#married your sweetie into the highest throne in the kingdom

[ganymedesclock]

Expanding on last post a bit as far as specific magic goes, think of it less as “this is a setting where mages are persecuted”- especially since in this context everybody has some amount of nascent magic. You can be debatably underleveled for your age due to circumstances, but basically every single person has an elemental sway, whether or not they cultivate it.

Ideally on paper Argent’s job is to prevent people from abusing specific highly lucrative forms of dark magic, like some guy in the middle of nowhere declaring himself the king of squids and holding major shipping lines hostage by commanding krakens to guard harbors. Public opinion of the inquisitors is generally high- that it’s a necessary and illustrious job. This is a prestigious position for Argent to have secured at a young age and even if he’s poorly-regarded by his coworkers and subordinates, it’s that a lot of those coworkers and subordinates are people from noble families who take badly to literally taking orders from some jumped-up brat from nowhere with his ugly little pet.

(Also it’s that Argent is himself pretty bad at talking to others / kind of highly insufferable in his default communication style)

In practice, well, see the whole, the entire countryside is shaken up from the previous Lord of Darkness. A lot of my goal here is to not just “what if the light guys were evil and the dark guys were good” but to actually examine it as a logistical followthrough of a ‘proper, ordinary, heroic’ quest of light vs. dark- especially one that had a really rough go of it. Kard died so his friends could survive the ‘penultimate boss’ and Hero left the final fight permanently disabled.

So Hero and Maenad did have as good intentions as you could reasonably expect of teenagers going through hell- and while they know it’s dirty business to try and kill Taylor before the latter “did anything”, they made an exception because they’re pretty sure Taylor is a time bomb that’s going to hatch into another once-in-a-lifetime apocalypse like they barely staggered out of last time, and have been trying to rebuild the kingdom ever since.

The inquisitors, in intention, are an anti-dark lord task force; they’re people given tools and orders and coordinated so that a group of plucky teenagers don’t have to solo the end of the world again. In that sense, they’re fairly noble intended, compared to true historical inquisitors who were generally more occupied torturing and threatening people to make sure everything stayed in order. But I picked that title for a reason- even if it’s well-intended, the end takeaway is still that people with a lot of power are scared of losing control, and think it’s okay to cut into their citizens’ lives a little bit more.

After all, Taylor was targeted purely for their raw potential- Hero and Maenad didn’t exactly wait long enough to realize Taylor was the seamstress’s apprentice and only used their power to help granny down the street with her arthritis, and once they- from the village’s perspective- killed an innocent child, their investigation in the matter was not exactly welcome.

#rpg tomfoolery #Basically a huge amount of this story is built on the fact that like #yes many really simplified Light vs. Dark stories can end up with the heroes doing some fucked up stuff #but also the majority of those simplified narratives /use trauma as a justification/ #Dark Lord so-and-so burned your village down! Dark Lord so-and-so kidnapped your sweetheart! #of course you're angry and want to stab Dark Lord so-and-so! #and like. the hurt was real and yes that was wrong #but if you continue to only approach the world feeling like it personally wronged you so whatever you do back is justified #you are going to end up making harmful decisions #and if you got A Hero's Reward in the meantime and like #married your sweetie into the highest throne in the kingdom #suddenly it is actually pretty easy to accidentally become a tyrant #and it feels upsetting and unfair and cruel #because you just wanted to go home you just wanted to be safe you just wanted love and comfort and ordinary reasonable things #you didn't even really have ambitions because you didn't GET to because the world was in danger and it was all survival #but there's the point where you have to stop running in survival #tl;dr plot of danse macabre/rpgverse boils down to 'large scale trauma is often cyclic and good intentions alone won't stop that'