all the shades of colours

C4 004 'Against the Forces of Death'

"Good people can do bad things sometimes" is interesting for the topic of a 5th grade book report. Any level beyond that it's kinda like. the baseline for complexity, and not something a mature story needs to waste time establishing explicitly before diving into deeper realms. Like, sure yes, it is more interesting for Thjazi to be complex than it would be for him to be entirely one-dimensional. But CR is not known for producing one-dimensional characters so what would be actually genuinely interesting is if both story and audience could presume "people are more than one thing" is a basic storytelling postulate and proceed from there.

As for the Bolaire of it all: Bolaire takes the attitude that anyone who had a positive relationship with Thjazi is suffering under a delusion of naive hero-worship and he takes it as his job to disabuse them of that notion. He's not the only one with this perspective—Julien said pretty much exactly that—but he's particularly vocal and insistent about it, to the point of being condescending. Even when he seems to think he's being pragmatic, his arguments against trusting Thjazi posthumously are focused much less on any of the issues at hand and much more so on opining his own suffering, and especially this last episode on getting Thimble (and to some extent Mara) to admit they're wrong about Thjazi. The idea that his cynicism is useful or necessary for the story in order to complicate an otherwise unblemished figure and establish Thjazi as multi-faceted falls apart under close analysis.

Thjazi's legacy is already complicated and loaded with baggage for each individual mourning him. It's especially telling that I've yet to see anyone bring up Azune when making a case for Thjazi's dark side. Azune is only an Arcane Marshall as a service to Thjazi, to be his man on the inside, and living this under cover life is killing him from the inside out! Beyond that: Hal has complicated feelings about how his brother shielded him, Thimble is grappling with her identity beyond being his partner in crime—these are all interesting character arcs which take as postulate that Thjazi was a complicated figure capable of fighting for noble ideals and of causing harm while doing so. If Bolaire's vague references to cruel and dehumanizing treatment (from a character who has repeatedly displayed both those tendencies himself, no less) are seriously meant to balance out our view of Thjazi or prove that everyone else has rose-tinted glasses, then it's pretty sloppy storytelling, and a disservice to the other characters' internal arcs.