2013-05-02: [CT] Totally Not Foreshadowing Something

[Graybeard]

It reads as more true to watch a fundamentally selfish person who thinks they're a good guy erode into their worst self than it does to think a genuinely selfless person would snap and become suddenly this homicidal narcissist just because now he's got more power.

Hoo boy, do I wish this matched my own experience. Sad story follows, spoilered for brevity...

Spoiler: show

A long time ago, I shared an office with a guy I'll call Franz; he was from a German-speaking country (which may be important to what follows), but that wasn't his real name. Thinking back, he actually had certain resemblances to Ian as we first saw him in the story. Notwithstanding a belief that he was part of an "intellectual" social circle like many other highly educated Austro/Swiss/German expats I worked with at the time, he was a very pleasant and mild-mannered man, unfailingly courteous, always willing to help others ... right up to the moment he killed two people (one of them himself) and seriously wounded another.

Franz was a devoted family man until the last three months of his life, and he and his wife "Greta" had had three children that he adored. Unfortunately, his oldest son had died in an auto accident not long before we came to share the office, and he and Greta took it VERY hard, very much as Ian took Evelyn's death. I knew this (I'd known him for years), and marveled at the fact that the two of them had been able to hold it all together after this loss -- or so I thought. He continued to be polite, helpful (this was during my post-doc days and I learned a vast amount of science from him), and so on, even as the anguish of this loss was eating away at him, because that's just the kind of person he was. And then ... Greta left him for another man. I never learned the details, but obviously the strain on their relationship had reached the breaking point even as both of them continued to be pleasant to those they encountered, certainly including me. Franz stewed about this for several weeks as his working efficiency plunged to zero ... and he was still pleasant to me and our co-workers.

And then one day, he did the "American" thing: he went out and bought a Saturday Night Special, which he had abhorred in the years I'd known him, not least because it was the American thing as he saw it. He thought civilized people should be beyond such "solutions" to their problems, wearing his best European-intellectual hat. But he changed his mind. Saturday Night Specials do give one the power of life and death, after all ...

What followed from there was too predictable. He caught his estranged wife with her lover and shot them both, one fatally, one receiving serious wounds. Then he drove off into the mountains, parked his car on a secluded dirt road that had been a favorite hiking and Nordic skiing destination, and turned the gun on himself.

Absolutely nobody who knew Franz saw this coming. We weren't necessarily shocked that he'd gone off the deep end, but that he would actually kill somebody as a result -- that was as contrary to what we knew of the man as running naked through the streets of town would have been, probably more so. To all appearances he was a "genuinely selfless person" -- right up to the moment he snapped. If he hadn't been, his friends (he had many) would surely have intervened to prevent that final tragedy. As it was, we just didn't know. In some ways I've never forgiven myself for not seeing it coming and doing something about it. But realistically, there wasn't anything to do.

End of spoilered story, but I think you can see its relevance. Genuinely good people do snap, and the results can be very, very ugly. To me that's the consistent view of what happened with Ian, and because of this event in my past, it hits too close to home.

[Imp-Chan]

There is a huge difference between that behavior (which is very sad, and I'm sure from my own experience with losing a close friend to suicide must have been horrible at the time), and Ian's behavior. Franz snapped once, hard, under what sounds like pretty extreme duress. That sucks, and it does happen, and it would indeed be a believable and painful story.

But when you look at Errant Story as a whole, it's clear that Ian didn't snap, he merely escalated an existing pattern. There was no part of his apparent thought processes which actually changed... he hated elves and blamed them for his problems at the start, he set out to be the one-man solution to a situation he viewed as terrible at the start, he was entirely willing to hurt innocents to achieve his goals since literally the first page we saw him, he was prone to violent reactions to the point of overkill from the start... Ian was all the terrible things about himself from day one, it's just that when he had more power and less to lose he was all those terrible things about himself more. The reason I call him a narcissist is his absolute dedication to believing he is the solution. Whether as a would-be healer or a would-be exterminator, he thought he knew what was best... and nobody else's opinion, needs, or even CONSENT mattered if they were in opposition to his self-appoointed role as savior. Really, his character is incredibly consistent throughout, it's only his behavior which escalates.

