catch ya on the flip side

My favorite is Pendleton, which is an answer that seems to surprise a lot of people. He’s got these moments of genuine affability and grief, and he seems to be somewhat in awe of low-chaos!corvo (“You say less and do more than any man I’ve ever known,” etc).  According to Callista (at least in low chaos) he didn’t necessarily want to betray Corvo and the rest so much as he was too cowardly to do anything but go along with the other two’s schemes, which is sad and pitiful and very much in line with what he know of his life under his siblings.  His snark is low-key hilarious at times.From a more meta perspective, he’s also just the loyalist we get the most information about, really? He talks about himself freely–what he’s more reticent to share we still get a glimpse of in his memoirs–and others talk about him just as much.  Havelock and Martin both insist he’s not as bad as other nobles/essential to the cause, Lydia and Samuel alternate between griping about him and worrying about him, Wallace is utterly devoted to him, and Lady Boyle’s party guests giggle about the cowardice that Callista later condemns.  He’s tied to multiple missions, so you’re thinking about him even when you’re not in the Hound Pits.      Martin, on the other hand, is the hardest for me to get a grip on character-wise, but that makes sense: as the primary schemer of the group, he plays his cards very close to the chest.  His idle dialogue tends to be focused around the Abbey or the coalition’s plans–very little is about him specifically, because he’s not going trust you or anyone with that information. He doesn’t even sleep at the Hound Pits, so you can’t snoop around his belongings the way you can with everyone else. His background is fascinating, but we learn of it through the Heart and get very little indication of how he views it until his high chaos monologue, when his façade starts to crumble under his desperation. You can overhear one Overseer at the High Overseer’s office muse that “Martin knows everyone, everywhere,” but nobody really knows him, including the player. He’s a question without a lot of answers. Havelock’s probably the least interesting to me.  To steal a line from Dragon Age, he’s “the man with a hammer to whom everything appears as a nail.” A military man who never met a problem he couldn’t solve with a fleet (or Corvo killing off all the coalition’s problems).  He’s mildly intrigued when you take other approaches, like bribing Sokolov instead of unleashing the rats on him, but physical might as a source of power is so heavily engrained in him that he’s deeply befuddled in the Low Chaos ending, noting that he’ll “lose it all to a man with a…slower sword hand” and that “the world doesn’t make sense.” The Heart mentions the long since dead little brother whom he loved dearly, but even then Havelock muses in his journal that if push came to shove and his brother were still alive, he could probably still sacrifice him the way Pendleton does the twins. He believes in, above all else, “will and vision and not being afraid of getting dirty.” For me, the main point of interest re: Havelock is that he’s the one who founded the Loyalists. The one who straight up told Burrows he wouldn’t fly under the flag of an usurper and walked out on the position he’d spend his life working up toward.  And by the end of the game he’s poisoned you and all his fellow conspirators. He’s turned on his rightful empress, just as Burrows did, entirely for his own gain.  In the low chaos ending he monologues a bit on how this happened (basically Dishonored’s main theme: the dangers/allure of too much power, the consequences/addictive nature of abusing it, etc) but not a lot of attention is paid to this change in him as it’s actually happening–you can basically ignore it if you’re not poking through his journal or engaging him in idle dialogue between missions.  I think we miss out on a lot of complexity in his character that way, but it’s probably necessary to maintain any chance of players being surprised by the betrayal post-mission 6, and the game is already sort of implicitly showing a similar process with Corvo and the collapse of the city if you’ve chosen to go high chaos.  So that was probably a way longer response than what you were looking for, but basically: Pendleton is my fave, Martin is mysterious and hard to understand but that’s also sort of the point of him and so I deal with it/fill the gaps with fanfiction, and Havelock is a jackboot who probably could have used a little more attention from the game to be less of a jackboot and more of a proper cautionary tale.  

nope! i think he was written very strangely, and i didn’t find his motive for suddenly wanting to kill the outsider convincing in light of the changes he underwent in the DLCs for DH1, but he’s always been an important character to me.  

the outsider is all about choice. that’s the basis of his character, watching what you *choose* to do with your power. in dishonored 2 you can flat out reject his gifts and he shrugs it off and lets you go on your way, for god’s sake. physically grabbing a resisting woman who he explicitly acknowledges doesn’t want his mark or really much of anything to do with him and then forcing horrifying and invasive body modifications on her *anyway* while she screams and struggles? that is fucking horrible and comes with a boatload of bad implications. it’s an abuse of power and everything he himself has suffered and hates. miss me with that bullshit.

