#daud critical

[magewardensurana]

I feel like sometimes people still don’t get it.

[palecrepegold]

Do I love Billie more than I hate Daud? Do I love Billie...MORE... than I hate Daud...?

[palecrepegold]

mylittlechimera replied to your post “To elaborate, briefly, on why I dislike that take on Corvo sparing...”

i like those tasty tags, they have the right edge to them, I could actually be interested in that story

Ahh, thank you, I’m glad you liked the idea! 

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Daud’s non-lethal should have been removing his Mark.

Non-lethals are about suffering, and letting Daud wander off alone has no actual aspect of suffering involved at all. He just gets to leave, to apparently retire to a small beachside cabin where he can drink cocktails all day and write his memoirs (according to the majority of fan art, anyway). All you have is his word that he won’t continue doing what he’s done for his whole adult life: use his Void powers to kill people for money. Even if Daud is sincere, and there’s no reason for Corvo to think that he is, in ten years’ time, when his current cache of blood money runs out, what’s to stop him from going back to his old trade? What if someone offers him even more money to kill Emily this time? There are too many unknowns, and too little reason to trust a man who just gloated about knowing what it felt like to shove a sword through Jessamine’s heart.

Cutting off his left hand first, though...that will leave him alive to suffer, remembering what he once could do and how he lost it. Spending the next decades of his life as an average person, even his non-supernatural fighting abilities reduced. Daud might still be something of a threat in this state, if he fought very hard to be, but not at all one that Corvo couldn’t dispatch easily if needed. That would be a true non-lethal neutralization.

Daud will grow old, and die, as no one special, just as he was born. The Mark convinced him otherwise for awhile; perhaps there was something unique to him in his youth, during his single-minded quest to contact the Outsider. But what I think the DLCs make clear is that Daud has wasted his gift. He has the power to change the world, and he uses it to kill for money. And perhaps most notably, he kills for money at the direction of others. He’s a weapon that others use--he gets a contract, he fulfills it. He has no vision or goal of his own beyond doing a dirty job and getting paid for it. The more I think about it, the more it disappoints me, and the more I understand why the Outsider became so bored with Daud.

Delilah uses the Mark to reshape the world, pushing and extending the boundaries of what her powers allow her to do again and again. Corvo uses it to right the course of the Empire by putting Emily on the throne and eliminating a deeply paranoid and dangerous Lord Reagent. Daud changed history by killing Jessamine, but he says himself that he didn’t realize what a destabilizing action that would be and how far the consequences would extend. He could have done anything, but he ended up only a pawn. Let him think about that for about forty or so years.

[palecrepegold]

The idea that anyone liked Daud and thought he was a good character is totally wild to me. He’s King Hypocrite of Shit Mountain and his internal narration was the worst.