#im sorry but the only actual girlboss in fontaine was rizzley

[gold-rhine]

i keep seeing posts about how furina was Actually Competent As A Ruler, which i think are misguided, even if they are coming from well-intentioned place. like, ppl love furina, and so they have an impulse to advocate her good qualities, which is v understandable, but where it derails i think is in assumption that agency = power, so ppl feel the need to prove that she was Actually Good At Power.

This also shows bc these posts *always* bring up neuvi, to either compare furina to him and say that he Did Her Dirty By Stealing Her Power, or to be like, actually they were Dual Rulers, and even if he was running the government, she was Girlbossing Too, like she was handling diplomatic relations or smth else, we just never got to see The Girlbossing.

both Stealing Power and Girlbossing Off Screen takes, I think, are not only textually incorrect, but also miss one of the central points of Fontaine, which is that its government was a hot mess and NO ONE there was Good At Power. Neuvi was absolutely not Girlbossing himself. Whats the point of like trying to prove furina was in charge of More Things, when all of the things were in shambles. The only efficiently run institution in fontaine is autonomous prison.

like, Furina is Marie Antoinette coded for a reason. She is a critique of monarchy, literally a divinely appointed monarch, that shows that putting in power a random person just bc of their birth circumstances, while they are not qualified at all, and then forcing them to be a figurehead under intense scrutiny of society that expects them to somehow be More Divinely Special than normal ppl, will be horrible no-good for both that person AND society. We had to watch her cry every day for 500 years cut scene for a reason. losing archonhood *frees* her to be what she actually wants.

Neuvi on the other hand, is a thesis of how impartiality for a ruler turns into indifference and inaction. Yes, he was incorruptibly fair in his judgements, but he was judging using the flawed laws inside of a flawed system, and this lead to tragic cases like Navia's dad' death and general bureaucratic and inept government. Like we had to listen to Navia yell at neuvi about it for like 5 minutes straight, come on. He realized that the system was flawed (his stories mention his disdain for courts being run like opera performances), that laws were often nonsensical, but he didn't try to change it, because as a dragon, it was basically not his circus, not his monkeys. only when he started to care about humans and forced by a crisis, he challenged the system, and his final ruling as he ascended to the power of god of life again, is markedly NOT impartial, but made with favor for humans. The thesis is that the judge should rule from a position of caring FOR the judged.

these two are explicitly not Cool Divine Bosses Ruling Together or Neuvi Stealing Furina's Importance As An Archon, but two sides of one miserable coin about how badly run fontaine actually was.