#not to make pk sound any better lmfao

[ruthlesslistener]

Finally another soul master hater- like I like his whole aesthetic but seriously fuck that balloon toad looking soul stealing shaman kidnapping rich ass tyrant

Soul Master is one of the very few characters in the game (other than the Radiance) that legitimately creeps me out, except that he doesn't have the 'biblically accurate angel' vibe that balances out that terror with a healthy dose of awe. He's just a selfish rich man with absolutely no value for any life other than his own, and even if his arena sets you up for the dead baby pit and the question of whether mass loss of life for the 'greater good' is worth it with PK later on, I personally find his cruelty far more abhorrent. The Pale King, at the very least, had the excuse of not realizing that the vessels were sapient beings (and the Path of Pain gives us a good idea of just how terrible that realization was to him), and the vessels died young with relatively quick deaths via falling, before they had much of a chance to live at all. It's horrifying, but it's also a tragedy, and that accidental cruelty is part of what makes the whole deal so terrible and unforgivable. You can, to an extent, sympathize with the Pale King and White Lady (though not by much lmfao), and their self-punishment and guilt for what they've done is pretty damn evident. The horror of the Vessel Plan is that it was created out of a desperate, toxic sort of love- a love for Hallownest- and that love blinded and poisoned the minds of the Pale Gods to drive them to acts of unfathomable cruelty against their own children. It's a tragedy.

The bugs that the Soul Master kidnapped and experimented on, however, were mortal beings that already had a life, family, and friends who loved them. They were vulnerable, and he murdered them in a myriad of grotesque ways under the pretense of trying to figure out how to 'cure' the Infection when all he really wanted was to gain enough power to become a god himself. When the Pale King- aka perpetrator of mass infanticide on the scale of millions- told him to stop, he reacted with indignation and hatred, because how dare he be told to value the lives of others above his own. The studies of the Soul Sanctum might have started out with good intentions, as a genuine desire to understand how soul works and to test the limits of what mortals can create with it, but it ultimately accumulated into a grotesque killing-grounds because some selfish with a lust for power wished to become more than what he was. It's an exploitation that's uncomfortably close to reality, and thus evokes a lot more vitrol and hatred as a result. At least in me.