hi I am still not normal about how we never get much of an epilogue for Emily and Corvo in the second game we are told how the rule turned out and that Emily is the beloved empress now but nothing beyond that and I get that the entire game is very much built on that I get that the first game we have close relationship with Emily and become fond of the staff that work with the Loyalists so we feel alone because we do not quite see eye to eye with our allies and all we have left is this little innocent child that sees Corvo as someone who can do no wrong in this world which is strongly contrasted with the second game where Emily (or Corvo) has few trusted allies that they can actually rely on and it feels like a group of almost-friends working to dismantle the conspiracy but at the very end of it all Emily is all alone, even her return to the Tower is so much more grim, her taking down Delilah, the entirety of Dunwall- it all feels so incredibly and thoroughly isolating, she is all Alone now, and maybe that's why it bothers me so much to see the story end so abrupty.

it would've been so, so poetic if both the first and the second game ended with Corvo and Emily embracing

Okay I’m not done talking about this actually. Re: the Dishonored series’ attempts to reconcile its critical views of imperialism with keeping the characters who sit at the very top of the Empire likable, I think DH1 is considerably less obvious/glaring about this internal conflict than DH2 because: 1) it’s, duh, the first in the series, and suspension of disbelief comes a lot more naturally the first time you’re told “things will be better now, for real” than the second; and 2) Jessamine’s rule sees so little screentime it’s much easier to portray the miseries of the game as entirely attributable to Burrows’ rule (and the actions of other assorted Bad People™) without directly confronting the imperial system that put them all in a position to seize and promptly abuse power in the first place. Under a read more because I can't shut up, sorry.

Like, say you play DH1 for the first time on low chaos: you get the happy ending epilogue speech, and even if it seems to smooth everything over a little too optimistically for a game that otherwise shows a collapsing society and the corruption that brought it to that state in grim, unflinching detail, well, that’s mostly okay—you maintained low chaos, after all, in essence proving the Outsider’s “Perhaps that’s just the nature of man” theory wrong, and the good effects just rippled outward to a much a larger scale, which was pretty much the point of the chaos system in the first place. If it all sounds a little bit like the happy ending to a parable not particularly grounded in the realities of systems of power that the rest of the game was critiquing, maybe that’s just what happens when an entity as long-lived and far-sighted as the Outsider summarizes a period that is little more than a miniscule blip in time to him. Stand far enough back from something and all the rough edges blur out to nothing.

(Plus it’s a video game after all, so maybe you can suspend your disbelief/any personal political beliefs about real world empires you may have brought with you. Maybe it's nice to imagine that things can change meaningfully for the better for Dunwall and the other Isles simply by plopping a Kaldwin back onto the throne.)

The existence of DH2 makes it clear, though, that the ending monologue to DH1 really is more fairytale than reality (or, you know, what happens when a game gets greenlit for a sequel the devs of three years ago didn't know they'd get). A Kaldwin takes the throne—under the watchful eye and protection of her witchcraft-using Serkonan father, at that, a man with viscerally personal history with the Abbey, the City Watch, and the deeply xenophobic nobility—and despite all those very real family connections and personal reasons to want to reform things for the better, we step into Emily’s rule to see the people of Serkonos being trampled on and worked to death in the silver mines, the Abbey still freely hunting down and torturing or otherwise “disappearing” people suspected of witchcraft, and the Guard casually beating and murdering citizens—in one notable case, by throwing one directly into the same brutal Wall of Light technology mobilized to great effect by Burrows’ corrupt regime and that is still in wide use around Emily’s Empire fifteen years later.

Some of this chaos was instigated by Delilah and her inner circle (especially the Duke) leading up to the coup, but much of it is preexisting corruption that can’t be blamed on her—she and the coven certainly had no reason to prop up the Abbey, for one, and she didn’t have to create the aristocratic bitterness motivating turncoats like Ramsey, only give them an outlet for what was already simmering. Meagan, Sokolov, and Lucia Pastor all make it abundantly clear that this was not a momentary slip-up—Dunwall Tower had been looking the other way while violence and unrest grew for some time, because the human cost of keeping silver flowing was out of sight and out of mind, a function basically built into the system of Imperial rule. Not a bug, but a feature. A tendency toward retaining corrupt institutions, an erosion of empathy, because that’s what keeps the wheels turning and wealth being funneled upward.

So when low chaos Emily professes in mission nine that she’s learned her lesson and that from now on she’ll Pay Attention, really! to the four nation Empire she’s the head of, and the happy epilogue plays and we get another Outsider monologue about the golden age ahead, it just seems…vaguely absurd? Like, we already saw this! Burrows, Campbell, and the Bastard Trio™ of the loyalists were deposed or otherwise gotten rid of, making room for Good People™ with Good Intentions™ to take their place in charge and fix things—you’ve got Emily on the throne with Corvo to guide her; Yul Khulan, a “kind” man and eventual close personal ally of Emily’s, becomes High Overseer; Curnow, widely reputed as a Reasonable Authority Figure and rare man of principle in the Guard, has survived (and presumably still has some years of service as a Captain before the retirement mentioned in The Corroded Man).

