Tagged as Emily Kaldwin, Billie Lurk, Corvo Attano

Contributors: Eels, Aidan, Jacob

No nice little girls

Eels: Hi I'm feeling emotional in bed about how the women in dishonored are allowed to be nasty and get dirty and puch people and get fucking pissed off and wreck shit without having to justify it or be nice or apologize and it's so cathartic

Aidan: oh yeah it’s great. I know they’re the main ones out of many, many women but I really love how functional and practical emily and billies designs are, and how they aren’t perfect nice little girls

Eels: God yes like they both have so many serious flaws and issues and it just makes them achingly human and the game is like yeah, that's what u get

Esp with billie in DOTO it's like. Is she Good is she Bad fuck you she's Complicated and answering that moral question about a character isnt the point of this game the point is the ambiguity and the choices that you make regardless of how the world has defined you or how you've internalized those definitions and submitted to or reacted against them

This may be vaguely hc-ish (bc of what we've discussed previously abt em's character being not developed enough) but I don't really think so bc there's plenty of evidence imo but like. Emily?? She has some fucking Anger Issues in dh2 and I think she's often vindictive and righteous and nasty esp when u do high chaos things... she's in this shitty situation and her default way to cope is to lash out, probs partly bc of lingering u know like, trauma from dh1 stuff and what the fuck is a therapist in the 1800s but also from the fact that she's been so restricted in her comportment as empress and all this stuff has been simmering and then bam bam bam corvo alexi losing her home and being thrown out into the world with nothing like YES she is going to explode

Aidan: YEAH YEAH there’s definitely enough in canon to suggest that she’s suppressed and isn’t a perfect empress, that she wants to jump on rooftops and get into fights and be a vigilante

Jacob: Absolute HC but one of these days she’s gonna get a light but firm hug from Wyman that just says “im here and not going anywhere” and the poor baby is just gonna burst into tears

Everyone she has gotten relatively close to has either died or ended up imprisoned and thats gotta be traumatic to the fuckin extreme

Eels: Is it good? Is it right? Does her situation excuse her bad actions from impulsively lashing out? Absolutely fucking not, and she doesnt understand i think how harmful what she does can be because of how her grief and hurt turns her inward because at the end of the day she's just a person, but what she does carries the weight and power of royalty and entitlement even if she's deposed and also the terrifying firepower of someone marked.

The way I play dh2 is like, I think she realizes that she's been horrible and it's not just about the coup, it's about everything and how she's been living her life until hitting absolute rock bottom let her start to identify the problems and something has to change... by the time they return to dunwall and she forgives billie I think she's ready to start trying. even if she's stayed overall low chaos through the game (if barely) to have meagan reveal berself she's probably still a horrible person to be living with on board most of the time: short fused, moody, punches shit, stuff like that

I think billie sees that anger in Emily and it's the same hot useless rage that was hers at sixteen. The reasons are so drastically different but the result is the same

On Corvo

Jacob: On the same sense Corvo probably has a bunch of shit just waiting under the surface too. Going from one coup to another, failing in his duties as royal protector twice… He’s gotta be going through some shit

“You’ve lost another empress” im surprised he doesn't just absolutely break right then and there. But there is a difference, he more or less knows how to deal with these emotions and has had an outlet in training and doesn’t have the weight of ruling an entire empire on his shoulders constantly

Eels: God yeah corvo's a whole other can of worms in that situation. I feel like if you do a fully high chaos run of dh2, it would be more in character playing as corvo than as emily. His trauma of having to actually deal with the events in dh1 and not just being a victim of the situation there like Emily was, but actively doing really terrible things to claw out of prison and save his daughter and then being betrayed twice... yes, he's absolutely victim in what happened, but he also victimized others to allow things to be where they are by the time of dh2.

With the second coup, it's like, was all this for nothing? those horrible things I did for my family weren't actually ensuring anything at all? How could they then be justified? So his conceptions of ultimately at his core being a good man get shaken deeply and along with the massive re-triggering of the PTSD from jessamine's death in front of him now with the same happening to emily where he's equally powerless, who he's done everything for..... basically yes i think him snapping and going full/mostly hc is much more plausible than for emily. And he, in that headspace if it's carried through the game, would absolutely not forgive billie.

For not-high-chaos Corvo I think you're absolutely right with the experience piece and having had outlets and also just... more time being alive and dealing with stuff? Plus as Protector the whole thing is to not show emotion, be the silent guard, carry on even in the most extreme of circumstances, have a plan, triage your losses, etc. I think his coping would be fragile in a different way than dh1 - then he was freshly smashed and beaten down and destroyed, but he's had time to heal since and so the second time it's a re-fracturing of familiar and worn cracks, a kind of familiar panic that's terrifying but also ironically comforting in that he can say ok, I've been here before (fuck fuck no not again) and I've fixed it before so I'll goddamn well do it again (please please let this be the last time I'll have to)