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Always fascinated by this.
Love the effect of friendship and love on behaviour, especially that of villains or otherwise morally grey characters. This also suggests that the fundamental difference between Lord Vile and Skulduggery is love - love is what created Vile (Skulduggery losing his family and being consumed by rage) and love is what killed him too (Val’s companionship and love of Skul allowing him to move on and improve himself.)
I adore this duo so much - platonic soulmates for the win!
I’m a little obsessed with Skulduggery telling alt Vile that he’s the superior one in DotL because it’s such a fascinating trope subversion.
The typical trope is that a character who is a morally good person is faced with an alternate version of themselves who is stronger, but also evil. Then said character must battle with whether or not they value being strong or being good more.
And this is why I love Skulduggery here so much. He has spent nearly his whole life being the despicable one. He’s cruel. He’s strong and he bullies those weaker than him. Even if he is clever, he is ultimately a brute who’s spent so long being used as a weapon that he’s come to love it. He’s been strong his whole life, he doesn’t want to be strong anymore. He wants to be good in order to please Valkyrie.
And finally, he is faced with a version of himself who is even stronger than him, but also a worse person. He is finally the better person, even if that makes him weaker. He’s happy to be the good one. Even if it means getting literally dragged off and tortured, he gets to know that he’s not as awful as he could be. It is no moral battle for him, it is finally being able to claim moral victory.
And he’s never really worried, even when they take him away to be tortured. Because Vile is alone, there’s nobody in the world who loves him. Skulduggery, on the other hand, has someone who’d burn the world down for him. He doesn’t need to be stronger because he has someone he can rely on. And that’s how he gets away with claiming superiority to Vile. His growth as a character over the series has resulted in there being someone who will break him out.
Anyways, subversion of annoying tropes for the win. Skulduggery’s relationship with Vile fascinates me.
So true. Looking back on this series as an adult - or a not twelve year old - has made me question a lot of what happened in this series. Still love it with all my heart though. Can’t wait to properly re-read and be completely horrified!
Honestly I think that Tanith and Skulduggery’s friendship is CRIMINALLY underrated in this series. They are so unhinged.
They really said “hey why not?” And decided to illegally co-raise a teenager for YEARS together in spite of barely knowing each other. They’re both hyper-violent and get mad when they can’t punch things for long periods of time. They try and kill each other a LOT. A WHOLE LOT. And they just…don’t care the next time they see each other. These were the people that decided that it was alright to use a thirteen year old as vampire bait and to NOT come with backup.
When all the Teleporters were dying off and there was only a few left, Skulduggery fully trusted that Tanith wasn’t the one killing them while not trusting just about ANYBODY ELSE. But yeah, this bounty hunter lady he’s known for two years cannot possibly be the culprit.
When Skulduggery is yelling at Valkyrie for hanging out with a vampire after he got back from the Faceless Ones dimension, everyone else was too scared to say anything EXCEPT for Tanith, who told him to shut the fuck up.
She also saw him turn into Vile while they were all in Dimension X? And as far as we know, she HASN’T TOLD ANYONE??
There’s more as well, they are such a crazy duo. They aren’t even codependent on each other and yet keep coming back to team up with each other, even if all safety and reason would say to probably not trust the other. Why do we not talk about them more.