whatever floats your boat, there are no canonically wrong endings.
marshall served with and led the common man, people in the lowest rung of society, not spoiled noble brats. he was in no way pampered after he was disowned. this is the first time im seeing someone describe sobik as a dedicated father figure and im not sure it’s helping legitimise your statements.
marshall doesn’t know the roughness of life? my brother in Christ, the marshall is a walking amalgamation of suffering and despair. the amount of ptsd only rivalled by the sorts of sidestep, and the bastard MCs.
i believe marshall posseses the acumen. besides, the only options are either rade or marshall. also, intimidation works just as well as ego stroking and juggling. if the marshall has enough support from the public and a strong and loyal enough army, i don’t see how his ambitions will be curtailed by a few rogue nobles.
you make fair points, the marshall remains mainly unproven in the court of intrigue. it is my opinion that he will rise up to the occasion. ofc it’ll be much more difficult seeing elya won’t exactly be on speaking terms with him, but at least we got lada to kinda mitigate that.
The Marshal served with common men the same way officers of the Royal Navy “served with the common men” aboard the ships. They shared the space and pretty much nothing else.
It’s because you misunderstand what i’m saying. Darin is the dedicated father figure in question, not Sobik. Sobik is the “real father who got you the cushy job afterwards” in the later part of my post.
And yet the Marshal only gets a fraction of the bad experiences the common men they “served with” has experienced in the same campaign, and years before it. I’m not negating they’ve been strongly affected by these experiences but that’s got nothing to do with regular experience of a common man they know nothing about because that’s something they’ve never experienced themselves.
Also, if anything, this makes them bad suited for any managerial role. Or do you really think that being a walking amalgamation of suffering, despair and ptsd are good credentials for entrusting such person with anything important, nevermind entire kingdom?
Caracalla usually would work alongside his man, carrying the ensigne of the Legion (that were heavy), refused to be adress as Imperator by his men and even create bread on his own…
Remarkable it doesn’t change the fact he was still the emperor.
That’s a little example to the whole “the Marshall share the common man tribolation”
it’s been a while since ive re-read the book. i thought the soldiers looked up to the marshall and respected him? of course he feels he led them to their deaths but i remember thinking he was accepted more among those strangers than he ever was in his own family (outside of elya).
alright, we got a cushy job, after being thrown into war as a pre-pubescent and receiving what is likely a lifetime supply of trauma. what about elya? you seriously arguing she received the shorter end of that stick?
id argue they know it better than elya, who was raised as a noble would have been, inside castle walls away from the filth and peasants, trained in court politics and not much more. sobik probably planned to marry her off once she was of age.
hey, we got lada by our side now. im counting on him opening up to her, maybe making peace with a few old demons.
I can think of Dismass that was a dishonored, and the bar respect/fear. The Kroridian of course that see the Marshall has a War Hero.
I mean some officer/general can have the respect and loyalty of their man, even if they are noble.
I could say Caesar or Alexander the Great for example and many others.
A lot of this, in part, is also mostly irrelevant. You don’t hold a throne because of support from the common man, during this era, you hold the throne because you have the support of the nobles and the common man follows whatever noble rules over them at the time.
I haven’t mentioned Elya at all in my replies. I’m only discussing the claim the Marshal knows the woes of the common men. Yes, Elya is also unfamiliar with these but it by no means that the Marshal is. Neither of them has any real experience with these.
i mean, overthrow them? place puppets or rival houses in charge after said noble randomly dies of an unknown disease (6 arrows to the back). and nah, the people have always had some sway even in medieval times. as I said, with the backing of the church, the public, and the army, i do not think a few rogue nobles will be impossible to topple.
i only mention her as she’s the only other alternative. everything else aside, i think it’s not unreasonable to say the marshall has a greater proclivity to be aware of such woes and to a greater degree, given how much time he spent with them. vs elya, who is just… yeah.
everything elya does, marshall does better, barring court intrigue. and i believe it’s easier to learn the ins and outs of the court as well as elya does for the marshall than for elya to reach the level of military genius of the marshall. if we’re comparing them individually, elya’s cooked. now, admittedly, it’ll probably be wiser for elya to rule with the marshall as her right hand man, but that’s not as interesting as seizing it for yourself, but that’s more of a personal choice.
in the wise words of Napoleon, “if you want done something done right, do it yourself.”
Let’s not forget that, after all, every marshall IS different, depending of our choices and interpretation. Personally I can’t see my marshall as a regent, I think he’s perfectly fine as a Elya’s advisior, in the shadow and far away from the court and its games.
