And I don't see that anywhere in this thread. I see Barinellos asking why people thought the character was necessarily evil, and then making a point about people's perceptions of "good," or "greater good." And the Barinellos point you quote still says nothing about children. I don't know why you are assuming that he thinks that would be "okay."


Hey, Pavor. Sadly, I won't be staying.

Thank you Raven, I'm glad you picked up on the fact that my stance wasn't in favor of Kasmina doing... whatever, but was instead my objection to moral absolutism.

Barinellos, Raven, I know you guys will enough to trust that you do not mean these things they way they look, but the phrase Barinellos was responding to was literally "traumatizing teenagers to turn them into slaves". There is no way that could ever be the morally correct action. I realize that your point was that we don't know if that's actually what she's doing, but there can never be any doubt that if it turns out she's doing that particular thing, then there is no useful system of morality under which she isn't considered evil.

Thank you.

And does anyone here think realistically she's going to be portrayed as a hero?



What is that supposed to mean?

I don't know, shall we cross reference the extremely dubious morality of our current crop of heroes?
Even the brightest of their number, Gideon, was still willing to roll with the Order of Heliud's tyrannical lockstep.
Honestly, Ajani is about the only one to walk out clean, and that's because he just ALMOST went through with murder.
To tie it back in, you could argue that our cast is striving to pay back the karmic red in their ledgers, but... that's a false equivalency, isn't it? If they did bad things then, but learned from the experience to do good things now... it removes a lot of agency in their choices to do bad things.

The last thing I'll comment on regarding the moral objection being applied is thus:
It's. Fiction.
If it's necessary for a good story, I will gladly take an anti-villain doing whatever they feel is necessary. I'm here for a story, not a moral compass.

Where does Dumbledore fall of the evil spectrum? I would hazard to guess that Kasmina falls in a similar zone, except her “army” is probably more adultish (like college level).

First of all, I'm not sure why I'm involved in this at all. All I was saying was that neru's post about "child soldiers" seemed to come out of nowhere to me because I didn't read Barinellos's post as in any way saying that Kasmina's apparent actions are acceptable. I read Barinellos's post as saying that a great deal of vile things have been done in the name of the "greater good." I see nothing in Barinellos's post that suggests that, on an absolute scale, those things are good; I see only an observation of perceptions of a character's actions by the character themself. I connected it more with Barinellos's next post, which challenges the Gatewatch's use of morally questionable actions for their own ideal of "the greater good." Their highly questionable actions on Kaladesh come to mind.

I'm not in a position to know what Barinellos meant or didn't mean, only to read the thread as I read it. And frankly, I couldn't care less about the moral argument. I know nothing of Kasmina apart from this little blurb, which says nothing about children OR teenagers. What I object to is people immediately assuming the absolute worst about the people they are ostensibly having discourse with. This entire thread has been based off of people making blind assumptions, about this character and about fellow posters. Maybe a nice intermediate step would have been to ask Barinellos for clarification.


Nobody who has been around Magic's Merry Band of Mary Sues for any amount of time thinks that anyone opposing them will be portrayed as a hero, no.

This particular story hook, assuming it becomes a focus of the story, is likely to break in one of two directions. Either the Gatewatch will confront Kasmina and she will be the big bad of a set or block, or this greater threat will be revealed and Kasmina will be proven "right," though her methods will still be looked down upon (and for the record, rightly so). So she's likely to either be full-on baddie or reluctant ally down the line.


I was referencing that old glib expression that when you "assume," you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me." In other words, people shouldn't assume. I first came to the expression via an old rerun of The Odd Couple, where Felix Unger uses it in court, though I have encountered it several times since.

* * *

Anyway, I have no real interest in Kasmina, her blurb, or the moral implications thereof, except to say that this is another one of those times where canon is doing now what the M:EM did years ago. This character's secret cabal of planeswalkers is shockingly similar to Tevish's Ellia the Endbringer and her Coven. Ellia (who, by the way, does seem objectively evil) did precisely the same thing of finding newly ascended or latent-sparked planeswalkers and cultivating them into loyalty to her and her aims.

