If you count hunger, and a desire to destroy all life as feelings, then yes minions have feelings too. But they don’t love. They never try and justify themselves. They never have a reason for what they do; and they don’t need a reason. Most of them seem incapable of even comprehending the idea of justifying what they do.
Just because they Elder Dragons and their minions don’t show any sort of love, that sets them up as examples of pure evil? I would argue that love any in either of the groups would be a bad bad thing, but I’ll get to that later.
Other than that, I was talking about the higher ranking minions that has shown independent thinking and not mindlessness. They are single minded in their motives, in that they will destroy their enemies and spread their master’s influence, but they have also shown planning, thoughtfulness, and subterfuge to enact their plans.
They same came be said for the Nightmare Court. Their entire existence, because there is no leaving or retiring from the NC, after being converted is to “free their people” by spreading the Nightmare enough to corrupt the Pale Tree. Each member and/or group in the Nightmare Court may have different methodologies in how to do it, but their motives are all the same. “Spread Nightmare, corrupt Pale Tree”.
Sure, the NC’s members might be more intelligent on average than ED minions, but that doesn’t mean they are all that different. If it wasn’t for the fact that the EDs wield so much power, I would consider them a much more dangerous group. I would still consider the NC more evil than the EDs though.
Stalkers have been known to try and kill the person they are stalking. Kidnap, torture, killing etc. And if you asked them, they would have strange, convoluted, perverse reasons for doing it. So too, the nightmare court. They have their reasons, even if their reasons would only make sense to the insane.
This , I would consider a much more evil act than mindlessly killing someone, and why I consider them more evil than the EDs. To the Elder Dragons, the minions are simply a meanings to an end, and the intelligent minions leading them are something to more easily deal with the problems that get in their way. Us, the players and lesser races, are simply ants. It’s nothing personal, but we’re a nuisance and in their way.
The Nightmare Court, no matter their convoluted reasoning, take pleasure in watching people suffer, because that’s what a good majority of them live for now. They go out of their way to create new forms of torture, new ways of killing, and new ways to drive people into insanity, because it all leads back to their single-minded goal to spread the Nightmare and corrupt the Pale Tree.
You mentioned love earlier, but that isn’t in anyway really a good thing, since it could be used as a driving force for acts of good as well as evil. You used it to show the difference between the groups, but I wouldn’t consider the “love” shown in the NC as actually love. It is more inline with fanaticism. Which would go along wonderfully with your stalker metaphor, and it’s shown a lot in the relationship between the Elder Dragons and their minions.
