if Gyro survived at the end, do you think he would quit being executioner?
to be honest i think he would. because he was meant to inherit the position and i think he’s selfless enough that he wouldn’t want to force that on another of his siblings to have to bear. something i didn’t realize is that he did actually assist with and execute people, i thought marco would have been his first execution but he would have been the first as the head executioner. brutal nevertheless.
in my opinion, gyro’s greatest struggle as ‘inheritor’ was mainly that he disliked being a vector of his father’s ideology, and not necessarily his vocation. so i think his sense of duty to his country and protectiveness of his family, as well as pride in his spin techniques and desire to get better at them, would keep him in the position. his aversion to killing people has to do with the authority of the person ordering the killing and the moral consent to justify it. his struggle with marco was that consent, and questioning the authority which ordered it for no reason. i think that as head executioner, he’d be in more of a position to demand that consent and justification before blindly carrying out a killing.
his struggle as a surgeon was that of the ball hitting the net. there was the choice, who lives and who dies. he has become that authority ordering the killing, as a doctor. but i think that lesson 5, and finding the golden path through a detour, would help him in a new way. with wekapipo’s sister, his father new that the roundabout, keeping her blind, was the right path, because that way she was protected from the government. gyro blew through straight ahead and failed to fix her eyes even still. but now, he’d be more patient, somehow even more calculated in his actions.
i think that after the papal states collapse he’d definitely stay in that business of being a doctor, and gladly give up the burden of execution.
those r my thoughts i tried to go answer this several times in the past few days and didnt have an answer but now ive pondered! sorry it took so long!!! thank you so much for the ask anon reach out anytime!!!
hi there! gutsssee wrote a well-articulated post. i invite everyone who's interested in gyro's personality to read it
i wanted to agree with the main idea and add a couple of thoughts on the topic. like gutsssee, i think that in canon gyro would stay an executioner as long as he could
the first thing is that he’s fully dependent on it. all his contacts, family, social support, income, education and other different benefits are connected with it. all the eggs are in one basket — and the basket owns the man, not the other way around. it is rare for people with such a centralised system of personal resources to leave their position, regardless of the moral side of it, because it would literally ruin every aspect of their life. so i don’t think gyro would even seriously consider changing anything
the second thing is that executioners' families were historically socially isolated because people informally treated them as "dirty". i assume that gyro lived inside his own small social bubble, and outside of it he probably wouldn’t have been welcomed very warmly, at least in napoli. so friends inside, enemies outside. why quit?
the third thing is that at that time (in the late 19th century) there wasn't any public discourse around the permissibility of executions. that kind of discourse only became widespread relatively recently, approximately 70 years ago or so. and even today many people don’t see anything wrong with executing murderers or other people if they did something truly evil. just read the comments on youtube, or talk to your neighbours (or watch death note...) people genuinely don’t understand. they start discussing it from gyro's perspective: "is the crime evil enough to kill the criminal?"
without even noticing that the question could be "who am i to decide who should live and who shouldn't?" without realising that they're operating within a framework that takes the role of a killer for granted
so back in the 19th century, gyro probably never encountered much support for an alternative point of view. no any ethical discourse around it, no widely known literature, and so on. let's remember that he is a conformist. social norms and the concept of honour within the larger group he lived in were important to him, and he genuinely wanted to live up to them (let's call it the eldest son mindset). and that society didn’t openly criticise executions, at least not in any widespread way. i doubt even political dissidents thought much about the ethical side of it. it just wasn't really articulated or reflected in the broader public consciousness
so i'd say that gyro is an average man who doesn’t reflect on things all that much and simply does what other people expect him to do, even if it involves some killing. his spirit awakens during the race, but it's still weak, and i don't think it would be enough. "if executions are socially accepted and i can justify them to myself, then why not?" that's the logic. maybe he even thinks he's doing something necessary or good by punishing bad people. and who would dare throw the stone at him?
