The Dread Pirate Westley

[ShieldWife]

In The Princess Bride, which I’m sure we’ve all seen, Westley tells of how he became the Dread Pirate Roberts after he retired, or rather after Roberts’ successor retired. Roberts had the reputation of leaving no survivors and that reputation seemed important to Westley.

My question is this: did Westley act as a pirate for a considerable amount of time and did he continue the tradition of murdering his piracy victims? If so, then Westley is a truly evil character, a mass murder who kills helpless civilians for money. Could this be? The evidence seems to point to this and there is nothing to contradict it.

Even if Westley moderated his piracy and acted like a more typical pirate, he would still likely have killed many innocent people as well as inflicting harm and stealing large sums of money.

Upon learning that Westley was a “sailer” on the pirate ship Revenge, the Dread Pirate Roberts’ ship, Prince Humperdinck would be obligated to execute the murderous scoundrel after torturing him to extract all possible information about Roberts’ activities and possible whereabouts. Any reasonable king would do this with such a dangerous criminal.

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Ok... so what are we supposed to engage with and discuss?

I mean pirates have been whitewashed in fiction for a long time, despite the fact that they were (with very few exceptions) reprehensible individuals who would have been perfectly at home with the worst of the cartels of the modern day.

 

[Husky_Khan]

But Dread Pirate Roberts was a larger then life legend in the setting.... which itself was a Children's storybook. It's many times removed from actual piracy. Especially since the original Dread Pirate Roberts somehow had let Westley survive for some reason.... there's no reason to assume he's exceptional... same as vice versa as well. Plus pirates can be a broad term historically anyways. This was pre-Blackbeard days anyhow. Who knows how they classify their pirates if we're going to take dramatic license in assuming Westley is a mass murderer even when he won't murderize Prince Humperdinck.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

In The Princess Bride, which I’m sure we’ve all seen, Westley tells of how he became the Dread Pirate Roberts after he retired, or rather after Roberts’ successor retired. Roberts had the reputation of leaving no survivors and that reputation seemed important to Westley.

My question is this: did Westley act as a pirate for a considerable amount of time and did he continue the tradition of murdering his piracy victims? If so, then Westley is a truly evil character, a mass murder who kills helpless civilians for money. Could this be? The evidence seems to point to this and there is nothing to contradict it.

Even if Westley moderated his piracy and acted like a more typical pirate, he would still likely have killed many innocent people as well as inflicting harm and stealing large sums of money.

Upon learning that Westley was a “sailer” on the pirate ship Revenge, the Dread Pirate Roberts’ ship, Prince Humperdinck would be obligated to execute the murderous scoundrel after torturing him to extract all possible information about Roberts’ activities and possible whereabouts. Any reasonable king would do this with such a dangerous criminal.

We really have no way to gauge what the "dread pirates" do, or to whom, because the whole theme of the dread pirates, and a major theme of the movie, is "X is not what you think it is".

 

[Bear Ribs]

Taken at face value none of the cast are exactly knights in shining armor. Fezzik and Inigo are pretty clearly rogues who've murdered quite a few people for coin and only balk at killing Buttercup because she's a pretty girl. Westley didn't murder the innocent on screen but he's clearly been a'pirating for a decade and planning his retirement which pretty clearly implies he's been robbing and murdering. Buttercup's the only one who doesn't obviously have innocent blood on her hands.

They're heroes in the Greek sense of being larger than life, not the modern sense of being paragons of virtue.