#Detlinde AoB

[nefertittythegreat]

P5V7 Spoilers, no context:

[yuiamaya]

I love Adolphine

[ming-sik]

My dear good comrade in the trenches against AoB's nonsense: I'm having Ferdinand thoughts (derogatory, mostly) and stewing. You said you thought Ferdinand's boring, if you would be up for it we could complain to hell and back about him T_T (aka, I remembered someone saying “Lestilaut's bad and he doesn't even have [Ferdinand's] trauma excuse!” as if... trauma... is an excuse for... anything... also did we forget the system was inherently abusive and traumatizing orrrrrrr)

i'm always up to complain about ferdinand. i swear i tried to like aob's golden boy but he just... is bad.

like ok my main problem with him is honestly just that by being the most perfectest bestest coolest guy ever he makes the story so fuuuuuuucking boring. there are so many potential conflicts especially from part 4 onward that just get completely ironed over with "ferdinand took care of it offscreen" or "literally as soon as the problem was introduced ferdinand already had the solution", half of the remaining conflicts are just getting ferdinand to stop being an asshole long enough to easily solve the conflict, and half of the conflicts left over after that are how to stop ferdinand from being so incredibly selfless that he burns himself out solving all the story's problems before they can go anywhere interesting. it'd be one thing if he existed in a story that wasn't trying to be serious or if he was used very sparingly as a hermit whose help was difficult to acquire or came at a high price, but as it is i can't even bring myself to get that invested in new conflicts because aob's world has been mostly converted into a playground for rozemyne and ferdinand to flex their enormous brainpower over because obviously the only thing more interesting than one ridiculously overpowered protagonist whose only flaw is being too self-sacrificing is two of the damn things.

to which the counterargument is obviously "noooooo ferdinand isn't a perfect angel, he's deeply flawed!" and yeah he is, but not in a way the narrative is at all interested in doing anything but glorifying. i love it when characters are deeply flawed unpleasant assholes, but only if 1) that's taken in an interesting direction and 2) the story doesn't lie to my face and pretend everyone loves them. YS's society is systematically and inherently abusive, which means that every noble we meet is dealing with an intense web of motivations and pressures that mean being a "good" person in yurgenschmidt's nobility is basically impossible, but ideally that's a way to set up interesting tragic characters, not a reason i'm supposed to excuse ferdinand(and only ferdinand) from judgment for perpetuating that abuse and call for the execution of anyone who thinks he's an asshole.

and the counterargument to that is "oh it's not the narrative that thinks ferdinand is perfect, it's rozemyne!" but that's objectively wrong. the entire plot point of ferdinand's marriage to detlinde is when the story just spends basically an entire volume repeatedly telling the audience that ferdinand is actually the only reason anything gets done in ehrenfest ever and he's the most wonderfulest person ever and everyone is overcome with grief that their savior is gone. even sylvester's habit of pushing off work seems to exist basically entirely so we can have the literal archduke be hugely reliant on ferdinand for day-to-day work just so he can get a little extra credit.

that's not to say that he and rozemyne aren't massively codependent. they are. and again i understand that ferdinand doesn't intentionally put rozemyne in a position where he's literally the only person she can fully trust and she's both completely reliant on him for guidance and terrified of losing him, he does do that. he claims he wants her to rely on wilfried but outside of trying to train him to be more competent(unsuccessfully) he doesn't actually do anything to achieve that, and he never thinks of the perhaps more sustainable option of trying to get her an actual support network. a lot of the tragedy of her losing her life in the lower city is that originally she had a wide group of people to trust: she had her family for comfort, benno for guidance, and lutz as a peer who also knew the full story of her reincarnation. afterwards, she only has ferdinand, and the paranoia he teaches her prevents her from trying to find anyone else, to the point that she only realizes that elvira knows about her commoner origins when he's leaving! and. again. i get so hard that this is an understandable result of ferdinand's trauma making him extremely insular, it's in character, but it's also really, really something that i want the story to, at some point, actually interrogate, but it doesn't! even when ferdinand is totally for real ripped away during the marriage plotline, he actually isn't because they stay in contact the entire time and then she has an excuse to come rescue him and post-battle he's literally just back on the team and it's like he never left so that ended up having the same emotional impact as if he just moved to the next town over. so he never really "leaves", and rozemyne never has to actually get used to life without ferdinand, which would've been really interesting and a way to actually deliver on the ticking time bomb that is grooming subplots.

which he is! and to be clear, he's a groomer in the general sense, not even specifically the pedophilic sense(although yknow. he is explicitly pro-child marriage), i mean that he grooms her to accept that the way yurgenschmidt's society works is normal and fine. he's not solely responsible for the inherent abuse of feudalism, but he's a product of the system he lives in and a product that's not particularly interested in changing that system, so he views myne primarily as an aberration who needs to be incorporated into yurgenschmidt's nobility and made to understand that things work the way they do because this is the best system. i think people rail against ferdinand being called a groomer for two main reasons-- firstly people think that if you say a character is immoral you're saying that they're a bad person for liking them or finding them interesting, and secondly people not understanding that grooming isn't as simple as mustache-twirling villain evilly and intentionally completely controlling a helpless child. bc yeah rozemyne struggles against ferdinand's attempts to fit her into noble society and at multiple points does the opposite of what he tells her to, but that doesn't disprove my argument! it's actually repeatedly acknowledged(well, joked about) where characters including rozemyne and ferdinand themselves say that ferdinand has made her more and more similar to him. like basically the first thing that happens when he gets her into noble society is him convincing her to start participating in the buying and selling of orphans and speaking of orphans do not get me started on the temple it drives me so insane how her turning it into a company town where they serve as her unpaid labor is presented as her being a saint. that can't totally be blamed on ferdinand but he sure does talk her into accepting that the only way she can interact with lower status people is through the lens of a benevolent master. one of the main facets of their relationship is him making her worse.

