No, actually, I do want to talk about it.
I think there is a genuinely interesting conversation to be had about Bolaire, masculinity, neurodivergent coding, gender nonconformity, and the way that being perceived as “socially off-putting” can become moralised by an audience.
And before somebody gets mad at me for something I have not actually said: no, I am not saying that everybody who dislikes Bolaire is ableist. I am not diagnosing Bolaire with anything and I am DEFINITELY not diagnosing Taliesin Jaffe with anything. I am also not saying that you are morally obligated to like the fictional murder mask lest the fandom police arrive at your house.
You can dislike him! He is deliberately abrasive! He is a dickhead and an arsehole! He murders people!
We have all been over this.
However, what I am interested in is the language people use when explaining why they distrust him, particularly when that language stops being about anything Bolaire has actually done and starts becomes things like:
“He thinks he knows better than everyone.”
“He doesn't react normally.”
“He makes everything uncomfortable.”
“I don't know, there's just something about him.”
Because those are different kinds of statements. They may originate in the text, but they aren't arguments about particular actions so much as affective judgments which can very quickly become moral ones.
“I don't trust Bolaire because he lies” is a textual argument.
“I don't trust Bolaire because he kills people” is a textual argument.
“I think Bolaire is being unfair to Thjazi because X, Y and Z contradict his version of events” is a textual argument.
“He just gives me bad vibes” is something else.
And I think it is worth asking what, exactly, those vibes are.
Because Bolaire is profoundly socially strange.
He isn't human. He isn't even a conventional living creature. He is a sentient object who has spent seventy years observing personhood from the outside and trying, with varying degrees of success, to participate in it. He frequently seems to understand human behaviour intellectually before he understands it intuitively. He can identify extraordinarily complicated emotional dynamics while completely failing to recognise the ordinary social expectation happening directly in front of him.
He is simultaneously hyper-perceptive and socially oblivious.
He can be incredibly articulate about somebody else's emotional state and then say something so catastrophically inappropriate that everyone at the table looks like they want to crawl under it.
And I, personally, love it a lot. To me, very good television.
There is something deeply compelling to me about a character who appears to have learned personhood almost anthropologically. Bolaire watches people. He studies them. He collects information about them. He understands patterns. He has developed an extraordinary appreciation for the ridiculous complexity of living creatures.
But knowing about people and knowing how to be a person are not the same skill.
And that distinction produces a character who is very easily read through the language of neurodivergent coding without requiring Bolaire to secretly possess a fantasy DSM diagnosis (and we're simply not going to get into the weedy can of worms the DSM is as a diagnostic tool just by itself).
He is frequently too intense, too direct, and too strange. He doesn't always perform the expected emotion at the expected moment. He fixates and intellectualises, and he sometimes seems to have trouble approaching interpersonal relationships as something that comes naturally, rather than a series of systems and static rules he can learn and execute (pun intended) with a predictable and guaranteed effect on the intendee. He can miss something everyone else considers obvious while noticing something nobody else has noticed at all. There is something particularly poignant about a constructed being apparently expecting personhood to operate like another function he can eventually learn to perform correctly, only to discover that people are inconsistent, contradictory, and constantly changing the rules.
And crucially, he knows that other people find him strange. Sometimes he weaponises it. At other times, he seems genuinely wounded by it. And much like the “regular people” he observes and admires, there can be very little rhyme or reason to which way that particular stale bread crumbles on any given day.
Sometimes he appears to have accepted that this is simply the price of being Bolaire, other days, he is infuriated that he is not granted the same space, grace, and personhood as the others around him.
This is where the discourse becomes interesting to me, because audiences are generally pretty comfortable with “weird” characters when their weirdness is reassuring rather than threatening or passes the point of no return in terms of social acceptability.
The awkward genius can be ultimately harmless. The quirky autistic-coded character's eccentricities are cute or infantilised. Their heart is pure. They're just a strange little guy who needs protecting.
Bolaire is not reassuring. He is not innocent.
He is socially strange AND dangerous.
He is vulnerable AND manipulative.
He misunderstands people AND sometimes understands them frighteningly well.
He has been used AND he uses people.
He can be profoundly loving AND profoundly cruel.
You cannot resolve your discomfort with him by discovering that underneath all the weirdness is a perfectly conventional Good Person, because there isn't one.
And this is also where we get into the gender of it all because another thing that sets Bolaire apart, is that he's not particularly interested in performing masculinity in a way designed to reassure anybody.
He is theatrical, decorative, and frequently quite camp in a way that he clearly enjoys performing and inflicting on people in turn. He is comfortable in femininity and beauty, and comfortable occupying positions that conventional masculinity often treats as humiliating or diminishing. His presentation is entirely uninterested in demonstrating that he is sufficiently masculine to other men.
And I think people underestimate how much social permission conventional masculinity provides.
A man can be aggressive, arrogant, emotionally withholding, domineering, even frightening, and those qualities remain culturally legible. We know what that kind of man is. Fiction has spent centuries teaching us how to read him.
The strange, feminine, theatrical man is often treated quite differently.
His masculinity itself becomes suspicious. His emotionality becomes manipulative. His theatricality becomes dishonesty. His intelligence becomes smugness. His attention to other people becomes invasive. His unconventional social behaviour becomes creepiness. His femininity becomes weakness right up until it becomes threatening, at which point it becomes perversity.
“This person makes me uncomfortable (they don't perform gender correctly)” can very quickly become “there is something morally wrong with this person” without consciously deciding to make that leap.
