#Also if Runaan turns out to not be Harrow's murderer it also damages the nuance in Rayllum as Callum isnt really enthousiastic

[madou-dilou]

Your interpretation is frankly the only way this whole sub-plot -if it actually is a sub-plot, makes sense. Viren is terrified of losing control. And him not knowing whether the spell worked or not... not only it drives him insane, it also makes Harrow's scene in Viren's dream make total sense.

I just hope so much that your prediction about Runaan will turn out false, because it kills any nuance the show still had left -and it was already flimsy, by making Viren the bad guy all along instead of Runaan and the cycle of violence -which defeats the purpose of the show.

Anyway.

But if it's actually not a sub-plot, and just symbolism...

I think Pip is the metaphor for Viren's guilt.

Harrow and Viren's dynamic strikes me as a Honor versus Reason, or Heart and Brain.

The first time we see Viren and Harrow interacting, Pip squeaks before Harrow speaks, as if doing the intermediary between them. Harrow's principles... well. They frustrate Viren, but also compell his admiration and respect. When Harrow refuses the snake spell for the second time and Claudia calls him an idiot, Viren tells her to watch her tongue -while no one was there to hear them; and Viren is actually thrown in doubt; he no longer knows if his pragmatic, ends-justifies-the-means views are the right now. He genuinely doubts himself, and Harrow is the one who made him.

When Harrow died, Viren tried to crown himself, having Pip's cage moved from Harrow's bedroom to the throne room, so it could attend his coronation. This bird saw Harrow ordering him to kneel and breaking his heart. And Viren berates Harrow's pet bird. As if Viren was trying to show Harrow what he actually was capable of, using this bird as an intermediate, transfering his own spite on Harrow's bird since Harrow himself... is dead.

And it's no coincidence that Pip flew away as Viren started murdering Katolian soldiers : Harrow's judgement was Viren's moral compass.

Let me make a detour and look at our favourite strawberry commander : Gren. This ties in, I swear. Look at what happened to Gren : why didn't Viren murder him ? Gren was the living proof that Viren was up to no good. As soon as he would be out of his shackles, he would report everything to Amaya. Viren tried to murder two children (and not just any children), but somehow couldn't bring himself to get rid of a loose end ? And he can't just not kill him, he also refuses to talk to him or even look at him. The only time Viren does talk to him, it's when he has lost every last bit of hope he had, and asks him how to remain hopeful. But otherwise, Vire straight-up ignores all of his attempts at making conversation, refusing to make eye-contact. As if Viren were.... embarrassed.

And now it ties in. Killing the princes, in Viren's mind and morals, is justified : their young age and naivety make them completely unfit to rule a country at war; and it's not like they will ever name him regent after what he did. But ... killing human soldiers ? In a war to save humanity ? Now, that's a line Viren can't bring himself to cross. It would confirm everyone's fears (including his own) about him : that he is not a servant of humanity, but a power-hungry scumbag who is just in for himself. That's something he cant accept.

Until Aaravos comes in.

And Viren gives in.

And Pip flies away.

Now, watching the scene Harrow has in the dream, it seemed strange to me that Viren never said anything like "I don't deserve your forgiveness, I tried to usurp your sons by having them murdered".

I think it's because this scene is not how it should play out, but how it should have played out. I am certain I have read this exact sequence in a thousand fanfictions. It's the perfect scenario (besides himself dying) that has haunted Viren since the very second Harrow died. Viren says so in the speech he pronounces for Harrow's funeral, "he called me his brother" which Harrow does say in Viren's perfect dream, but which we all know he never said, or even thought.

What happened in the dream just before was Viren's wildest desires for control coming true (the room is cluttered in red, symbolising desire and violence), he is king, everyone bows to him; but Viren realises that they speak rubbish, that the whole situation is absurd, and he rips the crown off his head because he knows he should not be king.

And seeing Harrow, he not only kneels, he bows, his forehead on the floor. It's an over-correction of the time everything went wrong because he didn't get on his knee before Harrow.

It's the whole "I should have said that first", the "Why did I say that", the "things might have gone so differently had I done this instead of that", the old festering wound of regrets, remorse, grief, pain and self-loathing. This is one of the old wounds referred to in the title of this episode. It seems like a desperate attempt to re-write the past. To finally get some of the peace Viren desperately strives for. And Viren gets it. He finally gets to do, say and hear what he's been rehashing for all this time. Finally, the wound is being healed.

