Been chewing on this since a mostly-unrelated convo brought it back to mind yesterday but:
we know Aral's "green silk rooms" line, of course, excellent paragraph:
"The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real."
on the one hand, yeah, very true observation, but I think given the context of what else is going on at that point (that Cordelia and by extension the reader don't find out about until later), I think there's another layer to it.
because that describes the whole Escobar war pretty much exactly. Death wholesale, by the shipload, all for the sake of killing Serg before he can become a nightmare of an emperor and destroying his political allies' popularity so they don't become a problem afterward. sound familiar?
And at the time he says this line, making sure all that happens according to plan is Aral's job. Because Ezar ordered it, and (more importantly) because Ezar convinced him it was necessary. He phrases this in general terms, but I don't think he's actually talking abstractly here, and I don't think he's being a hypocrite given everything else we see of him as a character. He seems to believe - after trying to exhaust other options - that the Escobar plan is necessary, but given how he handles it afterward (drinking, downward spiral, basically suicidal), I don't think he views it as forgivable.
so when he talks about "calm men in beautiful green silk rooms" committing unforgivable acts, I think he means himself.
#fun question: at what point in canon do we think he got over the critical mass of his self-hatred?#because that's obviously why he's drinking when cordelia shows up#and i do think he's transmuted most of it by the time he goes off to sergyar#but what does the graph in between look like#and how does it correspond to miles and gregor#and their own bad moments (southern-continent-skies)
Absolute spitballing here, but I propose: that moment at the end of Vor Game where Gregor stands up to him and says "I'm the Emperor, you listen to me now, not me listen to you".
And maybe that's the point where he let go of the last of it. Because he could finally convince himself that it had, truly, been worth it, and that he'd raised a capable successor to Ezar.
