoided punishment on technicality.

I think there is a point in that there's gradation about how we feel about citizens of Dresden, Tokyo or Hiroshima being bombed - even if they weren't war crimes, everybody agrees it was a horrible tragedy of war when talking about those civilians, soldiers of "non-evil" armies - people will accept their death more easily, but still talk about tragedy of World War 1's trench warfare enormous war casualties, or maybe about Red Army defending from Nazi offensive, but who bothers to talk about large casualties of Wehrmacht or Japanese army during WW2? Sure, it's generally acknowledged they still have rights, but caring about those rights tend to be on lower priority.
I mentioned Nazi officials hiding in South America assassinated by Mossad. Ideally they would be given fair trials, but without that option can you really argue that their murder was immoral? Right of justice for their victims triumph any consideration of their own rights for me.

Laws of human societies are mostly based on what people of given society feels is just and right, so falling back on one's own feeling as moral compass isn't that weird.

Moreover, there's aspect of not only revenge but restoration to the victims in this situation that you ignore. I already acknowledged that it's a contrived solution of "trolley-fying" the situation to make Rimuru look good, but that doesn't mean you can ignore it. The action Rimuru took restored to hundred innocent civilian victims the most important right and righted great wrong. It was at the cost of life of those who committed this crime or unambiguously intended to commit further crimes of genocide. Comparing outcomes where victims stay dead but the army tasked with genocide stay alive, and one when army is annihilated but victims have their life restored, I would say the latter one is more just and therefore Rimuru's action can be considered moral, especially from the perspective of the victims themselves or their loved ones.

Edit: That doesn't mean I think sparing the army would be immoral - it's a question of conflicting rights, and I don't think anybody can truly say who there deserves to live or die or stay dead. Both outcomes are both moral and immoral in some ways.
This is a perspective that I feel you ignore - that human (or monster) rights might clash sometimes, and peace and lack of bloodshed can sometimes be achieved through ignoring some unfortunate victims, who do not have to agree with the peaceful resolution being most moral option. There's example of peace talks with groups like FARC, or Pinochet's junta, or possible Taliban peace deal, which can be both treated as morally good in aggregate and, especially by victims, as denial of justice.

All those I referred to, are recognized universally as evil. Just because there are some good people sprinkled in there doesn't make that any different.

I just finished rereading the light novels from the beginning to the present time. I haven't caught up to the Day of Ruin in the anime yet. But I will assume that a lot of what Rimuru was thinking in the light novel, just didn't show up in the anime. Another problem is that we are just the audience, so we don't feel the loss, like Rimuru feels.

We all know what the Falmuth soldiers were going to do and what they did already. Even Falmuth's otherworlders were just as bad, killing women and children. spoiler[The light novel seems to imply that when it comes to summoning, you kinda get what you are.]

We can believe that the Falmuth forces are irredeemably evil, while also acknowledging that there are some good people, trapped by circumstance, in those forces. As hard a choice they had, they could have let their country kill them for not participating in the war, tried to flee their country with their family, or continue to participate in a genocidal cleansing. When they crossed the border, they chose their fate. Not having good choices, is not having no choice at all.

If you're a good guy you don't get to do the same things as the bad guys, regardless of who you're targetting.
If you act like a baddie, you're the baddie.

I understand what you are saying, but I just think you are being unfair to Rimuru. He no longer lives in our modern society. As the Dwarven King mentions, this is a world built on strength. You see it in the monsters and the demon lords.

Not everyone here thinks that Rimuru "acted like a bad guy." I don't.

I don't think so. You don't want to debate it because it is a matter of opinion, not fact. You're trying to say something is objectively true under all circumstances. *If* that were the case, then yes, that would be a problem. I don't think that's the case. I think you *want* it to be the case, which isn't the same thing at all. You can appeal to modern international norms (which I don't agree apply here anyway), but that still doesn't make it objectively true, it just means a lot of people agree with you.

I don't mind if you want to state that you feel what Rimuru did was a horrendous and evil thing, a terrible atrocity that should be condemned by anyone with a modicum of civility and good conscience. But when you try to turn that into an *objective* statement, then we have a problem, because I don't think you have any basis for putting things in those terms.

I can understand if you, or people in general, feel disgusted or disappointed (or both) over what Rimuru did. But implying that no one has the right to feel any differently, or that other points of view are utterly without merit to the point of "not something that is up for debate" is taking things too far. We all have our own opinions regarding the morality of what happened and rationale for them. I'm not saying they're all equally valid, but they all have the right to be heard, IMO.