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So I’ve got to the end of Iron Gold and I am having a real hard time empathising with Darrow. He’s done some really monstrous things so far and his justification for doing so has been essentially non-existent. I don’t think I am supposed to want to gleefully drink his tears when the Ash Lord tells him he screwed up and find that so hilarious. Same with when Dancer condemns him in the Senate, it was actually cathartic to have Lyria and Ephraim condemn him.

Now I have seen an interview where the author compares Darrow to Sherman in the Civil War. So from that I take that the author wants Darrow to be a morally grey ends justifies the means kind of character.

Now, I am pretty willing to look the other way or make excuses if I want to like a character. Say, Storm of Swords when Daenerys takes Mereen. Arbitrarily kills a few hundred slavers and then uses extreme violence to suppress the slaves who go on a rampage. Very dark but you can kind of follow why that happens and there’s enough justification and being on the side of right. Plus in that instance she very clearly is taken aback by her own loss of control.

Darrow on the other hand is just an unrepentant ass who has went far beyond the pale. At the large scale he does things like nuke a moon that kills ten million people on a whim that are mostly the people he wants to liberate. He sells out half the Solar system into slavery and sells out his own agents as well. Now, this event does backfire spectacularly on him and is proven to be entirely pointless as the Rim rebuilds its ship anyway. At the small scale he does clearly sadistic things like decide to burn a dying man alive and allow the Obsidians to torture and massacre people without any challenge; all things he could very easily choose not to do without major consequences to himself. It comes across as him just wanting to avoid anything that might inconvenience him (like throwing two clans of Obsodians in jail over the sack of Luna) instead of these being truly existential we don’t have a choice instances.

If you have a character whose idea of end justifies the means is that extreme then this is not Sherman, this is Stalin. Which is the final word in why end justifies the means is a flawed and often self destructive way of thinking. It makes the characters reluctance to declare himself a military dictator and purge his enemies or enslave the Reds for war production outright bizarre given his repeatedly stated moral compass that any action is justified if it means conquering the Solar System. This would also include the author deliberately avoiding Darrow coming to blows with the Red Hand or Vox Populi where logically his hyper violent and end justifies the means approach should have genocidal outcomes but he avoids that conflict occurring by artifice where he’s always up against the Society Remnant.

But yeah I dont get the impression the author wants us to hate Darrow and that’s very weird when he’s worse than Stalin. An utterly loathsome, irredeemable character and it’s really annoying that because he wins every fight he doesn’t suffer as much as he should. Ephraim was too kind in his criticism. Eo died because of men like him.