it’s funny you mention taliesin specifically in regards to this, because while you’re right that he’s a very good person, there’s two traits that find their way into every single one of his characters - the overwhelming attitude that they’re in the right (or if they realise they’re not in the right, they don’t think twice about doing it anyway), and finding a certain glee in knowing someone’s mistakes are going to lead to their downfall, but sitting back and watching it anyway. (literally, all three of them have at some point seen a plan about to go badly wrong, and instead of doing something about it, have said something to the effect of “we’re all about to learn a valuable lesson here”)
and like, those are very much tal traits too, he’s just, been around long enough to learn how to be kind and respectful to other people, but those flaws still come out in every flawed character he writes (and every character he writes is very flawed, but for some reason the fandom kinda has an aversion to seeing them?)
like, tal is very vocal about when his characters fuck up, because of that tendency of the fandom to make taliesin’s kid the perfect baby. he was constantly trying to drive home how terrible a person percy was, because everyone just saw the angst and decided to conveniently ignore the irreparable violence percy wrought on the world (or considered it only in how the guilt affected percy). and don’t get me wrong i love him too but like, kid fucked up. still has a lot of fucked up traits. gonna take a while to get over that.
it’s been a while since i watched episode 18, but as far as i recall when molly was doing the hotel shit, taliesin was apologising out of character? because he knew that’s not how you act like a good person, but a part of molly didn’t know and a part of him didn’t care so he did it
even caduceus has a lot more of that vicious justice and “everything i say is right” streak than most people acknowledge? like he’s kind and empathetic and all that but he will let you walk into a trap he knew was there just so you’ll know not to do it again, and definitely has a kinda “everyone will come around to my way of thinking eventually” point of view on the group (not me bashing caduceus i love him a lot but also flaws make characters interesting)
but anyway back to molly. a lot of people in the notes are using this as an excuse to hate molly, some people are offering their own elaborations on this which are always an interesting read. i definitely don’t think molly is hateworthy because of this (i’ll admit, i haven’t read a lot of molly fic because of that tendency for him to be overly mischaracterized), because like, it doesn’t outweigh the fact that he has plenty of moments of kindness and goodness. people just, in the wake of his death, choose to focus more on the good or what they thought was the good and less on his tendency to ask forgiveness not permission and then decide he doesn’t need forgiveness either
and that’s fair. everyone’s welcome to remember the good (funerals are good for that. remembering molly was dedicated to leaving every town better than he found it is a lot more comforting than remembering his frequent boundary issues, or with vax as well, everyone described him as “the best of us” where i bet very few members of vox machina would have called him that a few months earlier). but also yeah character flaws are interesting and we do a disservice to the complexity of mollymauk when ignoring them (and especially writing him as the dramatic gay flirty archetype when, he’s not. elements of it are there, but molly is not charming, and molly rarely resorts to non magical charm because he’s not good at it. he’s sharp and prickly and WEIRD and he knows it and makes no effort to hide it. too wide smile full of sharp teeth is far more his MO than charming grin)
i think tal put a lot of really interesting things in there, honestly. here’s another trait constant across all taliesin characters - some level of naivety towards the world, they haven’t experienced it, or experienced it only recently, they’re too young mentally for what people expect of a body their age, and they’re floundering a little. molly’s only two years old, and the entirety of his experience on this planet has been learning that the circus are His Friends, and everyone outside the circus are Not Friends.
he explored the discrimination against tieflings a lot more than jester has - jester doesn’t realise it’s a thing, and laura doesn’t seem interested in exploring it, so matt’s mostly dropped any consequences of it, but that was a very central part of molly. you see a lot of people in the first two arcs be outright rude or cruel to him without caring, because he’s a tiefling. molly gets instantly protective over jester and speaks up on her behalf in the first arc, because he knows if they can’t solve that murder, everyone’s going to pin it on the tieflings and call it a day. he’s got a very “fine, if you’re only gonna see me as a devil, i’ll fucking act like one” attitude to a lot of people. when it comes down to it, a lot of molly’s character is that he a) learned how to socialise from a bunch of deeply fucked up, damaged people in the circus, and b) has learned from repetitive experience that, up until the m9, the circus are the only people who’ve ever had his back
the fact that he’s still empathetic to everyone in the towns they visit (wanting to be kind to people, leaving gifts) shows how good a person he is on some level, and how much better he had the potential to be. despite the first two years of his life not being at all easy, he still sees the good in everyone and the beauty in everything and he’s a very likeable person. but one thing he needed to learn was better self control and respect for people, because when they first met him he was running on the assumption that the circus would forgive him for most things and the people outside of the circus didn’t matter, so he didn’t need to worry about it. he could learn not to do that. i think he was learning, just didn’t have enough time to do so
but yeah i definitely think he’s a far more layered character than most of what’s left around the fandom these days
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