catch ya on the flip side

(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.)