#redcloak

If Redcloak has no fans, that means I'm dead!

This is an older pic, don't know if I ever shared it. It's hard out there for an Order of the Stick fan, so I gotta share whatever scraps I have with the wider OotS community.

The Dark One can be a bit of a contradictory god, as he does genuinely want the goblins to be better off, but also he's so so so pissed at what happened to him at all times. He wants both to improve the goblin race, but also to get revenge for what happened. Even if I would imagine its justified by him as an idea of "so this can never happen again" by holding the gods hostage so the might of the world can't descend upon the one real city he has, in reality, he wants his revenge for his death.

It also doesn't help that if the world does go kapooey he could just...make goblins again and equal from the start. Admittedly there's a lot The Dark One doesn't know, but from what he does it really does seem like a win win, either he gets his revenge and better goblin protections, or he still gets his revenge in the form of someone basically flipping a game board and then can give goblins a fresh start in a new world.

What I mean: Redcloak is an incredibly smart character who has done terrible things for reasons beyond just personal failing and shame. The reasoning for why Redcloak hasn't done the right thing (and most likely never will) are multifaceted and are genuinely baked in logic that only appears faulty because the reader is privy to a greater understanding of the world than he is. Even if you looked him in the eye and told him the ways in which he is biased towards his conclusion (see Right-Eye) he would not stay his course because in his mind he still has everything to lose and the worst thing that could happen is that he stops and is wrong for doing so.

He poured everything he had into creating a better world for his people and to make all the bloodshed mean something, and it worked. If Redcloak hadn't murdered Right-Eye and stayed with Xykon he AND Right-Eye would most likely be dead and Gobbotopia would not exist. He created a world that wouldn't fall apart without him but he cannot trust in his own success because he is ultimately afraid of failure and what that means.

He can't settle for less than divine endorsement because everything he has ever been from stories, from personal experience, from The Dark One himself- is telling him that it is HIS responsibility to not let The Plan fail. Handing the reins to his god is the only point at which he will accept that the fate of everything is no longer his fault.