I still haven’t watched the rest of E13 because the cold open took over my entire brain. Based on that cold open and everything else we’ve seen, I have some thoughts to share about Bolaire’s morality (with thanks to @onlyteoristeor for being super smart and helping me develop them.)

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about Bolaire being amoral. I don’t think that’s true. It’s just that it’s blue and orange morality that has little to do with typical human(oid) standards.

Truth

I believe that Bolaire’s first moral principle he ever had was about the importance of truth. This makes a lot of sense, since he is the downfall of a goddess of trickery. He is not dedicated to a god, but to the antithesis of that god. Crucially, though, for him the truth does not have to be literal cut-and-dried facts. We saw in the cold open that Bolaire was enchanted when Eunice told him about how the lies of the theater can reveal more profound truths about the world.

We have a bunch of evidence that the truth is still a core principle to Bolaire in the present day. He often manages to avoid lying by either saying nothing or by saying something that is technically true. (A hilarious example from E2: when he told Thaisha “I touched the wrong thing and I got this thing stuck to me!” Technically true, if the “thing” he got stuck to was his human body.) In E11 he described the Cormorays’ desire to take over the Archanade and present history in a way that was favorable to their interests as “violent.” That makes sense in his morality; to him, doing damage to the truth might seem more violent than actual violence against people. He also agonized in E4 over how much he’d wanted to tell Hal the truth about himself and how much it hurt him to have to lie. I would argue that in Bolaire’s moral system, Thjazi forcing him to lie was a kind of profound moral injury.

(I also reiterate what I’ve been saying for months: Taliesin rolled a natural 20 on persuasion in E4, not deception.)

Freedom

Another principle that Bolaire clearly held even before the E13 cold open was about freedom. He says in the cold open, “I’m fighting for freedom. That’s what I do.” He booed along, if shyly, with the crowd when the MC of the play denounced the tyranny of the Shapers. He clearly values his own freedom to a very high degree, willing to kill and even lie for it. In the present day, he fights the authority of the Sundered Houses. Of course, the irony is that his own freedom must necessarily come at the expense of the freedom of his stolen bodies.

Fairy tale morality

I believe that Bolaire pieced together more of his morality based on the play he saw in the E13 cold open. It’s important to contextualize that Bolaire would have witnessed very little in the way of moral aspirations up until that point. He was used as a weapon of war for decades. When would he ever have seen or heard anyone expressing an ideal of goodness or nobility or anything like that? In the play, he saw a noble knight bring down a god through the power of love, which was making some aspirational statements about what is morally right.

That play, though, had the structure and logic of a fairy tale. The knight lured wicked men into playing the dice game for him, thus taking misfortune onto themselves, in the way that animals in fables get each other into trouble. The play presents the knight as noble for doing this! There is a parallel between the way the knight got the wicked men to play with the cursed dice, and the way that Bolaire got Aubrus Drime to put him on in the E4 cold open. The wicked men chose to play the game, thus sealing their own fate; Aubrus Drime chose to attack Bolaire and “steal his mask”, thus sealing his own fate. There is a kind of fairy tale justice to what Bolaire did to Drime.

The play also has the fairy tale logic of exchange and honoring agreements. In the final task, when the knight owes Rauwyn his honor, she makes a change to the agreement and asks that he pay her a kiss instead. Bolaire immediately took that on in his worldview. His existing agreement with the soldier who wore him was that he would temporarily offer his body to Bolaire and in exchange Bolaire would temporarily fight for his cause. Bolaire apologized and said the terms of the agreement were changing; he’d be taking the soldier’s body permanently. But he didn’t just run off with his body, which he easily could have done! He gave something in exchange. Since the soldier was permanently surrendering his freedom, in exchange Bolaire would fight for the cause until the war was through. It does follow the same logic as the play, where you can change the terms of an agreement as long as you exchange favors of equivalent value.

I do think Bolaire’s morality has evolved in some ways since then, especially now that he has friends and people he cares about. But the foundation of this blue and orange morality, that makes it okay to him to do what he did to Aubrus Drime, is still there.