Characters With Terrible Priorities

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

As for sending out assassins that isn't Loghain's style. He tried to remain an 'honourable' man to the end by

One word: Zevran.

Anywhoo, continuing this argument would be getting more off-topic than is perhaps respectful to the OP. I'll just say personally I find Loghain to be the precise kind of character that the thread was created to discuss and I don't agree with folks who justify his actions. You are, of course, entitled to your own view of him. Cheers for the response.

Five words: Hired by Arl Rendon Howe.

Skyrim:

The Blades want you to kill Paarthurnax.

I don't need to break this down. You should be familiar with how stupid a request and ultimatum this would be.

Do you think you could, for the sake of those unfortunate people who haven't played Skyrim yet, myself included?

Spoiler

Elder Scroll Dragons exist to dominate, it's in their nature.

Paarthurnax saw what Alduin (big bad of Skyrim, first dragon and proclaimed 'world eater') wasn't the best ruler and taught the lesser races how to use Thu'um (dragon shouts, a very powerful magic).

After Alduin was defeated Paarthurnax realised that his dragonic lust for power would cause him to follow a similar path to his older brother and began to follow 'The way of the Voice' a pacifist creed that preached the Thu'um should only be used for the worship and glory of the gods rather than martial exploits.

By the time you meet him a couple of Eras later, he is the the Grandmaster of the Greybeards and willingly assists you in defeating Alduin.

However during his time as Alduin's lieutenant he committed terrible atrocities and the Blades want him brought to justice.

This quote sums him up the best: "What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Skyrim:

The Blades want you to kill Paarthurnax.

I don't need to break this down. You should be familiar with how stupid a request and ultimatum this would be.

Do you think you could, for the sake of those unfortunate people who haven't played Skyrim yet, myself included?

Spoiler: Oops, err, spoilers!

The Blades are an ancient order of dragonslayers. Paarthurnax is a dragon. That the Blades might want a dragon dead was a shock to some people.

OT: Hilary King from GTA:Vice City. For those unfamiliar with this guy, at one point in the game you're hunting for a talented getaway driver for a bank heist. Hilary will agree to be your getaway driver if you can beat him in a race. I'll run that one by you all again, he'll agree to be your getaway driver if you prove you're a better getaway driver than he is.

 

[Legion]

OT: The Dragonborn from Skyrim. Alduin the World Eater has come back and you're the only one who can stop him! But first, can you find 20 Jazbay grapes for that gal that grows Nirnroot in her backyard? She'll be sure to give you honest pay for honest work.

RPG's are very funny like that.

Mass Effect 2 even more so considering the urgency of the main mission.

Shepard: "The Collectors are abducting entire human colonies, let's go stop them!"
Tali: Uh, Shepard? I need to go back to my fleet briefly for a trial for something I didn't do."
Miranda: "I want to check in on my little sister"
Garrus: "Hey that jerk who betrayed me is on the Citadel"
Thane: "My son is going to assassinate a racist"
Grunt: "I want to kill stuff, help me find out why"
Legion: "Geth are on a station nearby, let's go get them"
Samara: "I found my daughter, can we confront her?"
Kasumi: "I wanna steal stuff lol"
Jacob: "My fathers crashed ship was miraculously discovered"
Jack: "I want to blow up an abandoned facility"
Mordin: "I want to stop a Salarian developing a cure for the Genophage"
Zaeed: "I wanna go kill a guy who tried to kill me"

It's amazing that the Collectors hadn't abducted all humans in the time it took to get everything done.

 

[Easton Dark]

I have to bring up Lelouch in the last episode(s) of Code Geass. Like what the flying fuck...

Spoiler

He literally wanders off from the final decisive battle, he turns and flies several miles out to sea to check on/save his little sister instead of y'know winning the war he's been fighting for god knows how many episodes?

His army was sieging the final capital building and their one tactical genius of a leader fucks off, leaving them without a response to the counterattack that hits them. They instantly fall apart without Zero there to lead them. Understandably so, because Zero singlehandedly raised and trained this army + military resources out of thin air without even using his Geass on them and they just accept everything he tells them to do without question.

Quite sure there's a scene that was just various people screaming "what are our orders?!" into their comms.

Sister complexes lose wars.

Ah well, at least he gets his act together in R2...

Considering his entire motive was to make sure Nunnally would live happy and un-used for political purposes, and the plan involved staying hidden, I think it makes fine sense.

