Cell: Truly evil or a product of his genetics?

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Forgotten Hero
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Post by Forgotten Hero » Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:34 am

Raki wrote:
Kroni_Hunter wrote:I know he understands the concept of murder, he just looks at it in a different way, like survival of the fittest. He was brought up to believe he was the strongest creation and whatever creature is the strongest is the winner. The people he killed were just the losers, it was their own fault for being weak because he believed thats how the world really works.
Cell understood clearly that absorbing the humans and Androids meant the end of their lives. He was cynical about it saying "They should be glad to be a part of me". Cell had the intelligence not to follow on that path, but he did so anyway. The Cell character gets no sympathy from me.
Cell only absorbed the androids because that is what he was built for. Just like the androids, they were built to destroy Goku. Cell clearly understands what he is doing, but I don't think he understands the consequence or the concept of murder. Cell automatically believes that it is his right to take what he wants. "They should be glad to be a part of me," that is just Cell's ignorance. I think that comes from Vegeta personally.
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Post by Rocketman » Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:38 am

He said he wanted to do the Cell Games so he could see fear on the faces of the humans.

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Post by Forgotten Hero » Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:47 am

Rocketman wrote:He said he wanted to do the Cell Games so he could see fear on the faces of the humans.
Only after he had absorbed the android...Ah forget it, now I'm just confused!
This situation can be played out in so many ways!

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Post by Raki » Mon Aug 04, 2008 1:17 am

Rocketman wrote:He said he wanted to do the Cell Games so he could see fear on the faces of the humans.
I like how Trunks had that terrified look on his face. Exactly what Cell wanted.
The series doesn't start with the arrival of Raditz. Stop being lazy and watch Dragonball.

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Post by Pain » Mon Aug 04, 2008 5:06 am

Raki wrote:
Rocketman wrote:He said he wanted to do the Cell Games so he could see fear on the faces of the humans.
I like how Trunks had that terrified look on his face. Exactly what Cell wanted.
So....that explains your quote. :lol:
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Post by Forgotten Hero » Mon Aug 04, 2008 2:14 pm

Raki wrote:
Rocketman wrote:He said he wanted to do the Cell Games so he could see fear on the faces of the humans.
I like how Trunks had that terrified look on his face. Exactly what Cell wanted.
That was just great planning on Cell's part, when to exactly throw that line.
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Post by Drunken Master » Mon Aug 04, 2008 5:41 pm

Cell wants to destroy the planet, pretty much just for fun and/or boredom. His only objective was to kill Goku. He came up with that idea by himself, and knowing no one could even get close to his power, he made a tournament, just to mess with everyone's heads. He's evil, I don't know why people question that.
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Post by Forgotten Hero » Mon Aug 04, 2008 5:56 pm

He is evil, sure, but at this point we are discussing wheither or not if Cell understood that his deeds were evil.
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Post by Raki » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:31 pm

Forgotten Hero wrote:He is evil, sure, but at this point we are discussing wheither or not if Cell understood that his deeds were evil.
If you are someone who is evil, I'm pretty sure you know that your acts are evil if you choose to commit those kinds of acts.
The series doesn't start with the arrival of Raditz. Stop being lazy and watch Dragonball.

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Post by Thanos6 » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:50 pm

If all he did was commit the acts, it could be argued. But when he does them just to see the expression of terror on people's faces, I think that makes it inarguable.
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Post by Forgotten Hero » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:55 pm

I guess. It has been an interesting coversation on another hand.
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Post by djkalteraphine » Mon Aug 04, 2008 10:42 pm

Drunken Master wrote:Cell wants to destroy the planet, pretty much just for fun and/or boredom. His only objective was to kill Goku. He came up with that idea by himself, and knowing no one could even get close to his power, he made a tournament, just to mess with everyone's heads. He's evil, I don't know why people question that.
Yeah, pretty much. :wink:

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Post by *PINHEAD* » Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:13 am

