Does Althea (QtR #21) deserve Darklordship?

[Hell_Born]

Now, to get things out of the way and be fair first, I've never actually seen whatever 2e product introduced Althea and Demise to the Realm of Mists, so I don't know much about the history of the character or her realm.

Having just read the writeup on Demise, I found it a very impressive piece, especially its history for Althea. It really makes Althea a tragic villain character, which is great for gothic fantasy... the problem is, I have to wonder if maybe she's not too tragic. The more I re-read this article, the more I wonder if Althea is really that much of a villain, or at least deliberately villainous enough that she deserves to be given the role of Darklord.

I mean, let's look at the facts?

* She never wants to marry a maedar, but is forced by social pressure to marry one who decides he wants her.
* Said maedar is explicitly stated as wanting to marry her because, in his arrogance, he believes he can "sculpt a proper wife out of [her]".
* When she gives birth to her first child, it's human, and even despite her culture's teachings, she's devastated when she petrifies her child.
* She pleads with her husband to restore her baby, but he refuses.
* She is then compelled to bear child after child, inevitably petrifying each one.
* When she tries to save one child by veiling herself, she petrifies her by accident when the little girl knocks off her mother's veil. Her husband again refuses to help.
* Another time, driven near mad by grief and desperation, she attempts to blind her newborn son so that he will never be petrified by her, only for him to be "rescued" by adventurers.
* Eventually, she grows so sick of going through the cycle of heartbreak, and her husband's indifference, that she attempts to cheat on her husband with a human so she can be assured she will finally have a child who lives.
* Her husband tricks her into sleeping with him instead.
* Finally driven over the edge by his cruelty, she murders him.
* Then she discovers she's pregnant by him, and finally gives birth to a maedar son.
* She tries to love this son, but between her husband's emotional abuse and implied post-partum depression, she snaps and tries to murder him.
* Demise is formed at this point.

Now, I'm NOT saying Althea is a saint. Because she did kill her husband, and she did try and kill her maedar son. But looking at this... giving her the role of Darklord kind of seems wrong. Hell, looking at it in the right angle, it kind of feels misogynistic.

Honestly, I think Stelios, Althea's husband, qualifies better as the Darklord.

Because, let's face it: when you have the power to turn stone to flesh at will? And your wife is begging you to use that power to bring your firstborn back to life, practically out of her mind in grief, only for you to refuse? You are a prick, sir.

But when you then compel her, playing on her emotions and her "duty", to go through the same prolonged heartbreak over and over again (we're never given the exact number of kids, but Althea has "rows" of them, so that's probably around twelve at least), all for the sake of callously obtaining your all-important maedar heir? Then, sir, you have gone beyond the pale of prickishness to a whole new level. You, sir, are utter scum.

...But that's just my opinion. What do the rest of you think?

[ScS of the Fraternity]

That's a very well reasoned argument... for a filthy HUMAN.

The key to Althea's fall is that she is not supposed to be a human, but a creature that merely looks and acts human-ish. Sure, we'd see Althea as a good person... well, better person, due to her very human unconditional love for her offspring. For a humanoid monster, she is really more of a perverted obsessive creature. You might compare Althea to a spider that traps her millions of eggs inside her own web so that she can be certain to look over them until they are all full grown adults. It seems sweet and well intentioned at first, but, like most forms of daycare, ends with the babies eating each other. It may be a natural inclination for a human being, but it goes against her own biological necessities.

Stelios is clearly more evil by our standards, but at the same time, he is typically for his species. He's acting on his instincts, which while disgusting by human standards are the only was to ensure the survival of his species. Think on it: if maedar allowed medusae to occupy themselves with the raising of human children, then the population would steadily decline and the species eventually cease to exist. If nothing else, they'd be creating generations and generations of a competing species.

It is all part of the brutal reality of having more than 1 hit dice.

[Hell_Born]

The thing is, ScS? That "blue and orange morality" never comes across in the article, at least not in Althea's section. Everything she does and feels is described in recognizable human terms - the callous disposal of her human offspring described as "cultural", not "instinctual". There is never the slightest indication that Althea should be judged by non-human standards, or else I would not have found myself wondering if Stelios or even both of them don't deserve the Darklordship.

Even beyond that, your argument has holes in it. Unless you're actively trying to argue that Althea was right to believe maedars are nothing but parasites who prey upon the medusae.