^-^'

[Forrest]

Impy, I think your assessment of Ian's character has a lot of factual insights, but I still disagree that that really made him a bad person from the start.

You're right about Ian's plans all hanging around him having to be the solution in some way, but I don't think that necessarily entails narcissism. I think more likely it comes from someone who is used to having no significant support group and having to solve all of their problems on their own. Having a family consisting entirely of a physically sickly younger sibling and a debilitatingly depressed mother, Ian would have spent his entire life as the effective head of his household, without ever having a real childhood, having to support his mother instead of the other way around, and having to support his sister too since his mother was incapable of doing so.

Coming from that kind of background, I'm not surprised that he simply doesn't think in terms of "let's confer with the others and see what kind of plan we can come up with together by pooling all of our resources", because in his home there were no others and there were no resources, it was all on him. This would leave him both accustomed to acting alone without consulting others (and accustomed to having to act on others for their own benefit even if they may protest, like parents have to do with children, and Ian must have had to do with both his sister and likely his mother as well, given her apparent destructive, and self-destructive, tendencies); and also with an overbearing sense of responsibility, of it being all up to him because there is nobody else to take care of him or the ones he feels he's responsible for.

That doesn't justify any of the choices he made that he could have made better, but it's a more charitable interpretation of his motivations than just plain narcissism. Ian doesn't know to think in terms other than "I have to be the hero", because he has always had to be the hero.

Also on the subject of someone "being good" vs someone "doing good", I question that distinction, for some very personal reasons. That got kinda long, so, spoilered I guess:

Spoiler: show

Deep down inside, I don't really emotionally care a whole lot about other people. I don't have a visceral reaction when I hear about or even see other people suffering. But I have an extremely strong, almost obsessive compulsion to do what is right for the sake of just doing what is right, not because it gets me anything or because I feel someone else's pain, but just because doing what's right is intrinsically valuable in and of itself. And that includes a kind of intellectual honestly, and open-minded neutrality, a mediator's mindset seeking to figure out what exactly is truly right in each particular circumstance before taking any action, so I'm not talking about being some kind of Knight Templar pushing my view of morality on other people or anything like that, I just mean I make a point of conforming my actions to the best approximation of what is objectively right as I can, simply because doing so is just the right thing to do, not for any emotional sympathetic motive.

Pretty much everyone I know (who hasn't severely wronged me in some way and been on the receiving end of what happens when I snap) will go on and on about how I'm such a friendly selfless person. In an intellectual sense I can accept that because doing good for goodness' sake seems to me like just the straightforward obvious thing any thinking person who's capable of introspection would do, just like believing things because that's what reason and evidence suggests is the straightforward obvious way of forming beliefs (vs, say, because it makes you feel good to believe something). But that all applies to actions I intentionally take after thinking about what I should do, which is how I try to act all the time... but under stress and duress, when my intellectual rigor starts to wane and my actions start to become more dominated by my emotions, I can turn into a very angry scary person, and if I hadn't at some point developed a psychological mechanism where I turn that anger in on myself (not healthy, I know), I could easily see myself hurting someone else (instead of myself) when I get pushed past the point where I can think before I act.

I'm obviously biased, but I wouldn't think of a person like myself as a bad person deluding themselves into thinking they're good, because the feedback I get from others (trying to weed out my own bias here) is that on the whole I do more good than bad than the average person does, and our actions are what deserve praise or blame more than our motivations. In some ways I think doing good even when you don't really care about the people you're doing good by is more admirable than doing good because you feel some overflowing love for everyone you see. I can look at a person who has wronged me and think "You're a worthless, pathetic sack of shit and I could easily enjoy watching you suffer... if I let myself, but that would be wrong, and I won't lower myself to that, so I will do right by you even though I don't want to; because I have to, not because someone will punish me for doing otherwise, but just because it's right". I consider that a kind of strength. But, the flip side to it is, when I get too emotionally weak, when I no longer have that strength, when I've been beaten and worn down past the breaking point... then someone who wrongs me is just a worthless pathetic sack of shit who I could easily enjoy watching suffer, and I'm too emotionally exhausted to care that that's wrong now.