The only thing Cell is guilty of is having a stronger will to power. In a Freudian perspective on human behavior, "man is wolf to man," and with regards to this principle Cell is the ultimate realization of everything human progress has attempted to accomplish. Look at wars, genocides, prejudice, or the capitalist raping of the proletariat, or the mindless commercialization of the bourgeois, the consumer-oriented social stratification of culture and government, a winner-take-all survival-of-the-fittest world where man is alone and connects only through pain. Despite the insistence that people are good and love will conquer all it is becoming further apparent with each passing day in this sick, cruel world that such lofty idealizations are just that, and in reality man is nothing more than the most vile, sadistic animal on this planet unfortunately and regretfully blessed by nature or whatever cruel God there is with the most deadly weapon of all: intelligence. Being a product of and in fact a composite of human beings, Cell is nothing more than human nature taken to its logical conclusion. An existence without purpose or reason other than its own survival, establishing its own identity and destiny in an absurd world.

Cell exists in the world of Dragon Ball not as a villain, but as a reminder. His character ultimately serves as a mirror to the very world that fears and despises him. He is, after all, created by and nourished by humans. The protagonists of Dragon Ball believe they are fighting for some higher purpose, as though their actions are legitimized and justified inherently. Cell fights for no other purpose other than his own will. Yet he is in fact no different than the heroes of this story. At their core, each one of those contestants wish to be the best, to prevail against the others. And though they suppress this urge with sentimentalities such as familial bond, friendship, loyalty, or humanitarianism, it cannot be argued that they enjoy conflict, they feed off of it, they revel in the idea of competition and domination of their opponent. Cell is their own animalistic inclination refined and polished to its peak. He wishes to extinguish all life, all of existence, he wants to break down all barriers and walls and expose reality for the farce that it is, so that only he remains, alone in an absurd world, where only his pointless existence remains.

Is Cell a villain? Cell wishes to instill fear in the hearts of innocents and put an end to all life. Cell is not bound to the moral codes of society. He exists as a free agent who only wants to establish his own reality and truth and meaning to a world that believes it has meaning when in fact it is utterly void of it. He is willing to live in the tension between the reality of absurdity and idealism of humanity and to obliterate the confines that suppress his own will. He is no worse than the big businesses and war profiteers that make up America. In the context of ideas such as love and mercy and pity and all that good stuff, that Western conceptualization of humanity, Cell is evil, though it is that very system that promotes bigotry and antipathy and exploitation that is not all too different from Cell's own actions. His mechanical purpose is no different from the development of his own "evil" personality, no one is free in this deterministic universe. Yet he owns up to and transcends his programmed "evil" and it becomes a catalyst for his own liberation. The moral ambiguity of evil is never more apparent than with Cell. He is at once the most knowingly-sadistic villain and the most metaphysically-free character. He does not deny his wants and needs and instead revolts against any and all systems that pose a threat to the establishment of his own individuality and his own truth. He would destroy the world and all of existence even if it meant an empty existence simply because it is within his power and determination to do so, not for any external validation or justification but because he has found meaning within himself. Cell's motivation, all his efforts, are not meant to please or satisfy anyone or anything or any idea of truth, he only acts in defiance against the absurd world that produced him, a conscious revolt that neither his creator nor his enemies could ever grasp.
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Post by Terra-jin » Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:56 am

Jezus dude, you sure have a dark outlook on life. :?
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Post by djkalteraphine » Tue Aug 05, 2008 6:14 am

*PINHEAD* wrote:*Post snip*
I'm pretty sure deciding to kill everything is evil.

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Post by *PINHEAD* » Tue Aug 05, 2008 6:50 am

He's just misunderstood, is all.
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Post by djkalteraphine » Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:01 am

*PINHEAD* wrote:He's just misunderstood, is all.
If being nice and helping people (I.E., not killing them) is considered being good, and evil is opposite of good, then killing everyone is evil. There's nothing to misunderstand.

He was created by a doctor with evil ambitions, who went insane when those ambitions crumbled because of one boy. So he created a monster to kill this boy. But when the monster, Cell, broke free of Gero's orders, and realized he had free will, he decided "Meh, why just kill Goku? I wanna kill everyone." That's evil, dude. Cell was a product of himself, just like the rest of us.

