Quote Originally Posted by DoH View Post
Because... the WoL could literally kill every single one of them then and there if he wanted to? If the point was to subjugate them, we would already be doing it lol. Also, we had no problem knocking out tempered Garleans on our way there. It would've made much more sense if, instead of letting ourselves be captured, we just knocked everyone out and left them with some supplies that they would wake up to. Then they could choose whether to eat the food or not, and they could find out after the fact (when they aren't subjugated) that we were honest when we said that we're just there to help and not take their country over.
Sure, we could have just gone in and killed them all, but then:
1) there would be nothing left to subjugate - which was not the intention, and
2) proves the Garleans right about us - that we're savage monsters.
The contingency, no matter how well intentioned, was a means to end the war that, evidently, many Garleans had no interest in doing, even in times of desperation. We even see this after the Legatus commits suicide - many of the refugees are so broken and tired that they just don't care any more and are simply desperate to live. We stripped them of any choice in the matter by moving in when they were at their most desperate, and even then they still wanted to fight. Were we right to do this? From a humanitarian standpoint, yeah. It's either this, or they all die slow and painful deaths. Were they justified to resist, or at the very least, remain skeptical? Sure.

And, if you ask me, the whole "We're merely knocking them out!" wave off was probably the weakest point in the story for me. Ignoring the fact that telling a whole army to set their guns and swords to stun mode is really stupid, so many of the refugees were weak and sick that 'knocking them out' probably would have meant killing them.