Yeah, researching that does make her pretty similar, though at least Ellia is described as "a sociopath".

Say it again for the people in the back.

Urza is still the most important character in Magic in my book, and he probably isn't where you should be looking for a moral compass (or a measure of sanity) that you could apply to everyday life. And that's fine, because while Urza was many things, he was never boring to read about.

And I'm not saying Kasmina wouldn't be interesting to read about, but at best she's the villain protagonist or an anti-villain.

Sure, I wasn't replying to you specifically, I just wanted to emphasise what Barinellos said in general. Between Creative's tendency to erase ambiguity in their protagonists (and "mature" topics from their storyline) and some of the things the weirdos on Twitter get outraged about, I think it's a message that needs to be spread.

The line "...it seems that some kind of confrontation with the Gatewatch - Planeswalkers who believe in putting their magical abilities to good use - is inevitable." really ticked me off. It sets up a pretty black and white scenario.
Gatewatch good. Kasmina bad. Gatewatch fight Kasmina.
The 1st too are kind of iffy, and the 3rd doesn't logically follow, but it sounds like creative sees it that way.
I'd like to see a Prof.X / MAgneto kind of setup, but I don't see that in the cards.

According to Ethan, the Gatewatch arc was the highest engagement has ever gotten with the magic story. I'm personally not a fan, but other people seem to like it, so WotC is probably going to keep doing it. I guess when most people only have a passing familiarity with your storyline, the best way to get people into it is to boil it down to a couple of visible, recognizable characters so that even people who don't read any of the lore can get something out of it.

I wonder if the data used to judge that engagement went back to the Tempest Era?

I don't think it had to be the Gatewatch, but I do think that something had to come back on the cards and to the forefront the way they did. Unfortunately, we're now kinda locked to the characters that did. Maybe Gatewatch: TNG, when it someday comes, will learn from what the Gatewatch did right and wrong. But I don't think that's coming any time soon and kind of hope not until some sort of regime change, so it's new people taking things a new direction.

Regarding the big debate... I like the comparison to Urza. And Urza was morally dubious at the best of times, but all the same wasn't locked to "Anti-villain or villain protagonist". There were points where he was legitimately the lightest shade of gray on the table, or more often the blue in a blue-and-orange contrast.

Personally, I want to give Kasmina a chance. As Raven pointed out there are some similar notes between what she's doing and one thing I did when given the absolute free rein of fanfic to create a Magic character. She could be a complex protagonist or anti hero, or she could go all the way to being a straight up diabolical villain, having her and her recruits act as the Legion of Doom to the Gatewatch. Or anywhere in between. Assuming the Gatewatch don't dropkick her first thing, I'm kind of open to seeing where her arc takes the story. It's a mild, placid interest... but then my engagement with Magic in general is kind of at a nadir right now so mild interest is pretty good.

Yeah, good use, like burning buildings down and brain scrambling yourself and others!
Hooray for good!

Or murdering ghosts, aging people to death, creating avatars of destruction, raising the dead and making them dead in the first place and getting the land to kill you.

Can't think of a bad use of Gideon's powers though. Unless his planeswalking as "lightstorm" literally means he can make storms of light, which would be awesome if giving you a lot of skin cancer.

I think this sums it up. The Gatewatch coincided with some great decisions that brought the story to the players. The Gatewatch setup was a minor part of the solution, and a part that could be swapped out quite easily, but as part of the solution- the face of the solution, it is seen as the solution itself to MTG's flavor woes. As long as the Gatewatch correlates with some good data points they'll stick around.

That would be pretty boss.
With Gideon, I feel like it's less the powers and more just not necessarily choosing to act on behalf of the best people. Besides the Order of Heliud, his run at the trials wasn't the best choice.

So looming threat. Did she perhaps learn about phyrexia, or is it emrakul. Or maybe Ob is making a legion of doom?!

Yes, him wasting everyone's time for his cat waifu was pretty pointless.