which is interesting! conceptually! ferdinand is entirely a product of the cycle of abuse and his reaction to his trauma is to preserve that cycle even as it continues to harm him and everyone around him because it's just the way things are. on that topic, he's completely bought into yurgenschmidt's view of children where 5-year-olds are expected to be capable of fending off psychological warfare and 15-year-olds are expected to be fully mature adults, so he has a vitriolic, burning hatred for wilfried age 6 and later detlinde age 15 despite both of their biggest crimes being not magically overcoming the fact that they're being neglected and abused, because he did, which means it is possible and therefore required. even his favorite oops all negative reinforcement education is irl infamous for being literally the worst possible way to educate children because it doesn't work very well and also traumatizes them, something which rozemyne herself seems to understand when she tries to keep ferdinand from being so harsh on letizia but never ends up interrogating because she can keep up with it. just kind of because? the implication is that she has a big headstart from her being an adult university student in japan but we actually don't see him do much instructing outside of giving his pupils a bunch of stuff to memorize and then getting really mad if they don't do it fast enough, which is... not the most effective strategy, wouldn't help with her memorizing new information, and also requires her to show a level of attentiveness and reading comprehension she never actually shows when she's onscreen doing stuff because when she's onscreen she lacks basic reading comprehension and stops paying attention to literally anything she's not interested in, but all of that's just ignored because the whole reason ferdinand cares about rozemyne is that she's the only one who understands that he's just trying to do the right thing and she's the only one who can keep up with him in this world of idiot sheeple. and i don't like that either i think it's pretty boring.

the specific combination of his plot purpose mainly being to instantly solve problems and his actual character just kind of being an insufferable asshole who won't shut up about how awesome child abuse is means that unfortunately every time the male lead of the series is onscreen i'm booing and throwing tomatoes at the page because he isn't interesting enough to pull off being morally grey or fun enough to pull off being a terrible little freak. and i really do not feel sorry for him because everyone in the story is experience similar levels of abuse but mysteriously the story can recognize that it's bad when literally anyone else treats any character the way ferdinand treats everyone all the time.

the lestilaut comparison is so specifically dumb oh my god. like yeah he has the trauma excuse.... everyone does... if we take dunkelfelger seriously lestilaut was raised in an environment where his worth was entirely placed on how physically strong he is and the only solution to any problem is physical force, so that's the only way he can think of to solve problems. his main character flaws are being kind of a jerk in a way that's very normal for a teenager! like his character introduction is revealed to be him misinterpreting hannelore's desire to hang out with the cute shumils as a need to have them at any cost which combines with the existing prejudices he's been taught(yknow the excuse that works for ferdinand and nobody else) to mean that he executes a stupid plan, and then even the bride-stealing ditter plot which is... not his finest moment, definitely, but is him trying to save rozemyne from what he thinks is severe abuse. which isn't an excuse for his actions, like i said with sylvester you kind of lose the right to appeal to good intentions if your mistakes have a body count, but you could make the exact same criticism of ferdinand. i mean his "i'll get ahrensbach for you" bit is basically just the shumils thing but it's treated as romantic instead of "what the hell are you doing"

tbh in the AU i'm working on i just toss him out the window entirely but if he IS going to stick around he neeeeeeeeds to have his untouchability be dialed way the fuck down. he can't just solve literally every story problem with "and then ferdinand pulled the solution out of his ass" and there need to be things that he is actively bad at which other characters are good at. also other characters NEED to be able to criticize him for things other than being too self-sacrificing or limply saying that even though he's the most skilled wonderful guy ever it's a shame he's such a jerk. instead of having people being worried about how dependent rozemyne is on ferdinand be played for cheap jokes about her being in love with him you could idk have it GO SOMEWHERE because if ferdinand isn't totally perfect then you could have that relationship actually negatively affect her in some sort of way that could perhaps cause a narrative conflict, and there should be sympathetic characters who actively dislike him for reasons other than not being able to keep up with his amazingness. like florencia just thinks he's a massive piece of shit because he tried to get her 6 year old son condemned to the ivory tower, or lutz thinks ferdinand is wrecking the myne he knows and loves in order to fit her into noble society, or charlotte and wilfried just end up hating him after he tries teaching them because he's an abusive jerk. i don't even wanna give him a redemption arc because i don't want rozemyne to need to "fix" him and idk who else it would be outside of maybe sylvester? if i was gonna try and not fundamentally change the structure of aob i genuinely think i would just move detlinde's assassination attempt to basically as soon as he gets settled in ahrensbach and also have it succeed. just fucking kill him! make rozemyne navigate the world without him! it also killing off justus and eckhart could even make it so they're also invading ahrensbach without knowing anything about lanzenave so the silver cloth and instant-death poison can actually matter.

[nefertittythegreat]

Me, every time Detlinde as much as looks at Ferdinand: