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It's been said before and I'm sure it'll be said again, Brennan isn't a subtle storyteller. I don't necessarily know if I think he's incapable of it, but I do think he's not interested in it. There's a reason he keeps looking at the camera and saying "you can't prove this is an allegory!," he tells stories with a moral POV, often centering on class, and he likes it when the audience picks up on that. Which isn't to say he isn't capable of infusing moral nuance into his stories. He definitely is! But it is to say that 31 episodes in, we know what kinds of moral nuance he wants CR4 to be exploring through its NPCs. And I believe we've got four categories of it:

Why don't people act against oppressive systems? We've got a couple different forms of this. There's the people that are comfortable in the status quo and unwilling to recognize the problems with it or summon the will to dive into discomfort. Our "nice" nobility falls into this category, but so do people like Azune's Captain Fazir. There's the people that are too afraid to act in a significant way like Bolaire's fellow curator Makmaz. And then there's people like the various unnamed Magpies, who simply have more immediate concerns, such as feeding themselves and their families.

When do the ends justify the means? What terrible things are we willing to do/accept in order to do a greater good? This is Thjazi! This a major part of Thjazi's role in the narrative and what he symbolizes! This is also Mara, and the fairies in the Hollow. I also think the druids and their historic neutrality fall more into this category than the first one. If the Bolaire-Thjazi conflict is executed well, this is where it will live. And I still have a lot of hope that it will be executed well. I know there've been some concerns about Taliesin's play and bts statements, and I share some of those. But I do think this train is still very much on the tracks and Taliesin, with some assistance from Brennan and Laura, probably, can still very easily bring it safely to the station. For my money, the most likely scenario is "how could Thjazi justify to himself collaborating with a mask that had declared itself judge, jury, and executioner of petty criminals and was gleefully torturing them to build a comfortable life for himself." I think that's already been set up a little with Thimble's "have you considered he might have been afraid of you." But if we want a darker read on Thjazi, it could also be that he knew Bolaire would have to be sacrificed to restore the halfling afterlife and was doing everything he could to create emotional distance for himself about it.

Related to 2, but I want to class it separately because it's contained less in what the NPCs do and more in the options they present to the PCs: When do you align yourself with a lesser evil to defeat a greater one? This is mostly the Einfassens, but it could also be Termina.

How does one reconcile the good an institution can do with the corruption involved in running it? Candescent Creed is a big one here. So are the lingering worshipers of the Shapers. The Penteveral also plays around this idea.

Those are the moral ambiguities Brennan is exploring in this campaign as a DM. The good guys and bad guys are very clear. The abusers in the story look like Primus, Yanessa, Azgra, and Sylandri. There's no ambiguity there. Thjazi is a good man with questionable methods. Nothing about the story Brennan is telling is interested in asking "but what if he were also a bad guy too?" And if it did try to ask that question after more than 31 episodes, it would feel weird and out of place. Brennan would have to suddenly develop a much gentler touch to handle it gracefully, and it would change the entire tenor of the story.

That doesn't mean there's no room for other kinds of moral ambiguity. Julien, Occtis, Bolaire himself is the biggest one. But it's all coming from the PCs. I just reblogged a post that mentioned how we probably won't get to see Ethrand Tachonis grow beyond his abuse the way Occtis probably will by virtue of Occtis being a PC, and yeah, that sums it up. We get to spend a different kind of time with PCs that allows for deeper dives into moral nuance than NPCs do. They are also piloted by different people. Brennan has made clear what moral ambiguities he's interested in exploring with this story, but he's not the only one telling it, and he's happy to facilitate what others want to explore within their own PCs psyche and relationship to the world.

Going back to Brennan's style with this campaign, I've talked before about the fact that symbolism is pretty hard to do in Actual Play because you need player buy-in for it to really work. Which is why all the symbolism Brennan is doing has been with flashing neon signs (think bird hell). And flashing neon signs don't have a ton of nuance. This is what I'm talking about when I talk about Thjazi as a symbol. Brennan set up everything Thjazi was symbolically in the opening scene in as heavy-handed a way as he possibly could. A criminal, accused of theft and murder alongside his more bullshit charges, apologizing for keeping his distance from a friend, being executed under the guardian wall, calling out about the Falcon's Cry. And it has allowed the players to run with him as a symbol. Most recently and beautifully in Liam's ending to Kothar'ai.

I feel like this is perhaps why the conversation in C3 fan spaces has primarily moved to the adulation of Ludinus. Unless it's shortly after a new Bells Hells one-shot, in which case the conversation turns to the typical insecure braggadocio about how they're obviously better than any other party, the fandom response for Bells Hells themselves is mostly screenshots and video clips without commentary beyond the usual bland cooing that always accompanied them. It is Ludinus who now occupies the C3 fan imagination. The problem is, there's not much of a remaining story about him to be had. He was a man who spent a millennium working towards the death of the gods. He failed miserably because his plan was completely reliant on either the cooperation of Ruidusborn or the forcible seizing of their powers. He failed to earn the former nor achieve the latter, and it is now likely permanently out of his reach. He seems to cling now to the consolation prize of Catatheosis, and to Bells Hells, who do not seem to care for him at all.

It is the adulation that's most puzzling - it's neither the fond "just a silly guy" failboy type of blorbo-fication, nor the "step on me" villain fandom. It is, frankly, a desperate and pathetic cling similar to his own, to the only significant character who still thinks killing the gods was a good idea, and who was not permanently killed by Bells Hells some time prior to the story's endgame nor is dead at the hands of the unambiguously triumphant Vox Machina and Mighty Nein.

The thing about Ludinus is that once the mystery of his past is revealed, he becomes rather dull. He has the sort of backstory that lets people claim he's sympathetic but which is canceled out by his complete failure to learn a single lesson from it in his thousand years of life. He is single-minded but unprincipled, intelligent on paper yet bizarrely easily foiled, a charismatic cult leader whom no one really likes and really only a couple of people fear. His master plan is to sic an ancient evil on the gods in an event that is all but guaranteed to be even more catastrophic than the inciting incident that led to his own trauma. He reminds me of the protagonist of To Build a Fire, who freezes to death in the Yukon territory, killed by the harsh climate but doomed to that fate by a lack of imagination. Like any cheap grifter he promises something so vague that the suckers born each minute, some during Ruidus flares, latch onto it, and like any cheap grifter he fails to deliver but rather claims it was all part of the plan before absconding with what little he still has.