User blog comment:Unrulyruby100/Thoughts On Corvo and the Heart/@comment-5607198-20121119070448/@comment-27202257-20121119083057

ETA: Holy goddamn I didn't realize I'd written that much. Uh, tl;dr ahead!

I suppose that depends on how Corvo's actions are viewed and interpreted. Corvo does some extremely bad things, yes, but that's virtually the only road he's been given to walk. He didn't wake up one day and decide it was a good day to start murdering people: he was framed for the death of his good friend, tortured day after day for months, and didn't know if the girl he regarded as a daughter was even alive, or what had happened to her. All that, while the guys who really did it ran the Empire into the ground, blaming him for it and laughing in his face.

Even with that, in the low chaos version a least, Corvo's actions are less acts of revenge and more hoisting awful people on their own petards. Campbell rises to power via a system that allows him to subjugate others through blackmail and the threat of excommunication? Smack the brand on him and let the system he benefited from eat him alive. The Pendleton twins willingly work men and women to death in their mines? Toss them in there and lets see how much they enjoy it. With almost every assassination target, the only reason the non-lethal option even exists is because the targets exploited those systems to their benefit.

(The only exception to that I think is Lady Boyle, since I don't think her non-lethal elimination constitutes poetic justice; however, I would also note that Brisby seems relatively stable and rational until Corvo hands Lady Boyle over, so it's entirely possible Corvo thought he was being merciful until it was too late.)

Even without any of that, if you subscribe to the idea that hurting these people was wrong no matter what their crimes, Corvo was still backed into a corner: in the world of Dunwall, these people hold all the cards. They're not going to play nice, try to save the ailing Empire, or deliver Emily safely to Corvo, because they directly benefit from things being just the way they are. In a perfect world, it would've been optimal for Corvo and the Loyalist to use legitimate channels to repair the damage done to the Empire by Burrows. However, Dunwall is far from a perfect world, and the legitimate channels have been broken by corruption. If they want to change anything for the better, the Loyalists have to work outside the system that favors the current state of affairs. Corvo just happens to be the one who gets his hands dirty in order to make that happen.

So I think, in the long run, I don't interpret Corvo as a gigantic bastard, at least in the low chaos version. I interpret him as a man who has been a casualty of others' attempts at grabbing power, and if he wants to keep himself, his loved ones, and his home alive, he has to act in the only way his enemies have left him. He also happens to be a trained bodyguard and assassin, so he is the optimal candidate to do the dirty jobs according to others' plans.

Also, all that aside, none of that makes him utterly heartless. His main targets have all, to one degree or another, caused him, the Empire, and the royal family harm. It's understandable that he hates/disregards them. Jessamine, however, is someone he truly cares about (whether romantically, or in friendship, or both). Even if he feels nothing for his targets, he's likely to react a lot differently to finding out that in his attempts to make things right in her memory, he has been directly causing Jessamine pain.

Unless we're talking high-chaos Corvo, then all bets are off. Who even knows with that guy.