#and I think reading his EoG arc as 'Shannon Chakraborty caving in to Dara fans' does it a massive disservice
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#so the thing about Dara from the Daevabad trilogy is#or rather the thing about the fandom reception of Dara#is that I think he's neither a poor little meow meow nor an intolerable piece of garbage#and I think reading his EoG arc as 'Shannon Chakraborty caving in to Dara fans' does it a massive disservice#like yes he's committing atrocities while whining about how sad that makes him but simultaneously continuing to do them#but have you considered#that we're not supposed to uncritically agree with his perspective here#EoG gives us a lot of detail on Dara's personal history and thoughts and interior world#and yes part of that is seeing his perspective on the war crimes he committed#and - surprise! - he has ways of justifying those to himself to varying extents#and those justifications start to fall apart more and more#but it's still a PROCESS#like the point here is to trace the psychology of someone who committed a slew of atrocities#and to understand why that happened#why he did those things#that is NOT the same as excusing or absolving his actions#we're supposed to understand the internal logic of Dara's thought process but that doesn't mean we're meant to agree with it#Dara's story is about redemption and it's about how that is HARD#'oh you talk about him like he's Zuko but what he did was much worse'#I don't know how to explain this to you but Zuko's arc isn't the end of all redemption narratives#some people do bad things for reasons other than 'having the emotional maturity of a 13-yo and being goaded by your abusive father'#and the books make it very clear that he's not fully redeemed at the end#he's SEEKING redemption. he's at the START of that journey. and he's very aware that he doesn't know where or when it'll end#but that that end is still very far away#also I think it IS good and thematically important that he chooses his own punishment actually#in part because what he goes for very much leans towards restorative rather than punitive justice#but more (thematically) importantly because the horrible things that he did were all fulfilments of other people's orders#part of why he allowed himself to not take responsibility is because he 'just did what he was told to' 'he was just an instrument'#(this is bullshit of course)#but I think it's really important that his life from here onward
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