Fact 1: human + medusa = new medusa (which is spelled out in Althea's backstory as why she tried to commit adultery)

Fact 2: medusa + maedar = humans, or rarely new maedar

The medusa race loses out when it breeds with maedar, and generations of such breeding would lead to the extinction of both races anyway. Hells, by fathering human sons and helping his wife to keep them alive, Stelios would have been assuring a steady supply of mates for other medusae that would produce more medusae for his own maedar descendants.

It achieves nothing if he optimises his chance for a maedar offspring, only for that maedar to then have no viable mates of his own, now does it?

Honestly, AD&D monsters have never been very well put together in terms of reproductive lore. Witness the absurdity of the sphinx family, where only one species is female, the one male species that produces more females hates sex, and the other two species basically have to find and rape females to propagate themselves.

To get back on topic...

Althea's murder of her husband and her attempted murder of her son was wrong. But she is very much a victim of circumstance, and the best way I can spin this out is to remember that the Dark Powers genuinely do have a blue and orange sort of morality - which can be crudely summarized as "makes an interesting tragedy: good and worth preserving, else it is bad and should be ignored".

Because that's what Althea is. A tragic villain, with emphasis on the tragic. She's a victim of circumstance, a villain who was made by someone else's actions and now can't be redeemed. More than Strahd or Soth or Drakov, I actually pity her, and wish she could be redeemed. Even though I know she can't.

It really is unfortunate that, in the same websplat that changes Diambel because "the sole 'Muslim' Darklord being a maniac who believes he is god is Unfortunate Implications", we have this, a Darklord who feels like she is getting unfairly punished because she is a woman who suffered until she refused to and because she is not human.

Although I suppose since one of the Medusa's origin legends is that she was transformed by Athena after Poseidon raped her in Athena's temples, this is following pretty solidly in those legendary footsteps, so I guess it deserves commendation for that.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

First, let me say thank you for reading the article, and for your compliments on it. And I'm happy to see that it resonated enough to have you think critically about it and enough to post about it.

This was definitely a "known issue" going into writing Althea. There was very scant canon info on her background. Seriously all there was to work with was: she's lonely, she's insane, and she wants to mate. Coming up with a backstory that incorporated that while steering clear of the minefield of cliches surrounding female villains was a big challenge. On top of that, there was the classic issue of the monstrous darklord: What did this innately evil creature do that's so much worse than the rest of its kind that it became a darklord? Yes, I could have had her formerly human, but a) that feels a bit like cheating, b) I wanted to distance her from the original Medusa because a woman being cursed with ugliness for having sex was both distasteful and cliche, and c) because D&D medusae are not the classical Medusa.

So given those constraints, I focused on the parenthood aspects of mating, rather than the sexual ones. Now you could say that becoming a darklord through Motherhood isn't a big feminist step up from becoming a darklord through sexuality, and that's a fair point. But as a parent myself, I tried to make the story about Parenthood and not specifically Motherhood. And I didn't want to abandon any of the few known canon attributes she has, so mating had to play into it.

The Maedar/Medusa angle fit because that odd dynamic between them was established in their 2e description. While more recent editions have changed that, Althea came from 2e originally, so it seemed fitting that she'd come from that sort of world. I agree their culture doesn't make 100% sense by human logic, but they aren't human. ETA: And I'd argue that their attitudes make sense, given the numbers. If every maedar/medusa pairing made maedars, then yes, eventually there would be enough maedars to go around and if there were enough maedars for every medusa, there would soon be no more medusa. But since maedar are so rare, most medusae have to go off and breed with humans, which keeps the medusa population up. There's no need for a maedar to protect his human children to later serve as medusa-producers, since humans have a nasty habit of reproducing on their own. Assuming a decent human population nearby for the medusae to use, why go through the hassle of raising your own? Are the maedars parasites? Well, the medusae certainly get along fine without them. The only thing the 2e Monstrous Manual says that the Meduasae get out of the arrangement is food (from the maedar's stone-to-flesh ability). So it seemed to me that only a cultural pressure could keep that arrangement going.

