#Hanneman: but what about my sister tho :( *goes on to help murder innocents*

[butwhatifidothis]

I can't believe Cap thinks he had such a gotcha moment about Dimitri's line about the present being all we have. Cap, and an annoyingly large portion of this fandom, misunderstand Dimitri's views. Dimitri isn't saying the past and future don't matter. His beliefs are that we have to remember the past and work for a brighter future, but we live in the present. Don't carelessly and selfishly throw away the people of the present for the sake of a past that can't return or a future not set in stone.

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It's just so telling that the supposed "gotcha" against Dimitri's views about the present being all we have is Hanneman bringing up his dead sister and how she'll never get to live in the present. It's like... yes. Dimitri knows that feeling. Dimitri knows what it's like having loved ones never being able to live the lives they deserve due to being unjustly killed. That's like. What his character revolves around.

But what Hanneman, Woobiegard, and Cap'n don't realize is that, in this scenario, Woobiegard is just trading a bunch of "Hanneman's sister's" with thousands of victims of war who have now lost the ability to live out the lives they deserved to just the same. Woobiegard and everyone on her side have also justified their murder with shallow defenses about "doing the right thing," just like Hanneman's sister's husband in the fic tried to justify his murder with shallow defenses about "doing the Goddess' will." What Dimitri tries to get at is that trading death for death is meaningless, because it ends with the exact same result.

Woobiegard and those who stand with her in this fic try to rationalize all the death they cause as for the greater good, for a society that will be better than what it started as, but that is quite literally what they lambast Rhea for doing. They pin all the blame for Fodlan having anything wrong with it on Rhea for "allowing" it to happen in order to preserve the status quo, all while 99% of the time never pulling their heads out of their asses and realizing that that is what they are doing right now. And not through any sort of passive acceptance of it like they try to say Rhea does, but through actively killing people with their own hands.

And whenever Woobiegard does contemplate over whether she's being like Rhea? When she does question whether she's any better than her? She does the equivalent of shrugging her shoulders and lol'ing before going right back to doing what she was doing. Like, take this line: "Would [Woobiegard] descend into madness, believing in her righteousness even as she damned herself?" You wanna know what chapter she says this in?

Chapter 43.

So. You know. She has this thought before she chases down Judith to brutally shatter her against the stone floor even after she'd stopped fighting back. And before she watched as Petra put down a commoner's rebellion with threat of lethal force. And before she crumpled Alois up like a soda can before throwing him to the side. And before she took Aymr, physical proof of her collusion with TWS and a constant symbol of her hypocrisy. This is what she thinks during the food shortage that she is making her people go through in order to feed her army. And during a time where she is orphaning children (and letting them idolize her after she was the one that got their parents killed). This was after she'd already laid siege on a monastery that housed at minimum hundreds of people who had no other place to go - those people that she forcibly kicked out.

And all of that? That's what Dimitri is talking about. Woobiegard and her side trying to wash their hands of all the suffering they've caused because it's "for a better future" makes people suffer now. It kills them now. It traumatizes them now. It ruins them now. They are permanently fucking over the lives of thousand of people for the exact same reasons that they say Rhea is evil for doing. Them prioritizing the future over the present is presently ruining the futures of thousands of people, and they just do not care. They're trying to sell pennies for dollars to a billionaire, saying that they're the heroes when they literally have the mindsets of villains to someone with genuinely heroic viewpoints, even in this fic. Actually baffling that someone could miss the point this hard