#someday I’m just gonna write a dissertation on the themes of Fable apparently

[mustbemosstaken]

I know this has been said before but the people bringing it up in the art stream has put it back in my brain (Also please keep in mind this is very /lh and just my opinion based on how I interpret the story of Fable SMP as a viewer):

Y’all don’t want a Rae villain arc, you want an arc where Heyhay can play a villain. A villain arc for Rae would go against literally all of the character development that has been established for Rae.

And you can’t even have the argument of like “oh well the angst of if he’s corrupted and then comes back later to see how he hurt people” because WE HAD THAT. WE HAD LIKE A WHOLE ARC OF THAT WITH THE WARDEN.

Even outside of the Warden, you’ve got that whole Among Us AU where we get to see Rae being evil?? We have villain Rae guys what more do you want?!? Villain!Rae is a fun idea for an AU, but narrative wise it does not work in canon at all-

I agree that Heyhay would play a great villain, and would probably find a way to make Villain!Rae really compelling. But Rae has been built up in such a way that to have him suddenly “go on a villain arc” would just like,,, wreck any of his previously established arcs?? At least from my interpretation of Fable so far, the overall arc with Rae as a character, regardless of gods or anything like that, has always been about a man coming to love himself through learning to love other people, and through that, a lonely man finding a family. S1 Rae at the very beginning is a lonely, broken man with no regard for himself or those around him, driven purely by research, who is forced to take a mentoring, and then pseudo-leadership position, and forced to care for and eventually come to love the people around him, who he now views as his family. A family he never got to have beforehand.

That’s why the relationship with c!Jamie is so important to Rae in canon. Jamie is the first person where Rae really had to step up and be there for someone else. Thats why he cares so much about c!Athena, because Rae really had to find it within himself to save them and be there for them. That’s why Banner Fam, or the Breakfast Squad, or even eventually Broters means so much to Rae because he didn’t have that family when we started the story. To have him go on a villain arc and hurt the people around him would narratively break all of that. It would pull apart all of those relationships at the very foundations, and it would be really hard to repair them from a storytelling perspective.

The only way I could see it being done is if Rae was to go “evil” to protect the people he cares about, but as long as those characters are still in the picture they’re the kind of people who wouldn’t let Rae do that to himself. Hell, the man had a full breakdown because he punched his best friend one time, you think he’s gonna murder someone or something?

And like,,, it’s not even like we don’t get to see snippets of these things in canon. We get to see elements of Rae losing himself to anger and desperation in order protect others. We get it when he replaces his eye in S2 and he goes all mad scientists, or when he yells at Ulysses in S3 because he genuinely believes he needs to step up because this man is a threat to his family. Hell, we even see the angst of “his family thinks Rae is evil and is scared of him” because THATS LIKE MOST OF C!JAMIES ARC IN EARLY S2???

Season 2 really is a treasure trove of theoretically “villainous Rae” content. His betrayal of Aax’s trust with the eye surgery, the Jamie memory arc where they do view Rae as evil, delving into more and more dangerous and morally questionable Telchin medicine to help c!Athena, and then the entirety of the Warden arc where he’s actively hurting those around him and taken over by an evil goddess, like it’s all there. We have that guys!?!

This ended up way longer than I thought it would lol, but I don’t know, I just constantly see people in the fandom and in HeyHay13’s twitch chat being like “oooh villain Rae we desperately need villain Rae in canon” and I just personally don’t get the appeal from a storytelling perspective. Maybe I’m just too caught up in wanting characters to be happy lol. Let my poor little meow meow have peace and love his boyfriends and not have to be evil again.

Anyway, uh… TLDR Mosstaken doesn’t like villain!Rae except for when he does I guess lmao /j