Carl and NPCs
I’m only halfway through book 6 so now spoilers past that please!
Anyway, I think Carl’s view and how he deals with the NPCs is kinda fucked up, for a few reasons.
He has no idea which NPCs are generated and which are former crawlers (Astrid :( )He seems to view regular NPCs as not real, but former crawler NPCs are real people. Except he just sometimes kills NPCs thinking that they weren’t real anyway so meh. But realistically with the amount that he has killed, he has no way of knowing if any “real” people were among them just trying to finish out their contracts. He literally flooded a whole city and killed thousands of them, how could he be sure that no real people were there?
He has pretty much decided that they’re not real people and therefore they are better off dead. Except it seems as though he based that entirely off Fire Brandy and the dwarf guy in book 3 wanting to die instead of going through another crawl once they realised their families weren’t real.
Ok cool, but that was just those guys. I’m sure other NPCs feel real and want to life, even if it’s not what we would consider “life”. So far Juice Box seems pretty ok with everything, so is it really up to Carl to decide “I’m doing them a favour, they’re better off dead”
- Just because he thinks they’re not real doesn’t mean they aren’t. Based on something a hunter said in book 5, it seems that crawlers aren’t always seen as real people either. So Carl deciding that they are better off dead because they’re not real and whatnot, it sounds exactly like the attitude that the hunter had towards him, so maybe just because he thinks it’s ok to slaughter them, maybe he’s no better than the hunters who think the same about the crawlers. Can he really be sure he’s doing all of them a favour?
I really love these books, I’m tearing through them. But every time Carl justifies killing an NPC that he’s saving them, it just rubs me the wrong way a little bit.