Writing Daud for fanfics is always a very interesting experience to me. He has a manner of speech that I find to be very intriguing, and when I started playing his DLC (after having never read anything written by him, nor heard him speak in my first playthrough of Dh1), I was surprised by how well-spoken he is, because I wasn't really expecting it. I don't even know how to describe what I find so fascinating about the way they've written him, but it gives him a very strong character, and it tells you a lot about the way he sees both the world and himself. He's descriptive in his speech in a way that's almost dramatic, and yet it doesn't feel overexaggerated. Just... Raw, honest, and almost artistic in its imagery. He's not verbose or supercilious, like Kirin Jindosh, but you can tell when he speaks that he's intelligent, likely well-educated, and very candid. This is not - as I first assumed of his character when I knew almost nothing of him - an assassin who relies on raw power and unfeeling cruelty. Daud is a man who feels very much, and thinks even more. He's smart, cunning, observant. It seems to me that most of what he feels is contempt for both himself and the world around him. He can recognize injustice and corruption, and yet he still participates in it because he is, at the end of the day, both deeply pragmatic and very self-serving. He is honest about what he is, and in a game where honesty and deceit are very important to the story, that makes him stand out in a cast of characters who are largely deceitful and insincere to varying degrees. See also his "I never lied to you" line during his duel with Corvo. He is mostly honest, if secretive, and he knows very well that he's a man who does what he has to do to gain power and coin regardless of who he has to cut down along the way.
I believe that to be the reason why his DLC and his decision to hunt down Delilah and save Emily from her is so impactful- he goes against his values to go out of his way to help someone else, and it is precisely because he feels so deeply and has such a sense of guilt over what he's done that he does this. The fact that he decides to atone for his greatest sin rather than ignore it or excuse it is what makes his character arc so wonderful. He hits rock bottom when he kills Jessamine, and instead of wallowing in his misery, he does something about it once the Outsider gives him a goal to focus on. We know from the way he speaks of himself that he's very aware of what he is and what he's done (ex: wondering if he's the one who has rotted inside, commenting to Delilah's statue that history will likely not remember any of the Marked, even him, and asking Corvo if he's accomplished more than him or much less), and it's clear that he doesn’t have a good opinion of himself. He's under no illusion about the fact that he's a feared killer with enough blood on his hands to replace all the water in the Wrenhaven with it, and while he doesn’t necessarily choose to change entirely (as we can see in DotO), he does choose to "make up" for some of the things he's done in his own way.
What was I talking about again? Something about how well-spoken he is? Oops. Went a little off topic there.
Anyway. I am by no means a Daud apologist, contrary to what other (less serious) posts on my blog might suggest. He's not a good man, and he's one of the villains in the story of Dishonored. But he's also a fascinatingly complicated character with a lot of depth put into him, and as such, writing him is always a (fun) challenge for me. I also happen to be one of the few (or so it seems to me) people who actually love what DotO did with Daud's character arc, but that's another post for another day.
Yeah, I just really love Daud. In my opinion, he's the most well-written character in the entire series, and he has the most consistent characterization to me, even in DotO. I'm planning on writing a long essay about him in the future, because a dozen separate Tumblr posts just isn't working for what I have to say about him.
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