No. The arcane collar is, basically, lost magic. Very few people know how they work, and they come from earlier sources. It’d be the equivalent of Tesla knowing how to work a particle accelerator (except in this case the particle accelerator would’ve been built in the past by a lost advanced civilisation). I also HYPOTHESISE that knowing how to remove the collar would have been meaningless either way, because a slave collar that lets the person wearing it remove it isn’t much of a slave collar at all.
The answer to this is that Leomar doesn’t really care about Arcadian lives.
And yet here we are, in a world where Leomar’s first response to a dude indiscriminately genociding a bunch of Arcadians they were responsible for via magic-biological weapon is “surely, he should’t be punished too much”.
Yeah, the reason Leon executed the emcee was purely because of public pressure, he didn’t want to do it, but he buckled. He may not despise Arcadians, but he sure isn’t a strong kinG. I’d be willing to bet that if there hadn’t been so much of a public uproar, MC would, if not have gotten away Scott free, wouldn’t have been barbecued and might have even escaped and gotten away with everybody looking the other way. I’ll even play devils advocate here, and even though I wholeheartedly disagree with his move, and I despise him forever, I can understand where he’s coming from. The kingdom has just been through a Civil War, everything is balanced on a knife edge, the last thing he wants to do is piss off the people and the nobles because who knows what kind of revolt could occur, especially since the Saintess is practically divine and not avenging her death would seem like blasphemy. You could definitely put the blame on Leon for not trying very hard to save MC, but that’s probably more because he wasn’t thinking straight and not because he was being purposefully malicious. If the blame has to go to one thing in particular, it’s all of the people of the kingdom in general and The overall society that would let something like this happen
Because now that he’s the king, he’s trying hard to present himself as this image of a strong and decisive leader who does what is best for his people. Giving mercy to the worst criminal of the kingdom without a good reason aside from being his friend/lover does not paint his reign in a good way. I personally think his decision was understandable.
You know what I find more insulting than the statue? The fact that Paramites instituted a freaking holiday where they all make prayers for the MC’s soul, as if it were the MC that had done anything wrong and the well-wishes of the people who literally had them executed meant anything.
I’m pretty sure it’s implied that Leon knows something is wrong, he just doesn’t know what it is, and the fact that MC isn’t able to explain it to him isn’t helping. That frustration, plus the pressure of the decision he’s forced to make seems to prevent him from thinking straight and trying to figure out what’s going on properly so he goes with what everybody else wants him to do and what seems like his only option. Conclusion, Leon is a great wartime leader but a shitty peacetime one
Not going through with the execution would have most likely meant uproar amongst the populace and nobility and possibly risking a second Civil War… That’s what I presume Leon was thinking. Could he have found someway to stall it via a trial or other legal proceedings? Probably, But let’s be realistic here, if, after trying to stall, no mitigating evidence came up, then the execution was going to have to happen.
Also, a fantastic point that somebody brought up in a separate discussion about the same thing, how hard would it have been to fake an execution? Just saying
After months of silence from us we suddenly show up and kill the equivalent of the pope and offer zero explanation as too why. We were basically a nuke in terms of military power during the war and now we just killed a very public figure so not only do they have a very justified reason to kill us, if they don’t take advantage that we were captured, the consequences if we escape, they have a laundry list of reasons to execute us friend or not. His feelings for us is irrelevant.
Pretty sure the MC was sitting in magic cuffs in dungeons looking and feeling like jelly without opportunities to escape or harm someone.
And this is extremely dangerous and needs to be investigated. What if MC is just a single part of a whole anti Param organisation? And what if they are someone important in that organization? So mich useful info could be extracted but Leon showed up once, asked MC once and left. What a champ.
3. Even from a monarch’s point of view the decision to bbq MC was terrible. Basically Leon strained his relationship with the new saintess and the prince, probably made his other allies distrustful of his decisions (because who knows when he decides to bbq someone else for being sus) and simply showed himself as incapable ruler. Oh, and now he’s working nonstop shortening his lifespan.
Freaking Leon, I’m just looking forward to showing up with Eli and going “BOO!”, then you know, destroying his kingdom and raising Arcadia back to power. Seeing the reactions from everyone is what I am looking forward to the most. Ohhhh, hopefully there is the option to turn everyone against Leon, that would be fun.
If you couldn’t guess I really hate Leon, and I rarely use the word hate.
I’ll never get tired of pointing out that absolutely NOBODY in Param has two braincells to rub together, because if they did “this dude who single-handedly won a war for us now did something completely unexplained and out of character, I wonder if the fact that they were alone with someone who is known to go around mind-controlling people could have factored into it, hmmm” would inevitably come up in what passes for a brain in Paramites.
At least the head of intelligence (forgot her name, again) has the excuse that she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the MC and them being dead makes her job infinitely easier.
