Hi all! Damianista here. Our ‘Dream Role for Damian Lewis’ series continues today with Mallory who has written up a fan fiction featuring Damian as a flawed character whom she created herself in a fan fiction for a video game she loves. Many thanks go to Mallory for sharing her dream role story with us!
One role that I would love to see Damian in would be one that I have created in a fan fiction for one of my favorite computer game series of all time, “Baldur’s Gate”. The game itself is a D&D based, “dungeon crawl”, “save the world” sort of game.
In my fan fiction I delve into the main character’s (in my version a girl) life both before and long after the events of the games. I have her as a paladin but as she has a mage for a stepfather, I needed a way for her to learn her skills.
Enter, Caradoc. Her older foster-brother. A paladin of a prestigious order and as powerful, brave, and self-sacrificing as one could possibly imagine. He is also at the best as well as worst of times a peerless leader. His charisma and battle prowess as well as his love for the men under his command and their love for him is unmatched. It is he who trains her and hence is indirectly responsible for saving the world.
There are elements of a lot of different roles that Damian has played that are present in the character of Caradoc. The character has changed so much in the years that I have been developing the story but from an early stage I realized that Damian would be perfect for the role and have since written the character with him in mind.
A paladin, as referenced in this fan fiction is a term for a warrior, a knight in essence, who has dedicated their actions to a particular deity they also hold themselves to the highest levels of conduct. They are often peerless warriors and a classic example of a glowing beacon of all that is good, just, and righteous. Caradoc is a Paladin dedicated to the service of Helm, the god of protection, (who he later finds out is his father) as expressed through the wishes of his superiors in the order in which he is a member. He is also a commander of peerless skill, charisma, and bravery. He is always in the thick of fighting alongside his men.
Theirs is a wonderful life with their foster father, and Caradoc’s own wife and children.
But although Caradoc is a great man, he is not perfect and is at numerous times plagued by pride AND self-doubt, anger, and temptations towards impurity.
These weaknesses are preyed upon by a villain whose chief domain is sewing discord in the mind. That, along with grievous torture leaving him nearly dead and the death of his young family has Caradoc’s demons making war in his very being.
During the course of my story, Caradoc goes from being a magnificent and well-respected paladin and doting family man to a man stopping at nothing to seek vengeance against those responsible for the death of his family. He goes from being a loving older brother and mentor for his foster sister to being her betrayer, her husband, and her tormenter. He goes from being a paladin to a vengeful soul, to the chief general of the royal armies, to the king himself.
He goes from saving his foster-sister from an icy lake to being her killer, however unintended.
He is then, despite his great military prowess, banished by his son (the new king) on the eve of a war, and delves, literally into the depths of hell. There he, penitent, is aided by the souls of his sister and his best friend. There he seeks the god of that realm and slays him (as, it is discovered part way through the story, Caradoc is the son of two gods.)
He, upon killing the evil god is trapped within hell but in the personages of damned souls, finds reflections of himself and turns the place into a realm of expiation but not torture. A place of redemption where he helps the souls learn and become purified and ascend to the heavens that he shall not see until the end of time. At this point he has become known as “Luca, god of redemption” which I take from an honorific that he received in his younger days as a paladin, “Morning Star”.
He is a character where at his worst, I still want people to see the humanity in him, the struggle to regain any semblance of the man he once was. I want the readers to root for him to do just that, even if they hate him. In fact, I don’t want them to hate him. I want them to feel betrayed by him as much as the main character does. The character walks a ragged edge that he often falls off of in horrible ways, despite the love offered him by the main character who loves him despite his great cruelty towards her, which nearly causes her to descend into the absolute depths of despondency on multiple occasions, and it is to her great grief that she cannot help him as much as she would like.
This is as succinctly as I could possibly describe the character. He is such a story of triumph and failure, great joys and great sorrows and such inner turmoil that I think that Damian would be ideal to play the role. He would bring such humanity to the role and I for one would not be able to help but to root for him to reclaim the man he once was.
A couple last notes:
One: While ruler of “purgatory” Caradoc goes by “Luca” for two different reasons. One being that some of the souls down there may know him by his true name and its hard to gain respect that way sometimes, and two, he wants to separate himself from his name and all the baggage that came with it.
Two: The title that he goes by for the most part in “purgatory” is “Brother Luca”, rather than “master” or any other honorific as he in a very true sense sees himself as one of them. He truly believes that were he not there as its god and ruler, he would be there as a damned soul. The mercy that he shows towards the denizens of that realm is in stark contrast to his views on mercy earlier in his life. He, although a good man, was quite staunchly on the side of justice over mercy. Through his own experiences, shortcomings, and sins, he is able to connect with the damned souls in a way that he never would have (or perhaps even *could* have) before his fall.
The character of Caradoc/Luca is in the series for its entirety, and it shows him from the age of about nine years old to the age of nearly 60, though because of his divine nature he has aged incredibly well. The portion of the story where he is in hell/purgatory goes from when he is about 60 to when he is centuries, if not millennia old, but since he is a god, he now appears in his prime, or how ever he darn well wants to.
