#i tend to take heavy advantage of it in aus where robin stays in plegia

[iturbide]

Hey I was just reading Gangrel’s wiki page and came across some interesting things. First is that he was apparently a thief before rising up to high king so I had this interesting little idea, what if Gangrel helped smuggle Robin and his mother out of plegia and Robin’s mother gave him her power and land as both a reward and to keep it out of validar’s hands, little weird but interesting. Second is that he doesn’t worship Grima so I’m wondering how he reacts upon meeting Grima in Aske? Thoughts?

That would be a fascinating case ovo I think that would make for a really interesting AU, but I also think it has some major risks attached to it. 

I think I remember hearing that Gangrel was getting by as a thief before he ended up as king!  But I think his age is something that really needs to be considered: canon is really unhelpful most of the time when it comes to how old characters are, but I usually see Gangrel as 30 at most (if you want to get technical, I tend to put him about seven years older than Robin).  This means that, if Wren fled shortly after Robin’s birth in order to keep her child safe, Gangrel would have been at least seven, at most ten.  I have a non-canon view of Gangrel’s history, where he was a war orphan from the eastern desert who survived an attack by the Exalt, witnessing the man murder his mother and put his entire village to the torch; even assuming a ten year age difference, he would probably need to be at least eight to account for the festering hatred and vivid memories that he harbors into the future, meaning that he only had a maximum of one year, maybe a year and a half, to develop any kind of thief skills before meeting Wren.  And while pickpocketing might offer a way for a child thief to survive, I don’t think a boy that age would have the physical or mental capacity to help smuggle a pair of highly wanted refugees through unfamiliar territory, since Gangrel had likely never ventured into northern Plegia before.  

There’s also the fact that it assumes power can be transferred directly from person to person.  I don’t generally think that Plegians take individual ownership of land so much as property (due to the communal nature of their society and the fact that cooperation is the only way to succeed in the desert, individual ownership of land only hurts peoples’ chances), but Wren fleeing would mean that she couldn’t take much of what she owned with her.  Validar would take automatic ownership of it unless someone stepped forward to claim it – and as soon as Gangrel did, what would stop Validar from taking him and torturing Wren’s location out of him?  He’s the son of the Grimleal hierophant, after all – he could probably get away with it just for that fact, but given that his purpose is finding Grima’s vessel, I think most people would turn a blind eye.  This means Gangrel wouldn’t have any opportunity to claim what she left except by stealing it (a dangerous prospect, since it would be deep within Validar’s home, which was heavily guarded during the war).  And since I do think there’s a significant split between secular and religious power in Plegia, any power she might have been able to grant him wouldn’t have put him in any better position to become king since her position was on the religious side. 

Also I love the idea of poor Gangrel getting confronted by Grima in Askr so much that I’ve talked about it before 8D it’s quite a shock and he never figures out how he feels about it, but he also never adopts a view of them as gods, and they appreciate it quite a lot