I would imagine that growing up in isolated responsibility, rather than as a beloved and nurtured member of a healthy family, could foster this kind of mindset, the "I will do what's right whether I want to or not because someone has to be the responsible adult around here" mindset, vs a more emotionally-motivated sense of morality. I didn't come from quite as dysfunctional a family as Ian did, I didn't have to support any sickly siblings or anything, but my parents were emotionally unstable and fought all the time and from a young age I was breaking them up and mediating their disputes and generally having to be the grown-up in the house, emotionally speaking. I don't know really if Ian has this kind of mindset either, but you seem to be suggesting he has something like it -- that he's "trying to do good" vs "intrinsically good-natured" or something -- and if that's true, I can see that as a byproduct of his upbringing.

With that character interpretation in mind, I can agree with you that Ian's descent was an exaggeration of character traits already in place, but I don't think they're the ones you suggest. Aside from the ingrained mindset of always being the only person around who can solve the problems and save the people he loves, I think he was always (since we met him at least) desperate and worn a little emotionally thin, and so not making the best choices he could. As the story wound on, he got more and more desperate and beaten down and eventually lost any capacity to calmly consider all the available possibilities and pick the best of them. When he came home to his charred home, he rashly started doing something, anything, to try to make something better, without thinking about the implications (e.g. force-healing Leah). When he failed to resurrect Lyn he completely snapped and lost his shit and went on a suicidal charge against whoever could be blamed for all this (the Elves, via Veracia). By the time he was out of that rage, he was already across the moral event horizon, in a den of villains urging him on, and seemed kind of sadly resigned to this course of action -- like he wished there were other options, which there were, but he was too scarred and hardened by then to even see them.

In short, what I think got exaggerated in Ian was not narcissism, but a kind of emotional overwhelm and burnout which left him unable to think properly about what he was doing and should have been doing, leaving him alternately lashing out in anger and sleepwalking toward oblivion.

Which, again, doesn't excuse any of his actions, but to me seems not only a more charitable interpretation of his character, but a far "better truth", in the sense that if that is his true motivation then I think it makes the story better than it would be if he was just an unwitting narcissist.

[Imp-Chan]

That's a good point about Ian's background... his older sister pretty much raised him from what I can see, but weakness in any sort of guardian can leave a child feeling the weight of the world. That would go a long way towards explaining his self-orientation. And it is true that being a good person is not particularly a native state for everyone and that making the directed effort because you perceive that it is not your native state would still (at least in my book) qualify you as a good person (I hope so, because I do a certain amount of that as well). I don't think that's what Ian was doing, though. It's a subtle thing, this discrepancy I see in Ian, and I'm having a very hard time communicating it even ten years later, apparently. Let's try a different approach...

I met a person the other day who saw that I was in distress. This person made the effort to listen to my distress, and to offer comfort. Those things were both needed and appreciated, but they also felt a little bit greasy. They were supposedly the right things, so why would they feel that way? Because I felt that in some way my distress and the chance to help with it were feeding that person. The care and comfort were genuine, but not quite freely offered, because underneath them was that person's need to play that role. He talked a big game about how he cared so much about people he couldn't help healing them, and he maybe even believed it, but the reality was that he was a person who sought people in pain because he needed the fix of being the one to help with it. Even when in order to do that he would harm himself or others, he refused to believe he should change his behavior. Being a healer was how he had defined himself, and that was who he had to be for his sake, more than for anyone else's. The result was good intentions and good behavior, but still... not entirely a good person.

