obvious disclaimer: i can only speak for my own MC :b
they had accepted their death well before they were put to the pyre, so waking up again was not exactly high on their post-mortem list of priorities.
they were content with the things they had done and so, being resurrected directly into a life of servitude at the hands of a person who, in their mind, is cut from the same cloth as Mireil isn’t their idea of a good time.
they are thankful that they got the opportunity to see Eli again, but that’s about as far as that feeling goes
TL:DR, less so unhappy with being alive, more so unhappy that their life isn’t their own anymore(again) because they’re alive. at least they had peace in death
people are weird, feelings are weird, they don’t want to be here but they’re also not going to kill themself because of it
Yep, unlike Mireil the mc is only a slave, not a valuable ally who gets lots of resources and a long leash. The most damning point still remains that the Arcadians knew what Mireil did to the mc specifically but chose not to lift so much as a finger to do anything about. So they are not the people my mc can rely on for any sort of individual restitution since they caused a good deal of his problems in the first place. Espeically if we count sister as an Arcadian (because she had a phantasma) for this purpose.
So even if the Arcadians attain all their goals and god-empress Thalia subjugates the entire continent the mc will probably remain a slave in the same shitty conditions they are in now. Unless Thalia herself disposes of the mc by this point as they will probably have outlived their usefulness.
Or in the most disturbing outcome of all she might very well decide to use my gay mc as breeding stock to make pure-blooded babies, which means lots of involuntary heterosexual intercourse, the ultimate violation.
Therefore, however much he has come to detest him now, that leaves Leon as the “lesser evil”. Plus of course the only real friend (not counting Bess) he might still have, a.k.a. Saine is on that side. Even Eli, by acting as a jailer, has downgraded himself from a friend and brother to a mere ally. For my mc at least.
As of the last update it seems you can also end up that way and tortured for real if you simply try to escape. You can get on that even if you reserve judgement about Arcadia when you first meet them.
In any case the mc does never get a long leash or any real resources of their own, no matter how cooperative you are. So one thing is very clear, the mc is no particularly valued ally. Either you cooperate “voluntarily” and you get to pretend you are not functionally enslaved as the lowest ranking employee or you don’t and get enslaved. Either way the treatment the mc gets isn’t particularly good and you get to have no real agency of your own as “management” decides everything, whether you pretend to cooperate or not.
He can never be on the Arcadian side, because killing him, as he’s a Parami royal is an explicitly stated-goal of god-empress Thalia and nobody in Arcadia, least of all the mc, gets to disagree with her.
I don’t think the author is going to let mc and Saine form their own, third, side in the coming conflict.
Ehhh, last time we see Saine in the demo (at least, the version I played) he wasn’t particularly thrilled at his big brother. Though I wouldn’t go nearly as far as saying he’s on the Arcadian side (because why would he be?), I’m not entirely sure he’s still on Leomar’s.
And, again, the only way you can end up collared by Thalia is if you pretty much tell her that you intend to give away the location of the Arcadian refugees to the people who keep killing and enslaving them the first chance you get.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, because my treatment was perfectly fine. I went the “eehhhh, not really keen on declaring allegiance right now because the last time I did THAT, the dude I declared allegiance to had me burnt at the stake so now I’m not really keen on it” route, to which the response was “smart move, keep it up”. Then you get to pick which of three high-ranking departments you’re going to help with in a pretty high position (at least the I picked has you working directly under the person in charge), and they send me AND a squad of highly-trained mages to rescue my childhood friend, which wasn’t a mission I was going to pass on anyway.
If you’re wondering why you don’t get the leeway Miriel did, well… that didn’t really work all that well, did it? I mean, there’s a distinct lack of success in that whole shebang, isn’t there? And also, I can’t stress this enough, one year ago you were literally the bodyguard of the king of Param, a kingdom who goes around murdering and enslaving them. So, no, you don’t get much leeway, and you get even LESS leeway if your thoughts run in the direction of “and now I’m going to rat all of you out to the dudes who go around murdering and enslaving you”, because, well, your thoughts run in the direction of ratting all of them out to the dudes who go around murdering and enslaving them.
