(was thinking yesterday about how kcd has this clear—not unique, certainly, but particularly pressing—problem where it needs to express both the norms and standards of its world, the things that its inhabitants understand and believe about their lives, and also the realities. what people expect and what actually happens are, as always, two different pieces; we need to understand both, and the writing is too subtle and too good to just have characters going 'wow this is surprising!' all the time. it uses hans, a character who is young and inexperienced but not stupid or naive, to handle a good part of this, i think: we get to see very explicitly the movement from "this is what i have been taught" to "this is what i have learned."
specifically about what a nobleman Is and Does—a lot of what hans says very much does reflect accepted standards of behaviour, the way they get written down in books. but also it's obviously bullshit and people did not, or did not always, live that way, especially at the smudgy margins. putting it into the mouth of a young man who is obviously trying to assert himself and find his voice, who is acting freely on his own agency for perhaps the first time and who is finding that things are not happening as he was assured they would—who is therefore helplessly reiterating the way it's supposed to be, the things that he expects and feels he's owed—idk it's both very nice character writing and an excellent way to orient you to the world without either giving everyone Modern Values or presenting a fiction which takes didactic materials as descriptive.
also ties into my theory that dry devil is a weird mirror for hans, alternately reinforcing and undercutting ideas about what nobility is.)
#i like that these two things coexist in the story: i) hans struggling to understand the complexity/nuance of some ideals (some #of which a modern audience might some have a flattened idea of themselves). how differently they can take shape. but also #ii) hans struggling to accept that the things he learned and took seriously are often discarded entirely or doctrine is at most #something people pay lip service to while acting in-self interest. opposing sides drawing arguments from the same pool of justifications. #(which gets at what you said in the post wrt reality and behaviour not aligning with written rules) #henry learns a lot too but doesn’t hit the same way. commoners had less formal education and personal stake in the way the 3 #estates business was justified ( — @turbotrout )
exactly, exactly, you've put it so cleanly! henry's so interesting as well because of course as an rpg protagonist he's a very flexible character, but there's a core of personality that persists regardless of player choices—imo every option available to the player is something that some version of henry would do (not to say he'd be satisfied with the consequences). personally i see him as someone who already understands a good deal about what the world is really like in terms of class relations (i suspect radzig’s hand, if not his presence, in henry’s upbringing, and there's a whole aside here about radzig's own social position in relation to, say, hanush)—i think he’s very good, generally speaking, at knowing when to bow and scrape and when to steal the candlesticks. he does not, for instance, seem to feel much moral conflict about disobeying the direct order to stay in talmberg—we don't get an antigone moment about the reconciliation of mortal and divine law, here; he just goes.
the way henry treats hans, with an occasionally pointed lack of deference, is of course very much a mark of his personal respect and affection, though i think it takes hans a while to figure that out—and hans’s anxiety about not being able to assert his own authority makes him at times uncomfortable with henry’s honesty, even while he craves and desires it, because some part of him fears that it’s not a reflection of friendship but of hans’s own inability to demonstrate appropriate power in his social position-masculinity-adulthood. he is very much struggling with that throughout the second game, even as he's coming to understand the way—again, wonderfully put—opposing sides draw arguments from the same pool of justifications. (henry is also coming to understand this, but where hans is learning that birth and blood are not the foundations of the world, i think henry is learning that good and evil are tremendously exploitable ideas—as well as how best to present himself to power in order to get what he wants. and of course part of that is how to speak to and about hans in the presence of others of various ranks in a way that reflects well on hans, both because he cares increasingly deeply about him and because this too is part of henry's own optimal social positioning.)
there's a lot you wrote here that i nodded my head at and decided i wanted on my blog too (learning about good and evil being exploitable - yes!). but also you raised something i’d hadn’t considered in the couple months i’ve been rotating henry in my brain: him intentionally optimizing his social position. probably an oversight on my part (istvan voice you’re just like meeee). i'm biased towards thinking of it as something self-serving or unsavoury but it is really a resource like any other! one that henry might be particularly adept at fostering. even the most chivalrous defender-of-all henry would benefit from improved social standing -- perhaps more so, since everyone must be convinced to do the noble thing.
and now that i think of it: while playing kcd1 i was struck by how frequently charisma-based speech checks involved henry leveraging his employment under radzig, sometimes overselling his importance — even for quests/conversations that had nothing to do with radzig at all. (actually felt mild embarrassment at times). so this tracks! henry is not an ends justify the means kind of guy but he IS inclined to use whatever tools are at his disposal — he hates feeling powerless to the point of refusing to acknowledge when he actually is powerless. better stock that arsenal 💪
fwiw i don’t think that henry opportunistically glazing hans in public (and thus himself) detract at all from what he feels about him. i think this also has some interesting implications for what henry gets for being associated with hans vs radzig — radzig has considerable influence but henry is truly in his service. compared to his bizarrely (but gorgeously) symbiotic partnership with hans which empowers both of them
