one take I haven’t seen talked about a lot (which maybe I just missed it idk) that really struck me was that bolaire conceives of the world through narrative. he treats the world as a story—or, at best, as a set of stories—and a lot of his actions and mindset fall into those patterns, whether it’s something he’s aware of or not.
bolaire was made to exist as a role in a play. the thing that “woke him up” was seeing a play that made him realize he wanted to be in a main role, not just a prop in someone else’s scene. now he’s been creating his own narrative, in which he can be the main character (and, in theory, his siblings… if he ever finds them. but he hasn’t yet, so for now they’re just his backstory, not actual characters). he treats others with no regard for their lives or agency because they’re background actors and npcs and nobody important to the (read: bolaire’s) story, as far as he’s currently concerned.
his obsession (positive) with hal is because hal isn’t an npc. he became an important character in bolaire’s story, so now bolaire cares about him. and hal is someone that understands story. he creates stories! he’s a playwrite, after all. and why would someone like that be written into bolaire’s story if he wasn’t meant to play an important role in how it will progress?
his obsession (negative) with thjazi, even after death, is because thjazi was the villain of bolaire’s story—and a story can’t just lose its main antagonist halfway through. that would be a bad story. so clearly thjazi must have some ongoing evil machinations that will continue to act as the antagonist for bolaire’s story, and the fact that no one else seems to understand this is a temporary obstacle that will eventually be overcome as the narrative goes on. (the fact that none of them have done so yet is getting frustrating to bolaire—don’t they know their lines?)
the reason he was so upset when termina tried to kill him was because she wasn’t following the right script. she was supposed to return and recognize bolaire as the hero of his story and love him and join him as another main (though perhaps still secondary to him) character. she wasn’t supposed to turn against him, and if she did, she was supposed to quickly realize her mistake and penitently return to bolaire’s side. (she can’t be an antagonist to him, because that’s thjazi’s job. which he’s still doing, of course.)
bolaire’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that real life doesn’t work like stories. there’s no authorial intent guiding life, and sometimes it is messy, or unsatisfying, or unresolved. and bolaire, whose emotional development is currently on par with that of an entitled 14-year-old theater kid, can’t handle when that happens, so he clings to his ideas of tropes and narrative and what’s supposed to happen. sometimes he lashes out, sometimes he digs in, sometimes he makes shit up that seems weird to everyone else but fills in a “plot hole” that he doesn’t like. he always centers the story. he and everyone else are just characters playing roles for the betterment of that story.
a lot has been made of whether Bolaire thinks he’s a person or a thing, but to me the interesting questions is not whether bolaire considers himself a person. it’s whether he considers everyone else as people.