#(hell King let Caleb call him circus man! you see him letting like Beau or anyone do that? no!)

[captainsparklefingers]

Oh man. I was gonna do this in the tags so that I didn't get started on somebody else's post, but I hit the tag limit and got more to say, so, I'm really sorry, OP. I got started on this and am now going off on a rant/diatribe/I'm not actually sure what (I'm fairly sure I repeat myself, I do that a lot). Imma stick it under a cut, at least.

(And man does it bug me when people doing the 'king is molly to the left' thing ignore lucien but that's another rant entirely.)

Molly is part of Kingsley. That does not mean that Kingsley is Molly. Lucien is part of Kingsley but that doesn't make Kingsley Lucien, either!

Molly and Lucien and Kingsley have the same soul. A soul that was broken and shattered and lived and died and lived again, who's deaths were particularly traumatic and violent. A soul that denied the other part of it so much, even when things slipped through the cracks to make it clear that no, they are the same soul with different lived experiences.

These two parts of a soul FINALLY accept that they are the same and part of one another, and take the other's hand, and Kingsley is the result. Molly and Lucien are Kingsley, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Kingsley is Molly or Lucien.

(I always thought of it as sort of being like fusion in Steven Universe, particularly Garnet. Ruby and Sapphire together are Garnet, but Garnet is her own person with her own life that is both separate and connected to Ruby and Sapphire. But that's an aside again.)

Kingsley is a whole soul with a new chance at life. A chance to take chances, make new mistakes, get messy, and most importantly, to never go through what Lucien and Mollymauk did.

Kingsley woke surrounded by friends who already loved him and made sure he never felt empty. He didn't have to claw out of a shallow grave, afraid of the past he couldn't remember so much that he threw himself into being as disconnected from it as possible. He didn't have to grow up in Shady Creek Run, join the Orders, leave the Orders, be betrayed and broken and brought back and in the end be a tool for others to use.

(yes Lucien turned the tables on the Somnovem, but I firmly believe that he was their tool being used for an end before he did.)

Anyway, does that think I mean that Kingsley doesn't remember things from Molly and Lucien? No. There was an insight check, after King said he didn't remember, and I'm like 90% sure it was never followed up on (a lot was happening, it's understandable), so yeah, there's enough ambiguity there for interpretation. I've said it a lot (I wrote a goddamn fic about it when we had exactly one episode with King to go off of), but I think the memories are there, Molly and Lucien's both. And when King is ready, when he's sure he's not going to be consumed by these past lives he doesn't want to live, when he knows he'll still be Kingsley, he'll take them back.

That was how I interpreted the woman in red, telling him in his dream how to keep secrets. She (the moonweaver, because of course it was) was telling him how to keep the others locked up while he became himself. Does it mean it's perfect? No. King got feelings from the Nein, he says and does things that are very much like Lucien and Molly, that greater restoration definitely did SOMETHING to King...I mean. You try suddenly having two lives shoved into your head!

Anyway. I don't think he'll deny Molly or Lucien, because that's what they both did, and he's not going to make old mistakes. I don't think he'll run from them (it's why he views them as parents right now, I think, it's an easy way for somebody who's existed for exactly six months to figure out how to handle his soul's past two lives), but even when he accepts them, he won't be them. Will King be similar to Molly and Lucien in ways? Absolutely! Same soul, remember? Some things don't go away (like feelings for friends when you have nothing, or instinctively knowing how to use your bloodhunter powers, or being able to juggle). But that doesn't mean Kingsley is either of them.

There's a lot in campaign 2 about names and identity and memory. We have Fjord, who spends a good chunk of the campaign pretending to be somebody else because he doesn't feel like his identity is enough, like he's enough. We met Veth as Nott, who basically kept those two names and lives separate until she was a halfling again. Because that was how she dealt with her trauma and with what was done to her and the person she'd become when she became a goblin. It's fairly minor, but Jester wasn't born Jester, she was born Genevieve. That's the name her mother gave her, but it didn't fit her, it wasn't right, so she took a virtue name, something that DID fit.

(side note: one could consider Kingsley to be a virtue name, since it comes from the feeling of kingliness that both parts of his soul had experienced and felt).

You have Yasha, the Orphan Maker, who has huge chunks of time she lost, who we got to see break her chains and get her wings back. She wasn't the Orphan Maker anymore, at the end.

And then you have Caleb. Caleb, who can and will never be Bren again, who is forever defined by his past actions. Who came so, SO far by the end of the campaign. He'd taken his old mentor down. He'd found acceptance and friendship again. He let his parents go.

And despite that, he never goes back to calling himself Bren. Even by campaign 3, he's still Caleb Widogast.

Obviously none of that is the same as Kingsley, who's whole situation is complicated and weird, but it's not like he's the only one who's got a past they're not going to live again. And a reminder, Molly's name wasn't one he chose. It was randomly given to him by Gustav, to make MT mean something, and it was one he said he wouldn't mind wearing for a while. Lucien basically discarded his name when he threw himself fully into being the Nonagon, and we know from our first meeting with Cree that he didn't like being called that.

Kingsley chose his own name for himself, based on something he felt was important to him.

Do I miss Molly, and am I sad that he died? Yeah. It felt like we lost some interesting story opportunities and the chance for Molly to grow as a character in the same way that the rest of the Nein did (because are any of them the exact same people we met in Trostenwald? No.). That doesn't mean I'm not happy we have Kingsley. He's a fascinating concept of a character, he's the best of his two past lives, he's a snarky shit who's a damn good sailor who cares about his crewmates and isn't above teasing his captain about his business name. He's the guy who almost made a bargain with Zehir because he 'likes boons', but who also recognizes that he needs to have a conversation about that at some point because 'what else [does he] have?'.

Molly and Lucien are part of Kingsley. But Kingsley Tealeaf is not either of them. He's his own person, trying to not make the same mistakes his soul did before.

Let him just be Kingsley .

One of my only campaign 2 pet peeves is when people try to pretend that Kingsley and Molly are the same person. Maybe Kingsley does turn out to be quite similar to Molly! But imo making him too similar to Molly kind of undermines what Taliesin was trying to do with Molly in the first place.