honestly my favorite thing about hardison is that he has no real tragic backstory, he's just like "i am very smart and therefore i should be allowed to do crime" and he's entirely correct
i love everyone reblogging this going "yeah! soft boy!" in the tags bc that's my other favorite thing about hardison (i have many) and that's that he's never particularly treated as morally grey bc he is constantly so kind and loving and good and also he enjoys some crime
parker: i have severe psychological trauma and i steal things to cope bc i don't know how to relate to people
eliott: i have a tragic history being entangled in the mafia and even now i could kill the most dangerous fighters without firing a gun
hardison: if money is fake, why not for me and my grandma who i love? :)
Yes!! I love Hardison's orientation towards right and wrong, in part because it's such a fun, powerful contrast with other members of the team.
You have Parker, who has been designated as bad and wrong since she was a very young child and who has let go of any expectation of being anything else, so that identifying and doing what she thinks is the right thing is consistently an overwhelming and scary experience for her;
Then there's Eliot, who can point to exactly when and how he became irredeemable in his own eyes and whose highest ambition now is to do the wrong thing for the right people this time at least;
Nate, who is clinging to all of these ideas about morality and legality and good and bad that are completely inconsistent both internally and with his behavior, because his very normative view of the world was shattered and he never put the pieces back together in any kind of coherent way;
Sophie, who sees right and wrong as primarily about relationships between people, like she does everything else: right and wrong is in how you engage and who you hurt interpersonally, anything more abstract is irrelevant. But within that, there's also this weight to how she engages, this sense of regret at how she's treated people in the past that we never really see the full scope of;
And into this morass of regret and alienation and self-doubt, beautiful sunshine child Alec Hardison sails with this completely coherent, straightforward understanding: he's doing the right thing. He understands the systems creating and maintaining inequality and he's winning against them. He doesn't feel bad at all about breaking the law because he doesn't respect it as having any moral weight, and why should he? He's right. Y'all I love him so much.