But maybe some marshalls are fine with being a ruler, maybe they’re know more abt than Elya. As i said; it depends lol
I don’t really view the Marshall as miltiary genius to be fair.
To answer to Napoleon quote, if he really thought in this way, why he hired Berthier as Chief Of Staff?
The court politics is a large part of being the ruler – Rade finds it the hard way, in the ending where he wastes many years unable to pacify the nobles (and ultimately gets a bolt to the gut for all his trouble)
Being a military genius is good qualification to be a general who serves the ruler with their experience. But hardly to be the ruler themselves.
(for this matter Napoleon you quote found it out the hard way himself as well. Pissing off entire continent doesn’t end well no matter how much of a military genius you are, who knew?)
of course, that’s a given. i thought we were debating who’d be a better individual choice in this hypothetical scenario where only one of them can rule.
chief of staff who still served under him
that was in large part because he lost the siege. had he won, things would have been different, cant blame court politics for that. again, maybe if he were an even better general he would have pulled it off and have taken the throne by now.
the people and the army were with him (a military genius with the support of the army, the people, and the church? sounds familiar, no?) it took the combined efforts of 12 sovereign states and seven coalitions to finally topple the man. the man is still a legend, truly one of the greatest military geniuses.
Considering this scenario takes place after he crushed his rival in the open field and took the capital, there’s no real guarantee the outcome would be any different and the nobles any less willing to take a shot at ruling themselves if those events happened little earlier. At the end of the day Rade is still an usurper with no political skills to keep his opponents in check. He and the Marshal are quite alike in this regard.
I prefer to think the sign of military genius is primarily knowing how to pick your opponents and achieving tangible results better than just getting yourself defeated and exiled.
as were many other people. im sure he didn’t mean rule the entire empire all by himself. what mattered was he had the final say.
i apologise if i diverted. i may have lost track of who I was replying to as i am currently debating 4(?) people and some of the others were bringing in real world logic.
the church kinda already supports you. as long as you keep their pockets full (im not sure but I think you can intimidate the dude to crown you w/o using money). it’s corrupt, basically. so that’s that.
feats and lore over statements. the marshall does say he’s not built for that life, but i argue he’s selling himself short.
that’s just speculation at best.
part of it is, yes. but him being a military genius is a non negotiable for me, you simply do not reach the level he reached by playing by the book. no one in modern history has been able to achieve what he did and i doubt any one person ever will.
Not to mention, in the book it is stated that the Marshall is a genius, it’s the reason why King Sobik put him in the military in the first place because he saw potential and in the letter Sobik kind of admits that the Marshall would be a better ruler than any of his legitimate children.
Also, for the Marshall’s life struggles part… wth @fsix ? Seriously. Are you the kind of person who compares others’ misfortune and down-play their trauma like some edgelord?
Goodness… did you not read the Marshall’s conversation with Darin? If you did, or if you pay a smidgen of attention to be book, you’ll understand and perhaps learn some compassion from him.
There’s a saying from Darin that is very easy to undertand about comparing your or any other people’s misery, that just because someone out there is happier than you doesn’t mean your own happiness is any less true and vice versa!
So was the claim Rade wouldn’t have any trouble if the siege was successful. Since it didn’t stop you from making that argument i think i can play the same card in return? My speculation had at least some basic reasoning attached to it.
No, i’m not. Did you, perhaps, jump to this conclusion after reading single sentence from my reply? Because i thought my overall point was worded clearly, two sentences later: it was that Marshal’s misfortunes don’t have anything to do with the discussed subject (their alleged familiarity with woes of common man) not “who suffered more”.
No, it was not a single sentence. I read all of your replies.
And a huge part of the army the Marshall leads consists of commoners (even criminals), not to mention if you’re good to them the common people are more impartial to back a soldier who risks his own life to protect them than they are towards the nobbles.
Sure, the Marshall’s experiences doesn’t compare to the usual commoners, but he is familiar with them.
Then again, it seems you play a different sort of Marshall with your own head-canons. If so, is it really worth debating at this point?
(honestly what in the ninth layer of hell has this thread turn into)
Also, this is a game. Whether the Marshall is a good or bad ruler depends on the will of the writer and the player.
Then i have no idea how you’d reach that conclusion when i haven’t said such thing anywhere.
No, they are not. The idea that the Marshal is familiar with lives (and woes) of commoners because they have commoners in the army they lead is so painfully detached from reality it shouldn’t even need to be pointed out.