But what made that culture really work here, I thought, it that allowed Althea to violate both human and medusa taboos, and hence qualify for darklordship beyond any of her sistren. Stelios, on the other hand, was and is evil, sure. And in any human culture, he would qualify for co-darklord at least for what he did to her. But he's just doing what all maedar do. (Maedars gonna... maed?) If the dark powers gave him a domain, why not any other maedar? Althea killed all but one of her human children. (OK, that's better than most Maedar-paired Medusae, who kill all of them, and it wasn't voluntary). She blinded one of her children (OK, to save his life, yes.). She killed her husband while he slept (BIG taboo in medusa culture, also in human culture). She tried to kill her Maedar son (HUGE taboo in medusa culture, also in human culture). If you look at those out of context, that's enough for darklordhood. I'd considered the fact that in context she wouldn't seem evil enough, and thought about adding in a bit where she kills her sisters or their eggs out of spite. But Roitpher pointed out that it's a tiny little flyspeck domain. Her evil doesn't have to be massive like Strahd or Azalin. A small, personal evil is good enough. (And I made sure that her killing of Stelios was slow, painful, and while he was sleeping, so that calling it "self defense" would be difficult. She could have just left instead of shooting him the first time. She could have left again instead of shooting him the second time.)

Now, you make an excellent point that it's easy to spin Althea as 100% victim, who killed her husband to escape an abusive relationship, and tried to kill her son due to mental illness (post-partum depression). And those echoes of the real world are intentional. But as you said:

Althea's murder of her husband and her attempted murder of her son was wrong. But she is very much a victim of circumstance, and the best way I can spin this out is to remember that the Dark Powers genuinely do have a blue and orange sort of morality - which can be crudely summarized as "makes an interesting tragedy: good and worth preserving, else it is bad and should be ignored".

The Dark Powers are also pricks. They don't care about intentions. They don't care about mitigating circumstances, and they sure don't care about mental illness. Those are modern concepts, and utterly foreign to both the Dark Powers as we know them in the game, and also the Gothic storytelling roots they are meant to evoke.

In the real world, if she were human, we'd want to get Althea into a good women's shelter, and get her a divorce and some therapy. But her tragedy is that she doesn't live in our world, and she isn't human, and she's judged by different standards.



Anyway, in brief: A lot of thought was put into making Althea sympathetic but still evil enough for a (small) domain, and to fit into what little was known about her and her species. If I erred too far on the side of sympathy, I'm OK with that. If you find the end result distasteful, you're free to disregard it. But it's awfully hard to write about a woman to whom bad things happen without leaving any opening to see misogyny. Bad, unfair things happen to people regardless of gender, and in Ravenloft especially.

[alhoon]

Now, I'm NOT saying Althea is a saint. Because she did kill her husband, and she did try and kill her maedar son. But looking at this... giving her the role of Darklord kind of seems wrong. Hell, looking at it in the right angle, it kind of feels misogynistic.

Well, Ravenloft is Gothic horror. In Gothic Horror, there morality is absolute, without excuses or grays.
Killing your husband is a no-no whatever the situation. Attempting to kill your child is also a terrible no-no too. That she was kind of a victim in the situation doesn't come into it. I don't know if cheating on your spouse is a no-no too, tainting you with evil for ever etc.

On the other hand, treating your wife as a breeding machine, playing with her emotions, refusing to help her get over the grief... that's just a bad husband, not a terrible sinner.
According to the Dark Powers, Althea was worse. Way worse.

[Joël of the FoS]

There are people more evil than some darklords in Ravenloft. Take Baron Metus, the Bogeymens, S, Montarri, Styrix, ... Why aren't these darklords?

The dark powers are often seen as collectors, with peculiar taste. They collect evil specimens. But who knows what else attracts their fancy? What Althea had, that attracted them?

[alhoon]

Baron Metus would eventually have been a darklord IMO. Styrix, not possible I think. She's a fiend after all.
Every time the DP have the chance to snatch a fiend, they do so.
As far as I remember from canon sources and VRGtF, the MOMENT a fiend loses their reality wrinkle and are bound with the land, Dark Powers go "HAHA!" and give them a domain. The powers given by the dark powers to fiends are to tempt them to do the ritual.

[Don Fernando]

I can agree with Hell_Born, Althea is a tragic Character but not enough to be a Darklord.

Loved the Article though. Great work as always!

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Question for Hell Born and Don Fernando. Would it have worked better for you if I had included the bit with Althea killing her sisters and/or their eggs out of spite because they had what she couldn't?