And then we fast forward fifteen years and all these groups...still suck? The Empress hates her job and is eating off plates made of silver mined by Karnacan laborers dying hideously of terrible respiratory ailments, the Overseers we see in Karnaca are ransacking homes and torturing Outsider worshippers (a group including such dangerous people as *checks notes* newspaper artists), half the City Guard is on the payroll of the shitty aristocrats supporting Delilah’s coup, and the Grand Guard is passing the time by throwing people into Walls of Light. Emily’s reign began with a veritable A-team of Certified Good People and fifteen years later it's barely made a dent, because the system of imperial rule is built from the ground up to shelter corruption and complacency, to resist change, no matter who’s in charge and whether that person is “paying attention” or not. It’s beyond the power of one sufficiently motivated Empress and a team of well-intentioned people in positions of authority below her.

It’s tempting to say “no, it really was just an issue of Emily not taking her duties seriously, look at Jessamine’s rule, or Euhorn’s before her!” but the thing is Obvious Disasters like Violent Coups Aside we really don’t have much evidence that their rules were all that much better, or at the very least any less prone to corruption? DH1 again has the advantage over DH2 here, mostly by way of omission. We don’t get to actually see what life in the Empire is like under Jessamine, just that tiny sliver of time in the Prologue returning as Corvo to Dunwall Tower, where despite the player being told there’s a deadly plague about to bring the city to a “breaking point,” the scenery is beautiful and calm and the staff are polite and affable. It makes for very compelling contrast when the game fast forwards six months to the dank misery of Coldridge Prison, and then later the grim state of the streets filling up with corpses and weepers.

Mission six completes the comparison with a return to Dunwall Tower, where the courtyard is now brimming with hostile guards and surveillance towers and tallboys, and one lone maid who openly laments Jessamine’s passing. Life under the authoritarian despot who purposely instigated a plague for the purpose of wiping out the lower classes is, obviously, much worse than life under the benevolent Empress who is introduced to us passionately advocating for saving the lives of all of her citizens. But, in the same way Emily and her inner circle of Well-Intentioned People weren’t enough to dislodge the entrenched corruption and brutality—or prevent a new wave of it—Jessamine’s kindness can’t paint over the miseries of the imperial system she presides over. We the players see Coldridge Prison for the first time in the six-months-later flashback of Burrows’ rule, but it existed during Jessamine’s time—guards state explicitly in the DLC that she and Corvo used to come inspect it, in fact. Jessamine wholly loves Corvo, a native of Serkonos, but anti-Serkonan prejudice runs rampant in her court and city. Corvo and Emily wholly love Jessamine too, but the people of Dunwall are somewhat divided on the matter (“Long live the Empress!” “She was a WENCH!” / “Not everyone did, but I really liked the Empress…”). Burrows deceived Jessamine and took advantage of her trusting nature, but he only had the resources to do so in the first place because of the system that promoted him to Royal Spymaster, a position of incredible power and very little accountability.

Euhorn we know the least about, but we are told he enjoyed a “prosperous age”—a sentiment that falls somewhat flat when we learn that he had an affair with a chamber maid (the power differential of which is highly questionable at best), strung along the resulting illegitimate daughter with promises of elevating her to a princess that he never intended to keep, then took his chance when said daughter was blamed for breaking a vase to throw her and her mother out onto the streets, where the mother is brutalized by a prison guard and eventually dies in agony in debtor’s prison, leaving the daughter to fend for herself alone in the world. All of which shows us that the Empire is, in this age of “prosperity,” still a place of extreme power imbalances where the Emperor takes advantage of women in his employ, debtor’s prisons exist, guards can cause fatal injuries to civilians on a whim and face no consequences, and children are thrown with disdain onto the streets to die. Which, on many levels, is not all that different from the ages of other rulers who follow.

tl;dr these games show us over and over again that the Empire is built on a fundamentally broken system that perpetuates corruption and then try to append “but it’s okay so long as the people in charge are good people who are paying attention to their jobs” to the end of them for the sake of keeping those characters likable, and while the first game can get away with this by virtue of being the first game and using Jessamine’s rule primarily as a way to showcase how bad Burrows’ rule sucks by comparison, this falls flat when the very existence of the second game provides ample evidence that the Good Intentions of Generally Good People are not enough to counteract the entrenched cruelties of the institutions that keep imperialism afloat. Okay I'm going to go get another hobby now bye.