okay. i think when i say “logan’s writing is copaganda” a lot of ppl assume i just mean that he’s a cop and he’s likeable. but it’s a lot more than that. so let’s talk about logan.
he’s a captain of the seraph—seemingly the highest-ranking, but it’s possible he just has de facto outsized influence bc he’s closest to the queen. he’s a powerful guy!
we don’t get a ton of insight into what his job looks like day-to-day, or what his officers and krytan civilians think about him, besides that they like his hair. (who doesn’t?) but what we do see of his behavior on duty is… hm. well.
in level 10 personal story, logan brings a noble human PC with him on a raid on minister zamon’s house, suspecting zamon of collaborating with bandits. he doesn’t have a warrant or strong argument of probable cause.
Interacting with the door:
Maid: Is someone out there? What do you want?
let’s review. logan gets you, also a civilian, to help him force an illegal entry into a suspect’s house, letting you do the talking so that the consequences of lawbreaking, if any, will not fall on him. following his lead, you can:
➡️ threaten to kill the suspect’s house staff
➡️ threaten to arrest the staff for “obstruction”
➡️ use the vaguest possible wording to manipulate the maid into opening the door for you
once you get inside, logan encourages you to destroy zamon’s property out of spite even though zamon hasn’t been convicted of a crime and you’re both there on a “routine investigation.”
Logan Thackeray: If you find anything breakable, break it. This dandy needs a few more setbacks in his life.
when zamon is brought to court and initiates a trial by combat, logan begs you to choose him as your second so he can personally kill the accused:
Logan Thackeray: As a Seraph captain, I can’t really jump around saying, “Pick me! Pick me!” But I can certainly think it.
he also says outright that he plans to murder zamon if he’s found innocent:
Logan Thackeray: I’m a loyal servant of the crown, but if Zamon gets off, I’m going to take matters into my own hands.
in another level 10 PS route, the human street rat can say they want to become a vigilante and kill “a lot of vicious punks” (gang members) on the streets of divinity’s reach. logan’s reply:
Logan Thackeray: If you’re serious, I’d like to take you up on that. Unofficially, of course. I need more friends like you, who know how to get a job done. What do you say?
this is obviously illegal, and manipulative; it’s clear that his status awes the PC and makes them eager to please him, since your response is:
➡️ Are you kidding? Me, friends with the Captain of the Seraph? I’d be honored.
he is absolutely abusing his power here.
earlier in the same instance, logan delivered a line that has stuck in my head for fully a decade:
Logan Thackeray: Prison’s full, Pete. Let’s skip the trial and go straight to the execution.
PRISON’S FULL? PRISON’S FULL?
anyway. it’s easy to see why the human PC, and a lot of players, like logan. he’s a cheerful, encouraging mentor. he likes you. he’s easy to get along with, full of compliments, eager to help, and motivated by a strong sense of personal justice and love for queen jennah and the spirit of peace & generosity towards the common folk of kryta that she’s supposed to represent. the civilians he’s brutalizing are cartoonishly bad guys. he’s funny, and his outlaw streak, a holdover from his past as a young mercenary/hero, can seem rogueish & fun, making him “less” of a cop, because he rebels against the institution he works for.
except. it’s actually the opposite.
when not angsting about jennah or rytlock, logan spends most of his screentime in GW2 complaining that the seraph are spread too thin and that he, personally, is not given enough power to go above and outside the law and just kill anyone he suspects of criminal affiliations or plotting against jennah. he uses the human PC, especially the highly vulnerable street rat & impressionable commoner, to get around that “unfair” limitation.
this is despite the fact that he DOES fight and kill criminals (and untried suspects) on the reg and never suffers legal consequences. but it’s not a universal license to kill. he & his seraph are not getting enough resources and leeway from the crown. and that’s why violence and injustice persist in kryta. if only logan, the Good Cop, was freed from all oversight, he could eliminate crime and misery.
what copaganda tries to say is that, sure, the justice system is flawed. terribly flawed! but the terrible flaw is that the system prevents individual heroic cops from going to the fullest extent of their abilities to root out corruption, protect the helpless (white, cisheteronormative, nuclear) family unit, and champion the fragile, not-perfect-but-all-we-can-hope-for status quo.
not that the system creates, protects, and rewards abuse of power against the systemically vulnerable. we don’t need to defund the bad lawmen, we have to give more resources and liberties to the good lawman.
to be clear, i know that most of this was written in 2012! there wasn’t a lot of popular awareness then, at least among mainstream white audiences, of what copaganda is and why it’s dangerous. he was written to be likeable, is a good friend to the commander (unless, like me, you consider his criminal misuse of the human PC a betrayal) and has an engaging backstory. it’s not wrong to find him interesting & endearing! but i hope we can all admit there’s a clear reason why he might’ve been written out of the main storyline, and why the game’s attempts to re-center him by involving him with the pact and the charr civil war conspicously stopped in 2020.
this post is long enough without getting deeply into minsec’s role in EoD, but i do think it’s worth noting & initiating a conversation about how EoD’s main cop ally, rama, quits the force after finding out it works to oppress outsiders and ethnic minorities in cantha (👍!) but that minsec in general remains an allied faction, and the fact that it’s riddled with purists and fascist sympathizers is framed as a shocking perversion of its intended function (protecting & serving cantha’s people) and something that can be fixed from the inside by a good cop like captain min, instead of something that follows naturally from the culture of an imperial police state.
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