Spoiler

Her being discovered and re-positioned as a princess would be hella-awkward to the plan, as shown in R2, where he spends half of it trying to get her back.

The Black Knights had Todo, and I remember after re-watching it again two or three weeks ago, I have no idea how the Black Knights lost. That move he pulled with dismantling the settlement looked like it took out, oh... basically everything. All their tanks had to be gone, so many knightmares, and the Gawain just completely obliterated all the britannian air power with its hadron cannons.

I guess either Todo's a chump or Gilford's a super bad-ass.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Not to derail the thread, but everyone in Mass Effect.

"We have a number of viable methods involving firepower that we know can defeat Reapers. I say we invest in the magic microphone."

 

[Vegosiux]

OT: Hilary King from GTA:Vice City. For those unfamiliar with this guy, at one point in the game you're hunting for a talented getaway driver for a bank heist. Hilary will agree to be your getaway driver if you can beat him in a race. I'll run that one by you all again, he'll agree to be your getaway driver if you prove you're a better getaway driver than he is.

Well, you ended up having to do that drive anyway...

Mass Effect 2 even more so considering the urgency of the main mission.

At least that one is justified somewhat in that by doing those loyalty missions you rid your squadmates of distractions that could make them fail in a critical moment.

~snipped~

It's amazing that the Collectors hadn't abducted all humans in the time it took to get everything done.

Well, technically even that does happen on a smaller scale - take too long after they abduct your crew, and you'll only be saving one of them, and she'll chew you out so hard on that not even a renegade Shep would have a decent comeback for it.

Though the entire scene with the Normandy abductions is a grand example, though.

"So, we have this reaper-tech IFF module to install. We don't know how safe it is, them reapers are crafty buggers and who knows what aces they hol dup their sleeves. In order to make sure this goes smoothly, we will, um, round up everyone who could fend off an invasion, stuff them into our shuttle and tell them they can take a while off."

 

[Angie7F]

Batman. If I were that rich I would totally be Paris Hilton, not Batman.

 

[WanderingFool]

I'm going to say Loghain from Dragon Age: Origins
Technically a villain, but you can also look at him as a tragic hero.
Anyways.

He helped kick Orlais out of Ferelden so it got its independence back. So he doesn't like Orlesians, I get it. But... JFC he's so against having anything to do with Orlais that he's willing to commit regicide (abandoning King Cailan to the darkspawn) while simultaneously dooming the one organisation (the Grey Wardens) that can stop the darkspawn.

PRIORITIES MAN.

And then when you read the novels it becomes EVEN MORE BAFFLING because Cailan's mother was the woman Loghain was in love with, so you'd think he'd want to protect the child of his former lover, BUT NOPE DEAD HE GOES BECAUSE GOD FORBID CAILAN WANTS HELP DEFEATING EVIL MONSTROCITIES. Christ he isn't even getting help from Orlesians per say, but GREY WARDENS from Orlais. AAAAGH.

LOOOGGHHHAAAIIIINNNNNN WHHHHYYYYYY?!

Simple, he didn't believe it really was a Blight.

Hell, common knowledge (for the surface folks at least) stated that all the darkspawn had been killed in the Forth Blight.

He was given the choice of doing two things:

1: Believing a foreign order of warriors that a god-made horde of monsters is going to invade lead by a defiled Old God and that he should let in troops form a country that had within his lifetime invaded and occupied his homeland or...

2: This a just a plot to get soldiers into Ferelden by a country where complicated and underhanded dealings are a national pastime for the wealthy and nobleborn.

In hindsight it was a stupid manoeuvre but you can't blame the man.

THE FUCK I CANT! LOGHAIN, YOU ASSHOLE!!!

Anyways, I would go out and say any player character from a Bethesda game, but especially my friends character... in Oblivion, he did everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, before dropping off the medallion... Hells literally coming to Earth, lets go steal some forks from this house for the Thieves guild.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

Dean Winchester from Supernatural, especially in season 6.

"Right, so there's a civil war in Heaven and the two sides are the ones who want to start the apocalypse (again) and the ones led by my angelic bff. Since he's horribly outnumbered, he's turned to the King of Hell for support, and even though I myself have accepted help from him in the past, this is the absolute worst thing ever. Clearly, I should try to stop him, never mind that by all rights I should want him to succeed no matter the cost. Also, I think it's a really great idea to go full on Knight Templar, because the fact that everything in this world is grey at best, and almost everyone important has helped me at least once doesn't count for s**t."

