[GF4] Monarch's motives?

[alhoon]

Several year after playing GF4 and I still wonder over the Monarch. First thing first I like this villain a lot. Not gray lines there. A madman without redeeming qualities bent on evil.

 

Still, what do you think the Monarch's motives were? Power? He could have made a nice underground kingdom for himself for his mindless serviles. And what's the point of having a big patch of land, as big as a moderate province actually, completely devoid of sentient life as your own? Even the vast majority of his Creations were not loyal to him but rogue. That's not power. 

He could have just gone to a nice empty place in the Dera Reaches and set up camp there if he didn't want a place with anything not Monarch-made.

 

I really don't understand why the Monarch wanted to wipe out anything non-monarch made. He didn't wanted control over Terrestia apparently; he didn't conquer land. He emptied it. Was he a hermit? There are other ways, safer, to be anti-social than taking both the Rebels and the Shapers for the lulz if you don't like neighbors. Just go to a mountain, make things to eat and make those mindless non-sentient serviles to serve you. Problem solved. Was he a nihilist that just wanted to destroy anything non-Monarch made in the world? He GOT to have realized that this was impossible by just throwing out spawners and a control baton. At some point the creations would eat each other and stopped moving away.

Edited November 19, 2017 by alhoon

[CattyKit]

I honestly thought Monarch just wanted to kill things and do research on his dark pit area thing.

[Triumph]

"Some men just want to watch the world burn."

[TheKian]

I would argue that Monarch essentially represents the results of Unbound (hehe) Shaping. He was excessively Shaped, and went mad, and in his madness, would not control his creations. He's sort of foreshadowing what the Drakons will become. Although he claims to want to form his own glorious empire, he clearly cares only about destruction, as a result of his insanity.

[alhoon]

The Drakons never ever went that far. The Monarch was just spawning stuff acting like a volcano with Shaping. A force of nature, a destructive wave that leaves behind only ashes. The Unbound were made in a way to die off within 1-2 years of their creation as we learn in GF5. The Drakons planned to rule their parts and threw the Unbound behind enemy lines. The Monarch was spawning rogues right in his home, practically under his bed, putting all his confidence in a stick that would keep them away long enough to not eat him.

That was nothing like the desperate plan of the Drakons. 

 

If the Monarch just wanted to do his naughty research, in that locked door that I never went into BTW, I think Litalia had the key or something, he could do it in the wilderness or deeeeeep in the mines under his house without saying "Hello. I decided to kill all of you! And I mean every last one of you." To his neighbors once they came knocking. Really, they started investigating when the monsters became too many.

 

I think that maybe Triumph is right. He probably just wanted to see the world burn but unlike Nero that was reciting poetry as Rome was burning, the Monarch was using his spare time to do bizarre research as the Fens of Aziraph burned.

But why?

Nero was convincing himself he would build a better Rome. The Monarch just had a bunch of mindless serviles and didn't seem kin to make more of them.

 

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by alhoon

[Gameman112358]

I mean, it would be easy to simply chalk it up to insanity due to canister abuse, Geneforge abuse, or who knows what Monarch has done. He seems mentally insane, and insane people don't exactly have the most logical of minds. XD

[alhoon]

This game... this game has made me to give a pause and get a strange unease when I hear about non-human surgeons, created surgeons if you will, that are under a platform named Monarch. I mean it is certainly good news for humanity ... right?

Edited March 25, 2018 by alhoon

[Gameman112358]

I wouldn't overthink it too much man. XD

[alhoon]

Pffft. Overthinking it is what I enjoy.

[Val Ritz]

Monarch was a man with infinite power and no sense of scale--a madman, as we'd call such a creature in our own world. There's a pretty great John Mulaney skit where he says the line "That's the thing about crazy people, they just have unlimited crazy currency, the things they say don't mean anything to them."

 

This was someone who was at a power level where he could lift a finger and wipe out a swathe of countryside with a horde of ravening beasts. If he wanted to be rid of society (either as an end in itself or as a means to get peace for his research) it took comparatively more effort to pick up and go someplace else rather than just raze and kill everything within a hundred-mile radius of his laboratory. We see that canisters erode a user's empathy, and indeed their ability to care about anything but their own pursuits, their ability to so much as recognize the sentience of other life forms. What if Monarch was so far down the rabbit hole that this was just his solution to finding a mess on his kitchen counter?

 

What if everything he did, from his perspective, was no more unreasonable than taking some Clorox bleach spray and cleaning house?

Edited April 23, 2018 by Val Ritz

[alhoon]

Well, Monarch says such things himself... Taygen is not much better, he is also a misanthrope. But Taygen didn't act (at least on that scale). 

Monarch's solution to clean house was "I have to go to the store and buy Clorox. What a bother... it may rain. Oh, wait, I have a ton of nerve agent next to the kitchen counter! It would also clean my place. Yeah, I will go with that. Faster". 

 

This detachment he shows, the "I can create life so I don't value it" taken beyond the scale is fascinating for me. 

Edited April 23, 2018 by alhoon