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There Is No Reason For Shen To Be Neutral

PapaGreg21·3/4/2016, 12:40:04 AM·2 votes·1,495 views

I expect many downvotes (which is funny) but thing about this logically first.

Outside of several priests exterminating demons, I haven't heard of any times within the lore of humans attacking the spirit world and trying to slaughter demons or other creatures from the other dimensions. However, these creatures are constantly coming over to Runeterra and trying to cause as much mayhem as possible (void creatures, shadow isle creatures, etc.) Shen isn't as much neutral as he is extremely reactionary to violence. I read the story about some priests that were destroying some spirits and Shen decided to murder them. I took the side of the Holy men in this story because they are probably sick of Rek'sai, Kog Maw, Cho, Shadow Isle ghosts, and seemingly thousands of other creatures appearing from out of thin air and slaughtering everybody they see. They probably said "we are going to fight back and try to exterminate the ghouls from this area to save our families from more attacks."

Put yourself in the Holy man's shoes. They spend most of their day praying and living a largely uneventful life. Every so often the sky opens up and unkillable monsters blindly kill everything in sight. These demons may have slaughtered their families or loved ones and completely devastated their lives. So they finally say to themselves "let's be proactive here and try to stop some of these monsters from wiping us out by getting to them first." As soon as they do that, Shen arrives and murders them for it (another instance of Shen being late to the battle). Maybe Shen should have talked to them about why they did it and he probably would have found out that these guys are sick of waiting for Shen to hunt down monsters AFTER everybody has been killed like on the boat. They were being resourceful and proactive in ridding the spirits themselves.

And let's be real here. These demons don't have a culture or conscience. They have done nothing but act like piranhas waiting for a chunk of meat throughout the entirety of lore. I find it hard to believe that Shen will ever fight against humans again to protect demons that they are picking on, whereas he is going to spend 99.9 percent of his battles protecting humans. I don't even know why he wants to keep the two worlds balanced. The spirit world keeps going to the physical world picking fights but I can't imagine the people of Runeterra ever having incentive to want to go to the spirit world and try to mess up some of the spiritual creatures for fun or any other reason except they are sick of constant supernatural attacks.

Anyway, I enjoyed the story nonetheless and am excited to hear more about Shen. The writers are very talented in making these stories come alive. Hopefully Shen realizes his false sense of being neutral is just an interesting character flaw that he will figure out was incorrect along his journeys.

15 Comments

GreenLore3/4/2016, 12:49:54 AM7 votes

I doubt that the void creatures have anything to do with Shens job,they aren't spirits,they are monstrosities.

Also the reaction of the "holy man" is rather extreme. What he is doing is essentially "oh some evil spirits attacked us?let's kill every spirit we find",he is pretty much trying to do a spirit genocide here(or at least do one as good as he can),its like burning down a whole town just because there is a criminal in it.

The thing that the holy man wanted to kill at the end wasn't a demon,but a regular spirit that has probably never hurt anyone.

I mean keep in mind that Bard is a spirit and he is someone who protects the balance of the world,so saying that "spirits have never done anything good" is also wrong

The Last Ballad3/4/2016, 6:42:11 AM4 votes

Shen's neutrality isn't a interesting character flaw, it is his entire purpose in life, which he struggles with. His neutrality serves to make sure that his actions are just, but being just isn't always the compassionate thing to do.

And your assessment of the spirits lack of culture is entirely unfounded, as none of the story takes place in the spirit realm. Ionian's entire theme is based on Asian culture, and in Asian myths the entire spirit realm is a complex structure of beings with a hierarchy, usually based on age. The demons are destructive and attack humans, before being dealt with by hero's, while the benevolent spirits shower good gifts upon heroes/the populace in general.

And who is it to say that the spirits don't have issues of there own that Shen helps them out with?

Tesla Effect3/4/2016, 7:40:22 AM1 votes

Balance in all things = True Neutral

GET IT RIGHT!

Valaran Nara3/4/2016, 8:12:15 AM1 votes

Well, I would like to assume that Shen looked at the demon more like a random animal that ate a few chickens from the farm and the holy men as hunters that go out killing random animals for sport.

One did it for survival. The other did it because they wanted a trophy.

This isn't to say the holy man did it purely for sport, but the way he treated the imp spirit in the end showed that he may actually have some form on enjoyment from hurting the spirits.

Dreamspitter3/6/2016, 12:02:55 PM1 votes

{quoted}

I expect many downvotes (which is funny) but thing about this logically first.

Outside of several priests exterminating demons, I haven't heard of any times within the lore of humans attacking the spirit world and trying to slaughter demons or other creatures from the other dimensions. However, these creatures are constantly coming over to Runeterra and trying to cause as much mayhem as possible (void creatures, shadow isle creatures, etc.) Shen isn't as much neutral as he is extremely reactionary to violence. I read the story about some priests that were destroying some spirits and Shen decided to murder them. I took the side of the Holy men in this story because they are probably sick of Rek'sai, Kog Maw, Cho, Shadow Isle ghosts, and seemingly thousands of other creatures appearing from out of thin air and slaughtering everybody they see. They probably said "we are going to fight back and try to exterminate the ghouls from this area to save our families from more attacks."

Put yourself in the Holy man's shoes. They spend most of their day praying and living a largely uneventful life. Every so often the sky opens up and unkillable monsters blindly kill everything in sight. These demons may have slaughtered their families or loved ones and completely devastated their lives. So they finally say to themselves "let's be proactive here and try to stop some of these monsters from wiping us out by getting to them first." As soon as they do that, Shen arrives and murders them for it (another instance of Shen being late to the battle). Maybe Shen should have talked to them about why they did it and he probably would have found out that these guys are sick of waiting for Shen to hunt down monsters AFTER everybody has been killed like on the boat. They were being resourceful and proactive in ridding the spirits themselves.

And let's be real here. These demons don't have a culture or conscience. They have done nothing but act like piranhas waiting for a chunk of meat throughout the entirety of lore. I find it hard to believe that Shen will ever fight against humans again to protect demons that they are picking on, whereas he is going to spend 99.9 percent of his battles protecting humans. I don't even know why he wants to keep the two worlds balanced. The spirit world keeps going to the physical world picking fights but I can't imagine the people of Runeterra ever having incentive to want to go to the spirit world and try to mess up some of the spiritual creatures for fun or any other reason except they are sick of constant supernatural attacks.

Anyway, I enjoyed the story nonetheless and am excited to hear more about Shen. The writers are very talented in making these stories come alive. Hopefully Shen realizes his false sense of being neutral is just an interesting character flaw that he will figure out was incorrect along his journeys.

I don't know...but my gut says maybe.

http://i.imgur.com/dQT9AEP.jpg

Stars Shaper3/6/2016, 12:18:26 PM1 votes

There is a differnece between being neutral and keeping balance.

Neutrality is kind of "I don't want to get involved, do as you want", while balancing means interfer against the dominant factor to bring things on a 50/50 ratio. Also don't foerget that Shen can actually travel and see the spirit world himself so he might have a better knowledge of happening, we might not even know if anything of the Runeterrans do can have bad consequences in other worlds/dimensions/realities. Also the "natural" state of the universe is chaotic which means Shen and the order will have toa ct accordingly to bring things in a balanced state in order to preserve the actual state of things.