cuno doesn't fucking care

Are you a Soldier? On a quest for justice or revenge? Ready to fight and flee and raise your weapons?

Are you a Seeker, searching for something lost? Something that needs to be found before it is too late.

Or are you a Schemer? Do you have a day job that needs work and night shifts that keep you up until dawn doing the hard work it takes to change fates?

Show me your results! I wanna seeeeeeee

Azune Nayar is someone whose childhood and youth were marked by adults who, faced with bad choices, made the less-worse one because they cared about him.

His parents starved themselves to give him and his sister the chance of being recruited as child soldiers by a mercenary group, because that was the only way to protect him from starvation.

Thjazi Fang saw a child abandoned by the roadside, desperately, determinedly, and implausibly claiming he could fight. Thazi Fang was in the middle of waging a rebellion against the powers of Araman. That rebellion wasn’t the best place for a child of twelve. But it was a better place than abandoned by the roadside or picked up by another mercenary group, and Thjazi cared, so Thjazi took him in and assigned him to noncombat work away from the front lines.

By 15 Azune was fighting on the front lines. (In an earlier war, the same was true of Thazi at that age.)

Thjazi’s rebellion failed. He asked his brother Hal to look out for the teenage Azune. Hal did so, treating Azune as part of his family. Hal did the same for other people who needed it. Being like family wasn’t the same as being Hal’s kid.

The tragedy of Azune isn’t that he was failed or abandoned or uncared for or used. The tragedy of Azune is that the best that people who cared about him could give him still wasn’t the same as what he needed, because being an adult doesn’t make you all-powerful. Azune’s problems weren’t created by those who loved him. They were created by the world he lives in.

Azune lived his adult life for the Torn Banner because it was the life he knew; or out of loyalty; or because they were the ones trying to change that world into something different.

He offers understanding and empathy to enemies (Julien) and strangers (Vaelus). He learned that somewhere.

sorcerers are just a fact of the setting. they're not evil because they're sorcerers and they're not sorcerers because they're evil. sorcerers exist because of ancient pacts or boons or a chance of biology or simply being born in proximity to magical places, and that's clear in all of the sundered house mythos. i think speculating that the ancient versions of the sundered houses got their magic nefariously is falling into the "some things are Just Evil." we can't assume that because the human sorcerers of modern aramán are engaging in class warfare, their ancestors were wicked.

there are sundered houses who took the heroic position of defying the shapers during the shapers war. the priestly houses are rotten not because sorcerers are rotten but because wealth and resource hoarding and the dismissive carelessness they treat mortal life with is evil. otto einfasen isn't evil because he's an einfasen, he's evil because he took a commoner girl's head off with a hammer. and there's endless nuance to be found here: the einfasens are nominally allied with the protagonists, but it doesn't render them heroic, they're still canonically authoritarians. the royces are complicit in every evil done by the sundered houses for the last 70 years, but they are inexorably tied to the heroes in a positive way and are making active efforts to break away from the evil system.

additionally: assuming that the primordials were bad because they wed the shapers is a big leap. the shapers murdered them. thaisha saw the desecration of tehana's shrine in favor of trozhna as wrong and insulting. if it were one evil covering another, it would not have been impactful to notice the desecration. the primordials might have been a neutral or evil force on the world, we don't actually know, but they are a part of the foundation of the world, so it's more likely that forces of nature are simply a neutral concept.

aramán is a setting where evil consistently is shown to be an active choice. even the shapers. there is no indication that they were just born bad. they chose to come to aramán, kill the primordials and repress the population, turning them into playthings in their sibling squabbles as they bent the world to their will. those are the reasons they are evil, not because they come from Evil Land.