Sam in season seven (or eight, or freaking nine, I've lost fucking count).

"All right so there's this vampire here that's basically the only reason my brother got out of purgatory. He's renounced drinking blood completely by himself and was hunted down by the members of his former clan. I have previously personally allied myself with a demon for reasons that were sketchy at best, and let a coven of vampires go free in pretty much the exact same circumstances because they agreed to no longer drink blood. Harming this person would seriously harm my relationship with my only remaining family and would accomplish approximately jack and shit.

I totally need to waste this ************."

 

[Alfador_VII]

Batman. If I were that rich I would totally be Paris Hilton, not Batman.

Except Batman's motivation isn't money, it's revenge, or the like from having his parents murdered in front of him. The money just makes it possible to have lots of cool toys.

 

[deserteagleeye]

Travis Touchdown because he justifies killing hundreds of people with his pursuit to bone one woman. Though you could argue he's just bat-shit bonkers because he sees everything as a videogame, or you could argue that he's self-aware and perfectly sane.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

THE FUCK I CANT! LOGHAIN, YOU ASSHOLE!!!

Anyways, I would go out and say any player character from a Bethesda game, but especially my friends character... in Oblivion, he did everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, before dropping off the medallion... Hells literally coming to Earth, lets go steal some forks from this house for the Thieves guild.

He did what he thought was be best for Ferelden.

Remember as PC's we could see that it really was a Blight due to the Archdemon popping up in our dreams.

Loghain had a foreign order of warriors (who had been expelled from the country for trying to lead a rebellion against the then king) come up and say "You know those raids up in the Wilds? Turns out all those stories about the Grey Wardens killing off all the Darkspawn in the Fourth Blight weren't true! We need our brethren and foreign Knights who had free reign and committed multiple atrocities when they forcibly occupied your country to come over and assist!"

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

He thought he could remove the foreign influence of the Wardens from his homeland and rout the darkspawn raiders.

Instead he killed his best friends son, practically plunged Ferelden into civil war and almost lost it to the Blight.

The intentions were there, the execution was on par with Microsoft's recent debarke with its console.

 

[Vegosiux]

Batman. If I were that rich I would totally be Paris Hilton, not Batman.

Paris Hilton? Sheesh, I'd be David Xanatos.

Speaking of that guy, he's an example of someone whose priorities are straighter than Straighty McStraight that lives down at the crossroads of Straight Street and Non-curved Avenue.

 

[Realitycrash]

Batman. If I were that rich I would totally be Paris Hilton, not Batman.

Paris Hilton? Sheesh, I'd be David Xanatos.

Speaking of that guy, he's an example of someone whose priorities are straighter than Straighty McStraight that lives down at the crossroads of Straight Street and Non-curved Avenue.

I'm unsure if 'always fight for what interests me, and screw everyone else' is really the best set of priorities. It's a tad short-sighted, I'd say.

 

[Woodsey]

Not to derail the thread, but everyone in Mass Effect.

"We have a number of viable methods involving firepower that we know can defeat Reapers. I say we invest in the magic microphone."

Can defeat Reapers, but can't defeat the Reapers.

 

[Nicolairigel]

OT: The Dragonborn from Skyrim. Alduin the World Eater has come back and you're the only one who can stop him! But first, can you find 20 Jazbay grapes for that gal that grows Nirnroot in her backyard? She'll be sure to give you honest pay for honest work.

RPG's are very funny like that.

Mass Effect 2 even more so considering the urgency of the main mission.

Shepard: "The Collectors are abducting entire human colonies, let's go stop them!"
Tali: Uh, Shepard? I need to go back to my fleet briefly for a trial for something I didn't do."
Miranda: "I want to check in on my little sister"
Garrus: "Hey that jerk who betrayed me is on the Citadel"
Thane: "My son is going to assassinate a racist"
Grunt: "I want to kill stuff, help me find out why"
Legion: "Geth are on a station nearby, let's go get them"
Samara: "I found my daughter, can we confront her?"
Kasumi: "I wanna steal stuff lol"
Jacob: "My fathers crashed ship was miraculously discovered"
Jack: "I want to blow up an abandoned facility"
Mordin: "I want to stop a Salarian developing a cure for the Genophage"
Zaeed: "I wanna go kill a guy who tried to kill me"

It's amazing that the Collectors hadn't abducted all humans in the time it took to get everything done.

