To all of you who've been responding to my posts about SH being potentially brainwashed, I do want to say I have enjoyed reading your responses. This has been a great exchange, and I am very happy at the extent to which some of you have been engaging in discourse with me in a positive way and not just hating on me as some others have done in the past. So thank you for this.
I do concede (and have done so in the past) that having not played the game it is quite possible I am not seeing certain things about SH that some of you are seeing. Fair enough. But I disagree about simply dismissing any "evil" acts she may have committed in the past, even if brainwashed. Firstly, her story doesn't just begin when we run into her in the nautiloid. So it's not just about what she does or doesn't do while in our company. It's about what she may have done before getting tadpoled. We don't know. Secondly, whereas I can accept the argument that if you had no control, including literally no physical control over your body, then is it fair to assign blame to that person? But it's not about me or anyone else assigning blame. It's about the person themselves, in this case SH, and whether they choose to blame themselves, because for me a truly good person, even in the face of learning they did awful things while under someone else's control, would still feel severe anguish about it and surely blame themselves. I know I would IRL. If someone "forced" me to do something awful, the fact that I was forced would not be of much solace to me in the face of knowing I had done something awful. That to me is what makes a person a good person: their own feelings of guilt and remorse and their own inner torment. So it would matter to me how SH herself reacts to learning about her past.
No, if someone took control of me in the sense that I literally could not do anything to influence what "I" do, then it's not me who's acting, but the other person. I was just used as a tool. I would be very angry at that person, but I would feel no guilt. If I was blackmailed, that would be a different story, but I consider myself as being hard to blackmail, since I do not accept blame for things that might happen if I don't follow the blackmailer's orders. No, I am not to blame for their death if *you* kill that person because I refuse to follow your orders. It's in your hands, not in mine.
I have to ask though: does all this really matter? Isn't it all theoretical? The plain fact is we do not know Shadowheart's past, and in the absence of knowledge I will not judge anyone. I will not assume evil just because she's a cleric of Shar. She says about Shar "She took me in when no on else did" (echoing Viconia in BG2 who said more or less the same). That appears to be a perfectly valid and not particularly evil reason to follow a deity, as far as there is ever a valid reason to do so. And who's to say that her regard is unjustified? Is a goddess out to destroy all of existence incapable of caring about her followers? Is a goddess's evil all that there is to her? We would say "no" about almost any human, and Toril's deities are actually ascended mortals.
So, Shadowheart might not be brainwashed, but right. From her perspective, following Shar may appear right in a way we would recognize as valid could we adopt her perspective. With no need for any evil on her part.
