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.