#hatred is a poison and forgetting isn't an option

[wwriothesley]

      I return here after having done the Benoit questline in Genshin. Me and Venus were discussing this some days ago, and they posed an interesting observation.

      ( SPOILERS FOR THE LEROY: DYING FLASH QUESTLINE )

      Long story short, Benoit was, and still is, a piece of shit. He sells his daughter, Autumn, not once, but two times in arranged marriages to amass a fortune and get himself a cozy, big house in the court of Fontaine- the second time, Autumn has a daughter from the husband, who abused her heavily. She murdered him and entrusted her daughter to her father Benoit- only for him to refuse to serve as a witness on her behalf. She is then arrested and sent to the Fortress.

      After that, as if that was not enough in the list of shitty actions, he also sold Autumn's daughter to a rich family, and used the child support he received from them on himself. Tl;dr is that in both endings he gets his just karma. I'm not at all biased towards this NPC and I absolutely did not click the 'I'll keep quiet and y'all can kill Benoit's ass' option so fast I almost dropped my phone. Noooooo...

      Now, a particular point that I want to focus on is Autumn's escape from the Fortress.

      It's canonically stated that she manages to escape from Meropide- which I imagine isn't an easy feat, due to the high surveillance of the place, both inside and outside. A girl who has a goal so big, that dreamed of revenge, wouldn't have been able to adapt to the Fortress enough to ''forget her past life'', as Meropide preaches. She could have also escaped with Athos, a friend posing as her husband. Wriothesley knows every single inmate of the Fortress, too.

      A girl who has been sold like livestock, who wishes to kill her father for the evil he has done to her... 

      There's the possibility that he had a talk with her, at some point. That in no way she could forget the profound hatred for her father, who betrayed her in every possible sense and sold her like cattle, putting her at the mercy of people she didn't loved. She could have told this all to Wriothesley in front of a cup of tea, and he would have been quiet for a time- reminded Autumn that humans have deep-seated, dark instincts, and the call for revenge is a strong concotion to drink daily. It poisons every chance of starting anew, seeps into the cracks even as they try to build a new life down here. There's nothing he can do or say to make this better- it's up to her to find her path, now.

      How she has replied, and how their talk has continues or stopped, nobody knows about.

      However, I am a firm believer that Autumn didn't simply had a stroke of luck in fleeing Meropide. 

      Wriothesley didn't put an hand in to aid her escape- that's not his job, and it'd go against his duty as the administrator of the Fortress. But let's say that he, perhaps, turned a blind eye to her and Athos's disappearence-

      And simply pretended to be deaf if he heard the group of friends that she made down here whisper about how they were happy that she could act on her revenge.

#( HEADCANONS. ) ━ into the CERBERUS dossier. #( OOC. ) ━ smoke break; oh. and a cup of fine tea too. #ngl the implications of this questline have titillated me. i liked it v much and im glad i stumbled into it