Yikes! Reeaally expected to be in the majority with my hard-line "killing=bad" approach, but y'all surprised me. I feel like unless they show dark magic being created without the death of *something* to pay the price, it is wrong...unless maybe it's a self-sacrificial act to save people?

Dark magic is simply the law of equivalent exchange. Everything has a price, are you able and willing to pay it? Even without magic, humans kill bugs and animals for far less reason than miraculously healing people from lifelong crippling injuries. If we want to be morbidly pragmatic and use a situation that might be a little extreme yet also not at all unreasonable, we could also take, say, a war prisoner destined for execution and add insult to injury by using their essence to further the cause they were fighting against (but maybe that’s over the hard line that’ll be drawn. Geneva Convention and all)

It’s probably not the type of thing that should be used flippantly, and there should absolutely be hard lines drawn somewhere, but until it’s shown that it is inherently corrupting—and no, white hair from magical strain and effort isn’t “corruption”—I can’t see anyone fully justifying that it’s inherently evil and can never be used positively, even if it also might not be inherently good and is sometimes used negatively

if dark magic can make pancakes fluffier, than its not that evil

Even though I’m an animal rights activist in rl, I voted that dark magic is not always bad. Even in real life, I think there are situations where it is completely justified to use and harm animals if it is absolutely essential for survival.

If for example, we were in a situation similar to Katolis’ food famine, I would say it would be completely justified to hunt and kill an endangered animal so that hundreds of thousands of people wouldn’t starve

Pussies

Surprised by the results, but I guess it makes sense.

Bad doesn't mean Evil afterall.

As much they want to show us how evil dark magic is. It isn't really unless you want to use it for evil. I mean, what stops example Callum to kill someone with sky spells? You just do what we do to our mother earth. We use up the resource from the planet. Dark magic is the same thing except magic and not industrialised.

We know from the last year comic con there was a mage war between the humans after being banished from Xadia. And there isn't much magic stuffs around the lands. While Xadia is filled with magic.

Soo no not evil. Just a shortcut that will hurt the lands in long term.

There's an unfortunate lack of hidden option C which is that it is neither inherently good or evil, it depends entirely on how it is used. Like an axe. Sure, you can use an axe to chop wood for a fire or to build houses to keep people warm and dry. You can also use it to do a murder.

Kill a deer to restore your paraplegic brother to health? I don't even see moral ambiguity here, that deer was never going to live a long, happy life. It's nature, either it was going to grow old and starve or it was going to be killed and eaten, probably in a more horrific way than a quick knife to the throat from Claudia.

It’s in the middle there

What is the difference between dark magic and eating plants, meat, using wood and stone for buildings?

You use something to power the spell just like you use something to fill your belly or build a house.

Dark magic can be used for good, fox example when Claudia heald Soren. People will cry ohhhhh she killed an adorable Deer to do it but no one would bat an eye if she feed him with Deer stew.

Dark magic was deemed evil by Dragons and Elves. Why?

Because lesser species suddenly gained an equal footing with them and that's what freaked them out. Suddenly humans were able to take out dragons and elves and that is why Xadia chased them out and Sol Regem was about to burn whole city...

The question is where to stop. What shouldn't be sacrificed or used just because it is a great source of power.

I personally see magic as a double-edged sword, which is perfectly portrayed by when Callum used the turn snakes spell to free the dragon yet causes him to go into that coma or when Claudia uses it for healing and it makes her hair color bleach out (which I find really symbolic.)

Where’s my “dark magic is just a tool” option? Because that’s all it is.

Is a knife evil? Well I could use it to kill someone, or I could use it to cut vegetables.

Dark magic isn’t inherently evil, but it does encourage a mindset where you view people as “things.” Callum sees the adorraburrs and goes “OMG cute!” Claudia sees them and goes “OMG cute and also I’m gonna keep one in a jar because it might be useful for dark magic later.”

Dark magic isn’t evil, but that mindset can very easily lead to you doing evil things in the name of “pragmatism.”

Think of the griffin eye. Soren is like “eww gross why do you even have that!?” and Claudia is like “oh, THANK YOU Claudia for carrying around the griffin eye just in case a scenario like this happens.”

And that’s what dark magic encourages you to do. You take the eye of a griffin just in case. You get the horn of a unicorn because it’s a powerful magic component. That, more then anything else, is the corruption of dark magic.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Take the hunter who kills a deer for food, who honours the deer for providing food for the tribe, who offers some sort of ritualistic apology to the deer spirit for killing it but explaining it needed to kill the deer for the survival of the tribe.

Make that person a student of dark magic. They understand the cost and don’t use it often because of the price you pay, but I think they’d unquestionably kill a deer to heal a paraplegic. They wouldn’t lie about it though.

As a second thought... imagine dark magic like a person drinking blood. Imagine some fantasy race of elves that drinks blood to survive. That feels wrong, but really is drinking a glass of cow blood really any more immoral then eating a steak? No, but it’s still damn disconcerting seeing them drink blood out of a goblet. It just FEELS wrong. (Please ignore any potential hygiene issues because that’s not the point and also magic.)

Now that’s basically how elves feel about dark magic. It just feels WRONG to them on a deep visceral level.