#i've said before that I think these four characters form a sort of continuum

[mobiusstripper]

Filip calling out Marco in front of everyone in Babylon's Ashes is such a good moment. It sucks how many people shit on Filip as a character. Yeah, he did some really, really bad things (or, at the very least, was extremely complicit in them), but he was still a CHILD who was manipulated from birth by a man he (almost literally) looked up to as a god. (Seriously - look closely at the language in Filip's early POV chapters when he talks about Marco. It's almost Old Testament.) He was given life-and-death responsibility that he lacked the maturity to really even comprehend at his age and was saddled with moral injury that lasted the rest of his life. Seriously, think about the dumb shit YOU said, did, and believed at fifteen, sixteen.

There's no way he didn't know the consequences of standing up to Marco like that, especially in front of other people. I don't really give a shit about the "were they redeemed/weren't they redeemed/can they be redeemed" conversation around fictional characters because redemption is a subjective moral judgment. All I'm saying is that took real courage. And walking away took real courage. And it takes real courage to find an open door when someone else has already shut so many of your doors for you before you even knew they were there.