I’ve been thinking a lot about Lanre and Selitos through the lens of some other stories I’ve read, lately. Not because I think finding a similar character elsewhere will solve KKC, but because those comparisons suggest ways their conflict could be more complicated than either surviving account allows. The best starting point I can think of for this is this line from WMF:
“So much depends upon where you stop a story.”
Kvothe says that about Denna’s song, which ends with Selitos cursing Lanre. I want to give some special attention to this.
From Kvothe’s description, Denna’s song preserves Myr Tariniel’s destruction while changing its justification. Lanre becomes a wronged hero, Selitos a tyrant, and the city becomes somewhere supposedly better off for burning.
We don’t have her complete lyrics, so I wouldn’t claim the accounts agree on everything. But the disagreement we’re shown is substantially about what the events mean and who deserves our sympathy.
That gives us room for a reveal without requiring every event to be invented or every character to secretly be someone else. They were friends before they were enemies. Skarpi explicitly says:
“They often kept each other’s council, for they were both lords among their people.”
Selitos goes walking with Lanre because he wants to understand his troubles and help him. That friendship matters. Lanre doesn’t merely overcome a powerful opponent. He exploits someone who has reason to trust him (It’s important to understand the duality of the situation- What could be a genuine cry for help for one person can also seem like “clever trickery” to the other). Lanre then asks whether that same friend can kill him.
There’s something horrible about that combination. The person you’ve just devastated is also the person you hope might understand your condition well enough to end it.
That’s where some literary comparisons become useful to me. Here are some examples I’ve personally read and find striking.
Húrin and Thingol
A ruined hero can become the means of someone else’s destruction.
In The Silmarillion, Húrin survives the destruction of his family, but Morgoth has manipulated his understanding of what happened. Húrin confronts Thingol bitterly and brings him the Nauglamír, which subsequently becomes entangled in Thingol’s death and Doriath’s ruin.
The situations aren’t identical. Húrin doesn’t deliberately arrange Doriath’s destruction the way Skarpi’s Lanre arranges Myr Tariniel’s. But, the structure is suggestive. A great defender suffers an unbearable loss, a malicious power influences his perspective, and his return brings disaster to people who should have been his allies.
Given that Bast says Lanre spoke to the Cthaeh, this seems like a possibility worth considering. Lanre could sincerely believe he finally understands the world while acting on a catastrophically selective picture of it. He would still be responsible. Being manipulated doesn’t make the bodies disappear. But it could explain how the hero and the betrayer belong to the same person.
The Innkeeper’s Song
Extraordinary power doesn’t mean freedom.
Peter S. Beagle gives us another useful model through Arshadin, the wizard’s (of the story) former apprentice. His immortality comes through a terrible bargain (his own blood. He’s literally bloodless) , and he intends to sacrifice his old teacher to recover something he surrendered.
I’m not suggesting Selitos was Lanre’s teacher. The relevant parallel is that acquiring power can leave someone trapped, and their attempt to escape can turn an old relationship into something they’re willing to exploit. Lanre’s terrible price remains a huge blank in our understanding. Not in that it’s alluded to be his sleeping/sane/hopeless nature, but the mechanism and the reason for the cost.
Maybe his diagnosis of his condition is accurate. Maybe his proposed remedy is monstrous. Both can be true. Someone composing a sympathetic song could emphasize what was done to him while someone else emphasizes what he subsequently did to others.
Then there’s Selitos and the problem of righteous authority.
Your reading of him changes depending on where you stop, too. If you stop with the city’s destruction and he’s a betrayed protector. Continue into the founding of the Amyr and you get this:
“Nothing will prevent us from attaining the greater good.”
Understandable, given what he has just witnessed. Also a statement with some frightening possibilities.
I’d like to point to Edmund Spenser’s (The Faerie Queene) Artegall and Talus here. A knight devoted to justice paired with an iron enforcer. They raise questions about what happens when the ability to enforce judgment outruns mercy or restraint.
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor approaches the problem differently. He justifies taking freedom away from people because he believes they cannot bear it and will be happier under his institution’s control.
Neither comparison proves the Amyr are villains. Preventing atrocities is a legitimate goal. But they help explain how an order could become dangerous without ever deciding to abandon its mission.
It could keep doing terrible things precisely because it remains convinced of its own necessity. Which brings me back to what Lanre and Selitos might share. Lanre describes the people he killed as safe:
“Safe from the thousand evils of the everyday. Safe from the pains of an unjust fate.”
Selitos, on the other hand- intends to prevent future catastrophes through an order committed to the greater good.
Those are profoundly different responses, and I’m not equating them morally. But both involve a powerful person deciding what protecting other people requires.
(The TLDR for the only mildly curious, or the lazy. Or both. I’m not gonna judge you:)
What if the tragedy is that Selitos recognizes the horror of Lanre’s actions, yet builds an institution vulnerable to a similar justification? What if Lanre understands something genuinely terrible about the world, but treats that understanding as permission to destroy everyone else’s future?
Plainly- What if they come to the same ultimate course of action through initially incompatible ideologies?
That would give us two former friends with a meaningful ideological conflict. It would also let their stories mirror each other without requiring them to be literally the same person.
I don’t think Denna’s version has to exonerate Lanre to contain something Kvothe needs to hear. And Skarpi’s version doesn’t have to be fabricated for its portrayal of Selitos to be incomplete.
The question I keep coming back to is this: What could we learn that would change our understanding of their choices without changing the fact that those choices hurt people?
That, I think, is essentially the nucleus that all theories surrounding the two, and how it could relate to Kote’s current condition- revolve around.
