#oh i will also note. yes gem does just leave her students unsupervised at the end of her season

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

heyyyyyyy so in the malnourished fwhip explanation post you said you'd get back to the thing about gem and fwhip not liking that they got first pick during the famine and i fully agree with you. if it also you said you'd get back to it and you didn't and you're good at articulating things so I would like to hear you elaborate if you are willing

OH yeah. i had planned to get into that in the section where i talked about fwhip continuing to use the corrupted fertilizer because it works so well that it means his people are fed, but i didn’t elaborate much further than that. so i shall now!

(context for this can be found here, in case you missed that post!)

so as i said previously, when famine strikes the grimlands and the royal family have their food needs prioritized, this is something that fwhip and gem, despite both being very young, find awful. i think both of these kids have very strong senses of justice (cough because they’re both autistic cough), gem especially, since she’s the one being trained to be the next countess, so she’s a lot more worldly than fwhip at that point. fwhip is approaching this from a basic fairness standpoint- everyone needs to eat, it’s not fair that he and his family get priority. gem is approaching this based on her experience in other empires and her conversations with other to be emperors- this is not how a good ruler treats their people, a good ruler tries to put their people first always.

i think this manifests in a variety of different ways when they get older. for fwhip, this manifests in putting his people’s food needs above his own when it comes to the corrupted fertilizer. if the fertilizer was giving everybody else nightmares, he would’ve heard about it by now, so clearly it’s just him. that means the fertilizer is a net good, so it stays. i think fwhip is a weird and very distant ruler, one who thinks of himself as a little too equal with his people, and that can be good and bad. something like this, where he puts the people’s need for food above his own wants is (for everyone else) good, but it also means he doesn’t really register how much more important his actions are than anyone else’s. for someone else in the grimlands (or even for fwhip just a few years ago, when he was still the kid brother to the rising countess), blowing up your friend’s house might get you in trouble, but it’s not a big deal. for modern day fwhip, it’s literally an act of war. “peace is boring” is a very frightening attitude for a ruler to hold, and he holds it because he wasn’t properly trained to be count, he’s still very young, and he views himself and his people as pretty much the same when, unfortunately, they just aren’t.

for gem, i think what this does for her behavior doesn’t manifest for her a while. she ran away from the grimlands because she wanted to be a wizard, she wanted to be anything but countess, and i think she did fundamentally believe fwhip would do better than she could. so she becomes a wizard in a very insulated community, and then her instructor disappears and leaves the entire place in her care, and that freaks her out. yes, she was trained to have far greater responsibilities than this, there aren’t even any students for her to train yet, but being in charge scares her still. she so desperately wants to be a good ruler, a better one than anyone in her family line has been for a while, because she’s been up close and personal with bad ones. and i think for gem specifically that manifests in her wanting to be a just ruler. very few people are ever fully beyond redemption for gem. her pillager students just need to put their weapons down, and then they’re ready to learn! see, they weren’t really evil, just angry and armed. sausage has good left in him, even at his worst, she knows it. she just needs to draw it out of him, at any cost. scott didn’t mean to hurt her, he was just scared and she pushed him too far, that’s on her. i think the only person she sees as truly, 100% beyond redemption, who she never really changes her tune on, is xornoth. even the other emperors she isn’t a fan of i don’t think she thinks are irredeemably evil, they’re just assholes and she’s gonna be an asshole back (or she’s gonna let the other WRA members do it). (the only outlier to that is maybe joey. at some point after he gets the crown from xornoth, somebody says he’s most likely beyond saving, and that somebody might be gem but i can’t remember. if it is, i think she had simply run out of energy for second chances for him, and he’s not her responsibility anyways, so she feels less bad about doing it to him than say, a student of hers. if she isn’t the one who says that, disregard.) she is trying to extend justice, to extend second tries to everyone. arguably she even tries this with xornoth, when she tries to learn more about him when he first shows up, but he also made it very clear he had no intentions of improving, so.

TLDR: i think both roseblings are affronted at the fact that because they are nobility, they are inherently better treated in times of crisis. for fwhip, this is because he thinks it’s unfair, that he’s not inherently better than the people of the grimlands, so it’s unfair for him to be treated as such. for gem, she thinks it’s unjust. a good ruler, a just one, would put their people first. so when they get older, this manifests in a variety of ways. for fwhip, he views himself less as a count and more as just another citizen of the grimlands, a tinkerer with a penchant for explosions and not much more. this means in times of crisis he puts the needs of the many over the needs of the few, but it also means he doesn’t think about how much more weight his actions carry with the other empires than the actions of a regular person. for gem, this manifests as trying to extend justice, a helping hand, a second chance, to everyone she can. even at her detriment, there are very few people she believes are totally beyond saving, and she tries as best she can to save them.