Murder on the Dancefloor

As an assassin, I probably ought to prefer unarmed targets, and yet...

My play through of Dishonoured has stumbled somewhat at 'Lady Boyle's Last Party'. My issues with this mission are multiple.

Firstly, my target is an unarmed woman. It's the former part that matters more to me than the latter, although I admit that I am culturally conditioned to feel that murdering a woman is somehow 'worse' than murdering a man, even though both acts are equally abhorrent. The men I get sent after in this thing, however, all fight back if given the chance. Sure, most of them I choke out or even leave for someone else to deal with, but in a pinch I know they'd come at me with a sword. If it all goes to stink with Lady Boyle however, this is a target who will run, not fight. In fact, she will flee to the same room as her two 'innocent' sisters and cower in the exact same way, offering no resistance if you walk over and rob or murder her*.

In addition, Lady Boyle's crimes are... vague. My previous targets have been serial murderers and sadists implicated in massive-scale corruption, death and non-consensual perversion. One was the paramilitary pope who kidnapped children to be brainwashed as priests and murdered whores for the shiggles; the other two were in charge of holding an abducted child captive in a brothel and ran mines worked by mutilated slaves. Lady Boyle... is sleeping with the Lord Regent. That's all I've been told. It's only implied that she even provides political support, I'm basically shanking the big bad's girlfriend to fuck with his head. I am, in fact, putting a woman in the fridge, and I find that I'm not okay with that.

Finally, and more trivially, I'm supposed to make small talk with other party goers in order to tease out information (and find my non-lethal, but no doubt tasteless, option,) and if one more of the snobby shits tells me to piss off and mind my own, I'm going to lock the doors and set the place on fire; only way to be sure. It's funny how that seems like a more reasonable response to me than the mission I've been set.

Maybe it's because the mission is so engineered that I come in with almost no information, but in order to complete I have to progressively uncover information on the Ladies Boyle, none of which so far is of the order of 'today I laid off a pregnant serving girl and had an innocent footman arrested for theft so I could watch him being tortured; it was a laff' and more 'I am so bored; think I'll have lots of sex at my party' or 'who do they think they are! I know when I've had enough!'

Is it just sleeping with the Lord Regent we're judging Lady Boyle for? Because it sounds as though there's a 2 in 3 chance she's doing it because she's hammered all the time or a raging nymphomaniac. That would be curious of course; men of power have historically been hypocritically possessive of their mistresses. Surely we could achieve our goals by exposing Lady Boyle to scandal?

* I know this thanks to a badly botched attempt in which I left an unconscious guard in the hallway while exploring that very room, with the result that all three sisters ran in, accused me of plotting to kill them and then lined up waiting for me to do so. My bad, although it also touches on another problem, which is that the level has a more than usual requirement for the peripheral vision I don't get to have in my first person view.