pagerunner-j:

So here’s where I blather on a bit (and a bit drunkenly) about the whole Percy-is-a-terrible-person issue, because I have Thoughts, and those thoughts are in part why I got so interested in him as a character. Pardon me if I fail to be entirely coherent, because, well, see the preceding parenthetical statement, but here’s where I’ve been landing with the whole thing, basically:

Everything Taliesin said about him is true. All of those things are the most true, however, about Percy in isolation. 

Given the evidence, it’s entirely valid: left to his own devices, Percy absolutely could have become the villain of someone else’s campaign. Or even Vox Machina’s campaign, let’s be honest. With his worst impulses unchecked, and without The List getting destroyed, Percy very well could have ended up on a full-bore vengeance kick and it would have come to a head in some very ugly ways. The thoughts and plans that Taliesin’s talked about obviously went on percolating for a long, long while, and it was really only his friends that kept some of that from boiling over. The relationships he built changed him, or at the very least, tugged him onto a different trajectory. 

The really interesting thing: the final point at which everything could have gone all the way wrong also happened in utter isolation. It was his failure to speak to Ipkesh when he was right on the verge of using that contract to try to save Vax.

Let’s break that down a bit. Percy was ready to fight the Raven Queen for Vax, as much for his own personal revenge against her as anything, and then when that wasn’t an option, was ready to consign his soul to whatever horrible fate awaited him – convinced, after all, that he was still irredeemable, so (forgive me the pun) what the hell. This was entirely concocted in the space of his own head, and he really wasn’t thinking through the ramifications to anyone else at all. Imagine this from Vex’s perspective: Vax has accepted his fate to the best of his ability, has said his goodbyes, and then…her husband flings himself into damnation to try to yank Vax back from the afterlife (with no guarantees there wouldn’t be awful strings attached if anything was phrased the least bit wrong), thereby robbing her of the life she’d chosen thanks to his unilateral decision that he thinks is some sort of favor, and she’s stuck trying to put things back together. Even if Vax had come back, how long would that wound have taken to heal? Would it ever, really? And what on earth would Vax have thought, tugged back and forth and having his own resolution, however bittersweet, snatched away from him?

I would have been furious and heartbroken, and in full agreement that, well, yep: that’s the sort of decision a terrible person would make.

But he didn’t get to take that step (on a meta level: thank you, Matt), and instead, what we got was heartbreaking in a whole other way: Percy left alone and, as far as he was concerned, powerless to fix the problem in front of him. Because that’s Percy’s other issue. He likes to fix things, even when the remedy he chooses might be worse than the disease. He didn’t get the chance this time. He didn’t get to “fix” this one.

At least not by himself.

Vex there at the end cut through all of it – all of his plans and schemes and counterproductive brooding – and something as small as a kind word and a simple question got straight to the core of everything, uncovering the issues that Percy (and for that matter Taliesin) hadn’t ever addressed. The other losses he couldn’t mend. The small but probably satisfying life paths he didn’t get to take. The person he could have been if he hadn’t made all of those revenge-driven, self-serving, wounded-animal decisions, wrapped up in so much posturing that he probably never fully accepted what they actually were, or how much damage they were really doing. Vex laid all that bare. With her help, some of what he’d been finally came back.

So yes: left to himself, Percy would have been a terrible person. With his friends and the people he grew to love, he ended up with a much, much better shot at becoming – like he suggested to Vax once, in conversation held in a certain converted crypt – something else. 

And that’s the Percy we got to see after hours and hours (and hours, and hours…) of collaborative gameplay, and everyone interacting and developing and changing together, and decisions made in tandem, and no one ever really ending up alone.

So it’s not like Taliesin’s wrong when he shit-talks Percy. But it’s not like any of us are off base for seeing a different side of things, either.

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(Meanwhile, I’ll probably reread this in the morning and wish I’d waited until the whiskey wore off to post it. As smarter people than I have joked: write drunk, edit sober. 😉

Matt basically put it best – it’s one thing to have horrible thoughts. Quite another thing to actually act upon them. Percy had the thoughts, but usually didn’t act on them or was kept from acting on the, usually by Vex. And that’s what makes him so interesting and likable to probably most of his fanbase.