After finishing Empire of Gold, I have a lot of thoughts on Dara…. and most of them are that I can’t stand him.
(obviously, spoilers ahead)
When i first read city of brass, I couldnt figure out why i didn’t like dara when he is the exact type of character i would normally fall in love with immediately but from the very beginning i felt very neutral towards him. That quickly changed as i finished cob and by the time i read empire of gold i was getting annoyed every time i had to read one of his chapters.
he has had so many chances to change and doubts about what he is doing but he never changes. dara continues to follow the exact same orders that he has since he was 18 even when he doesn’t think they’re necessarily the right move (though never truly thinking they are wrong) or when he feels like a weapon. and even at the end of eog when he has supposedly changed sides, he doesnt seem to show any differences in beliefs or biases. he shows regret for what happened to the Geziris and the Daevas and he doesn’t like that he was the one to commit acts of genocide but he does not show any sign about changing his mind about the shafit. when nahri accuses his men of sexually assaulting women at qui-zi he is offended for the sole reason that his men would never do that because the women had “lain with shafit” and were considered tainted.
a critical thing to remember is that the tipping point for him was when his own people were murdered.
not the thousand geziri people who were massacred.
not the shafit who were systematically oppressed for hundreds of years.
not even the fact that the woman he loves is also shafit is enough for him to reevaluate his life choices.
it was when he saw his own people facing the same things as everyone else that he started to act against her. actually- he didn’t act against her. he went to kartir and zaynab and told them what happened but then asked zaynab to surrender before it got worse.
“’ [submit to] the rule of a woman who plotted their deaths? who killed their kin and executes her own people?’ ‘Yes,’ dara threw his hands in the air. ‘She is hardly the worst person to sit on that throne!’” (510).
so not even the slaughter of his people was enough. and this was right after he says that “his faith in the nahids finally, fully shattered” (464). is that true if he is still working in her favor and still refuses to do what he can to end the atrocities and kill her? it is only when he becomes enslaved and loses his freedom that he becomes frantic to stop what is happening.
I recognize that he is a very complex character and that all of this started when he was a child and had been raised to listen to the nahids but it is as nahri said:
“And the people at Qui-Zi? the mothers and children you ripped apart? did they not beg you? tell me…tell me how you could look at people-at anyone- hear those cries and not break? tell me how you could do it again. you’re not eighteen anymore, dara. you’ve got centuries on me, and do you know what I did when Manizheh asked me to join her? to view the massacre of innocents as an acceptable price for victory? I turned her down.” (619).
At the same age that dara was when he massacred an entire city because he was ordered to do so, Ali went against his father’s direct orders to help the shafit. The very first time we are introduced to him, he is giving them money to help them get their stolen children back and throughout the entire series ali has continued to do whatever he can to help the shafit and every tribe become equal not caring what happens to himself as a result. He literally planned and enacted a rebellion to overthrow his father because he was not being a good ruler but dara couldn’t stand up to some woman he’s only known for five years simply because of the family she is from.
Again, dara is a complex character and i dont think he is truly bad but he certainly isn’t the uwu baby the fandom (and the book to some extent) seems to have made him out to be. he made his choices again and again and they were the wrong choices. plain and simple. there is no way to excuse going along with genocide and oppression. in the end, it was too little too late.
TL;DR dara literally committed acts of genocide on more than one occasion and even though he had doubts, he didn’t try to stop it until his own people and his freedom were threatened but he’s hot so it’s ok i guess
