A Mage Reborn, Book Two (WIP) - UPDATED August 7th | Book One Released!

Uhm… Currently? We are not working for them because we want to.

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YOU might not. I totally am. Is this a path-not-taken thing, or are you referring to the resurrection as “kidnapping”?

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Yes, the resurrection. Thalia made very clear she can track us and put a silence spell if we were to rebel or try to escape.

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Look, if you’re unhappy with being alive, you can totally course-correct that state of affairs. Going from “alive” to “dead” is the EASY direction. Resurrecting someone is such an expensive endeavour they’re probably not going to do it again. Me? I LIKE living. Living is a PLUS.

Also, it’s not (just) “generational” trauma. Any of these people who were unfortunate enough to be born on the Param half of the continent were actual, literal, full-on slaves until less than 5 years ago. Not five hundred. Not fifty. FIVE.

EDIT: You can complain about Mireil all you want (I sure as hell do), but I don’t see you complaining that Param let the father of the Sircul Duke retain authority over an entire village-worth of Arcadians, the people he slaughtered on the basis of “because”.

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my (current) MC is not- definitely will try to go for neutral or peaceful, but I won’t hate Param or Arcadia.
The situation in which the MC is in did not go off well, and personally, I would be more willing to listen if Tahlia wasn’t so harsh on the MC when they just met

just my two cents on this, ofc!

tbh I’m still wondering why people are still fighting over this :sweat_smile:

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This is a perfectly acceptable compromise, provided you can get Param to fork over all the land they stole in the first place and to keep the Jovians the hell away from New Arcadia.

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You shouldn’t forget that Thalia is as far as we know in charge of the last “Bastion” of Arcadian culture and knowlegde there is. So I personally can’t really blame her to try to protect the last of her people or culture by any means possible. The MC is at this point a huge security risk, ESPECIALLY if they nonstop give her shit about it, after they literal brought them back from the dead.

See above, security risk. MC could pretty much fuck over everything for them at this point by simply knowing of their existence.

Absolutely wrong, she supported the War, not the fixation on the MC, she literally told her in the flashback, to back of or she will die. Henceforth the collar and stuff was all on good old sis herself, simply because she wanted to prove herself.

I see many assumptions without any real backing, you’re pulling things out of thin air here. We don’t know how Thalias powers work, Y even states they were inclined to resurrect sister instead, which implies that there are limits to her power.

About Sister, thats easy, she was a pretty much “saved” by her. And Eli even stated they worked with them to find MC so… yeah… your exact point here?

I agree with, with your take on their youngers… other than that though.
While I have no doubt, that Arcadia is not all sunshine and rainbows, your accusations seem again fall back to nothing but assumptions, without any kind of evidence.

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If you want to see it that way then our mc gets to be antagonistic to Arcadia too, seeing as how they are a slave of Thalia right now and before that Thalia openly supported our vile “sister”, who also enslaved the mc with that torturous arcane collar which is what started the whole mess, and knew of and probably supported our torturer in chief, Thaubal, tacitly

Which essentially means mc gets to be antagonistic right back to F and both have their reasons, but I’d still say mc’s reasons slightly trump F’s because while both were former slaves the mc is currently still a slave.

In the new update she does torture the mc a bit for having the gall to try to escape, while turning Eli into our jailer.

It’s harder than most people think it is and very much harder and far less glamorous than the media make it out to be.

That it apparently justifies making a slave out of someone you resurrect. :unamused: Never mind she apparently didn’t do it with sister and she also seems to have used a bit of a lighter touch with Eli.
Or maybe she made much, much better sales pitches to both of them than the nonexistent effort she put into her pr game for the mc.

Besides if she really cared about Arcadia, instead of her personal power, she’d have pulled a legendary Arcadian archmage out of the historical record, they’d have been much more magically potent than the mc and far more knowledgeable with now lost knowledge about old Arcadia.
Of course, unlike our mc who knows little and is weakened by parasites, such a person would have been an actual threat to the reign of god-empress Thalia, which is why she doesn’t do such a thing.

