/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Late in the last thread there was talk about how readily a monster may take a human life in defense of their husbands. This bit from World Guide 1 I think details the rules and conditions fairly well:

>It has been mentioned a countless number of times until now, but monsters love human men more than anything. For that reason, they can't stand the loss of beloved human life. For that reason, unless it's for self defense, or protecting their friends or husbands, they won't take the lives of human men or women. Even when humans attack them, they basically try to avoid taking their lives as much as possible while fighting. If they don't have husbands, they'll capture and claim men for themselves. If they already do, then they'll try to capture and take men prisoner for other monsters. The main reason they fight humans is to claim men who are captured during the fighting. For that reason, when the monsters clash with the soldiers of the Order, casualties are extremely few, but the captured soldiers become the prisoners of the monsters without exception, and they end up getting dragged into devilishness.

So on a technical level monsters "can" kill in defense of themselves, husbands and friends, but in practice they rarely kill even in those situations. From this and many scenarios given in other material, they usually try the myriad of nonlethal means first and tend to act proportionally to the threat. It's reasonable to say that when defending they will take into account:

1. How much of a threat the opponent presents.
2. What it would take to stop them from being a threat.

For an example in a scenario KC tweeted where an evil (albeit with sympathetic backstory) wizard tried to hypnotize a lizardman into killing her husband and friends, all she did to him in response was knock him out with a single punch (the wizard was then implied to be spirited away by a bogie).

Now the wording of the hellhound profile does make it seem like they could be more likely to resort to killing in defense, but its still up to interpretation. One has to consider also that Seven Seas version of the profile explicitly states "this aggression won't kill the hostile party." I don't know if this is simply a different translation choice or if KC changed the wording for the book profile to clarify things (the book profile has no fan translation).