#lots of stuff happening here but I'm writing this on my dwindling dwindling lunch break

[artbyblastweave]

 I’ve got a theory about why “Master” is a (paraphrasing @txttletale​ here) “fuckshit useless category,” in that it lumps in two kinds of minion controller- human-controllers and non-human minion controllers- which in turn clearly mandate different response protocols, because you can’t go full exterminatus against mind-controlled humans the way you can against constructs, projections or animals. 

The jokey answer is “They’re cops, hur dur,” but the more nuanced answer is that the people formalizing these categories lived through mass casualty events like Ellisburg, Laussanne, as well as the ongoing ethical fuckshow hostage situations like The Pastor, Heartbreaker and the Simurgh Quarantine zones, and so when it comes time to collapse some categories into an even twelve, well, there’s now a personal and structural incentive for these people to try and categorize human and non-human master minions as the same kind of guilt-free kill-em-before-they-kill-you extermination target. 

Structural, because, well, it’s convenient, from their point of view, to have institutional and cultural carte blanche to shoot first and ask questions never, if it lets you suppress the Master Du Jour slightly faster than you otherwise might have. Personal, because if the party line on Master Minions is that they’re as good as dead anyway, it absolves certain officials of their guilt regarding things like, say, having to kill all the Swiss people, or lock a bunch of people into a thunderdome with flesh-eating c53s, or the ongoing failure to rescue the people afflicted by heartbreaker.

(I think this is a similar mindset, by the by, to the mindset that produces Emily “fuck the unwritten rules, take the easy way out and bomb em to hell” Piggot; not coincidentally one of two survivors of Ellisburg.)

Now, the trick is that the PRT isn’t utterly institutionally dominated by frothing, gibbering jackboots like Tagg; if they were, the whole Tagg subplot wouldn’t have happened. So inevitably you have a lot of local PRT directors looking at the protocols and going, “Hmm, that’s fucked” and the department in practice continues to behave like semi-reasonable human beings when it comes to subduing human minions vs exterminating inhuman ones, tacitly adhering to the two separate categories that Master must have once been.

 But you’ll never successfully get the PRT to split the categories again, because the only way to justify doing so would be to publicly air out the ethical horrorshow implicit in having the one category. This simultaneously pisses off the Frothing Jackboots who pushed for the category collapse in the first place and creates a massive headache for quote-unquote “moderate” officials who simply don’t want to risk the potential negative PR of admitting to a longstanding ethical misstep and fixing it across all their documentation. So the category stays and everyone ignores it.