And even better : Harrow tells him "I would never have done it without you". During their argument, Viren said he felt hurt by how ungrateful Harrow was for his years of service; and that is addressed too. Not only Harrow has lived, he also thanks Viren for it. He finally gives Viren acknowledgment and gratitude and friendship. He even calls him brother. It's literally everything Viren has always wished for. It's the icing on the cake.

But Pip is watching.

And Pip has been there, alive, during all the horrible things Viren did after Harrow's death. He may not have attended all of the horrible stuff Viren did (such as having Callum and Ezran murdered), but he was around, and Viren still used him as a replacement for Harrow. Pip actually represents Harrow's judgment of him.

Viren does not deserve peace. And he knows that.

Plus, the fact that it's Harrow executing the sentence is quite telling of Viren's admiration and love for him : Harrow is the only person Viren would accept a judgment from.

The coin spell specifically, is also, to me, quite telling. At first glance, iit would have made more sense to use the soul-fang one, since it's the one associated to Harrow and Viren's fucked-up relationship; but the coin spell is actually important : what this spell does is transforming a human into a coin. A person into a means. A crime Viren is, of course, heavily guilty of. And Harrow has criticized him on that in length.

Viren believes in retributive justice, so to him, it is only fair that he suffers what he has inflicted upon everyone during his lifetime.

So... my thoughts.

Schrödinger's King in the Bird Box

Time for a return to the single topic that most torments me in this entire franchise canon: is Harrow in the goddamn bird or not?

Except not really. I'm not going to go over the evidence again. I've done it before. Almost everyone has done it before. It has only gotten stronger. At the absolute minimum, an attempt was made to put Harrow in the bird. That's not really disputable. I admit it. It's over.

This is actually the second time that I've struggled with narrative cognitive dissonance regarding a real core factor of this show (like not "what's the deal with Archdragon reproduction," but something that is clearly supposed to be thought about with the intent that it will eventually make sense), and eventually managed to rotate it so hard in my mind that the way I wanted to see it slipped out of my grasp and I saw it the way it's actually intended. Ironically, I think I may have been thinking about the Ocean arcanum at the time.

Anyway, what previously always bothered me about this question was mainly two things:

It would have a devastating impact on Ezran's character development if Harrow reappeared during s1-s3, but the timeskip and arc of s4-s5 made it so it would also be deeply weird for him to reappear before the show ends.

If Harrow is in Pip's body, both Viren and Pip's subsequent behavior, as well as how Pip is treated by the narrative on a meta level, make absolutely no fucking sense.

But... if Viren doesn't know whether the spell was successful or not? If we are meant to not know whether the spell was successful or not, because it's not going to get resolved in the show itself?

If we accept that the earliest point with any chance of the hooks for this plot being set is late s7—because yes, Aaron Ehasz would do an exact beat-for-beat repeat of Zuko and his mom—that both puts Ezran far enough in his growth for it not to be threatened by the "real" king returning, and keeps Harrow out of the loop for long enough that it doesn't really make sense for him to do anything but step down from the throne in favor of Ezran, anyway. As for Viren and Pip's behavior, if the show isn't going to advance that plot much further during its runtime, there's no reason for us to be constantly reminded of it. The setup has been made, and they can just let it stew because it's not actually relevant.

That being said, Viren's behavior actually does make a lot of sense if "is Harrow in the goddamn bird or not" is a question that is also tormenting him. To that end, I'll be doing some digging here on the nature and context of the body-switching spell, Pip/Harrow's behavior post-swap, and what the hell is going on in the Harrow section of Viren's dark magic dream.

The Spell is Made Up (Unlike All Those Real Spells)

First of all, I think there's been some long-term incorrect assumptions made about the body-switching spell. It's not a known spell: this is Claudia and Viren essentially flying by the seat of their pants... but we rarely stop to think about how that contextualizes the rest of the discussion around it.

The initial plan is to find the assassins and ambush them before nightfall. As Soren points out and Viren himself confirms: if they fail, the assassins will be unstoppable under the full moon and Harrow is as good as dead. Claudia decides to put her mind to that problem, so naturally she stops to flirt with Callum in the library and gets the inspiration for the spell from something he says.

(Fun fact: none of that happens in the novelization. Zero amount.)

She brings the idea to Viren, and they develop the spell from there. It's not really clear if Claudia actually knows whether something like that would be possible, but Viren does know that transferring the essence of a person can be done—he's got a nice little coin collection that proves it.

