Here's my hot-take: Moash and Vyre are two different characters sharing one arc. Pre-Odium (Moash) was a man drowning in pain. Post-Odium (Vyre) is what happens when you drain the ocean and leave just the wreckage at the bottom. No feelings, just function. A tool.
And here's what fascinates me. Odium saw the opportunity *immediately*. Moash was tailor-made for this. His entire existence was vengeance-shaped. But here's the thing, when Odium stripped his emotions, he didn't make Moash happy. He made him numb. Look at his reaction after the Tower. When the numbness breaks and he flees, feeling the crushing weight of *everything* he's done. He's completely destroyed. And he begs to have it taken away again. That's not peace. That's addiction to emotional death.
Now here’s my headcanon and what I'm running with in my fic: That "mostly unchained" part of Moash, it knows Odium wants Kaladin dead. And it doesn't want that. Not really. Not the way Odium wants it. So in his numb, delusional state, Moash cooks up a logic: I'll claim Kal as my project. I'll be the one to break him and "free" him into the numbness. Turn him or kill him. He genuinely thinks he's offering Kaladin mercy when he pushes him toward s****de or the void of numbness alongside him (essentially the same thing). Join me in nothing. Isn't that better than feeling everything?
And Odium? He sees right through it. But he lets Moash play his little games because the byproduct is *chef's kiss* either a dead Radiant or a tormented one, and either way the pain is delicious. Odium's immortal. He can wait.
Here's what gets me: Moash was Kaladin's biggest hater because he truly resented him. His hope was gnawing at the part of Moash that knew better. Hope was a trap. Then he became his biggest sidekick because he thought finally, *finally* someone who gets it. He saw Kal’s pain as a mirror of his own. Their arcs up until this point are similar. But when Kaladin chose to save Elhokar instead of letting him die? That shattered Moash. Not just the betrayal but the proof that they'd never be on the same page about their fundamental view on the world.
And Moash had been pining for that lost possibility ever since, in the only way someone with no feelings can: coldly, obsessively, delusionally.
He wants Kaladin as broken as he is. He calls it freedom. He calls it mercy. But underneath the numbness, underneath Odium's leash, there's still that Bridge Four kid who just wanted one person to stay on his side.
Does this excuse anything? Absolutely not. Moash is as bad as everyone thinks and worse. But from a mental illness angle, Odium's influence as a form of emotional lobotomy, antisocial patterning, the way pain can curdle instead of heal, it's sooo fascinating. And yeah, I feel pity. The same pity Kaladin would feel it if he let himself: grief for a person who could have been something else. Something good.