I see a similar underlying need in Ian, and I would be just as hard-pressed to say exactly why he seems that way, beyond pointing out that his behavior never prioritized his concern for others above his underlying need to be... well, empowered, really. I can't blame him for feeling disenfranchised most of his life, he's had a very rough go, and I think any of us would feel a lot of the same powerless rage that he grew up with if we were in his circumstances. The difference is that he chose to prioritize that set of feelings above anything else in his life, shutting out a lot of the good experiences to be had in the process, and the entire time he pretended that it was because he cared so much about everyone else. And really, that's the entire problem that I have with calling Ian a good person. He had good intentions, he did good things, he thought he was doing them because he cared... but at the end of the day, his priority was always that secret, slimy need to be the hero, the one with the power. Everything and everyone else, including his sister, was secondary. In my reading, the reason Ian takes a swing at Jon, here, is because deep down he knows Jon is right.

Incidentally, I think it's wonderful that we all have different views about Ian and different experiences to color how we perceive his motivations and behavior. We don't have to agree, he's a very complex character, and to me that says that Poe did one hell of a job writing him!

^-^'

[erejnion]

Whoa, wall of text. Let's see...

>I should probably clarify that my view both at the time and now is that it was more likely that Ian thought he was a good guy than that [...]
I could have tried to explain the same thing, but you did better job, Imp-chan

>All available evidence suggests to me that he would have simply healed Evelyn as he had set out to do, then got down to the business of improving the lives of his people -- with or without taking on the elves.
But would that have been enough? This whole haste was unneeded, even harmful, if he just wanted to heal everybody. The others told him that, repeatedly. But no, he was not content with the mere role of a healer, he wanted more. That's why Evelyn's grave scene happened, and that's why he flied away after that.

>This moment is telling: if she hadn't had this weird, supernatural intervention to get her straightened out, do you really think she'd have avoided the trap that consumed Ian? I don't.
Meji has always showed an ability to step back and look at herself, as opposed to Ian. This moment you linked just takes it up to eleven.

>Genuinely good people do snap, and the results can be very, very ugly.
I can tell you that you simply didn't know him well enough, but I wasn't there. That's why... uh, see, I myself don't have a moral imperative not to kill. What is actually stopping me from killing is a mixture between the restrictive bonds my friends impose upon me (I don't want to make them sad that I've stained my hands) and a deep-rooted belief in chaos (keeping a life provides for more chaos later on). These restrictions can fall off under the right circumstances, and I could kill. Does this make me a bad person? I don't think so; but still me-of-here-and-now and me-of-the-alternate-future-where-I-kill are the same person.
Ian is also the same person in the end as who he was in the beginning. It's not like he became bad over the course of the story. So, in the end, my logic boils down to "If you think he is a bad person at the end, then you must agree that he was bad at the start too."
That being said, I simply think of him as a really good villain; and this doesn't actually include "bad person" in the job description.

>The reason I call him a narcissist is his absolute dedication to believing he is the solution.
Narcissist is a little much. A self-righteous bastard... is a little off. Also used in the translation of Kokoro Connect I followed. Oh well, don't think there is a good word for him, especially considering how many protagonist tropes he plays with.

>Also on the subject of someone "being good" vs someone "doing good", I question that distinction, for some very personal reasons. [...]
That essentially makes you a good person who overthinks what he does. It's a common occurrence, honestly. I would say Ian's problem was more closely related with underthinking things than with overthinking them.
Hah, you say it yourself:
>[...] he rashly started doing something, anything, to try to make something better, without thinking about the implications [...]
But, I would argue that
>[...] but a kind of emotional overwhelm and burnout [...]
was never much of a reason for him not thinking. Remember, shortly after we meet him he just goes and levels a lot of Saus. Certainly not a sing of thinking actions through.

This whole rashness, the failure to see the right decision, the want to be the hero, and his self-centered-ness are recurring traits for Ian throughout the whole story. And they are what lead him to do all the "bad" things in the second half of the story. But, as traits go, I am sure I can find numerous "good" protagonists harboring these traits in the world's fiction. Well, uh, only that the decisions they take do turn out to be right in the end, although they aren't what one of us, the readers, would do.