She resurrects the mc because she wants an easily controllable slave, otherwise she really would gone with sister, but maybe sister was getting to be too much of a genuine threat to her control, seeing as how she was not weakened by useless parasites and more knowledgeable in the ways of new Arcadia.
She doesn’t do it out of the kindness of her heart, so my mc doesn’t feel like he owes his new torturer and enslaver much of anything as she is as bad as Thaubal ever was.

Old Arcadia seems to have been far from a paradise either, unless you were an Arcanist and their foreign policy was probably just as typical of the dark ages as anybody else’s in the game, which means they probably stole and raped and plundered as much as any of the other nations, except their innate superiority complex probably blinded them to the budding alliances among the “lesser” nations until it was too late for them, or maybe that alliance took some advantage of internal civil strife in old Arcadia as anybody who was not an Arcanist seems to have been a second-class citizen at best.

But their absolute greatest flaw was probably their own paranoia and distrust of their own youth…at that point they probably were a doomed nation anyway, as not passing all the “secrets” along to the next generations certainly guaranteed a slow but steady and nigh irreversible decline in the quality and power of their Arcanists and thus their power as a nation.

Point is old Arcadia doesn’t exactly seem to have been an innocent little lamb among nations and cultures.

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To be honest I dislike the Arcadians more. One faction betrayed the MC and the other one is essentially forcing them to work for them.

I mean, ya get burned at the stake, wake up and essentially get leashed with a choker. And these are the same people who let “sister” do her schemes.

The original kingdom may have been scummy and did terrible things, but at least the king ((before sister got all stabby on him)) was trying to change things. But, said change will never happen now, after what she did. All she did was fuel the cycle of hate again; which will only cause history to repeat itself.

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Hold up which option is that

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You insist that Eli goes through the gate with you and the plan fails. You can try a second time eventually and it kinda makes the lady mad and she tortures you till Eli says she will “Make you fall in line”.

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0.0

You don’t need to insist, my mc didn’t but Eli will come anyway, no matter what you say to them.

But yes, if you choose the escape route you get this snippet with Eli later on.

Eli the Jailer

It is clear that the older mage feels that ${ehe}'s been put in a strange position. $!{ehe} is at once your staunchest ally in a place teeming with enemies, and the jailor who’ll stop at nothing to make you stay there. You’ve both come to a silent agreement not to discuss anything related to that ill-fated night, or what plans you may or may not still be nursing in a bid to break free from Tahlia’s yoke. But through ${ehis} mannerisms whenever you skirt the topic—fidgety, uneasy, stilted in a way ${ehe}'s never been with you—you can hazard a guess that ${ehe} won’t entertain another escape plan.

Making his oldest and best friend be his jailer is something my mc will never forgive “new” Arcadia for. :angry:

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Welp say no more, we kill the bish or we escape, I ain’t putting up with her bs if she involves my friend.

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In the recent update don’t they delve into that, if you choose not to work for them that is?

Tahlia will collar you like a dog, so expect future retribution

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If Thalia should be punished for forcing us to work for her Leon should be punished as well for executing us without proper investigation

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I think that my main problem with Arcadia is their sheer xenophobia. When the MC is first resurrected Thalia describes the atrocities committed against the Arcadians, she talks about how ‘noble’ bloodlines were exterminated by ‘peasant’ masters, which indicates how she views non-Arcadians as inferior. This is compounded by the fact that the term they have for non-Arcadians doubles as an insult, which tends to have ugly history in real-life situations. Their obsession with bloodline also suggests an elitist view; with all the major characters being a ‘Mateus’ suggesting that they are all descendants of an important Arcadian house, I think mentioned to be scholars.

They also show a general refusal to ally with any non-Arcadians: the most they indicate working with outsiders are merchants, and even then it’s purely a business relationship. They don’t bother to find pro-Arcadian allies who aren’t actually Arcadian, brushing those people off as being entirely self-interested. I found this particularly notable since I was very surprised, as a reader, at how quick King Julius was to chew out his predecessor for not realizing that simply ending slavery was not enough to improve the lives of Arcadians. He struck me as a character genuinely dedicated to improving the lives of Arcadians in Param, yet Mireil was quick to deride him as someone just trying to look good, and the Arcadians didn’t have a problem with how things turned out because he was a Parami king and they were planning on killing off all of the Param royals anyways.

