dearly beloved

& the thing that they all have in common is that they subvert their orders. the "kind" templars in da2, across the board, all defy orders and expectations— thrask comes to you behind his superiors' backs to plead for you to stop his own colleague from catching up to some runaway mages for fear of what he'll do to them, emeric begs you to help investigate a series of murders of young women after both the city guard and his own superiors have already expressly told him to drop it, and. samson passed love notes between mages. (and when you meet him he may also ask for money in exchange for information on feynriel, but iirc he expresses hope that you're successful). maurevar carver helps malcolm escape.

and pretty much all of them suffer immensely for it! thrask and emeric are both ultimately killed. samson spends the entirety of the game homeless and suffering lyrium withdrawal before ultimately breaking, turning on you and returning to meredith.

When Glokta was first introduced, he struck me as the kind of villain who was eventually going to get “redeemed,” possibly in a clumsy and questionable way. I felt like I knew the type—he’s sad and angry, he has a tragic backstory, he’s not even sure why he does the horrible things he does, surely he will eventually do one or two major good things and then the narrative will immediately start treating him like he’s a hero now and because of that he’ll never have to answer for any of his previous terrible crimes. So I was really pleasantly surprised that not only did the story not take that direction, but it actively resisted it at every turn.

On the one hand, Glokta is absolutely a sympathetic character. His narrative perspective is really entertaining to follow, and there is a lot about him that’s tragic, and his actions often make logical sense as a reaction to the constant violent conspiracies he’s dealing with all the time. But at the same time, those actions are more often than not pretty awful, and their frequent depiction in graphic detail makes sure you don’t overlook that. They definitely aren’t presented as forgivable due to his tragic backstory either, because other characters know that tragic backstory, and they tend to see it as making his actions even worse. Several different people throughout the trilogy express sentiments along the lines of, “You went through all that trauma and then you turned around and started inflicting the exact same trauma on other people all the time, even though you know first-hand what it’s like? That’s fucked up, man.”

And while he does ultimately express a kinder side of his personality to a select few, he also remains consistently villainous, and concludes his character arc by just embracing that the reason he does this horrible stuff is just because he likes it. And I thought that was really cool and fun to read, considering how easily Abercrombie could have gone for a cheap redemption arc and didn’t—he went with the much more difficult task of balancing making a villain sympathetic while also keeping him a terrible villain, and he did a great job.

zevran just invite your friends to brunch or smt you can't keep using assassination attempts as good excuses to visit them