So, after having commented on most of the wall of text I was presented with... well, I could try to explain the difference for me between somebody who puts up a do-gooder front and an actual good person, but it seems to me Imp is doing a much better job at it.

[BloodHenge]

(I'll go ahead and say that I haven't read all of the replies after mine, but I don't have anything to add to the rest of what I've read so far, so I'll just reply to this for now.)

Shades of grey are what make the story interesting. Meji starts off cynical and callous and looking much more like the one most likely to turn into the superpowered evil maniac, but despite her very obvious sociopathic tendancies she apparently turns out pretty practical and responsible when she gets all her power. Ian starts off as the idealistic kid trying to save the world from a great evil and turns into the superpowered maniac himself. Without those initial good intentions, he'd be just as shallow an antagonist as if Chris (your stereotypical do-gooder adventurer with a heart of gold out to save the world) were the protagonist.

You raise an interesting point. Ian sought power as a means to an end, and once he had the power, that end is all he pursued. Meji wanted power as an end unto itself, and once she had it, she took a step back and thought about everything it could be used for. So Ian became a supervillain, and Meji became a philanthropist.

I don't see it that way at all. Meji had an end in mind too, and it was (at least IMO) a considerably less laudable end than Ian's. She just happened to survive the acquisition of superpowers with her basic sanity (such as it was) intact, which Ian did not. Nor was it obvious when it all happened that her sanity was going to survive. This moment is telling: if she hadn't had this weird, supernatural intervention to get her straightened out, do you really think she'd have avoided the trap that consumed Ian? I don't.[/quote]
Meji's stated goal was to "graduate", but an implicit consequence of that goal is that she'll become a (licensed) wizard. That's why I say that power itself was her goal. Some of that power is legal authority, but with Senilis in tow, she has enough magical power that she can coerce legal authority (which was technically her plan at the outset anyway).

I admit that Meji's experience integrating Senilis may have been more positive than Ian's experience integrating Anilis, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from that, and I'm not sure whether it's an indicator or a catalyst for what they went on to attempt.

[Forrest]

Also on the subject of someone "being good" vs someone "doing good", I question that distinction, for some very personal reasons. [...]

That essentially makes you a good person who overthinks what he does. It's a common occurrence, honestly. I would say Ian's problem was more closely related with underthinking things than with overthinking them.
Hah, you say it yourself:

[...] he rashly started doing something, anything, to try to make something better, without thinking about the implications [...]

But, I would argue that

[...] but a kind of emotional overwhelm and burnout [...]

was never much of a reason for him not thinking. Remember, shortly after we meet him he just goes and levels a lot of Saus. Certainly not a sing of thinking actions through.

I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make.

I concede that I am a good person to the extent that my actions are on the whole good, or more precisely, that my overall disposition, all things considered, is to act in good ways.

But I am only thus because I think that I should be good, and to a sufficient extent, I am allowed the peace I need to be able to act how I think I should act, rather than just how I feel like acting. I very often, perhaps even a majority of the time, do not feel like being good. If I just acted on my feelings all the time I would be a huge asshole to a lot of people who upset me more than I should get for their minor offenses, and tell people who want minor favors to fuck off before they inconvenience me, and so on, instead of forgiving minor offenses and doing minor favors.

When I am pushed too far, and run out of the emotional resources to maintain the kind of emotional peace that allows me to act how I think I should act instead of how I feel like acting, then I lose that thoughtful control of my actions and start to act just how I feel like acting. I still think that I shouldn't, somewhere in the back of my mind, and I wish that this could somehow be resolved better, but the thinking-voice is so meek and exhausted that I can't really hear it over the screams of anger or the monotonous drone of depression or whatever, and I can't even imagine how a better resolution could be plausible, much less make myself take such a path.

