How do you picks sides when the line between good guy and bad guy is blurred?

Blizzard recently ran the Open Beta for Diablo 4, giving many of us our first look at how the story is likely to play out. We haven’t seen the full campaign yet by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing has become clear: The purported villain of the piece is supposed to be Lilith — but I’m not so sure about that.

Popular media has a long history of painting people as villains, but when you step back and look at the situation with a wider lens, they’re not so much the bad guy but rather may simply stand in the way of the letting the protagonist get what they want. And said protagonist maybe be  less of a hero and more of an anti-hero and frequently an unreliable narrator.

Sometimes they embellish details to make themselves look better or more deserving of your pity. Sometimes they genuinely don’t see and understand the truth of the situation due to their own warped self-image. Sometimes it’s a calculated effort to sway the audience to support them.

In the first chapters of the Diablo 4 campaign, we are told repeatedly that Inarius is our father (in a broader spiritual sense) and that we should worship him. Yet his priests sacrifice his followers, many of whom live in abject poverty and fear for their lives against he many horrors that inhabit the world of Sanctuary. When we actually meet him, he is self-centred and doesn’t care that his followers are miserable and destroying themselves in his name.

By contrast, Lilith was banished and, having returned, seeks to free her children from Inarius’ thrall. She is the one that mourns the death of their literal child, killed by Inarius’ own hand while seeking his own glory. Stepping back and viewing the story that is being built, you don’t have to squint very hard to see their relationship as one of her fleeing an abusive spouse who then decides his best course of action is parental alienation to turn their children against their mother. And the population of Sanctuary behave like abused children fawning at the feet of an abusive parent whom they don’t want to anger.

Sure, Lilith kills — but then so do we. There are very few games of this type where the players characters don’t have the blood of hundreds, if not thousands of creatures on their hands. According to the beta summary, I managed to kill 12,488 monsters in the few short hours I had access to the game. So killing can’t be the only measure of good or bad within the game universe.

I don’t trust Inarius, and I think Lilith got a bad rap, like her namesake before her. Sign me up for Team Lilith! We meet every second Wednesday. Who do you think is the villain of this story, and how often do you stop to question the reliability of the narration in a game you’re playing?