Ooof, that’s… no. Hard pass. Even if I hated everyone else (which I don’t), Seine seems like a good kid and Yu’s a sweet cinnamon roll. Granted, they’re a sweet cinnamon roll that can summon a tornado that levels fortresses, but a sweet cinnamon roll nevertheless. Ilya and F are mostly great, too, even if Ilya’s too keen to throw in the towel at the first difficulty and F is… prickly? Yeah, let’s go with prickly.
They gained a whole country, the shebang seemed to have been pretty successful, at least initially, except that both sister and Thalia are/were too ambitious and self-centered for their own good.
And how did the mc end up that way? Because Mireil couped Salantira and cheated the mc out of everything that should have been theirs to begin with. Which is how they end up in Leaf’s end where the story start. After escaping the clutches of sister. Someone the Arcadians actively supported and they were very well aware of everything sister did to the mc and chose not to intervene. Thalia states that herself. So they don’t give a shit about “justice” for the mc.
Well they enslaved my mc and have made an explicit goal of killing the one friend he may have left in the world. They actively supoprted sister (who stole everything from the mc in the first place) and were tacitly supportive of Thaubal. So in the story of my mc’s shitty life thus far they pretty much look like the villains and that was never going to endear them.
Eh, at best this is comparable to the fate of educated roman slaves…you’re still expected to be an utterly subservient lackey and you get no resources and no opportunity to do any projects of your own. I view it as Thalia simply putting her slave at the disposal of another one of her underlings.
The mc never really gets any agency and their input is definitely not heeded.
So that they can then use him for their own purposes and to serve as our jailer. Yeah, that worked out really great. My mc is grateful Eli is alive at least but they are no longer friends thanks to Arcadia.
It doesn’t matter in the game thus far which attitude the mc takes towards Arcadia they do not get any real resources to pursue any projects of their own regardless.
Kinda hard to ever really trust Eli now that they have become our jailer. It is also less of a “side” and more the mc going completely crazy and billed as a bad end.
They didn’t gain a whole country, they had a Duke. Salantira isn’t the absolute monarchy that Param is. That thing is ran on elected representatives.
I have absolutely no idea, because it’s not like anybody asked me if I wanted the job.
You should meet the people Param supports. You know, like checks notes mass slavers and actual genocidal racists.
They only do this if you intend to rat them out.
I mean, that friend went about supporting their genocide, so, you know.
It’s a whole better deal than you got being Leomar’s retainer.
This is a definite lie. You literally get to pick what department you work for, and under Catalina at least you get plenty of leeway to tackle things the way you want, including your pick of products to work on.
Don’t try to rat them out to their genociders, and you don’t get a jailer.
Nobody gets any projects of their own. Nobody. There’s literally only one project going on and that’s “making sure the Arcadians don’t get enslaved and genocided again”. That’s it. You think Flyss has a gardening project on the side where she experiments with roses (to grow sharper thorns, probably) or something? There’s not enough Arcadians left (on account of the whole genocide thing) to allow for people to not be working towards “not getting genocided again”.
Also, (and again) I don’t remember getting any offer of personal projects as Leomar’s retainer, either. I DO remember stressing my mana ducts nearly to the point of not being able to use magic ever again by Gwael’ing all over the place to win Leomar’s war for him, about 3 months before he checks notes had me burnt at the stake without an investigation.
Very much comparable with prison labour, you get the “choice” to say whether you’d prefer, kitchen, laundry or general cleaning and maintenance duties. Except it is not really a choice if one of those gets too few or too many volunteers at any given time prison administration simply reshuffles the roster anyway.
Deeper research into the parasites, including how to get rid of them is never one of the options for the mc. As that might actually give us useful knowledge.
Again similar to be on good behaviour and you get to have dessert and aren’t placed in isolation. It doesn’t get you out of the prison.
Wrong, Eli did at one time and of course sister did. Although they may have deliberately sabotaged Eli, since his project was searching for mc, when the Arcadians already knew what sister’s little project was doing to the mc.
Except for sister and Eli at one time apparently. And god-empress Thalia wants to accomplish it by genociding everybody else in return. That’s gonna be loads of fun. Probably gonna force mc to kill Saine personally too, just for the shits and giggles of it.
