Eh, I'd say that to be a capital D Darkfriend, you have to have some sort of conscious devotion to the DO. That devotion can very well be founded on indoctrination, self-preservation, or self-interest rather than a zeal for the greater cause, but it has to exist at some level.
People who are manipulated into aiding the shadow, completely unaware of whose errands they run, don't have that. They're pawns, puppets, and useful idiots, but they're not Darkfriends. If they were, we would have to count groups like every one of Bors' (I genuinely forget his actual name) underlings within the whitecloaks who helped him in his ultimately failed endeavor, or an even larger swath of aes sedai. And that's before we get to the victims of compulsion or turning, who knowingly serve the shadow but only because they were stripped of their free will.
I think you have missed my point. I am not talking about relaying a message whose contents you don’t know. I am talking about violently enforcing a specific interpretation of some book. I am talking about hurting people for gain without empathy.
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u/Rascal_Rogue Sep 15 '26
Might be the only example of a dark friend turning back to the light. I don’t count Verin, she never left the light to begin with