I'm positing that if, as has been suggested, Ian doesn't really feel like helping other people, but rather just does whatever good he does because he thinks he should, then a plausible explanation for why his actions get worse and worse over time (and start out bad already) is because he is losing (and was already running low on) the emotional resources necessary to act thoughtfully, and is becoming effectively a mindless animal unable to change course and control his own behavior.

And I'm suggesting that that kind of motivational structure -- good because you think you should be, rather than because you feel like it -- doesn't make someone good or bad in and of itself. That, plus the emotional resources to act thoughtfully, make up such a person's overall dispositions, and thus make them good or bad in the sense that they are disposed to do good or bad things. Ian's motivational structure may have been the same all throughout, but his emotional resources got thinner and thinner over the course of various attacks and losses.

If he had found the book and absorbed Anilis without incidents with the Veracians or Elves, made it home in time to save his family, and healed his whole village, getting all kinds of positive reinforcement and support and so on along the way, leaving him emotionally resourced after it all, I could see him exercising much greater restraint with his powers and not going off to exterminate the Elves. But instead, starting from an already emotionally weakened position, he was met with constant attacks, constant failure, and then encouragement down the wrong path, and grew less and less resourced and less and less capable of thinking of alternatives and acting on those thoughts. Even if somewhere in the back of his mind he knew what he was doing was wrong, he had lost the intellectual power to find and take other courses of action.

I could see a similar transformation happen to someone who always acts motivated primarily by emotions, but is full of positive loving emotions. They've never really been able to control themselves, but they inherently feel like being nice to people, and just aren't very easily upset, are easy to forgive, feel others' pain and feel moved to alleviate it. They don't really think much about what is right or wrong, but they just feel like being nice to everybody because in their view all people are basically good and deserve it. But then, over time, hardships and betrayals change how they feel about other people, and the world starts to look dark and bitter full of worthless wastes of oxygen, and they may start to do horrible things.

In that case, that person lacked all along the safety net of being able to act how they think they should act even if they don't feel like it, so when they stop feeling like being good, they go bad. Someone like me or perhaps Ian instead lacks the safety net of feeling nice about people in general, so when we stop being able to act thoughtfully, we go bad. In either case, something about the person's overall dispositions changed, it wasn't merely that a new opportunity presented itself. Circumstances deteriorated whatever motive they had for acting properly. That their driving motivation was the same type all along doesn't make them bad all along. It's when they lost that motive that they went bad. Ian was already on his way there when we first met him, but it's not like he was always a bad guy at heart; he was on his way to becoming a bad guy, and could have been turned around, if circumstances had gone differently.

[erejnion]

I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make.

No, I think I understood you pretty well, just didn't express it, instead trying to show the same thing from my viewpoint. Which was something about over- and under- thinking, but it would probably be better if I avoid repeating myself, so... uh... even if you think you should be good, you can still underthink how you should be good, which happens, but then you need control mechanisms to avoid it, like introspecting on yourself and actually listening to your friends, and... I think I am slightly getting lost in this thought, so I will simply skip it.

[...]
When I am pushed too far, and run out of the emotional resources to maintain the kind of emotional peace that allows me to act how I think I should act instead of how I feel like acting, then I lose that thoughtful control of my actions and start to act just how I feel like acting. I still think that I shouldn't, somewhere in the back of my mind, and I wish that this could somehow be resolved better, but the thinking-voice is so meek and exhausted that I can't really hear it over the screams of anger or the monotonous drone of depression or whatever, and I can't even imagine how a better resolution could be plausible, much less make myself take such a path.

I, on the other hand, pose that Ian doesn't have such an inner voice. Or, the inner voice which made him keep up the do-gooder front is the same inner voice which later went on about killing the elves. As in this page: it's okay, I will still count as good if I pay off my previous misstep with this next one that I don't see as a misstep right now.
That being said, if his family wasn't dead, the line on the previous page would probably just have been "I just want people to be safe! I JUST WANT MY FAMILY TO BE SAFE!". Though said family would have probably managed to slow down his descend considerably, as his sister at least would have probably made him listen --and obey her. Something Meji & his friends didn't manage. Sheesh. Listening to other people's advice and actually taking these to heart is one of the traits I count towards "being good". It was completely absent in Ian.

