Nott’s Morality: A Long, Probably Incredibly Redundant Meta

Nott’s Morality: A Long, Probably Incredibly Redundant Meta

This is a long one, but I didn’t think it would work as well split in two. Please bear with me.

I’ve been thinking about Gluzo, and kind of laughing to myself over how the way the M9 react to him, alone and vulnerable in the aftermath of his personal tragedy provides kind of a litmus test to the kind of moral beings they are–a sort of D&D version of the story of the Good Samaritan, if you will. You see an attacked bugbear on the side of the road–what do you do? You have Caduceus, who is more than willing to just let things be (it’s none of their business, they shouldn’t bother him), who tries to amicably cut ties with Gluzo several times. You have Jester, who is more than happy to callously terrorize him for laughs, until he’s recruited and she instantly makes it her priority to be friendly and likable with him. You have Caleb, who more than anyone else is interested in recruiting him through a strange carrot-and-stick routine purely because he thinks he can be useful to the group’s goals. 

And then you have Nott. And as always, Nott is very interesting. Nott thinks “he’s a bugbear, fuck him,” and would be perfectly happy murdering him, because, as Sam says with a shade of humor, “I’m a fantasy racist!” But Nott also is the one to present the possibility of plying him for information or possibly recruiting him in the first place. It isn’t necessarily the option she prefers to take, but it’s something that she can help do, so she simply, neutrally presents the possibility, (alongside the possibility of killing him) and follows the group consensus on what to do without hesitation or reservation.

And this brought back to mind two things I’ve been thinking about Nott for a very long time: one, how very, very entrenched she is in “Us vs Them” mentality on every front, coupled with having perhaps the most traditional moral sense of all of the M9; and two, the curious and nearly mathematical way she juggles her various levels of personal allegiances.

#1 is an interesting thing to me, because on one level Sam is saying, “I’m a fantasy racist!” and being a very stereotypical D&D protagonist who thinks yeah, Xhorhas and monster creatures are bad, and the Empire and “good” humanoids are Good, why would I think any differently? What makes Nott’s character so interesting though is how that perspective is in immediate conflict with her surrounding context: she is the only person in the party who routinely refers to the M9′s enemies (and in the case of the Xhorhasian soldiers, people who were not the M9′s enemies so much as the Empire’s enemies) as “the bad guys,” the only one who routinely dehumanizes the people they kill to an extent that she quite literally doesn’t give a fuck about murdering any potential enemy at any time. (Watsonian perspective: maybe that’s one reason her kill count is so damn high?)

She is the only person in the party who immediately and strongly advocates for the idea they turn in the Empire rebels into the authorities for money in Zadash because they’re criminals, and what on Earth is stopping them? She is the only person in the party who ever questions Yasha as if she is a nationally based threat, as if she is potentially an evil spy just because she is from Xhorhas. She (alongside Jester) is among the people in the party who feel absolutely the least angst about murdering pirates on the docks of Nicodranas, because, they’re pirates! Criminals! The bad guys who attacked us! Why on Earth feel bad about that? She is the one who most strongly and insistently questions Fjord’s quest, not because releasing a violent Betrayer God serpent on the Menagerie Coast is “a bad idea” (Beau, Caleb) or because Fjord might personally betray his friends (Jester), but because Uk’otoa, and by probable extension Fjord, is “evil.” 

Nott has these very hard-line, essentialist perspectives on what is right and what is wrong, but beyond being Standard Fantasy Morality, it also reflects on how she’s in many ways the least weird person in a very weird party. And it’s also a very incisive commentary on exactly the kind of hardline, Us vs Them mentality you would expect to see in an ordinary middle-class woman in the rural area of an authoritarian empire rife with racism and propaganda. Because, even if her overall opinion of the Empire has drastically changed, the underlying assumptions and systems of belief the Empire inculcated in her haven’t actually disappeared in the process of her moving the Empire government to the category of “bad guys.” Of course Xhorhasians are the “bad guys”–”we” are the empire, and “they” are the enemy. Of course goblins and monstrous races are evil scum of the earth–”we” are the civilized good ones, and “they” are not. Of course rebels should be turned in–”we” are good citizens, and “they” are not. Notably, Nott’s own status as a deviant thief on the run from the law does not change her views on either criminality in other people or race in other people. She believes she was just forcibly placed on the “they” side of the equation, and, as she thinks that the kleptomania (and by extension, the criminality) stems only from her race, she thinks that the moment she is restored to her halfling body as “Veth” she can go back to being the “we,” a law abiding citizen living her ordinary life with her family.

But, you say, how are we to account for the fact that she is so easily convinced to act against her Empire-borne biases? Why does she agree to help the rebels and turn on the government? Why does she not take her friends to task when they join criminal organizations, when she thinks other criminals are deserving of bad ends? Why is she the one to so easily and uncomplainingly offer the possibility of working with Gluzo the bugbear? How to we account for the heel face turn of her opinion of the Empire after hearing Caleb’s story? Does she not care about the Us vs Them that much after all?

Well, in a way. And that brings us to #2: Nott’s Mathematical Ranking of Personal Allegiances. 

Which we’ve already heard about in action with Jester. Of course Nott would save Jester and prioritize Jester from being threatened by a dragon……unless she had to choose between Jester and Caleb. And I would argue that’s not necessarily a negative commentary on her relationship to either one of them, it’s just that Nott has a very codified, hierarchical system to help her determine how to act to best help Her People, and that involves a system of concentric circles for which the ones closest to her are always prioritized above the rest. (very different from Jester’s simple delineation between Friends and Not-Friends!) It’s a beautiful system, really, that saves Nott from a lot of mental agony. Post Ball of Fun, it’s what allows her to say, with complete sincerity, “I did nothing wrong,” even though she pressured Caleb to remain behind with the books to advance his interests while the others were in danger.

And what is this system? First and foremost, it’s her family, that she will put before everything else, and even Caleb. Then there’s Caleb. Then there’s Jester and a few of the M9…I wouldn’t be surprised, actually, if Nott has worked out a precise order of which members of the M9 she would save in a crisis. And the M9, as a group, come next, before her views on crime, her nationalism, or her racism. It’s because Caleb suffered at the hands of the Empire that she turns her back on the Empire–he is ranked higher, to her. But that doesn’t mean, that if presented with the option of throwing in with either the Empire or Xhorhasians in a conflict, she isn’t going to consciously or unconsciously side with the Empire every time, so long as it’s not against her family’s interests, or Caleb’s, or the M9′s. But her allegiance to the M9 over all else accounts for a great deal of the rest of the moral flexibility we see from her. It’s fine if the M9 join a criminal organization, because it’s them, and they are never going to be the bad guys of Nott’s story. It’s fine if the M9 need to work with a bugbear (to help Nott with her family!) because they’re ranked higher. Really, the reason why Nott does half of the things she does is because it matters to the M9, and what matters to them matters to her above all–until it happens to conflict with the needs and desires of someone more important to her.

What scares me about all this is that this hierarchical mindset of hers is, by nature of its construction, incredibly resistant to change. Because what kind of madness would it take to challenge it, really? When she can so easily justify any kind of code switching to herself without feeling any contradiction in what she does? Beyond that–do we need her to change?