As for the snake, there's no way Viren "acquired" a two-headed soulfang serpent because he has a book somewhere on how to use a rare, malformed specimen of a dangerous Xadian creature to switch people between bodies. He probably thought "that's weird, but could be useful," or maybe whoever sold it to him just had a great sales pitch. A non-trivial amount of success at dark magic is in having access to rarer and more powerful reagents than your competition.

Anyway, what this means is that Viren has absolutely no idea what success looks like for this spell, particularly when using it on subjects of different species. When he describes it to Harrow, he is 110% talking out of his ass. He sounds like he knows exactly what the spell will do and how, and I think a lot of us kind of fell for that. He needs to sound confident, because if he admitted that he doesn't know if it will even work, with a possible failure condition of "snake eats your soul," well... a) Harrow rightfully wouldn't go for it, and b) he'd look incompetent, which is the worst thing ever.

When he goes to Harrow's room, he casts the spell... but did it work? I think that whatever it did, it did it in a way that Viren can't tell whether it worked or not. Maybe both Harrow and Pip passed out. Maybe Viren just didn't want to hang around for the aftermath—in the novelization, when he exits the room and runs into Callum, his eyes are still black from spellcasting.

Activities of Dr. Pip Harrow, Ph.D.

Probably the thing that has always bothered me the most about the entire Harrow-Pip theory is that yes, literally everything in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the assassination points to that being exactly what happened... and then the narrative lens of the show completely drops the rope. Pip doesn't even appear in the novelization until Viren's pre-coronation scene, which is funny given his looming presence over half the scenes with Harrow in the show.

Pip appears exactly twice after the assassination—once in s1 and once in s2—otherwise he goes completely ignored. He's not in the background of Viren's office, or the throne room, or Harrow's bedroom. No one ever mentions him ever again. Ezran never mentions him again, in the show or in any supplementary materials. You'd think the boy who can talk to animals might have some interest in his dead dad's beloved pet... but who knows, maybe Pip has always been an asshole and Ezran's actually like "thank goodness I never have to speak to that dude again."

Anyway, in all of Pip's appearances, he behaves like... a bird. A trained bird—Harrow can rely on him not just fucking off—but he doesn't demonstrate human-like intelligence the way Bait does. That being said, Bait is essentially a main-cast character (at least as much as, say, Corvus... maybe even Soren) while Pip is a plot device, and even then it takes until well into the first arc for Bait to show the kind of complex reasoning and initiative that separates him from an unusually smart dog. Pip's human is also a stressed-out king, rather than a rambunctious ten-year-old, so he's probably a bit more sedate overall. I would personally bet, given the way the show has progressed with regard to Xadian creatures, that Pip is as intelligent as Bait.

The point of that is: even if Harrow's consciousness is occupying Pip's body, he's not really doing anything with it. He's pissy, sure:

But is that Harrow's pissy-ness or Pip's? Even if Pip is only as intelligent as a trainable bird, that's plenty intelligent enough for both grieving/confusion that their human is gone and holding a grudge against obvious assholes. Viren cages him, but is that because he flipped out and got bite-y? And was it Harrow flipping out, or Pip? Or is he caged just because Viren's of the general attitude that animals belong in cages? Those who fail tests of love... We just don't know.

A lot of us also, to circle back to assumptions about the spell, have tended to think of a body swap between Harrow and Pip resulting in Harrow flailing his arms around wildly and screeching... but again, we know literally nothing about this spell, nor do we actually know anything about Harrow's behavior after Viren leaves his room. Maybe his body sat catatonic on the bed until Runaan came in and shot him. Maybe Pip, being intelligent, was able to maintain the facade—once everyone's in the heat of battle, it would be hard to notice even significant deviations from normal behavior. Even if "Harrow" appeared to fight only halfheartedly, or give up entirely... well, he hasn't been the same since he lost Sarai. Maybe the spell only partially worked, and only half of his soul is inside Pip, with minimal or no influence over the bird body's behavior.

Viren does appear to take some precautions in case Harrow is alive inside Pip. The cage, for one... but he also has nearly all subsequent important conversations outside of his office. Like I said earlier, Pip's cage isn't rendered in the background of any scene, but since he escapes from Viren's office I'm assuming that's where he's been. Even if Pip was just out of frame in every scene in Viren's office post-assassination through end of s2, the only things he's seen are... Viren eating butterflies, and the conversation between Viren and Claudia about the mirror and her side mission to bring the egg back at all costs. He doesn't know about Soren's instructions to murder the boys. He knows about the mirror and Viren's obsession with it (which he could have known before), but he doesn't know about Aaravos. He may know that Viren stole his seal but only if Viren was stupid enough to stamp the letters with it in front of him (which... look, he could be). The only things he's really learned are that a) his sons are alive, and b) Viren lied to him and the egg is alive.

