Popular Culture Review Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2018 | Page 80

The Dishonored Series as Environmental and Social Commentary
and weight in the lives of the people around them , but he leaves the choices to them . In their choices lie both potential and ruin . Daud , who gathered a group of acolytes and built a life terrorizing the innocent , never takes responsibility for his actions . When Billie reunites with him in Dishonored : The Death of The Outsider , Daud burns with resentment , arguing , “ The Outsider gave me that mark knowing what I could do with all that power .” The sentiment is hardly fair . As Hazel Monforton argues , “ He gives his gifts to the oppressed , the downtrodden , and the blamed . He revisits his own powerlessness when he reaches out to give a choice to the abused . His position within the Empire , forcibly outside its walls , gives him the power to ask these questions ” ( n . p .). Antagonists , such as Daud and Delilah Copperspoon , eventually come to wield The Outsider ’ s gifts with cruelty , becoming what they once claimed to hate most . The protagonists embodied by the player�Corvo , Emily , and Billie 21 �may opt to become forces of good or chaos . Yet the key point is that all have been allowed to choose . The Outsider has neither threatened his chosen with punishment for not doing as he says nor forced them to follow any particular course of action .
While the game ’ s narrative offers no definitive conclusions , there is significant , albeit circumstantial , evidence that The Outsider ’ s true identity is the Leviathan , greater than just an ordinary whale , and perhaps akin to the biblical creature , an old chthonic creature of the deep who would , by virtue of that ancient existence and power , possess specific concern for the natural world . The murder of such a creature may bring about unintended results , such as this creature finding a new and human form as a god . The player can find a book
21 Billie is never marked by The Outsider , a reality she tells him she once regretted . However , in Dishonored : Death of The Outsider , he does grant Billie temporary Void powers .
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