I'm positing that if, as has been suggested, Ian doesn't really feel like helping other people, but rather just does whatever good he does because he thinks he should, then a plausible explanation for why his actions get worse and worse over time (and start out bad already) is because he is losing (and was already running low on) the emotional resources necessary to act thoughtfully, and is becoming effectively a mindless animal unable to change course and control his own behavior.

Given the same amount of time Ian had, I am sure your inner introspective voice would eventually get the better of you, despite your limited emotional resources. That's actually his failing of the "good person" test for me, not something else. People make mistakes, always. A good person should be able to avoid falling so much down that one spiral, though. Not that Ian even counted a lot of the things in his spiral as bad. Slaughtering elves was never bad for him.
edit: and, rereading this, it makes it sound like I can't accept a person as good unless he has gone through hardships. No, it's about assuming that somebody who looks like a good person would have a self-control mechanism in place, with the help of which he would cope eventually even with copious amounts of misfortune, given the time. Ian indeed was on the receiving end of the stick, but for me he had enough time to let such self-control mechanisms kick in gear. That is providing he had any. His meditation time in the Ensigerum sure seemed like such mechanisms starting to act, but in the end even these mechanisms didn't actually encourage him to stop and go back to simply healing, now, did they?

If he had found the book and absorbed Anilis without incidents with the Veracians or Elves, made it home in time to save his family, and healed his whole village, getting all kinds of positive reinforcement and support and so on along the way, leaving him emotionally resourced after it all, I could see him exercising much greater restraint with his powers and not going off to exterminate the Elves. But instead, starting from an already emotionally weakened position, he was met with constant attacks, constant failure, and then encouragement down the wrong path, and grew less and less resourced and less and less capable of thinking of alternatives and acting on those thoughts. Even if somewhere in the back of his mind he knew what he was doing was wrong, he had lost the intellectual power to find and take other courses of action.

I doubt this. What I think this whole misfortune did was merely speeding up the process. Speeding it up so much that those around him didn't have nearly enough time to try to change him out of his... violent ways.
If this was your usual battle shonen manga, he would have had a training arc, then some DEEP philosophy chapters, after which he mellows out, and starts preparing for the 'last battle' against some newly introduced Big Bad. Probably with the help of the elves, in order to hammer down the fact that he has changed. Hm. Now that I wrote this, I guess his inherited hate of the elves did play a leading role in his 'bad' decisions. But managing to overcome a built-in hatred is still simply one more typical "good" trait that Ian lacks.

In that case, that person lacked all along the safety net of being able to act how they think they should act even if they don't feel like it, so when they stop feeling like being good, they go bad. Someone like me or perhaps Ian instead lacks the safety net of feeling nice about people in general, so when we stop being able to act thoughtfully, we go bad. In either case, something about the person's overall dispositions changed, it wasn't merely that a new opportunity presented itself. Circumstances deteriorated whatever motive they had for acting properly. That their driving motivation was the same type all along doesn't make them bad all along. It's when they lost that motive that they went bad. Ian was already on his way there when we first met him, but it's not like he was always a bad guy at heart; he was on his way to becoming a bad guy, and could have been turned around, if circumstances had gone differently.

But Ian's motive was constantly "just trying to help", from the first page till the very last one. That being said, it was nice of him to accept the gun pointed at his head. I would have even been in awe from this act, were his hands not at Meji's throat at the time. Such a delightful mixture, truly. A perfect example of the reason why we can argue about Ian in such a manner right now.

I admit that Meji's experience integrating Senilis may have been more positive than Ian's experience integrating Anilis, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from that, and I'm not sure whether it's an indicator or a catalyst for what they went on to attempt.

I vote for "catalyst". What's more important for me is that Ian didn't focus on understanding his powers, instead simply trying to be an hero help. Meji did give herself retroactively a push at understanding her own powers, but her mind had always worked that way (after all, first thing she did with her powers). Something to do with better education, I suppose. It sucks to be Ian. He would have been a better person too if given such an education.