Then again, mass effect 2 is pretty much all about the characters and their random side missions. It's still one of my favorite games of all times, but it just seems like the collectors didn't even really NEED to be there, they could have just been gathering resources to fight the reapers, I dunno.

 

[commasplice]

Travis Touchdown because he justifies killing hundreds of people with his pursuit to bone one woman. Though you could argue he's just bat-shit bonkers because he sees everything as a videogame, or you could argue that he's self-aware and perfectly sane.

I guess this is a little off-topic, but since you brought up No More Heroes, can we just address that, like . . . there was a lot of stuff in NMH2 that just outright ignored plot points from the first game?

Spoiler

Like, what about the whole "Sylvia was just running a scam the whole time" plot twist at the end of the first game? Never referenced again. The agency she just made up in the first game is now a real thing? Okay, whatever. And suddenly, people actually seem to like Travis. I mean, there were, maybe, three people in the first game who didn't seem to just outright hate him or, you know, get offed by him, and those people didn't really seem to particularly like him anyway. And then in the second game, it's like alright, well. His only friend gets murdered 5 minutes in, so he goes off on a quest for revenge . . . during which it's revealed that he's got, like, two stalkers and his brother's ex-wife wants to boink him now. I mean. I know that there's a lot in both games that is just . . . in there because lolwhynot, but those things really made up a lot of who the character was.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I have to bring up Lelouch in the last episode(s) of Code Geass. Like what the flying fuck...

Spoiler

He literally wanders off from the final decisive battle, he turns and flies several miles out to sea to check on/save his little sister instead of y'know winning the war he's been fighting for god knows how many episodes?

His army was sieging the final capital building and their one tactical genius of a leader fucks off, leaving them without a response to the counterattack that hits them. They instantly fall apart without Zero there to lead them. Understandably so, because Zero singlehandedly raised and trained this army + military resources out of thin air without even using his Geass on them and they just accept everything he tells them to do without question.

Quite sure there's a scene that was just various people screaming "what are our orders?!" into their comms.

Sister complexes lose wars.

Ah well, at least he gets his act together in R2...

Considering his entire motive was to make sure Nunnally would live happy and un-used for political purposes, and the plan involved staying hidden, I think it makes fine sense.

Spoiler

Her being discovered and re-positioned as a princess would be hella-awkward to the plan, as shown in R2, where he spends half of it trying to get her back.

The Black Knights had Todo, and I remember after re-watching it again two or three weeks ago, I have no idea how the Black Knights lost. That move he pulled with dismantling the settlement looked like it took out, oh... basically everything. All their tanks had to be gone, so many knightmares, and the Gawain just completely obliterated all the britannian air power with its hadron cannons.

I guess either Todo's a chump or Gilford's a super bad-ass.

I know that but... Just take the enemy base THEN help her. Dammit man! I mean I guess he thought they were ok on their own but still. 'S not cool.

Oh shit they lost their tanks. GG war over. Tanks are the most useful thing ever in the Code Geass universe...

I'm keeping my eye out for any tanks that actually get a shot in ever whenever I go back to CG. They just get instagibbed by your bog standard Knightmare every single time. Why not just cease making tanks and make even moar Knightmares? It's the same with helicopters but I suppose you can't have air support comprised of only Knightmares. That would be so inefficient to maintain and unnecessary as hell.

Gilford is totes the biggest badass you have ever seen. Todo is supposed to be this legendary general but... I don't think he does too much in general. Maybe he just gets overshadowed by Zero hogging the spotlight every time the Black Knights do anything ever.

Seriously, I think half of Zero's existance is to unleash Lulu's inner drama queen...

Well R2 is fucking awesome so I can't complain really. I like how they literally just ripped off the first episode of the first series for the start of season 2 but just styled it up. It's the exact same thing theme and plot wise but in a different setting and with a few different characters.

Y'know, Lulu laments his shit life, wins at chess, CC dies... All that jazz.

 

[senordesol]

General Shepherd; MW2. His psuedo-philosophical babbling before the final QTE fight left me speechless. "Wait...50,000 of your soldiers died, and you thought the best way to honor their memories was to bring the entire Russian army down on the heads of their families? Isn't that like raising drunk driving awareness by getting raging drunk and ramming as many people as possible?"