And survival is not a bad goal, but the question is: at what cost? Cough cough Orpheus cough cough
Ah, Orpheus. The player favourite. He who can do no wrong. Son of Gith, who had pledged to conquer and enslave all planes of existence, and who will continue his mother's agenda.
By the way, the Emperor has never mind-controlled us, not for a moment.
Not the point. And a strawman.
I didn't have a problem with the Emperor until this point. We had an alliance of convenience, to which end I overlooked some fishy aspects of his history and the suspicion that his being a mind flayer might have tweaked his perspective a bit too much. Nor did I have a particular like for Orpheus, expecting him to be a typical githyanki but pragmatic about an alliance.
But suggesting to consume Orpheus' brain provided narrative evidence that he was, in fact, a mind flayer with a mind flayer's desires, and his perspective had indeed been tweaked too far from the human template to be trustworthy. And for the whole game, the story told us that being mind flayer meant to lose ourselves, and the Emperor, by this event, proved that to be correct. Apart from that, the story provided no in-world evidence that this was necessary. It was just the asserting of an entity whose words we could no longer trust. Acceding to the Emperor's demand thus feels like crossing a moral event horizon, the most significant act of unnecessary evil in this story.