Now, realistically, if we were meant to hang on to the is-Harrow-in-the-bird plot thread because it's going to be significant within the scope of the show... I'd be expecting to see at least one cut to Pip glowering at some point during all these machinations. If it weren't for the mirror and Aaravos, I'd expect Viren to be yelling all his monologuing at Pip, too. But the show does none of that. Instead, the next time we see Pip, we see him peace-ing out of the show for at minimum the next three seasons, and possibly the remaining two, as well. If Harrow's in there... why? Did he go to find Callum and Ezran himself? It's not actually clear that he knows Ezran can understand animals, so it would be reasonable for him to think Viren is his only chance at ever not being a bird again. Maybe he thinks that chance is gone with Viren's arrest and would rather not spend the rest of his life in a cage. Maybe he really isn't in control of the body.

Back to Viren, though: since Pip refuses to demonstrate any behavior that could be taken as distinctly Harrow's, Viren actually has no idea at any point whether Harrow's in there or not. He doesn't know if Harrow lived. He doesn't know if he succeeded or failed. It's a constant reminder that he's almost, but not quite, in control. Almost, but not quite, good enough to achieve what he wants.

It probably drives him absolutely insane.

Did You Think You Were Somehow Getting Out of This Without Me Mentioning Kpp'Ar?

Just kidding, it's finally time to talk about Viren's dream. We've gone two entire seasons and a two-year timeskip without any mention of Harrow or Pip (though those maniacs dropped the fucking snake basket on us as an incidental but obvious prop early in s4), and then suddenly we get punched in the face by Viren's subconscious.

First, though, I do actually need to point something out in the scene with Kpp'Ar. Bear with me, I promise this is relevant.

Viren sealed Kpp'Ar's soul in a coin 12-ish years ago, and the coin has been sitting collecting dust in his secret dungeon for... some amount of that time. Now he opens the door and finds Kpp'Ar standing there, free—and I will note that I don't believe Viren actually knows how to free people from the coins, or whether it can even be done. His reaction is surprise, followed by suspicion and wariness:

When he encounters Harrow—dead—his reaction is horrified shock, which is fair since the last time he entered the room that way there was no surprise body chilling out waiting for him in it:

Then, when Harrow speaks to him, suddenly alive and unharmed, he drops straight into relief:

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the differences between Viren's relationship with Kpp'Ar and his relationship with Harrow. With Kpp'Ar, after that initial moment of confusion, he's absolutely determined to not show a single hint of ignorance or weakness—this is a trick, or a test, and a passing grade in "light verbal sparring with the mentor you're pretty sure you remember betraying" is a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve. For Harrow, who he wants so desperately to call him brother, who he walked into this very room ready to die for, before everything went horribly awry—he not only immediately and willingly goes to his knees, he literally prostrates himself.

... I'll give everyone a moment to get all the innuendo and suggestiveness out of their systems, because that's not the point. This time.

What is the point is that Viren's reaction to Harrow isn't disbelief, but relief. Hope. Kpp'Ar is supposed to be in a coin, and Viren immediately questions how he got out. Harrow is supposed to be dead but Viren doesn't give a second thought to how he's not. Fortunately, Harrow helpfully explains:

Fun fact: back in s1, we don't actually see Viren actually taking action against the assassins. We don't even see evidence that he re-entered the room at all—it's only Soren and Claudia who participate in Runaan's capture.

I haven't actually touched a lot on the complex shit going on for Viren, emotionally, throughout all of this—I mentioned it's was probably driving Viren insane over the course of the first two seasons, but let me elaborate. If Viren successfully switched Harrow and Pip, that means Harrow survived... but he expressed his feelings on the proposal in no uncertain terms, and there's a good chance he will literally never forgive Viren. I don't think Viren thought far enough ahead to consider how to get Harrow into a human body again, but I do think he's dragging his feet on it a little because if he can work things to his advantage—unite the Pentarchy against Xadia and follow through on the war Harrow was avoiding—he'll prove to Harrow that he was right all along. Any chance of that flies out the window with Pip at the end of s2.

