Tangent about R,O!
That's the thing, though -- sure, Krieg is the person Allen has the most reason to hate in the world, but surely Carver Fringie ranks a healthy #2 on the list. Krieg may be the mindlessly psychopathic murderer but Carver is the fucking philosopher of rape, after all.

That's why it was so striking that Carver's death actually elicits multiple pages of real, sincere empathy and sympathy from Allen -- the brute fact of death strips away all the layers of morality and personality and self that separate Allen from Carver and make it impossible for Allen to not feel *something* that someone had to die so horribly, even if it was a monster like Carver.

And then in the next breath we get a total dismissal of Krieg and his buddy as nothing more than, well, hardwired murder trolls.

I know Allen isn't meant to a 100% reliable narrator but that still bugged me. I also know that even from a cold, objective level Krieg is "worse" than Carver -- Carver may have ruined lives but Krieg ended them, Echo could've come back from Carver's violation but she will likely never recover from what Krieg did -- but still: Did you really mean it to come across that Carver's intelligence and insight, however twisted, made him somehow redeemable or sympathetic in a way that Krieg wasn't? That was part of the feeling I got -- that Carver may have fallen as far on the evil end of the spectrum as a person could get but was still a *person* in Allen's eyes, but Krieg was somehow not, just a force of nature.

I was really hoping for some subversion of that -- some acknowledgement that Carver's penile philosophy is just an elaborate rationalization for the fact that deep down he's not actually *different* from "If some girl doesn't wanna fuck me I'll just make her" Krieg -- but the fact that Allen actually does seem to divvy out his empathy for monsters based on whether those monsters are intelligent enough to have had "thoughts worth thinking" seems to say the opposite, and thus sticks in my craw a bit.