#real rozenmarine sad girl hours you have been warned

[rinmession]

Feeling a little sad for Rozenmarine in Lebkuchen/Freya's endings ngl. Spoilers and rambling below:

Of course to start, Not Being Gruesomely Sacrificed is always for the best in the scheme of things, but also: imagine living so much of your life with fate as a compass, being so thrilled to be with your soulmate after years of dreaming about her to the point you know her intimately without having met her, guiding her through a dream you're willing to die for-- and then out of nowhere, in only a week's time, that fate, that dream, is totally averted at the last minute.

Either Elise chooses someone else to die in Rozenmarine's stead and leaves to become a depressed aristocrat, is burned at the stake, or she abandons the ritual altogether and leaves Kieferberg with someone else, and in any case Rozenmarine's whole raison d'etre is gone... I wonder if it's almost worse on a personal level for her if Elise rejects the ritual and chooses someone else, because then what was Rozenmarine even there for? To give Elise the push she needed to leave I suppose, but then what's Rozenmarine to do with her life afterwards? Elise has a different soulmate who she wants to fulfill her dreams with, not her, and the person Rozenmarine says makes her whole is gone.

She says she's not necessarily Elise's soulmate even if Elise is hers, and that fate is something than can be changed, so she's certainly aware of other possibilities, but I wonder if she knows what to do with herself if the fate she's been chasing is so directly rejected.

Even with her happy ending in Star-Crossed where Elise says Rozenmarine 'broke free of her fate' after abandoning the ritual, she feels the need to go out on her own for two and some years and 'grow', learning new skills and taking on a whole career as a chimney sweep before she's ready to meet Elise. It's a bit vague, but she's certainly lost without the same fate that chained her, and needs to find new grounding for herself. As Elise needs to go out and find the world outside Kieferberg, Rozenmarine must go out and find things for herself that aren't Elise before she's ready for their new beginning. Even though she's with Elise as she's always wanted, this wasn't the plan! How much more disruptive it must be to lose that sense of fate without Elise, without any purpose or person to rebuild herself for.

And just to twist the knife a bit, Rozenmarine in her own route--as happy as she is to be with Elise at last--expresses her remorse that she couldn't have come to Kieferberg earlier, or even been born there to make memories with Elise and feel like she's part of a community. She pointedly compares herself to Leb and Freya here, which makes me wonder how that envy must extend to endings where they're the apple of Elise's eye. How much more bittersweet an experience it must be to only have that happiness for a week before it's snatched from your hands...

So what then becomes of her then when she doesn't show up at all in Leb or Freya's endings (besides, strangely silent, in the background of Auto-da-Fe), when she doesn't have Elise as a tether? Lebkuchen and Freya both appear in one another's happy endings at least, so I think it's intentional. Lost without fate and without her soulmate to aim towards, perhaps it's too much for her to stay on in Kieferberg without Elise after having reached the end of the line on her star-lit path, and so she returns to her nomadic life as a now aimless wanderer, knowing nothing else. Maybe as Elise could never feel like a part of Kieferberg without Holle, Rozenmarine cannot feel a part of them without Elise. More hopefully, perhaps her experience in Kieferberg allows her to reinvent herself as in Star-Crossed, however hard the heartbreak. Rozenmarine characterizes the scales of her treasured pinecone in one of her dates as all part of her path to Elise, but maybe in that same metaphor there's a dot of hope for her she says herself, and there are more scales for her yet to find...