If the body-switching spell failed, it means Viren essentially killed Harrow himself. That's the reality I think he grows more and more resigned to over the course of s1 and s2, when Pip remains unresponsive. He had no choice but to take the best chance at saving someone he loved—but this time, instead of saving Harrow, he murdered him.

In the dream, Harrow has not only survived, but credits Viren with his survival. He doesn't just dismiss Viren's show of remorse, but makes his own apology to Viren. He calls Viren brother. After an impossibly long nightmare, everything is okay. All is forgiven. Maybe there was nothing to forgive, in the first place. Maybe Viren was right all along.

Then it all turns sinister with the callback to the coin incantation, and we have a sharp return to reality:

The cinematography here treats Pip a lot more like how I would expect him to be treated in s1/s2 if we were meant to know he was actually Harrow. There's focus actually on him, instead of just other characters' reaction to him. He "speaks"—as I noted in another post—in raspy sounds very unlike his songbird chirps from s1. This is absolutely Harrow as Viren actually left him—even if he's not dead, he's in a warped prison of dark magic, a perverse mockery of himself.

Oh wait.

Harrow-who-is-both-human-and-alive was never an option, and what we've got now is mirror images of Harrow-the-dead-human and Harrow-the-live-bird, and they're going to do to Viren what he did to them.

Now, it's not that none of this makes sense if Viren knows for sure that Harrow is in the bird... but it makes a lot less sense and has less emotional resonance. If Viren knows Harrow survived as Pip, he'd be more likely to question Harrow's human form than his survival—the way he does with Kpp'Ar. He might be more guarded, expecting hostility—which, I will note, is what he gets when Pip enters the scene. Instead, because until now he believed that he actually killed Harrow in his attempt to save him, he's so relieved to see Harrow alive that for that one moment he loses all pride and is ready to beg for forgiveness at Harrow's feet.

Since legitimately none of this makes sense if Viren didn't at least attempt to put Harrow in the bird, we're left with Harrow maybe or maybe not alive, Viren having maybe or maybe not been the one to actually kill him (gonna be a fun one with the Runaan context), and a plotline that is definitely not going to be resolved in the remaining two seasons of the show. I'd be kind of surprised if they even did any more setup for it (like Callum/Ezran finding out it's a possibility, or even a hint drop like Runaan being all "it was fucking weird, he just sat there" or something) outside of future supplemental media.

Conclusion

Either Harrow is alive and in the bird, with the future intent being to do a spinoff story The Search-style, or we're in for a huge bummer of a "actually, it was Viren all along who killed Harrow, therefore Runaan is a good guy and we can all be one happy family" pile of absolute bullshit. Yes, they said Harrow's dead. Harrow's body is dead, we knew that all along. There's a note in the artbook that Viren was actually going to rip the shroud off at Harrow's funeral in order to publicly prove it's his body, because that is an extremely normal thing to do.

The show just treats it extremely weirdly because, even as the only person with any chance of knowing, Viren is in the same uncertain boat as the rest of us. (Actually more uncertain than the rest of us, since he's not genre-aware.) Also it's another chance to torment Viren emotionally, and they'd never pass that up.

Thanks for coming to my absolutely ridiculous TED Talk on this topic, I hope this screenshot now does as much psychic damage to you as it does to me:

[abidos]

First, a few points. 

 1. I don't think Viren knew that Aaravos was going to kill the queen. Even if he did, their entire plan relied on the fact that she would want to torture him to death in the most excruciating way possible, so I don't think to kill her qualifies as all that bad. 

2. What genocide? Does Viren or Aaravos at any point indicate they wanna eradicate the elves? Don't think so. Going to war isn't the same as genocide. 

My issue, and I think the problem of several other people, is that Viren is unnecessarily and out of character villainous, often for no other reason than to advance the plot in a specific direction. Throughout the first two seasons, Viren's evil actions serve specific purposes, and he doesn't seem to relish in the damage that he does. On the contrary, he seems to very much see it as a necessary evil. The only exception is when he turns Runaan into a coin, but Runaan just murdered Harrow, a bit of relish in his pain is understandable. 

But in season 3 we often see him being evil and villainous just for the sake of being evil. Or for plot reasons. 

1. There it's no need for him to be cruel to Ezran, this is the 8-year-old kid of his friend for whom he was willing to die a few weeks ago. Even strategically it would be much smarter If Viren at least initially tried to sell the narrative that Ezran is being removed from the throne for his own good, and lock him up somewhere in a tower. His behaviour seems to serve no purpose other than making him look villainous to the audience. 

