Different anon, and my phone is being ornery so I apologize in advance if the formatting goes wonky, but “what does that change or add to the story?”
Potentially : Bolaire getting to have his emotional damage acknowledged, getting to feel seen and treated as as important and valued as ‘real people’ instead of dismissed and brushed aside as exaggerated and overdramatic and petulant. Seeing Thjazi die didn’t do much to make Bolaire feel any better, but that, maybe, would. The type of things that are healing for Julien aren’t so helpful for Bolaire, but they don’t have to be.
Potentially: Bolaire getting to hear ‘What happened to you was wrong. Regardless of whatever else Thjazi was to anyone or everyone else, how he treated you was wrong. You didn’t deserve that. No one does.’ 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, there’s 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 ‘Bolaire needs to grow up and get over himself’.
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 “It was wrong to use a weapon to oppose and kill tyrants.” This is not a story extolling the merits of pacifism. It’s 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 “this is abuse” 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 “kill tyrants with weapons” 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 “it was wrong to use a weapon”.
In addition, there is no conversation that could sincerely involve “abuse” 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 Bolaire’s actions isn’t a serious take.
Also, none of the therapy speak bullshit should work at this stage. I know it’s the fad in fan writing and contemporary young adult novels, but it’s 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 isn’t going to have therapy sessions with a sentient weapon, and Brennan is savvy enough that he’s 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 he’s going to be thinking the whole time “That would make sense if I was a person, but I’m not.” He would need to get there before any of this topic matters. The PCs finally made a dent in Bolaire’s insistence because he saw his painted doodles had come to life: he’d made something. He had been brushing off everyone’s comments until that point.
Finally, if any of this is addressed, I would expect it to be addressed in a way that doesn’t suggest that there is a specific “right way” 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 “this is the right way to address trauma.” What I take away every time I see it is “this is how some therapists will work through emotionally-fraught issues with their patients and the storyteller wasn’t creative enough to address the matter within the tone and setting.”
It’s lazy storytelling. Full stop.
