User blog:Red Chevalier/Pure Evil Proposal: Caulder

Alright. Time for a PE I've been wanting to propose for a while.

What is the work?
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is the latest installment in Intelligent Systems' Advance Wars series of Real Time Strategy games, released in 2008. Unlike previous installments, this game takes place in a different, darker setting. The world has been devastated by a meteor shower which has also caused the collapse of two of its major superpowers, Rubinelle and Lazuria. The game follows the 12th Battalion, a surviving regiment of Rubinelle soldiers, as they travel around gathering survivors and fighting warlords and other foes who have taken power in wake of the meteor shower.

Who is the villain?
Caulder, the main antagonist of the game. Caulder is the head of the private military contractor Intelligence Defense Systems and a cruel scientist looking to exploit the conflict in the wasteland for his experiments and to test out the destructive weapons he's been developing.

What does he do?
Some time before the game, Caulder created several clone children of himself to serve as COs for IDS. One of these children, Penny, was used by Caulder for several brutal experiments that left her mind shattered and drove her crazy.

Caulder also developed a virus known as the Creeper Derangea, which would cause those infected by it to have plants grow underneath their skin until their body was torn apart. Though the virus was weakened by sunlight, the meteor shower knocked up dust into the atmosphere and created ideal conditions for the virus to thrive in. Thus, Caulder decided to release virus out into the open to test its affects on the survivors, keeping the antidote for the virus to himself.

Caulder and IDS make their first appearance in game when Caulder sends Penny out to fight the 12th Battalion as a "test" their fighting capability. He later appears again a few chapters later to provide resources to the Beast, the leader of a group of bandit raiders ravaging the wasteland that were currently fighting the 12th Battalion. Caulder gives the Beast himself a medicine to make him stronger, however the medicine also has several fatal side effects that Caulder neglects to mention to him. After the Beast's forces are destroyed by the 12th Battalion and the Beast himself starts to die from the medicine, Caulder mocks the Beast before leaving him to die.

Caulder resurfaces later during the reignited war between the remnants of the Lazurian Army and the New Rubinelle Army formed by Admiral Greyfield (who is the other PE from the game I will be proposing), selling weapons to both sides so he can turn the war into a testing ground for his weapons of mass destruction. He also had no problem selling the insane Admiral Greyfield nukes, which Greyfield later has him use to blow up an entire city just to kill one man.

After the New Rubinelle Army is destroyed, Caulder emerges as the true villain and final boss of the game. Discovering that one of his clone children whom he had previously thought to be deceased had gotten amnesia and sided with the 12th Battalion, now going by the name "Isabella', Caulder blackmails a civilian with the cure for the Creeper virus into handing Isabella over. Once the civilian takes the "cure" however, Caulder reveals the "cure" was actually a deadly poison and leaves him to die.

With Isabella now back in his clutches, Caulder places her aboard the Great Owl, his massive warplane, and puts Penny in charge of it. However, Caulder's clone child Cyrus becomes disgusted by Caulder's actions and tells the 12th Battalion where they can find Isabella. After find out about Cyrus' betrayal, Caulder forcibly injects a poison into Cyrus that kills him in a painful and slow way as punishment.

When the 12th Battalion board the plane to rescue Isabella, Caulder orders Penny to crash the plane to kill all of the 12th Battalion. However, Isabella manages to talk Penny out of it at the last moment and convince her to defect from Caulder.

The 12th Battalion then attack the IDS home base, the Nest, to obtain the cure for the Creeper virus and put an end to Caulder's brutal experiments. In the final confrontation, Caulder reveals to the 12th Battalion that he is actually a clone of the original Caulder, and was one of many who were produced to be used for things such as organ transplants, until the clones all rebelled and killed their creator in a bloody struggle that left Caulder as the only survivor. Caulder then mocks the heroes for placing value on life, declaring it to be meaningless.

Caulder is eventually defeated when the 12th Battalion destroys the Nest's cannons and causes it overload and collapse. As Caulder is crushed by the falling rubble, he pleads for someone to save him, despite all his talk about him not seeing any value in life.

Heinous Standard
Pretty much every other antagonist in the game is backed by Caulder, the only exception being the Fanatic who serves as a filler villain for only one chapter. Besides that, Caulder's actions stand out as the most destructive and cruel in the game. Besides causing the deaths of thousands with the creeper virus, Caulder also supplied nukes to a mad tyrant and experimented on and attempted to sacrifice his own children.

Mitigating Factors
Caulder was originally a clone created to be used as a test subject, but this doesn't justify any of his actions in the game nor does it serve as a Freudian Excuse given his treatment of his own clones. While he regards Tabitha, Cyrus and Penny as his "children" and treats them politely at first, it's clear he only values them as pawns. He was perfectly fine with sacrificing Penny to kill the 12th Battalion, tortured Cyrus to death for defying him and denounced the rest of his children as "failures" after Tabitha failed to defeat the 12th Battalion. Caulder's final words ultimately expose all his rhetoric to be hollow and for him to be a hypocrite obsessed with only himself and his experiments.

Final Verdict
A pretty solid yes. Caulder doesn't even value the lives of his clones. He's