(Heads up for long discussion and DOTO spoilers below, mobile users should scroll speedily.)

You know, I’ve been thinking about exactly this for the last few days, and I’m still not sure I have a good answer.  They are, as you say, completely different in a lot of ways.

DH1!Outsider has such a sense of power to him–cultists and the Abbey and much of humanity in general are a tiny, amusing blip on his radar.  He disapproves of you abusing your power, but in a very cold, unimpressed sort of way–a glacial boredom that you turned out to be just like everyone else. DH2/DOTO!Outsider is significantly more human in his reactions.  His disapproval is much angrier, almost visceral, because it comes from personal experience of human suffering. 

DH1!Outsider could very well be the Void itself manifesting as a shape recognizable to the people it interacts with, sentient but eerie and powerful in a way that cannot be threatened or even understood without an anthropomorphic avatar of sorts. Compare that to DH2/DOTO!Outsider, who in many significant ways is human even before the transformative nonlethal ending of DOTO.  Forced into cosmic servitude and altered in arcane and horrifying ways by the experience, yes, but also capable of being freed, of reverting back to something comparable to what he was, what he still is at his core. That’s a nonsensical concept for DH1!Outsider. You can’t revert back to something you never were. You can’t kill the Void any more than you can stab a storm. 

I guess the key for me is…again, pretty much what you said: recognizing that both incarnations of the character are good and relevant to Dishonored’s larger themes, if in different ways. DH2/DOTO!Outsider is an important examination of trauma and transformation. How you survive the loss of your power, and how you get it back. How you live with your changed, sometimes damaged understanding of the world. He’s also interesting for all the usual reasons we as people are generally fascinated by martyr figures (he gets literal Pieta imagery in the lethal ending of DOTO, after all).

DH1!Outsider is excellent on so many accounts, but most relevantly here for his role as outside (ha) arbiter: he’s the eerie watcher who examines humanity and finds us, as we as individuals often fear the universe does, wanting–deeply selfish, prone to violence and terrible cruelty for the most poorly justified of reasons. And yet we can be better. Show him something different, and he’s pleased. Pleased, and so very interested. He’s been watching all of existence for hundreds and hundreds of years, there should be nothing left capable of impressing him. And yet acts of mercy are still remarkable, worthy of attention.  Compassion requires more from us. More than what we’re sometimes willing to give, but the choice is always there, and the universe notices. Notices and approves. And the world changes accordingly. 

So, is there a way to connect the two characters? The best way I can imagine such a connection is through the idea of escalation–Delilah’s actions and the meddling with time/life/death that occur before and during DH2 send the Void into chaos. Things are badly out of control by the time DOTO starts: cultist gangs draining victims of blood in the private rooms of exclusive bars, Overseers torturing women in the basement of what used to be a museum, the Void leaking through cracks in the world. If DOTO does anything well narratively–as disappointed and inclined as I am to say no–it’s creating a sense of impending calamity, apocalypse. Things are coming to a head. If anything could cause a change in the Outsider’s general disposition, to unearth a humanity buried by time and weariness, I suppose cataclysm would be it.  His backstory still doesn’t mesh well with DH1!Outsider’s aura of being fundamentally inhuman, but that’s about as close as I can get it. “He was more human long ago but by the time you see him at the start of DH1 he’s been dulled/disillusioned by what he’s suffered and is only brought back to something more human by the events of DH2,” maybe. It’s a stretch.

So basically and unhelpfully: yeah, I recognize that there is a dramatic transformation in character between the major installments, and no, it’s not really a change that can be completely reconciled. What gives my obsessive nitpicky brain some peace is the fact that both versions are compelling and thematically appropriate in their own ways, and that the series itself (as of DH2′s time altering mission and the effects it has on Billie in DOTO) makes room for alternate realities that are connected, if in somewhat disjointed and seemingly mutually exclusive ways.    

(All of this excepting that bullshit scene at the start of mission 2 of DOTO. That’s derailment for both incarnations of the character and can frankly choke, along with Daud’s regression to a character we haven’t seen since the literal prologue of Dishonored 1. But I digress.)