I don’t remember there being an arcane collar and a jailer there and we did get some time and resources (okay not enough, sure) for our own projects there, except that the only project we ever got to pursue was diffusing sister’s magical bomb, which then got the mc burned at the stake.
They had the Duke and everyone in a critical position, Mireil functionally controlled the whole government.
Arcadia on the other hand very much is, courtesy of god-empress Thalia. And Salantira under Mireil’s rule during the war was one too in everything except name.
Funny that seems to be pretty much Thalia’s plans for everybody who is not an Arcadian arcanist too.
It’s just one big giant circle-jerk of pointless revenge and atrocity by the leadership on all sides.
And if you didn’t think sister would have just let you go? No, she wanted the mc dead and was fully supported by Arcadia in that goal. God-empress Thalia is now expecting us to do the same for her, so that in the very best case we may get live to be still enslaved breeding stock. Not an attractive prospect in the slightest.
This doesn’t help them get not genocided. It’s not a viable project. (also, we still don’t know what’s planned for the as-yet-not-fully-implemented Arcadia Free Day)
Except you never get reshuffled.
I mean, good behaviour actually can get you early release. But that’s beside the point. Because the really important part is that if they let you go, they’re going to get genocided EXACTLY because they let you go.
Because EVERY SINGLE TIME Arcadians aren’t at the absolute, unchallenged top of the hierarchy, they get genocided. Every. Single. Time.
What got you burnt at the stake is that nobody in the Param hierarchy has two brain cells to rub together and Leomar, even though he advocated for leniency for an actual genocider, decided to give you a public execution. And not even an off-with-your-head-quick-and-painless execution. Nope. You get to have your skin blister away in intense heat before you suffocate.
Arcadia isn’t anything right now other than an organisation. There’s not enough Arcadians to make it a country. They’re not France, they’re the French Resistance.
Or, more accurately, for everybody in power in Param, aka, the people who went on to unprovokedly genocide and enslave the Arcadians.
Arcadia didn’t give a fuck one way or the other whether you lived or died because, again, you were literally the bodyguard of a member of the royal family that genocided and enslaved them.
Except she doesn’t. In fact, she literally tells you no phantasma for you for a while because if you do that’ll fuck you up.
Well you don’t know that, especially if you choose the magical items job with low enchantment skill or something.
Not on a life sentence, which is the closest thing to what our enslaved mc got.
So? Everybody seems to like torturing the mc, Thaubal, Sister, Leon. Thalia is in that regard no different from any of them and Leon was still the least worse of them to the mc personally. Oh, and Eli too now as a jailer, even if that is “only” psychological.
Don’t get me wrong my mc well and truly detests Leon by now, but he hates Thalia, Thaubal and Sister and the supposed Arcadian “glory” they stood and stand for even more.
Seems to me like it is a crucial one, but Thalia probably likes to do important stuff such as that on her own. Especially now that there are phantasma wielding opponents such as the weirdass twins and their mysterious backer.
And god-empress Thalia is going to actually share power once it is? That is very much against her nature.
They did, they backed sister. So they certainly gave a fuck and it wasn’t in our way.
But the way Thalia frames her exposition they chose sister over the mc a long time ago and they knew everything she did to the mc while in control of Salantira, including cheating them out of their mom’s legacy and title. They just didn’t care back then and they don’t care now.
Really Thalia only decided to change horses when sister lost the war, but unlike her the mc is a prisoner and a slave who gets no resources and no leeway whatsoever.
She really should have stuck with her first choice as living as a tortured slave (again) is not much of an enticing offer and it probably isn’t gonna end even if Thalia achieves all her goals.
Ironically, the magical items job gives you two possibilites and the one I tried actually wanted thaum. Which I didn’t have, so I took the only other option, and I was still not shuffled out. So I totally DO know that.
How do you even know her nature? You have literally seen her in no other position other than “leader of the resistance”.
No, they really didn’t give a fuck if you lived or died. That was a non-factor in their decision. And, goddamn it, you literally acknowledge this in the exact next paragraph.
See?
Well, yes, because backing a literally dead horse is a bad bet, and you can’t afford to make bad bets when fighting an enemy that has an overwhelming numerical and resource superiority and wants to genocide you.
