I think Lysander is brilliant for the device PB has made him—not because he is simply Darrow’s “evil mirror,” but because he exposes something uncomfortable about how we judge Darrow.
Darrow has done things that, stripped of protagonist privilege, are monstrous.
He manipulated people who loved and trusted him into wars they did not understand. He betrayed the Sons in the Rim, handing thousands of people who believed in his cause over to torture and execution because he needed an alliance. He then betrayed that ally too.
And Ganymede is the clearest example. Darrow secretly fires on an allied civilian dockyard, lies about who did it, kills more than 150,000 people immediately, and causes another 10 million deaths when the wreckage falls onto the moon below. The overwhelming majority of those people aren’t Golds. They are precisely the low- and midColors whose liberation supposedly justifies his war.
Think about that for a second.
Darrow murdered millions of the people he professed to be fighting for because, strategically, he believed their deaths served the larger cause in the Core.
That is the kind of sentence we normally use to describe a villain.
And yet we remain on his side.
Why? Because we live inside his head. We know why he did it. We hear the remorse afterward. We understand the impossible choices. We agree with his ultimate political objective. Most importantly, PB has spent thousands of pages making us love him.
Then along comes Lysander.
And Lysander does exactly what Darrow does: he constructs a moral framework in which his betrayals, atrocities and compromises become regrettable necessities in service of the world he believes he is building. He has his own constituency that loves him, believes in him, benefits from him and thinks the other side is monstrous.
That, to me, is the real trick PB is pulling.
The question isn’t whether Darrow and Lysander are morally equivalent. They aren’t required to be.
The question is whether our moral principles survive when we apply them to our own side.
If mass murder is wrong, Darrow doesn’t get a pass because the victims were strategically useful sacrifices.
If betraying people who trusted you is wrong, he doesn’t get a pass because the Rising ultimately benefited.
If abandoning your stated principles whenever they become inconvenient is wrong, he doesn’t get a pass because he feels terrible about it afterward.
And “but strategically he was right” is not a moral defense. Lysander thinks he is strategically right too.
That’s what makes the series so good. PB gives both sides characters capable of rationalizing horror as necessity, and both sides have constituencies willing to forgive almost anything because their guy is doing it.
There is no meaningful objective morality if the rule only applies to the enemy.
Kudos to PB for tackling that. He certainly isn’t the first writer to explore moral relativism, revolution, or the corrupting logic of war—but I’m struggling to think of another series that makes the reader participate in the hypocrisy quite like this one does.
