#(it still would be the closest i'd get for toeing u!roman... but i stilll want him to be... pitiable.)

[an-organized-confusion]

Watching “Trope Talk: Are We The Baddies?” made me think of what iZ!Roman went through.

I think the canon TL has him in between variations 1 & 2. Like, the guy’s somewhat disillusioned about the kinds of thinking the Dead Enders had him stuck in - made more clear/obvious with the help of Patton. But Remus being his first actual mark was the revelatory moment that maybe he wasn’t an unassailable hero like he thought he was being.

The alternate TL where he doesn’t get that wake-up call? Well. He’s somewhere between 2 & 3. He gets worse and worse, digging himself into a moral quagmire he may soon believe irreversible. This Roman WILL and HAS killed members of Team Z... and getting Remus truly breaks him. The moral injury is too grievous, and all he has is maladaptive coping strategies for the cognitive dissonance.

And I really liked this comment under the vid (even tho I’m not that cynical):

And then there's the Backfire Effect.  In real life, when someone is confronted with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, they almost always reject the evidence and double down on their belief.  The more evidence that they are wrong, the more strongly they will insist that they are right.  If the hero works for KittenSquishers Inc and someone tries to tell him that he's working for the bad guys, the hero will work very hard to find reasons to question this information and justify rejecting it.  If someone tell him that he's one of the good guys, he accepts that without question.  We accept stories where the heroes can be shown the error their ways and change because we like to think we can convince other people that they are wrong, but that's pretty much pure fantasy.