You certainly are if you intend to rat them out to the people who want to genocide them. I’m not sure what you expect anybody to do in their situation. Certainly not let you go so they can get genocided exactly because of it.
Which you can totally headcanon by stopping the game at the end of Book One. It’s even a convenient stopping point, and you don’t have to make anything up. Because those literally are the only two possible options: either your MC is perma-dead and the game ends with Book One or Thalia brings them back to life. This isn’t even one of those “Man, there’s this totally obvious option the author didn’t account for.” situations. You’re either dead or the Arcadian resistance brings you back to life, there’s no possible third route whatsoever.
Yeah, and if they did care to have the mc as an ally they could have approached them as late as leaf’s end. Well before Leon was ever in the picture. But they had sister back then so they didn’t care especially when it might have upset sister.
They only chose mc after we beat sister in a war she started and they never even so much as apologise for what sister did to us with their full support and backing. Again they are not interested in any sort of justice for the mc whatsoever, just enslavement, torture and more useless parasites that is literally all we get with Arcadia.
And yet they do exactly that with the mc. Mc or sister it wouldn’t have made difference at that point they were both dead horses who killed each other.
Thalia is never interested in anything but the worst options as any of Yu’s more reasonable suggestions get shot down as hard as the mc. They are not interested in non-Arcadian allies or slow progress, just more pointless revenge.
Yes. Because approaching you not knowing what you would do would antagonise Sister, and you don’t risk a valuable asset on off-chances, not when failing means “get genocided.”
No. You killed Sister. You are, empirically proven, the better horse. Sister doesn’t kill you. Leomar did. He killed you very, very dead. He basically made it a competition on whether the heat or the suffocation would get you first.
Arcadians don’t have non-Arcadian allies. All non-Arcadians ever did to Arcadians was kill them, enslave them, or protect the people who did. That’s it. Well, and there’s Yutai, who’s not a factor on anything unless the Empire tries to invade Arvandar again.
Thalia is, in fact, not particularly keen on an end goal that would be “get genocided somewhat more slowly.” She’d like to not be genocided at all, if that’s ok.
This isn’t about revenge. Or, at least, it isn’t just revenge. Non-Arcadians kill and enslave Arcadians. Constantly. For generations. They literally never stopped, unless the Arcadians manipulated them not to.
You’re basically asking Thalia and the Arcadians to believe that the Nazis will totally be nice this time around, you promise.
Unlike with sister, she offers the mc nothing but a lifetime of servitude/slavery, further torture and more useless parasites. She cared to actually offer sister something tangible and resources but really doesn’t do that for the mc, so unlike sister the mc is not a “valued ally” and more of a disposable slave and maybe future breeding stock.
And it was still sister’s arcane collar and magical time bomb that set in motion the event that got the mc killed. Oh and arcana collars is definitely knowledge they don’t care to teach the mc. They do use it on the mc though.
So, yeah, really feeling like a valued ally instead of a commodity here.
The Arcadians, by way of sister, took everything from the mc and then enslaved him again. With his oldest friend and virtual brother as a jailer to boot this time. And at some point Thaubal style experimentation on the mc, possibly led by Eli this time seems likely to resume too.
Even if they can disclaim Thaubal because they didn’t directly back him, they cannot do that with everything sister did to the mc and they never once even verbally apologise for that. And yet you expect the mc to put any hope for personal restitution and improvement in the very people who are possibly enslaving and torturing but certainly keeping them prisoner right now?
And all Thalia offers the mc is that he should hope that his new torturers and captors may be slightly less bad than the previous sets.
Also Param under Julius at least were a far cry from the Nazi’s and who killed Julius who seems to have been the best hope for a gradually improving situation? Sister with the full backing of the Arcadians.
Yes. Because Sister was always on their side, whereas the MC was, up until one year ago*, on the side of the people enslaving and genociding them. So, no, you don’t get the same leeway. Shocker.
That’s a really convenient step on which to stop the causality. Why not go through ALL of it? Because if you do, what you end up with “setting events in motion” is Param and Salantira invading Arcadia, genociding and enslaving Arcadians, at the behest of the Jovian Church, with no provocation whatsoever.
