Different anon, and my phone is being ornery so I apologize in advance if the formatting goes wonky, but âwhat does that change or add to the story?â
Potentially : Bolaire getting to have his emotional damage acknowledged, getting to feel seen and treated as as important and valued as âreal peopleâ instead of dismissed and brushed aside as exaggerated and overdramatic and petulant. Seeing Thjazi die didnât do much to make Bolaire feel any better, but that, maybe, would. The type of things that are healing for Julien arenât so helpful for Bolaire, but they donât have to be.
Potentially: Bolaire getting to hear âWhat happened to you was wrong. Regardless of whatever else Thjazi was to anyone or everyone else, how he treated you was wrong. You didnât deserve that. No one does.â Potentially, Bolaire getting to internalize that and eventually wrestling with how he dehumanizes, dominates, and torments his hosts. Potentially relinquishing his modus operandi of preying on/punishing those he deems wicked, in favor of a more symbiotic arrangement of wearing/being worn by friends and allies, consensually and to mutual benefit. Truly completing the transition from sword to plowshare rather than trying to move forward with one foot in each world.
Potentially, thereâs a lot I could see being done with that, (a lot more than beating a dead orc trying to posthumously enact justice against Thjazi), and personally, I find those possibilities more interesting and more thematically resonant than just a character arc of âBolaire needs to grow up and get over himselfâ.
This is a story, not a retelling of actual events, so the expectations need to fit both thematically and within the setting.
Bolaire is literally a weapon. He is a mask with no body of his own. Whether or not he or anyone else decides that he is a person will always be secondary to that narrative point. He was made as a weapon and intended to be wielded to kill a god.
No one in the cast of C4 is going to reach the conclusion âIt was wrong to use a weapon to oppose and kill tyrants.â This is not a story extolling the merits of pacifism. Itâs a D&D actual play show, so the game itself is designed around lethal combat. Some enemies (House Tachonis in particular) truly do need to be killed to avoid worst case scenarios. Further, using weapons to get it done is also a fundamental part of that.
The problem with the âthis is abuseâ perspective is it clashes with that and glosses over the important details. It muddies the theme by suggesting that actually, there is a limit to using weapons to kill tyrants, without giving any clarity as to what the limit is or why. There is no way to approach that issue with Bolaire without fucking with the âkill tyrants with weaponsâ theme because he is the only PC that is literally a weapon. He will always have been a weapon, even after the swords to plowshares thing. There will never be a point in this story where someone says âit was wrong to use a weaponâ.
In addition, there is no conversation that could sincerely involve âabuseâ without first acknowledging that Bolaire is and has been actively doing worse things to other people for decades. Any attempt to address this while ignoring Bolaireâs actions isnât a serious take.
Also, none of the therapy speak bullshit should work at this stage. I know itâs the fad in fan writing and contemporary young adult novels, but itâs truly useless outside the therapy context because it requires high levels of trust for any of it to land. A story about killing tyrants with weapons just isnât going to have therapy sessions with a sentient weapon, and Brennan is savvy enough that heâs not going to co-opt pop psych lingo in other types of conversations where it would be illogical to have the intended impact just to ride the tide of popularity.
This insistence also ignores a key problem that no one can fix for Bolaire: he thinks of himself as a thing, not a person. All that is absolutely useless anyway because heâs going to be thinking the whole time âThat would make sense if I was a person, but Iâm not.â He would need to get there before any of this topic matters. The PCs finally made a dent in Bolaireâs insistence because he saw his painted doodles had come to life: heâd made something. He had been brushing off everyoneâs comments until that point.
Finally, if any of this is addressed, I would expect it to be addressed in a way that doesnât suggest that there is a specific âright wayâ to address it. The new problem with the therapy speak trope is that people have gotten into their heads that it is the correct way to approach certain topics. This is a fantasy story in a pre-industrialization world where gods existed and were killed. Adding modern therapy speak to address the emotional damage of a mask with no body is so immersion breaking that there is no avoiding the message âthis is the right way to address trauma.â What I take away every time I see it is âthis is how some therapists will work through emotionally-fraught issues with their patients and the storyteller wasnât creative enough to address the matter within the tone and setting.â
Itâs lazy storytelling. Full stop.
