Aw, man. I really want to do this justice, but I have no idea what to contribute – how to contribute – to Teodora headcanons. Everything we know about her life is so dark. She was forced into a marriage she was eventually driven to murder her way out of. Every hypothetical about this situation fills me with so much anxiety.
I see readers get displeased with Bill and Barry for not appreciating the Jägers, but if I were coming out of that parental situation I would be angry about everything related to it within two degrees of separation for the rest of my life. I’m not surprised they preferred to be away from home, and I am surprised they did as well for Mechanicsburg as they did. To them, the Jägerkin signed up to stand by and watch atrocities happen forever. They willingly outsourced their moral centers, to monsters. And they’re jolly and lighthearted about it, but really?
This answer is entirely digression. Sorry.
Oh, not to stand by. They were the Old Heterodynes’ hand-picked army. Everything the Heterodynes set out to do, at least outside the town, the Jägers actively helped. I can’t fathom why Bill and Barry didn’t want to take them visiting (even after they stood up for them against the rest of the town).
…I think that the general reader perception that the high value Jägers place on free choice means they’ve never really gone around raping people is probably in line with the Foglios’ intent, and I don’t blame either party for that. I don’t want to attribute that to fun characters either. But… hmm… I think it’s more a rationalized preference than a logical consequence?
That said, and to bear on the original ask… I do headcanon, myself, that Teodora was clear-eyed enough to acknowledge that the Heterodynes had the virtues of their vices, as the saying goes. That part of their exceptional awfulness was their level of success, which was founded in apparently being among the very small fraction of Sparks who grasped the concept of the carrot as well as the stick, at least for their own people. Perhaps that Saturn going to war for her hand, while a terrible thing, was simultaneously something many Sparks (or their beautiful daughters) would have found immensely flattering – and that because he honestly saw it as a courtship, she had leverage to get a few things she wanted, like the non-Castle house. That she had a very long uphill climb to teach her sons to be good men in that environment, but also that she might have a few things to work with. Certainly their approach to being good men was in some respects very, very Heterodyne.
So I think it is plausible that one of the things she found to work with was doing her level best to do her duty to the town… whatever that was considered to be… and teaching Bill and Barry that they had a responsibility to Mechanicsburg (in fact, reforming it and creating an environment where its citizens could more readily become better people might be considered part of that responsibility) as well as to protect the rest of the world from it.
I also think Mechanicsburg itself may have tended to interpret their relationship and its conflicts, up to a point, in somewhat the way the Castle interprets that one argument between Gil and Zola through its own… particular… lens, culminating in his furiously sarcastic “Then we can build a nice doomsday device and wipe out all of Europa” being summarized as “he has asked her out on a date.”
…On the other hand, I think since she killed Saturn, she’s probably got pretty much the same level of respect from Mechanicsburgers as Lucrezia currently does.
I got this ask a while ago and wasn’t sure what to say about it either – I’ve been saved the effort now.
I think, as a fandom, we do soften our Jägers a bit in highly specific ways. We’re willing to deal with them being remorseless killers, but not with them groping waitresses. We want them to be Good On Gender even though they are, at base, a bunch of angry young men who fell under the sway of a charismatic dictator who legitimated their worst impulses.
They are capable of growing up, though.
Mechanicsburg itself is a strange place because it defines itself by being monstrous in both senses of the word. It tends to deliberately set out to shock and then define itself in opposition to the people who hate it for its atrocities. Bill and Barry seem to have steered it – eventually – towards being an oddity more than a horror. It still defines itself as weird and morbid but it’s something it’s safe to look at now.
Teodora – I suspect – did untangle those definitions of “monster” and see that Mechanicsburg could be better without being remotely normal, but the Jägers are always both.
I HC that Teodora was a pretty good Lady and took care of the people of Mechanicsburg, even though she detested some of their practices (eg the human sacrifice and breaking people down for parts) and thus was well-respected by the people if not well-loved. OTOH, she really, REALLY didn’t like the Jagers. The Jägers were aware of this, and pretty much treated her like they did Boris in canon, though never where Saturnus could catch them at it.
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