The Blog of Roon

The cunning plan that could not fail did not, in fact, fail. Really, it was quite simple. We had to play keep-away with a rock in the middle of a public park. Said park, per the GM, contained a fish-pond. We chucked the rock in the fish-pond and collected it later. End of problem.

Well, end of that problem. The nasty bodyguard was still a problem. The best Renate and I could do as a backup plan was taking the chieftain hostage, which is remarkably ineffectual in Dragonhunt-world because death isn’t permanent, so killing the hostage effectively ends the hostage situation. Rennie did the (dis)honors, because the bodyguard had just done Aryk considerable damage and Rennie was peeved about it, but I am reliably informed that if she hadn’t, the bodyguard would have.

Nonetheless, the bodyguard seized the opportunity to take Rennie down in two seconds flat. (She didn’t put up much of a resistance, knowing that to be pointless. Her best efforts would only have delayed the inevitable slightly, and given him key knowledge about how to defeat her in future.) So she trusted her friends to rescue her, as in fact they speedily did. And Rien, relieved to see her back on her feet—unexpectedly kissed her.

Oops.

Those poor, poor kids. They really do care for each other a great deal, Renate and Rien, as I hinted before. But for a variety of reasons, a liaison is (as Renate told an indignant Aryk later) eighteen different flavors of bad idea. So after a sad and awkward discussion, it’s the old Tristram-and-Iseult sword-down-the-bed thing for them. They’ll always be fond of each other (aside from the doubtless extremely unpleasant upcoming interlude when Renate finds out his real origins); they can’t help it. But the world is larger than the both of them, unfortunately.

Part of it, of course, is that Certain Things Are Expected of a young noblewoman. I have explained to the GM that if he’s interested in Renate’s romantic possibilities, somebody with sufficient authority needs to hint to her that it’s all right if she experiments a bit. (Or, hell, he can go ahead and arrange a marriage for her; that’d be a curious scene. Whatever.) Because otherwise, she’s limited to the most casual and distant relationships possible.

Truth be told, she’s more than a little afraid of the idea. She feels stretched thin as it is, what with family obligations, Aryk and Rien, and the net of interlocking political, economic, and social forces she is beginning to weave around herself. How can she reasonably add a lover to that? What will she have left to give? (My answer: Not much, so anybody seriously interested in her had better be prepared to shoulder the lion’s share of caretaking and sacrifice. Rennie is a sweet and lovely girl, but she’s extremely high-maintenance.)

She’ll have to get a grip, though, because Rien is hardly the first to succumb to little Jenny-Wren’s undeniable charm. (I was hoping I could manage to make her charming, and I seem to have succeeded. Role-playing point for me; in real life I’m not charming in the slightest.) Indeed, she’s practically had to beat indefatigable Aryk off with a stick, though she finally seems to have got through to him that there’s more to women than sex.

(Yes, Dragonhunt is a sexist world, but a consciously sexist one, which makes considerable difference. Nobody woofs when I fight the system, whether through Rennie’s patient glass-ceiling-breaking competence or Sabra’s acid-tongued critique. I find the critique experience useful, in fact.)

A lot of Renate’s problem is that she has a very distorted perspective on herself, owing to the all-or-nothing thinking typical of late adolescents. Because she’s not a paragon of beauty, strength, or intelligence, she ignores her very real charm, skill, and wit. She lets her mistakes fill her vision to the exclusion of all else (and, oh, do I remember this from when I was her age!); she hasn’t developed the mature realization that mistakes are universal and resilience is what counts in the end. Godfrey knows this well, and has tried to explain it to her, but we all learn these things in our own time.

The telling blow? Everyone around her is easier on her than she is, recognizing that her mistakes are neither fatal nor irredeemable, and her correct decisions outnumber them anyway. She will, I think, learn to forgive herself; indeed, she must, or her stern self-criticism will spiral into a paralysis of self-loathing.

This is, however, something a lover might perhaps be best-placed to teach her. We shall see.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 27th, 2004 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Dragonhunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.