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Post by *PINHEAD* » Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:41 am

What is true for you and even for me is not necessarily true for Cell. And in the greater scope of things, notions of objective morality don't apply. The dichotomy between good and evil, moral and immoral does not apply to a universe that is ultimately amoral. Such ideals are human constructs that are inapplicable in an objective manner. Now, the implications of this moral displacement are such that one could consider being responsible for the death of millions "right," while most would say that just, quite simply, doesn't fly. This is the problem of a relativistic epistemological mindset, this is what people have been grappling over since Nietzsche and arguably since Socrates and the Sophists. Some resort to what is referred to as philosophical suicide, intellectual jumping-the-shark, a leap of faith into belief of moral objectivism. This is convenient, it allows people to at least believe they have a grasp over the universe and what it all means. In reality, the death of reason as perceived by the existential and post-modern intellectual movements following World War II has only contributed to the persistent trend in Western thought to question the very fabric of what constitutes good and what constitutes evil, and no one with any inclination towards an objective response has made any attempt at answering without resorting to blind assumptions.

But for the sake of this little chit-chat, Cell's evil.

What we can take from the moral displacement of subjectivity is the idea that Cell does not operate under the assumption that he is evil. He knows that others believe him to be evil, but does he himself believe his actions to be wrong? He knows it causes pain to others but it causes only joy, or at least some sort of sick satisfaction to him. This is his truth, which is not necessarily THE truth, even though it conflicts with the predominant notion of truth, which isn't THE truth either.

Regardless of whether or not he acts knowingly and fully aware of the evil of his actions, one cannot attribute Cell to be responsible in any metaphysical sense. In the literal sense of the word, yes, Cell kills people, wants to kill people, and enjoys it. Is he in control of such compulsion? We know he was programmed or instructed or in some created for and purposed for evil. And we know that he took on a personal inclination for his evil actions. One does not control what one wants to do. You can't choose what your subconscious tendencies are. Libertarian free will, the idea that people are in fact in control of their actions and can choose freely without influence from outside forces, is impossible. All matter and energy in the universe is constant, and energy does not spontaneously appear out of nowhere. That said, there can be no way a personality can be in control of the neurological signals that process his thoughts and wants and desires. Whether it be his creation, or his birth, or his upbringing, or his life experiences, Cell did not control what made him evil. Perhaps he was designed to not only do evil, but to be evil. Maybe he developed it on his own. He is responsible, but not in a metaphysical way, only in a circumstantial way. And really, free will means that a person cannot be held responsible for one's actions. Free will implies that actions are spontaneous and without prior cause, and you can't blame someone for a spontaneous, un-caused action. Every action is determined in some way, directly or indirectly, by prior causes. It's Newton's Third Law.




This all means that yes, Cell is evil, maybe that evilness is independent of his upbringing, but no, he is not evil inherently in of himself but only because of what he was created or shaped to do and to be. I wouldn't let him into my house, though. I probably would, actually.
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Post by Storm » Tue Aug 05, 2008 8:47 am

Cell had no reason to kill anyone other than Goku after he became complete, but vowed to anyway. Why? Because he's evil. His programming code only went so far as "absorb 17 and 18, absorb any humans necessary for life force, and kill Goku." But he went beyond that. He had very strict guidelines, and because he was sentient and had free will, he went beyond them.

He's not "misunderstood" or "given a different mindset": the dude's just evil.
Last edited by Storm on Tue Aug 05, 2008 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Anonymous Friend » Tue Aug 05, 2008 10:25 am

I see Cell as being evil because he did evil things, just like all of the other villians. The better question would be of his motives in doing these things. The killing of humans was to give himself more power, with a ultimate goal of finding and obsorbing 17 and 18. I'm not sure if he was programmed to kill Goku like some of the other Andriods but he had the opurtunity to at his tournement. It seems like after he became complete, his goal became to have a worthy opponent.

When I look at all the major villians, most of them weren't known for their thirst for wanton destruction. They just wanted power and control.
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