#maybe if the white masks were allowed to care about each other they wouldnt constantly get shredded by monsters

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Edwin Slaughter is so interesting to me because he's so emblematic of my conspiracy theory that the Order of Saint George... has no idea what the fuck it's doing.

We know from the Book of Slaughter that the Order looks for children in the foster system with certain "psychological profiles" to recruit, which you can generally read as animal-torturing little demon children like Paris and Tybalt. Taking the baby serial killers and pointing them at the monsters seems like a solid strategy. And you can see how authorities might come to the conclusion that Edwin was a creepy morbid child - when his mom dies in one of the flashbacks in House of Slaughter: Scarlet, we see him putting makeup on his dead mom's face when the cops show up. Very weird and fucked up thing to be doing!

But like... is it? We know from Book of Butcher that Jace was 13 in the early 00s, and Edwin seems to be in roughly the same age cohort as him, Aaron, and Erica. Which means that Edwin's mom is presumably around the same age as my mom and my mother-in-law, and I can tell you that a LOT of women in that generation have a complex about not leaving the house without makeup. If you're outside the house and you're not wearing makeup, you're basically naked. If you're a little kid and your mom just died and you know first responders are gonna have to remove her from the house, and you're a) too young to fully process what your mom being dead means and b) too autistic to fully process what this will look like, putting your mom's makeup on for her is a very kind, loving thing to do.

Yes, Edwin Slaughter is a weird, morbid little man who likes to draw corpses because they're so much more interesting than the diagrams in medical textbooks.

He's also nice. That doesn't seem to be a trait that the Order cultivates. The main lesson Maxine's been learning in the Books of Slaughter, Butcher, and Cutter is that nobody in the Order besides black masks really have to care about slaying monsters and saving children. In House of Slaughter: The Butcher Returns, Aaron alludes to Cecilia "whipping the feelings out" of the white mask trainees - it's left unclear if that's literal or not, and most of the adults in the Order seem to be in backstabbing political hell while Nolan and many of the other azure masks are in specifically backstabbing psyop spy shit hell.

And then there's Edwin. He's pals with Bait, the misfit of the white masks (and loses horribly to this, like, ten year old at chess!). When kids approach him at the campground he's happy to show them his drawings. He laments that it's hard to parse exactly what people are asking for, but he genuinely enjoys helping them find stuff in the library. When Nolan confronts him about his suspicious biometric readings, he's not defensive or combative; he is, in fact, stoked to help solve a mystery. He's shockingly well-adjusted (...compared to everyone else at the Slaughterhouse, at least). Just a nice, friendly, helpful guy who's good with kids, even if he's a bit awkward and has morbid hobbies.

AND 👏 HE'S 👏 COMPETENT 👏 AS 👏 HELL👏. This man solo'd a whole-ass dragon! He had the completely galaxy-brained idea of dumping his supplies overboard so he could use his own fear of starvation and yucky lake water as bait for a dragon. Most of the actual hunters would have probably gotten stuck on "but but but dragons are extinct in North America dragons haven't been seen in centuries" until they got eaten. My man Edwin clocked that dragon within a couple issues, and, again, came up with an insane way to lure it out into ramming range. Give him an emerald mask immediately! We see that the scarlet head of house likes him better than Gerde, who is seething and poorly coping about this.

In one of the flashback issues of SIKTC, we see Erica ask if it's possible for baby animals to manifest monsters and Aaron tells her she's being intellectually lazy. I bet if she had had an opportunity to ask Edwin instead, they would have busted that shit wide open!!!

Erica cares so so so so much, and she tries so hard to be kind to people... and she's smarter than the Order. She figured out that a puppy could be a creator ex nihilo and she beat the woman who had presumably killed many other rogue hunters (and damn, what does it say about the Order of Saint George that this is a recurring problem?). Edwin is really nice and likes to be helpful and isn't particularly interested in conflict... and he's smarter than the Order. He recognized a dragon for what it was, kicked its ass, and is currently solving the mystery of what happened to the House of Blood. The rest of the House of Slaughter thinks they're bad at being monster hunters AND YET they are arguably the most effective hunters around. Let's not forget that Louis Boucher, second only to Erica as the North American black mask with the most kills in the field, doesn't seem terribly impressed by what the Order teaches its trainees. And Maven was on a totally different relationship wavelength with her flock of monsters than anybody else we've seen.

What I'm saying is the Order of Saint George probably isn't that good at hunting monsters and also it's smart to care about people. And also if Erica, Edwin, and Louis teamed up they would probably burn it to the ground in about ten minutes and the Order would be fucking clueless.