>On the other, he was SUCH a revolting figure that I hesitated to give
>even a heavily fictionalized demonic version of him any screen time.
>Azula's not just whistling Dixie when she calls him out about his
>habits in life and describes him as one of human history's foulest
>villains. There's some evidence that even STALIN found this man's
>personal brand of evil repellent. I almost didn't release this story,
>because it needs him or someone very like him in it, but he disgusts
>me so.

You made the right call. Frankly, (and this is going back some years) I always thought that Twilight was ill served by the lack of History's Greatest Monsters in the armies of the damned. I mean, yes, okay, obviously you're not going to put Demon Mao Zedong in there leading some cadres against Asgard, that would just be silly, but there's always space for scumbags like, say, William Quantrill.

The story is made more effective by putting in someone who was both a lesser functionary and a true monster in his own right in the "real world" into it. I would even go so far as to say much more effective. Same way having Gus Grissom around works, but in reverse, because Grissom wasn't, you know... slime.

>But then again, this vignette depicts him being outwitted,
>outmaneuvered, humiliated, and killed (for some values of), in his own
>office, by a woman. (Well, all right, technically Boone killed
>him, but in this instance he's more of a weapon system.) There is a
>certain poetic justice in that, which I finally decided I could live
>with.

And this is where I'll disagree with you. What happened to Beria should definitely have happened, but you shouldn't be afraid of having your villains succeed because it represents some sort of endorsement of their villainy, and nor should you have them fail just to prove a point about evil never prospering.

... the poetic justice was pretty awesome, tho.

-Merc
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