Which leads me to my next point; Arcadia’s main foreign policy seems to be to murder the ruling class of any neighbor that is powerful enough to be a threat, since they specifically mention not targeting Yotai because they were struggling to recover from a war with an empire. This suggests that Arcadia intends to make itself known to the rest of the continent, since currently there is no threat because no one knows they exist, and if they do so then there is a greater likelihood that the people of said countries would put two and two together, and if they found a figurehead or leader to replace those that were killed, would try to fight Arcadia. This would mean that Arcadia intends to conquer the countries in question, as if they left them alone they would be able to rally and fight back. It would have already been clear from the earlier war that people could fight back and win even when the odds were against it, so in order to ensure that the countries wouldn’t be any threat, Arcadia would have to destroy or suppress their leadership hierarchy entirely.

This struck me as all rather hypocritical. Do the Arcadians have a reason to be angry? Yes, definitely. Do they deserve restitution? Yes. But with the xenophobic and elitist attitudes that they’ve displayed so far, along with the implications of their goals, their main problem with the situation doesn’t seem to be that there is an inequality, but rather that they are not on top.

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Of course they view the non-Arcadians as inferior. Arcadians were minding their own business when, at the behest of the Jovian Church, the other two countries invaded them with no provocation whatsoever, slaughtered and/or enslaved each and every one of them, took their stuff, kept on genociding them, forbid them from practicing their culture, and then, FIVE YEARS AGO, considered sufficient restitution to put them on reservations UNDER THE CONTROL OF PEOPLE WHO KEPT ON SLAUGHTERING THEM.

The response of the Param crown to a massacre of Arcadian children was to solidify its assets at the expense of a Paramic noble house, while leaving the person responsible for the massacre in charge of a population of Arcadians. Leomar’s response to catching a dude who unleashed a literal plague on Arcadians was “woah, we can’t punish him TOO much”.

There are no pro-Arcadian allies. None. The Jovian Church continues to prevent them from using thaumic healing. The Sals were less terrible to the Arcadians than Param only because the literal Jovian saint was going around being saved by a literal Arcadian in his head. Param is… Param. Even Julius’s plan for “restitution” (which consisted on putting the Arcadians in reservations, fun times) was going to be mostly supported by Sallian finances (which were controlled by an Arcadian). The response to a literal plague was “send one healer”, a healer who wants to throw in the towel the exact moment things look difficult (though, to be fair, “throw in the towel the moment things look difficult or risky” is Ilya’s response to every situation; I know you’re a noble, but come on, girl, try making an effort once in a while) and throws an actual literal fit when Barza doesn’t fall to his knees in gratefulness or some shit, even though this would never have been a problem if the organisation she’s there representing hadn’t advocated for the murder and enslavement of Arcadians and didn’t prevent people from using thaumic healing for the sake of their power base.

The Arcadians hate everyone because literally everyone (except Yutai, who’s a naval power in the same continent and therefore not a factor) murdered, enslaved, exploited, and betrayed them. Repeatedly. And not JUST their ancestors. Them. Literally these people.

And after an Arcadian (you) wins Leomar’s war for him at the expense of constant pain and risking your magical abilities on a daily basis, repeatedly, the first time, THE ONE TIME, you ask him to trust you, he has you burned at the stake. Not “life imprisonment”. Not even a quick painless death like beheading. Burnt. At. The. Stake. Except apparently not, because you get to suffocate first. Fun times all around.

So, no, the Arcadians don’t feel safe as long as Param is a potential threat, because every time a Paramite was a potential threat, Arcadians got murdered with no provocation. And every time an Arcadian did something for anyone else, they never got any credit for it. And, again, not JUST their ancestors, literally these Arcadians.

And yes, Thalia wants you pull your goddamn weight, because they just spent a considerable amount of resources bringing you back to life. If you’re not happy with that, stop playing and headcanon that your MC blew their own head off while giving her the finger.

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This is why i am going to make a naive mc at the start and change him to an mc hell bent on destroying param no matter the cost(other than eli, eli is precious)

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