@L-ViBritannia and @Kitty_Gaige (whose fic i loved!) got me thinking. i was so floored that leon really slugs mc if they say you’ll never forgive him in the dungeons, the absolute mad lad! out of everyone, he really takes mc killing the saintess as a personal betrayal, even more than ilya, despite us never really hearing about any like personal commitment to the faith or relationship with the saintess. the reason i figured he was so mad was bc he was the one mc would be making a fool of if they betrayed the country, but now i think there really might be something to mc not living up to the version of them leon had in his head. in a playthrough where you saved the kids and the villagers, its like literally the first time you’ve ever not lived up to his expectations.
if anyone has any pet theories, i would love to know why you guys think leon was so unwilling to investigate! it feels like there was a lot going on while mc was in jail that we don’t know about–i always wondered if there was like an anti-mc contingent of like ante + the nobles who thought we didn’t deserve the retainer spot that made their move after the assassination.
I like Leon too! I don’t think it’s controversial bc in tumblr, he’s a popular ro. I was actually surprised to see that many people hate him when I went here lol.
wait i don’t remember him doing that. when does he do that??
It’s one of the possible reactions when in the cell based of a certain sequence of choices lol been a while since played through that part. Not 100% but pretty sure you half to be antagonistic.
he punches mc if you plead your innocence and then tell him you won’t forgive him for not believing you–you actually dont have to be antagonistic, interestingly.
My theory for why Leon was unable to properly investigate is quite the deep one that involves Ante.
i mean think about it, Who would Leon assign the task of investigation for other than the Royal Spy ?, And we all know how much prejudice Ante has against the MC which is why I think Ante rigged the entire investigation to always have the MC come up as the villain, Ante could’ve easily figured out that something is wrong given that she was monitoring the MC all the time when the MC was at thaubal lab
Between that and the church being a hair away from marching into the dungeon on their own and dragging the MC from his/her hair to the pyre is what pressured Leon to sanctions the pyre.
This only shows that Leon is a weak king who had no idea how to deal with the factions and that Ante most definitely knew of this weakness of his and used it to put pressure on him to kill the MC, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Ante who basically got the church riled up and demand the execution of the MC behind the scenes.
He’s actually VERY popular in here too. If you check up all of the replies defending/saying they like him/going his route receive tons of likes. Sometimes we get like 10 people or so that don’t like him together but mostly is the other way around.
Dont worry about that cause if you think like that then every book in existance is cringe. Plus you did great the story was very heartbreaking (considering IIlya here). Good job!
I accidentally did it had him do it to me on my first route and I wasn’t antagonistic at all, just playing a MC that was feeling betrayed and thought “The ADUDACITY” lmao
correct me if i’m wrong here but for what I remember there wasn’t a investigation at all?
Frankly, I thought Ante was dead when I went through that part. It was called a massacre, and her shoulder had had turned necrotic from Nyx’s plaguehand. That would have killed her eventually. Obviously, other play throughs might yield different fates for her I guess.
I don’t know what would be investigated… MC says nothing, even after stopping the ritual’s effects, and everything else is pretty much obvious. Pretty sure the MC admits what they did, at least in the dialogue options I chose.
she lives in all universes! i think the author said on tumblr it’s because she got a glyph of magebane off in time to save her skin but not quick enough to save her unit
lots of people feel the same way i think, but i just wondered why (for example!) no one ever seemed to try to track down where the mage was those mysteriously three months they were away, esp considering they went to salantira of all places. killing the symbolically important but politically redundant saintess is just a strange endgame if mc had been a plant the whole time but everyone rolled with it lol
MC says nothing but also has the option to be like “i had no choice”. It’s CLEARLY something wrong, he’s known us for years and we won a war for him. He also knows of the existence of magic collars that make you do stuff for others. He could have taken a while to put 2 and 2 together but he instead jumped right into speedrunning his best friend/lover barbecue and that’s what people have a problem with mostly.
