And they did something which I like, which is one moment that completely changes your view of a character. Only instead of the Naruto trick of introducing someone and building him up to be an enemy, and then with one stroke making you sympathetic, with Pullo they introduced him as, basically, a skeezy drunkard and then slowly built up his sympathetic-ness until you'd almost forgot his violence and were on the edge of not thinking about it because, hey, it was Roman times after all, and the victims may have paid too much by *our* terms, but by *Roman* terms maybe not, and then ... the guy-punch of no, this guy is violent and dangerous and brutal. And then they manage to get our sympathies back again, as he falls the lowest he can go and starts to struggle back.
I'm with the people who don't quite buy Eirene's actions at the end, plus there's the element of - hey, what happens when he gets drunk and gets mad at her for something? We haven't seen him engaging in violence against women, just men, but we haven't seen him in situations where he really can get mad at women. (Although with the extent to which he values his word, I think her safest option would be to extract a promise from him on his word that he would never raise a hand against her.)
And to continue my stream-of-consciousness babble off to the side somewhere: I characterized him in an email to a friend as the ex-Marine who goes to the bar and crushes beer cans on his head and hangs around telling stories about himself, because back in my undergrad days I knew someone very like that. He went by "Tank" and was indeed an ex-Marine (or ex-Army, but Marine is sticking in my mind), not much older than the college students so I have no idea how long his stint in the military was, had a very nice SUV with a very sensitive alarm system but, it seems, no permanent home that we knew of, because he was always attaching himself to groups of people on campus and hanging out with them until late, and crashing on their floor. He attached himself to the group I hung out with for a week or two and told us stories about basic training (I don't think he'd ever seen combat - this was exactly one year before the first Gulf War) and crashed on the floor of friends I knew. And then he moved on and I saw him walking down the hall with some sorority girls who lived in my hall (Trinity didn't allow Greek houses, and I think by now they may have banned Greek organizations altogether), which was a complete departure from us geeks.
So Pullo rang true to me in various ways. XD Only he was less skeezy than Tank, because, really, a homeless ex-Marine hanging around a college campus? Really should have made us call the cops, but he was very good at ingratiating himself and seeming like one of the group. I have no idea if he ever did anything more sinister but hang around and mack on girls, but that doesn't mean he didn't.
And *that* utterly random digression has been brought to you by the letters in I HAVE JUST WOKEN UP AND NOT EATEN ANYTHING YET.
I started watching at episode 5, maybe, when our free HBO kicked in, so Pullo was well on his way to sympatheticness by the time I met him. So when I got to the part where he wasted Eirene's boyfriend, I was so shocked and horrified that I turned off the TV, picked up the baby, and literally left the room. I haven't finished the episode yet, and that was like a month ago.
It's not so much that the violence itself was shocking and horrible (though it was), it's that I had no idea it was going to be that kind of story. I mean, I know what happens to a bunch of the historical characters, so I approached all their storylines as melodrama -- which is why I could enjoy emo!Octavia instead of being horrified. But I mistakenly thought the Titus and Pullo storylines were going to be sane.
I can see how that could affect you like that, since you missed his beginnings, where he was crude and violent and stabbed a guy in the neck for insulting ... probably the 13th Legion, although I don't remember the exact circumstances. I think he may have been condmened to death for something-or-other as the series started.
Pullo's just really interesting, though, because he starts low, rises up, and then plummets again, and manages to rise a little bit once again.
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I'm with the people who don't quite buy Eirene's actions at the end, plus there's the element of - hey, what happens when he gets drunk and gets mad at her for something? We haven't seen him engaging in violence against women, just men, but we haven't seen him in situations where he really can get mad at women. (Although with the extent to which he values his word, I think her safest option would be to extract a promise from him on his word that he would never raise a hand against her.)
And to continue my stream-of-consciousness babble off to the side somewhere: I characterized him in an email to a friend as the ex-Marine who goes to the bar and crushes beer cans on his head and hangs around telling stories about himself, because back in my undergrad days I knew someone very like that. He went by "Tank" and was indeed an ex-Marine (or ex-Army, but Marine is sticking in my mind), not much older than the college students so I have no idea how long his stint in the military was, had a very nice SUV with a very sensitive alarm system but, it seems, no permanent home that we knew of, because he was always attaching himself to groups of people on campus and hanging out with them until late, and crashing on their floor. He attached himself to the group I hung out with for a week or two and told us stories about basic training (I don't think he'd ever seen combat - this was exactly one year before the first Gulf War) and crashed on the floor of friends I knew. And then he moved on and I saw him walking down the hall with some sorority girls who lived in my hall (Trinity didn't allow Greek houses, and I think by now they may have banned Greek organizations altogether), which was a complete departure from us geeks.
So Pullo rang true to me in various ways. XD Only he was less skeezy than Tank, because, really, a homeless ex-Marine hanging around a college campus? Really should have made us call the cops, but he was very good at ingratiating himself and seeming like one of the group. I have no idea if he ever did anything more sinister but hang around and mack on girls, but that doesn't mean he didn't.
And *that* utterly random digression has been brought to you by the letters in I HAVE JUST WOKEN UP AND NOT EATEN ANYTHING YET.
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It's not so much that the violence itself was shocking and horrible (though it was), it's that I had no idea it was going to be that kind of story. I mean, I know what happens to a bunch of the historical characters, so I approached all their storylines as melodrama -- which is why I could enjoy emo!Octavia instead of being horrified. But I mistakenly thought the Titus and Pullo storylines were going to be sane.
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Pullo's just really interesting, though, because he starts low, rises up, and then plummets again, and manages to rise a little bit once again.
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Rome inspires amazing coherence in the unfed and uncaffeinated because the finale was JUST THAT COOL.