Thread:Atarumaster88/@comment-104549-20151030184059/@comment-104549-20151104233752

An intriguing question. I think a lot of the reason modern Rin is able to walk the line without taking a running leap over it is because of Dathomir. From Ye`keb's death to, more or less, the massacre at the Frenzied River, Rin was very much traditional Sith. She had some measure of affection for some of her teachers, but she was still very much using them as means to an end. That ultimately culminated in her leading the attack on the Frenzied River Clan and killing a lot of more-or-less good people out of what amounted to personal spite.

It also, however, shocked her conscience back to life. I think that's the sort of event where the killer can either go the Anakin way ("Well, if I just butchered a room full of younglings, it won't get worse than that!") or be forced to take a long, hard look at what got him or her there and make amends. Admittedly, Rin didn't reform in the sense of turning to the light side, but she did reassess a lot of things she hadn't bothered considering before. While you can reasonably say she didn't face many consequences in the long run (at least in the sense that she was allowed to leave Dathomir alive, and Keltrayu went with her), it's been emotionally and psychologically influential on her since. I think seeing the results of her actions on Dathomir (and especially Shessa Vel's death) drove home a long-lasting point about what happens when Rin lets her personal spitefulness get out of hand. Not that she doesn't walk the line, because she definitely does; the Nightmare War alone had several examples (the Anzat hounds, the Shadow Massassi, involving the relatively young Vos'elk'eetash in both of those, and the destruction of Kizav). And I imagine there may be some discomfort with the fact that, at the end of the Nightmare War, she authorized two speciecides inside six years. But I think—both in her own mind and in the majority public view—she's seen to be justifiable in her ruthlessness because the targets of it deserve ruthless treatment. Whether they're all justified in that belief is another matter, but I think Dathomir helps Rin check what might be an instinct to extend her ferocity to people less deserving of it.

I'm not sure if I have this anywhere on the Wikia, but it's definitely come up in RP: during the years when Selkee was a Royal Guard, she was effectively Rin's protege, and Rin, seeing a lot of herself in Selkee (powerful and talented, with people expecting a great future from her, but also prideful and possessed of an explosive temper under the wrong circumstances), talked to Selkee about "keeping the monster on the leash". In essence, she sees the malevolent, vindictive, and cruel parts of her nature as something to be deployed strategically and otherwise carefully constrained, because slack in the "leash" is one thing, but if the monster is ever let off the leash, it will consume its master along with everyone else. Selkee has largely adopted the same mindset since.