rememberwhenyoutried replied to your post “I think what I appreciate about Dishonored is not just that it rubs...”
I think part of why I liked that bit so much was that it rubbed in that things only got -so- bad as a result of lots of things going bad in a row, and righting just one of those things picked a surprising number of dominoes back up.
I do like that it was set up in advance, too! There’s a note you can find early on in the Darkest Timeline, about how the Duke insisted on replacing Stilton with a series of mine overseers who had never been workers themselves, presumably because they’d have fewer qualms about working the miners to death.
Then later we’re told Stilton started out as a miner and worked his way up, and that makes it clear why he is so invested in the miners’ health and safety, and why, even if Karnaca is still doing badly in the new timeline, due to Stilton’s intervention, it didn’t quite degenerate to the sad, empty town battered by sandstorms and eaten by bloodflies that we initially see. With the miners doing better, we see more open shops, more people on the streets, fewer abandoned buildings, and I think it was great to have that palpable proof of how one influential community leader can, through their absence or presence, influence the fate of a community.
