What she means: Merle is one of the most forgiving and unashamed characters to exist ever. He makes friends with the enity that is chasing him throughout 100 lives in 100 universes and had killed him many times. He faces the hunger and humbles himself by bringing his enemy into the parley space. He dies over 50 times making friends with a nihilistic monster who kills him at the end of every interaction. He had the chance to get his arm back with the chalice but he bared his mistakes and learned from them. He said ‘I like that guy’ about the grim reaper who tricked him into loosing his hand in the first place. He stayed with the people he gave faith to on the mushroom planet where he gave an honest speech about his own insecurities about life and death but still gave hope to the people. He gave 40 of his hit points to heal Taako for 20 in Wonderland. Merle didn’t rush in but he always followed his friends into danger anyway. He asks the leader of the hunger if he’s his friend and waits 30 years for John to realise they were friends all along.
This is a bit out there, and I absolutely don’t think it’s canon, but hear me out: Lucretia was under the thrall of the Bulwark Staff.
It’s clear that the IPRE aren’t completely immune to the effects of the thrall – they just are the ones who have the chance to overcome it, while everyone else to a person is overcome and gives in. Taako almost gave into the thrall of the Gaia Sash. Magnus was tempted by the Temporal Chalice. Even Davenport seems at one point to be drawn by the Philosopher’s Stone.
Lucretia had possession of the Bulwark Staff almost since she instituted her plan – she said it was easy to recover. The Bulwark Staff does not ever seem to tempt anyone else in the Bureau, as there’s never a hint that it’s a Relic. It would’ve had nearly ten years to draw her in, cement her ideas.
Secondly: the Bulwark Staff is abjuration magic. Abjuration is all about shielding and protecting, and that’s what all of Lucretia’s plan was about. She wanted to shield Faerun from the Hunger, she wanted to shield her friends (her family) from the pain of their decisions, she wanted to shield herself from their dissent against her plan.
Now, the Bulwark Staff didn’t cause Lucretia to institute her plan. That was all her. But why didn’t she turn back when she saw what it did to Davenport, or when Glamour Springs happened, or when she lost twenty years of her life in Wonderland? What made her so stubborn that she would continue for ten years, alone, turning further and further from her family and deeper into a plan conceived of hopelessness?
Well, having a Relic whispering in her ear every moment of that decade that she was doing the right thing, that together they would save everything, that they could protect everyone who needed protecting – in other words, a thrall that just needed to confirm what Lucretia already thought on her own – would probably go a long way towards steering her down that path and keeping her from ever looking back until Taako, through Paloma’s crystal prophesy, showed her a third way and broke through that thrall in the same way that Hurley dying broke through the Gaia Sash’s thrall on Sloane.
the implication that 45-year old men with dad bods and a jeans addiction represents Peak Elf Beauty is uhhhh Very Good.
Naturally, this means that Kravitz is, in fact, tragically plain-looking by elf standards and all the elves say it must be true love that keeps him and Taako together, gods know he’s no Barry Bluejeans
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