[Bytemite]

Yeah, it's sobering to go back and look at who you were (or at least your on-line persona was) ten years ago, or more, isn't it?

The interesting thing is, I think you got Ian completely wrong there. In fact, rather than being "too quick to be concerned about people other than himself" or a good actor, he was simply in do-gooder mode, as his later letter to Evelyn made clear. Furthermore, it wasn't just a matter of being "all pissed at the elves"; he had a good reason for his feelings. Something that we forget is that even a ditz like Riley was pretty clear about the danger posed to Santuarielites by elves. And reasonably so; wouldn't you agree that the typical rabbit, if sentient, would hate foxes?

You sure got the Errant part right, though... which I'm not sure I was doing at the same time.

I actually never really held the Ian's do gooder stuff against him, or his talking about his sister a lot, and I was surprised when people said they considered him "angsty." Of course he does eventually really jump off the deep end of wangst so hard that even I felt the impact crater. But yeah, I did think he was a good guy with good intentions. I do think he cared about his sister more than just as a means to make himself seem important once he saved her.

With that character interpretation in mind, I can agree with you that Ian's descent was an exaggeration of character traits already in place, but I don't think they're the ones you suggest. Aside from the ingrained mindset of always being the only person around who can solve the problems and save the people he loves, I think he was always (since we met him at least) desperate and worn a little emotionally thin, and so not making the best choices he could. As the story wound on, he got more and more desperate and beaten down and eventually lost any capacity to calmly consider all the available possibilities and pick the best of them. When he came home to his charred home, he rashly started doing something, anything, to try to make something better, without thinking about the implications (e.g. force-healing Leah). When he failed to resurrect Lyn he completely snapped and lost his shit and went on a suicidal charge against whoever could be blamed for all this (the Elves, via Veracia). By the time he was out of that rage, he was already across the moral event horizon, in a den of villains urging him on, and seemed kind of sadly resigned to this course of action -- like he wished there were other options, which there were, but he was too scarred and hardened by then to even see them.

In short, what I think got exaggerated in Ian was not narcissism, but a kind of emotional overwhelm and burnout which left him unable to think properly about what he was doing and should have been doing, leaving him alternately lashing out in anger and sleepwalking toward oblivion.

Yeah, this is kinda how I see that too.

But I also at the same time thought that this bathing scene is WEIRD. I mean, look at this.

http://www.errantstory.com/2003-10-24/161

He thinks "okay, I really shouldn't be looking at that" but then continues looking until Meji puts on her "EEEEK" act. Sure he then covers his eyes after and tries to act honorable, but he LOOKED and apparently on some level enjoyed the sight even though he knew he wasn't supposed to. Meji's underdeveloped and immature according to basically every standard at this point in the story.

2+2 you know?

I'm not making him evil in retrospect, I'm questioning this scene because it does imply there was something a little more than protectiveness going on with Ian's intentions towards Meji. Even though I think Ian IS a do-gooder to begin with, there's a bit of yuck factor here with Meji.

I didn't know about the uneven aging with half-elves. That's a thing? I thought they all aged slower, not that they aged differently even among their own population.

[Imp-Chan]

Incidentally, that "shouldn't look" page was SO MUCH WORK to fix up for the print edition, I cannot even tell you. I wound up resizing everything, doing all the line cleanup TWICE because I tried to clean up the existing lines and it lost all the detail, then had Poe rescan the original and cleaned that up, and it still looked muddy and unclear, so then I printed it out as redlines for Poe to re-ink, after which somehow I had to do line cleanup again in order to do the page layout even though that makes no earthly sense because I printed the red lines in the corrected layout, and ultimately I wound up putting it together with color flats so that Poe could shade it better. Most of the bathing scene pages were a pain like that. They'd better look fucking spectacular once Poe shades them.

If ever there was an argument for Poe to get a Cintiq, this revision process would be it.

^-^'