 2. As Soren points out, one of Viren's strengths is his ability to get people on his side. But throughout season 3 he treats Soren unnecessarily badly and callously. Following his character, you'd expect Viren to go out of his way to get Soren back into the fold. But he does the complete opposite for no discernible reason except the writers wanting Soren's betrayal to seem natural. 

 3. The same happens with him taunting Rayla with the coins. It serves no purpose, he doesn't know her or care about her. Why does he waste time when he has so much more important stuff to do and is working on a tight time schedule? Because now Rayla knows about the coins so we can get a plotline where they rescue Runaan and her parents. There are a few more examples of this. 

An additional issue is that Viren gets forced into so many villain cliches in this season. Like the thing with the broken shackle insignia. It was so predictable that that was going to come back and bite him in the arse. This show is fairly cliché and uses a lot of tropes. Like princes having magical powers for no particular reason, evil magicians vs good monarchy and soldiers, pre-teens being great at politics and the best leaders of state... The interesting part for me was that Viren was in many senses different and not predictable. But that is mostly lost in season 3. My main hope now is that, now that the writers have gotten where they wanted to get to, they can get back to writing Viren with the nuance they did before.

Viren

So I see a lot of complaints about Viren being a villian in this season compared to the previous ones, that he isn't morally gray anymore. I couldn't disagree more.

First, let's see what his "morally gray" actions were:

Season 1

Good

Wanted to sacrifice his life for harrow.

Wasn't too mean to Runaan

Bad

Told Soren to kill the princess

Told Claudia to choose the egg over soren

Tried to usurp the throne

Trapped Runaan's soul into a coin

Season 2

Good

Showed that he cared for the queen

Season 3

Actually tried to save the kingdom

Wants the best for humanity

Bad

Sends assassin's to kill people in each kingdom

Kills a few guards

Forges letters

Threatens crowlord

Season 3

Good

Actually wants people to be happy, but aaravos ruins it for him.

Doesn't want his soldiers to die

Shows appreciation for his daughter

Told aaravos to fuck off basically cause he called his daughter an asset

Tries to connect with his son

Bad

Kills elf queen (though he doesn't do it he literally meant for it to happen)

Gaslights soren so badly

Does not show to care about soren

Could not care less about soren

Tries to eat zym

Relishes in trapping raylas parents

Does that again but with rayla

Was about to destroy the egg but kept it for greedy purposes

Tried to kill anyone that stood in his way

Idk but I don't see much changing as far as his personality goes. The dude clearly had no problem with killing people. So him doing it now isn't a surprise. Like Aaravos barely had to do anything here, he just brought out Viren's true desires. HOWEVER viren does state that he only wants to protect humanity, and never once did he want claim to the throne because of his own selfish reasons. That is what most people see as the morally gray part as his actions do have a noble cause...

But that still means he's a villian.

Viren is not the first villian to have good intentions but bad methods. Thanos, Ultron, Lotor, the list goes on. Even modern villians aka terrorists such as ISIL think they have good intentions... But their actions is what makes them a bad person.

You can say viren only wanted the best, but genocide and abuse isn't what a hero or morally gray character does. Soren said it himself, even though his father meant well, he is still a villian.

His traits did not appear much in the previous two seasons cause he was never given the moment to do so. He was always worried about stepping on people's toes, and after the elf attack, he finally showed his true side. I mean hell, have you seen what he did to Runaan? The dude was never good to begin with. Yes, all humans see elves as bad, but any human who loves to hurt elves isn't a good person, same as how any elves who like to hurt people aren't good either. Sol Regem isn't good, he wanted to kill others just to force a man to stop dark magic.

But yeah basically, viren never changed, Aaravos just allowed viren to exercise his true passion, regardless of true intentions. He's not misunderstood, not "uwu poor baby just trying to save humanity". He's an abusive father who takes advantage of the weakness in others to push whatever motives he has, be it in favor for people. Harrow isn't perfect, the elves aren't perfect, but Viren deliberately set up false flags to commit genocide on elves who had no idea what was going on, not to mention tearing down anyone in his way, including his son.

But I still love him, cause he's an interesting character of man who's morals conflict with his passion. Aaravos is giving him everything he wants and that itself if showing how corrupt Viren truly is. He's an extremist, and Aaravos only pointed it out for the audience.