Okay not to actually get insane about Corbeau but like.
Imagine growing up in the shadow of a man you look up to as benevolent and aspirational, the only man who ever did you any good in your life. Loosing touch with him as you grow up and build your own life. And then seeing him become something unrecognizable, doing something terrible, world endingly genocidally terrible, and not being able to understand it for a single second. Standing in the aftermath of that and wondering if you could've been one of the people he led down that path with him, if you could've been convinced to commit yourself to something so awful in all of your youthful anger at the world.
Looking around at your life and realizing in certain ways that you have built it in his image. You are a leader like him, with followers like him, who you provide for like him. You do good for people where you can and in that pursuit occasionally also do awful things, not world endingly genocidally terrible things, but things you know are not good, that you have let happen bc they still allow you to bring about good in other ways. You wonder no longer if you could've been led down that path as a follower of him but if you could grow bitter like him, cold like him, if those little harms for the greater good could morph into one big terrible action in pursuit of a better, more beautiful world.
You do not understand how he made that leap and it haunts you, but you continue on. Day after day. Little harms. Little goods. Whatever you can manage with the power you've carved for yourself, a power you would not have were it not for his support in your youth.
He is alive, you find out. And you want to ask so bad how he went from the man you knew to that decision you can not square in your mind. But you still can't get that answer because he does not remember. He is not the man you knew in your youth, comfort and warmth and the support you needed at your lowest, and he is not the terrible terrible man you regarded as a stranger for the many years you thought he was gone. Now he is a true stranger. So you do not ask. You continue business as usual.
