Okay so I was going back over the CR4 transcripts and I'm gonna beat a dead horse to a fine paste and talk about the part of Stone-Faced where Bolaire talks about Thjazi. Because I think it's very interesting and also not completely honest.
To be clear, I'm not saying that because I dislike Bolaire, or purely because it was a Nat 20 vs Nat 1. I'm saying that because what he says is actually countered later, but in a way that I'm thinking Bolaire was doing a "true from my perspective, not necessarily objectively true" sort of thing. I think he was framing it explicitly in such a way that Hal would take his side and not question why Thjazi would respond so negatively to him. But with the coming episodes, we the audience get an idea about why he'd react so negatively.
For the record, here's that speech from Stone-Faced.
(sighs) One week after I met your brother at your home, Thimble arrived at the museum with a letter. (sighs) Your brother had discovered things about me that could get me, I'd say put away, but that sounds like I'd done something. He knew things about me that were, if put out into the open would've made my life if not difficult, unbearable. He told me I had to work for him, and he forced me to start stealing from this library for him, for other people. He told me if I told you any of this, that would be the end of me. I have tried so hard to never lie to you. Any lie I've ever told you is because your brother forced me to. I thought finally I would be free. I thought finally I could just know that my contract was over, know that there was someone who would let me go so that I could start cleaning up this fucking mess that your brother put me in. He has compromised every level of my life that I was very happy with and just treated me with more disdain than I can possibly express. And it has broken my heart that I've had to sit here and think about that in front of you for so long. (sighs) Your brother was a very complicated man. Many people I've heard have said many things about him. But he could also be very cruel and hateful. He was not kind to me to the bitter end, and I did not deserve it. Any sins that I have would pale in comparison to the things that I have done for him or the things I have seen him do. I thought Thimble, I thought maybe since she had been kind and worked very hard to make sure I never had to be in his presence. Used to say that she-- I would give her gifts and in return she would, as a Thimble should, keep me from coming into contact with a prick. (chuckles) So he's dead and there is something wrong out there. You know there's something wrong. There is a shadow.
So what is Bolaire communicating here? That without warning or reason, Thjazi used Bolaire's nature as a Panto Mask against him to force him to do terrible things. That Thjazi was cruel to Bolaire for no reason. That he "compromised every level" of Bolaire's life. That he did things so terrible that it Horrified the Horror.
Now. These things can be true. They can also be true from Bolaire's perspective, but not necessarily objectively true.
"I'd say put away, but that sounds like I'd done something". Bolaire has "done something". He has committed incredible acts of violence and murder. He has killed Falconers, killed and chopped up criminals, he literally has to wear other people and trap them in a mind prison so that he can live his own life (granted he doesn't have to do the mind prison but it seems he defaults to this). Even Taliesin, above table, acknowledges that this is the kind of artifact Percy of Vox Machina would put in a metal box and chuck into the sea. Bolaire is, put simply, dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. It is entirely disingenuous of him to suggest he hasn't done something to warrant being put away. He absolutely has.
But maybe not from his perspective. From his perspective, well, they were criminals! They were obstacles to his freedom and he surely can't be blamed for doing whatever it took to be free, can he?
"He has compromised every level of my life that I was very happy with" This is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless but it's worth noting that at the beginning of this session, the cold open was Bolaire being peeled off of a severely decayed body and taking over someone else immediately afterwards. So I'm inclined to believe a common theory that Thjazi insisted he remain on one body rather than go around bodysnatching other people. Which I imagine was very uncomfortable and made Bolaire unhappy, but wasn't exactly unwarranted or needlessly cruel from Thjazi's perspective, or indeed from most people's perspectives.
"He was not kind to me to the bitter end and I did not deserve it" Again, I think this is just a "My truth is that I didn't deserve it". It doesn't necessarily follow that he objectively deserved Thjazi's kindness or neutrality, which is what's implied here.
"Any sins that I have would pale in comparison to the things that I have done for him or the things I have seen him do." That is, again, definitely something I think is colored by Bolaire's own alien perception of what he considers right and wrong. What does Bolaire, a being who has gone through what? Three or four bodies in barely a week consider a "sin"? You can view that in one of two ways I think: That Thjazi did such monstrous things that he Horrified the Horror, or that Bolaire has such Blue and Orange Morality that he considers chopping up dead bodies to be an average Tuesday but something like telling a baldfaced lie to be horrendous.
I say that because Bolaire does, in fact, bring up Thjazi being a liar a lot. Thjazi was a trickster, a scoundrel, a thief and liar. And the last one seems to be what Bolaire gnaws at the most: He calls Thjazi deeply manipulative, a deceitful person, he straight up tells Thimble Thjazi was only pretending to tell her everything while lying to everyone else. I genuinely wonder if Thjazi's capacity for lying is something Bolaire finds so deeply distasteful that that rings as a greater "sin" than Bolaire living "honestly" as himself.
Combined with all this is the objective fact that we have absolutely no reason to believe Thjazi was aware that Bolaire isn't actively malevolent. Antiheroes and heroes alike work with evil artifacts for the greater good all the time; Vox Machina is a great example with the Sword of Kas.
From the outside looking in:
Thjazi meets Bolaire at Hal's place. Learns that Bolaire is a sentient artifact that has killed people, including fellow revolutionaries, and who wears people. He has absolutely zero idea why Bolaire is hanging around his brother. He has absolutely zero idea what Bolaire is doing. He only has history to fall back on: Bolaire kills people. Bolaire wears people. Bolaire is getting awfully chummy with Hal and seems entirely too interested in the theater.
He doesn't speak directly with Bolaire because he has no idea if Bolaire can put the mask on Thjazi himself. Better safe than sorry. He sends Thimble because she's too small to be forcibly masked and can get away swiftly if needed.
He does what he can to keep Hal out of it, in deference to Hal's request from years earlier, and blackmails Bolaire into not telling Hal anything. He presumably makes not wearing another body a requirement for Bolaire, which makes sense in the context of dealing with a malevolent artifact: You try to limit the damage they can do outside of your control.
We know that Bolaire is a PC. We know he's got a rich inner life and the capacity for benevolence and can be trusted. Thjazi, on the other hand, almost certainly did not. And had no reason to take that chance when Bolaire was hyperfocusing on his brother, of all people.
I don't know. I just. I read that speech again and it got me thinking about how it could be technically true but not entirely accurate, which feels very par for the course for Bolaire. It can be His Truth without necessarily being The Truth.
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