Yeah, because, again, you were literally on the side of the people genociding and enslaving them. And you only get collared if you decide to resume helping those people to continue genociding and enslaving them, in which case you are definitely not an ally, valued or otherwise.
Again, the Arcadians didn’t really give a crap what Sister did to you. They didn’t do anything to you “via Sister”. Literally nothing. You were a non-factor. If Sister had asked them what to do about you, they’re response would have been “meh, whatever.” Which is an incredibly nice take on someone who is on the side of the people that were genociding and enslaving them.
I have no idea why you’d think this. You’re already running around with 5 phantasma in you, 3 of which are apparently completely wasted. Thalia isn’t going to try to put a sixth one in so she can have 4 useless phantasma instead, because this is a suicidal move when you need every phantasma you can get to not get genocided.
Because they’re not sorry, because you were fighting on the side that keeps genociding and enslaving them.
Like, is this me? Am I the problem here? Am I somehow mispelling “genociding and enslaving them” so badly that the words are unrecognisable? Do they not mean what I think they mean?
*and that one-year period doesn’t count for anything, because the MC was, well, dead
They never cared to approach the mc before the whole harebrained resurrection thing.
Okay, well if you want to go that far back seems to me Arcadia’s own paranoia and the whole “let’s not teach our own youth our secrets” is what put the writing on the wall as you cannot expect to maintain your position on top a hierarchy with less and less knowledgeable and worse leaders every generation.
They may also have had an ugly magical/racial superiority complex to boot, which if those accounts are true would actually put old Arcadia closer, whose glory Thalia supposedly fights to restore closer the Nazi’s than Julius ever was.
The mc is never valued, the only choice is between slave and prisoner and that won’t improve even if Thalia achieves all of her goals, because why would it when she’d have gotten there by using the mc as prisoner and/or a slave as there is literally nothing in it for her then just as there isn’t now.
Really best case the mc gets to be breeding stock for pureblood babies in the glorious new Arcadia. Gay or not, because when has what the mc is or wants ever mattered?
You don’t keep careful track of non-factors. They knew the mc had phantasma even back then but didn’t judge it to be important enough to make any sort of offer then.
Thaubal’s experiments were more than putting them in, they were also about using them and that part would be what would be resumed, not putting them in since that part is already done. Taking the useless ones out though will never be an option because that would increase the mc’s power, which is the last thing Thalia wants, since she wants an easily controllable prisoner or slave.
The mc was instrumental in saving a whole village and by the point the mc first became a bodyguard when Julius was still alive the Arcadians were second class citizens, not slaves.
And yet Arcadia expects the mc to work for them now with not even the promise of any sort of reward or progress towards any of their own goals they may have.
But then the mc’s lot in life seems to be to be used by everyone and everything so what they want is irrelevant anyway, from Thaubal to Thalia to even an undead spirit like Augur everbody will use and abuse the mc anyway.
Mine is sick and tired of it.
The mc doesn’t get any leeway at all, not even the promise of any in the future either.
Because they had Sister, and contacting you would upset Sister. We’ve been over this.
They may also have been led by a literal boar, if we’re going on about baseless speculating now. There’s nothing to indicate this.
old Arcadia was doing nothing to anyone that we know of. If they were, we’d know about it because Param would have propaganda’d the hell out of it. This is the opposite of what the Nazis did, which involved rampant imperialism.
I am not faced with this choice, and I don’t even throw my support behind Thalia wholeheartedly.
“Not important enough to do anything about it” is the definition of non-factors.
If this were true, he’d have run the “using” experiments as soon as he got the second phantasma into you, not put in two more. Putting in two more is a waste of phantasmas and is also a waste of you, the only person he could use to run the “using multiple phantasmas” experiments you claim he wanted to run.
After you become retainer, a dude murders a bunch of Arcadians and the first thing Leomar does when he learns about it is to defend him. Arcadians WISH they were second-class citizens, because that’d be a huge improvement over how they’re actually treated.
The only way you don’t get any leeway is if you try to run to Param, in which case you’re an enemy who’ll get them genocided, and therefore you get no leeway, because you’re an enemy who’ll get them genocided.
Unless Thalia herself disposes of the mc by this point as they will probably have outlived their usefulness. 
