#It’s so good genuinely like such an interesting exploration of Lavinia as a character without like

[notacluedo]

Happy new year everyone read Lavinia by Ursula k le guin

[thornfield13713]

Top 5 Lovestruck characters you wish had got a route that didn’t?

Okay! Since they are now never going to get routes, I might as well do this now.

So-

5

Liliane Labasque

Okay, yes, I do realise that this does fill essentially the same basic 'dark vampire’ slot as Antonio’s route, but...much as I did genuinely enjoy or come to enjoy Antonio’s route, I just...thought Liliane was more interesting. Part of this is my basic bias towards WLW routes, it’s true, but the hints we got of her past were interesting, her dynamic with the MC was a lot of fun and every time she was on screen, I just wanted to see more of her.

I will confess, she places relatively low here because, much as I enjoy her as a character, I don’t really have a clear idea of how her route might go and what the major themes and plot beats might be. Differentiating her route from Antonio’s is relatively simple, what with Eva not being a major part of it, but I’m not sure what plotline would take its place.

4

Rhea Everleigh

I do...mostly...enjoy Starship Promise. It’s not my favourite, but the alien MC is probably my favourite MC in the Lovestruck stable, and Antares is one of my favourite LIs, and...god help me, I love a good space opera, even if it is a bit hokey sometimes and they should probably have workshopped a better name for the Evil Force. Even just calling it the Smoke would have worked better than that.

However, I’m not going to sit here and say the writing was always that great, and Rhea was one of the biggest casualties of that - she could not have been more blatantly killed off in order to clear Orion’s ex out of his life in his route - unnecessarily, as she had expressed vocal support of the human MC’s relationship with Orion before her death - and she is severely underutilised in the other routes she turns up in, to the point where I had to check the wiki to see if she was actually in Antares’ route at all.

Which is kind of a shame, because her storyline has a lot of potential. She joined the Empire to escape grinding poverty on one of the colonies - implied to be a Union colony - was accidentally murdered by the man she unrequitedly loved, and was then resurrected without her memories of either him or her other best friend, Antares, and possibly with no memory of her past at all. Okay, yes, that borrows a lot of story beats from Nova too, but as Nova’s arc with the human MC didn’t really explore any of this as deeply as it deserved, a Rhea arc might work to explore some of those themes of memory and personhood, and whether Rhea decided to go the Antares route and reform the Empire from within (even if I don’t know if she’d go so far as getting herself crowned Empress) or the Orion route of leaving after learning what they have done to her, I’d be very interested to read it.

3

Edward Bardot

Okay. I’ve talked before here about why Edward would be my first choice for the next LI for the MMC in Ever After Academy, and I stand by that argument. My other option, Sir Galahad, would also be great, but at the same time, he might be a little too close to both Abel and Lucas - both noble, duty-bound men - and might not offer anything new in terms of themes and dynamics.

Edward might work very well as the MMC’s version of the Lavinia route - a somewhat shady mercenary who nonetheless takes a liking to the strait-laced MMC, whom nobody else approves of as a love interest, but who shows unexpected depths when MMC takes the trouble to get to know him. Added to which, I just- I love Beauty and the Beast stories, and Edward being the Beast was always going to be enough to catch my interest.

Added to which, honestly, MLM routes were a very new development before the app announced it would be shutting down, and I kind of wish we’d got more of them, because the ones we did get were pretty damn great.

2

General Nisse

Okay. This was a close one. I was, like everyone else, looking forward to playing a Quince route, but...I think Nisse has the edge for me just for what she represents as the only LI completely outside the power structures of Altadellys. Yes, okay, an argument could also be made for Galen, but Galen nonetheless spends a lot of time in the circles of the powerful and will work for the Council. Nisse has none of that, which makes her already an entirely distinct route from anyone else in the game.

Furthermore, Nisse, as the leader of a group fighting for the interests of the Winter Wilds, brings the interests of the Wilds and the heroines origins as the ‘Wildergirl Queen’ to the fore of the story, and I can see a lot of ways that that could work very well - maybe start with the heroine joining Nisse’s army and introduce the discovery that she’s the lost heir at the end of the first season? Or have them begin as antagonists because Nisse feels that the Queen is not doing enough to support the Wilds. There are so many ways to make this route work, and it would offer an outsider perspective on the court that no other POV really does - sure, again, Galen is an outsider, but Galen’s route mostly takes place at sea, without interacting with Lysende’s politics, in a way that would be impossible in a Nisse route.

1

Ezekiel Dorian

Yes, okay, I know they put out a short for him, but! It was very clearly marked as ‘to be continued’ and ended ambiguously, establishing Zeke’s tragic doomed love for the MC and that he is still searching for some timeline somewhere where they can make it work without the world being doomed! You cannot offer me a setup as romantic as star-crossed lovers finally making it work when in every other timeline their love leads to disaster and then not follow through on it!

Added to which, Zeke himself is an engaging character in every other route, he has a fascinating backstory as the original leader of the Syndicate, but he also doesn’t often show more than a rare flash of vulnerability, so having the MC finally get to see behind the chill exterior is a very intriguing set-up for a romance.

I love all the LIs of Villainous Nights, but I really do feel like Zeke might’ve ended up my favourite if he got a full route, and given how much I love everyone else on this route, to the point of having some trouble calling a real ‘favourite’, that’s really saying a lot.