Again: THIS DOES NOT MEAN EVERYBODY WHO DISLIKES BOLAIRE SECRETLY HATES FEMININE MEN.
Please develop reading comprehension before sending that ask.
What it means is that fiction does not exist outside the culture reading it, and audiences bring cultural assumptions about what trustworthy people look and sound like into their interpretations.
Which becomes particularly interesting when Bolaire is placed against a male character who is easier to read through conventional masculine archetypes, such Thjazi, who exists within a fairly legible “lovable rogue, arsehole with a heart of gold, complicated man, veteran, and leader” combined archetype, who has the added bonus of being a very legibly handsome man in a traditionally masculine way.
The irony is that cultural legibility can make genuinely dangerous behaviour feel less alarming. We know the swaggering rogue. We know the gruff soldier. We know the emotionally constipated man with a heart of gold. Their roughness comes with a cultural instruction manual telling us where we're supposed to find the tenderness underneath it. The feminine, theatrical, socially peculiar man is not necessarily given that same grace.
That doesn't mean Thjazi actually is any safer, kinder, or more trustworthy than Bolaire. It means audiences already possess a well-developed cultural vocabulary for understanding a man like Thjazi. Simply put, that one masculinity may feel familiar. The other feels strange. And familiarity is very, very easy to mistake for safety.
This is also where I think there is a separate conversation worth having about Taliesin.
SEPARATE being the operative word.
Bolaire is a fictional character. Taliesin is an actual human being whom none of us know personally, and I am not interested in diagnosing him, psychoanalysing him, or pretending I possess secret information about his internal life because I have watched him play Dungeons & Dragons.
But Taliesin is, publicly and observably, an alternative man who has spent years being extremely comfortable with aesthetics and modes of presentation that also aren't particularly invested in conventional masculinity.
And the fandom has been very weird about that from the word jump! (I was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago ... )
I don't think we need to invent anything about his private identity to talk about the public response to his public presentation.
There has long been a particular flavour of criticism directed toward Taliesin that isn't simply “I don't enjoy his characters” or “I disagree with this choice.” It's the idea that he's pretentious. That he's trying too hard. That he thinks he's cleverer than everybody else. That he's deliberately being obscure. That he's performing.
And maybe sometimes you just find a performer annoying! God knows there are performers I cannot stand for reasons that would disintegrate under interrogation.
But when the same cluster of accusations follows both performer and characters despite enormous differences between those characters, I become interested in the pattern.
Especially because “pretentious” is so often an accusation levelled at people who are visibly trying something, whether that be trying aesthetically, intellectually, or artistically.
The conventional guy wearing a T-shirt is just wearing clothes. The alternative guy who has clearly thought about his clothes is “trying too hard.”
The conventionally masculine guy being confident is charismatic. The strange feminine guy being confident is smug.
The former is allowed to occupy space without explaining why he deserves it.
The latter's visibility itself can start feeling like arrogance.
And then Taliesin creates Bolaire, who is quite literally a performance mask.
This character, whose face and entire being is nothing but an artificial object that exists at the intersection of person and performance, who has spent decades negotiating whether he is a person or a thing, played by a performer whose characters and public aesthetic have repeatedly attracted accusations of artificiality, pretension and excessive theatricality?
I am going to chew on that!
This isn't even touching on how “masking” is a term frequently used within the neurodivergent community and the conscious or unconscious performance of socially expected behaviour in order to pass more comfortably through a world designed around different expectations. I don't need to claim Taliesin deliberately constructed that metaphor to notice how extraordinarily productive it becomes when applied to a character who is quite literally a mask trying to work out how to be a person.
And it does NOT mean I think Taliesin sat down and went, “Today I shall create an allegory for everyone who has ever been mean about my hair on Reddit.”
But artists inevitably return to questions that interest them, consciously and unconsciously, and audiences inevitably respond through the baggage they bring with them.
And THAT is where I think Bolaire becomes particularly fascinating.
Because so much of his story appears concerned with the difference between what something is and what other people decide it is.
Person or object. Weapon or victim. Monster or friend. Masculine or feminine. Sincere or performative. Loving or manipulative. Abuser or abused.
And the answer keeps being:
Sometimes it is a horrible, impossible, and uncomfortable yes.
This is also why I am so completely uninterested in reducing the conversation to whether Bolaire Defenders™ or Thjazi Defenders™ have accumulated enough evidence to prove who is the more morally superior man.
That is a thoroughly uninteresting question and premise.
I see a seventy-year-old sentient murder mask who loves people without entirely knowing how to be one. I see a character who can understand someone's soul and completely misunderstand the conversation. I see someone capable of terrible cruelty who nevertheless experiences terrible hurt.
I see someone who is strange and unsettling without the story needing to reassure me that underneath it all, he's actually a perfectly wholesome little guy.
I want to ask why some audiences find certain kinds of masculine danger exciting and charismatic while experiencing other kinds of masculine difference as inherently suspicious.
And not because I think the answer is automatically ‘prejudice,’ either.
Sometimes “bad vibes” really do mean “the text is deliberately telling me something is wrong.” Other times, “bad vibes” mean “this person is violating a social expectation I didn't realise I had.” Sometimes it's both. Or neither.
Regardless, I think we could all benefit from approaching that discomfort with a little more curiosity.
Why does he make me uncomfortable? What expectation is he violating? Is the story asking me to distrust him, or am I bringing that distrust with me?
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