Look, we all know that Trizza Tethis is going to die painfully the second she leaves the planet. Even without Doc Scratch and Paradox Space itself interfering to ensure that Meenah wins, even despite Jake’s backstory meaning we as readers know the outcome, there’s no timeline, even doomed, where Trizza wins. Meenah is millennia old, she’s killed dozens if not hundreds of potential heiresses before, she knows all the tricks, even assuming she doesn’t just use Captor Death Lasers or Serket Mind Control to end the fight before it starts.
But does Trizza know that?
There’s really only two options, and they have interesting connotations for Trizza’s characterization.
1. She genuinely thinks she can win. She’s full of herself, she assumes the rumors about what the Condesce can do are exaggerated, and if she’s lucky she’ll have a few seconds to contemplate how wrong she was before Meenah crushes her like an insect.
2. She knows exactly how slim her chances are. I find this one a bit more interesting, because it implies that she’s doing a sort of “feast, for tomorrow we may die” thing. She knows her life expectancy is shorter than some burgundies, and she’s living it up as Queen of Alternia while she can. It doesn’t justify her actions, but it makes her a more tragic figure in the classical model. She enforces the system, even as she knows it will be the death of her, because she doesn’t know anything else. She’s a villain, but she’s a victim, too.
Tag: Hiveswap
Please note that, if he were to participate in a SGRUB session, Xefros Tritoh would canonically be a Derse-dreaming hero of Rage.
I’m not certain what we’re supposed to do with this info but I sure as heck am going to do something with it at some point.
Speaking of the “only fuchsia to make it to adulthood” thing, I’m fascinated by the contrast between Trizza as the heiress and Feferi as the heiress?
And also kind of sad.
Because while we haven’t seen much of Trizza herself yet, we have gotten a glimpse of the style of her rule, and well… she’s ruling. Not fairly, not well, arguably not sustainable, but she is openly ruling the planet and she’s making use of what seems to be a lot of official infrastructure, particularly the use of imperial drones and her heavy-handed media presence. And while she’s got some adolescent revolutionaries plotting against her she doesn’t seem to be facing any kind of official censure for her actions.
Feferi, by contrast, is at most a sweep or two younger when she enters Sgrub, and she’s… not ruling the planet. She’s barely keeping Gl’bgolyb fed, and she doesn’t seem to be using any of the resources Trizza does, but we’re told that she’s already actively fending off assassination attempts which she has reason to believe are imperially sanctioned.
I don’t think Trizza actually expects to ever rule anything except Alternia. She hasn’t bothered to court anything resembling positive public opinion among her peers, she depends heavily on a (probably automated? It’s hard to say exactly what the drones are) private army which is, essentially, borrowed from an empress who will one day want to eliminate her, and her long-term goals are so opaque that I suspect they don’t actually exist. Feferi fully intends to make a bid for the throne, and as such appears to have led a positively spartan childhood that leaves significantly fewer vulnerabilities for the Condesce to exploit, and this is freaking the Condesce the hell out.
Cheloneuniverse 