That’s exactly it! It’s such a suspicious situation and MC/Arcadia had absolutely nothing to gain from it. Nothing.
If MC was a plant we’d have done something during the war, not after. Makes no sense the entire thing.
iirc, leon doesn’t know of the existence of arcane collars. i think what you’re referring to is an alchemical concoction called palmerra, which i think mc mentioned is what mireil used to put the grand duke in her thrall.
Maybe they simply assumed that mc wasn’t expecting to get caught after killing the saintess? Had it not been for Ante mc would have fled the scene. So not exactly an endgame goal.
Also, a plant may have had other goals than simply offing the king, his brothers or the saintess. Striking during the war seems redundant if mc was running a long con.
Yes thank you, those. Been a while since I’ve played. But the point is still the same: everyone was aware of mind control being possible.
But if MC didn’t wanna be caught we’d for sure kill all of the witnesses, we had the power to do it. Wouldn’t be a problem. Plus we could have ran away.
And about killing Leon and Saine? We had SO MANY opportunities at this point it’s not even a alternative. What doesn’t make sense is letting the side you’re “working for” get decimated and then killing a religious leader who was about to be replaced. She wasn’t gonna recover and everyone knew.
There is an option to kill everyone, I kind of did during my first playthrough, since my stats didn’t allow to choose any other options. Now, that looked ugly for my mc, who wasn’t willing to kill. Definitely didn’t help her case in trying to look innocent, so I just rped her getting executed as smth she thought she deserved, especially since I think she killed that knight who put enchantments on her during the war to keep her in one piece and to whom she gave her letter for safekeeping.
If, and only if killing the heirs was her goal. Maybe the long con was simply mc trying to get their trust and then to subtly manipulate Leon and co after the war to the benefit of whatever organization mc worked for.
[Edit]: Regarding the saintess: mc might have just been a religious zealot, a zealot wouldn’t rest until their presumed justice was delivered.
The meta answer to the Leon situation is that it had to happen for the story. Some sequence of events had to lead to MC’s death and resurrection. The in universe explanation, imo, is a mix of what people have already said about Ante, Leon being a relatively weak ruler (Julius even points it out and there are allusions to it with how Leon bungled up some meeting with that Lady D-something), and Leon just being a hotheaded guy to begin with. Ante’s suspicions border on paranoia imo. Seriously, if MC wanted to do something, he’d just have helped Sister out and wiped the Royals out entirely to begin with lmao. They wouldn’t have stood a chance, at all. Hell, with how pivotal MC is in the war effort, it sounds like they wouldn’t have really stood a chance even during the course of the war without MC. Ante doesn’t really give MC any chances to defend themselves, even before the whole incident with the Saintess - and it’s clear that Ante doesn’t even care to know. To Leon though - we’ve seen multiple times how he’s hotheaded, from the first time they meet. MC tries to help them, Leon goes “Oh uh, wow, I hope that’s not all you can do” while Saine realizes just how MC has actually helped. Then we have Leon just going with his heart with the kids, or trying to kill Sister after the assassination, or any other number of things that shows he’s not really a thinker and definitely much more emotional than the others. In that case, it’s not particularly a stretch if he’s just so focused on himself and his feelings of betrayal, along with some not so healthy pushing from Ante, and presumably the public, to just end up okaying the execution. I bring the public up because well, we don’t know how things were handled but if it got out that the Saintess was assassinated by MC right at the onset, damage control really wasn’t going to do moot, and that added pressure from the public probably did Leon no favors in thinking clearly.
In regards to the religious zealot argument, which is what Leon buys too if you go all in on the villain act - If MC was really that fanatical, it would have been so much easier to just kill the Saintess during their 1 on 1 … rather than while she’s under guard by temple knights and all that. Hell, even the chaos during Julius’ assassination. Literally just stab the Saintess in the back while everybody else is focused on Sister.
Yes, killing the saintess during those instances would have been the logical thing to do, except I think logic and common sense do not apply to fanatics. People like that are passionate not reasonable.