(If so, go ahead and mentally edit it in if you like)

[Don Fernando]

Personally I don't think that killing just because of jealousy is enough to be granted a domain, albeit a very small one. Perhaps more of killing for the joy of it or even for exclusive personal gain, and malice. I see Althea as a victim of the circumstances, and not as a cold blooded darklord. Perhaps the DP entraped her because they saw potential, they saw that spark of darknes in her heart, but never deemed them enough to give her more than an island in the SoS.

I'm a bit rusty in all things Rloft since I'm coming back to my books from a long pause but if you'd like I can take a look and expand the possibilities to make Althea worthy of a domain , and of course of the title Darklord (according to me at least).

Just my 2 cents.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Personally I don't think that killing just because of jealousy is enough to be granted a domain

Why did Strahd kill his brother?

[Don Fernando]

Good question! But that is not the reason why Strahd became the first DL. It was because how he did it and the deeds he did after killing his brother. He struck a pact with a demon, and killed everyone in the castle to boot, including his beloved Tatiana. He did it for personal gain, not because he was a victim of the circumstances. He did it knowingly and didn't stop to think the ramifications, because he was blinded by his greed to be younger and "own" Tatiana. That surely grants you a special place in the hearts of the DPs (if they have a heart, of course).

[alhoon]

Personally, I don't think the Dark Powers would make those distinctions. In a gothic setting, there's good and there's evil and they are not subjective. According to Ravenloft, Killing your family is a terrible sin that changes you forever.

That's why Ivan got a domain and Ivana got a domain. I mean, a lot of darklords were cursed because of "murder because of jealousy"

[Hell_Born]

Now, I know that misogyny wasn't your intention, Gonzoron, and that bad things happen to everyone, regardless of creed, philosophy, sex or gender. But, let's face it: upon reflection, you can see why being capable of boiling Althea's damnation down to "she wouldn't be a passive little baby-maker and obey her abusive husband" could be kind of skeezy, can't you?

I know there's more to it than that. But you can see why I'd note that it could be seen... problematically.

And, honestly? Yes. It would have worked a lot better if you'd added that element. Because that would have been a truly inexcusable act. Killing her husband is justifiable - he was an emotional abuser, there's no questioning that - and even her attempt on her son's life is understandable. But letting her jealousy lead her to murder her sisters? Or, even worse, to destroy - perhaps even consume - their unhatched daughters out of sheer spite and jealousy?

That, in my opinion, is a perfect Act of Penultimate Darkness. It truly marks her out as a villain, and strips away much of the sympathy she engenders. It stops her looking like she was punished because of some moral standing that has, frankly, outlived its zeitgeist and pushes her into true Darklord territory. Sympathetic in so many ways, but with sins upon her soul that she cannot deny or wash away or excuse.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Now, I know that misogyny wasn't your intention, Gonzoron,

Thank you, and I've taken enough literature classes to know that author's intention doesn't matter a whole lot, so it's fine that that's not relevant.

But, let's face it: upon reflection, you can see why being capable of boiling Althea's damnation down to "she wouldn't be a passive little baby-maker and obey her abusive husband" could be kind of skeezy, can't you?

Absolutely, but I think that boiling it down to that is a bit of a trap, as the real-world analogy overpowers some important particulars of the fictional case. For one, she wanted to be a baby-maker. She was actively striving to have a child. For another, her damnation is from having a reaction far out of proportion with the situation. Now, let me be clear in big bold caps: THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT EMOTIONAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE THAT IS IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM ACCEPTABLE, AND THE SAME IS TRUE FOR BLAMING THE VICTIM THEREOF. But with that said, it is not acceptable to kill an emotional abuser either. I don't know about your legal system, but I imagine it's pretty similar to the U.S., where emotional abuse doesn't merit capital punishment, nor does it excuse a victim from killing their abuser. Physical or sexual abuse may sometimes be used as a defense in a case like this, but I was careful to never cross that line with Stelios (note that he revealed himself before she had sex with him in his human disguise, otherwise it would have been marital rape, pure and simple. She willingly mated with him that final time and was not coerced, though plotting his death while she did.) The issue with Leftheris gets a bit stickier because PPD has been considered grounds for an insanity defense, but that's pretty controversial. And again, while the situation certainly evokes PPD (and was meant to do so!), the actual motivation for killing him was misplaced vengeance, with a bit of racism for good measure. She killed him for being a maedar, not because she couldn't love him.

ETA: One point I'd meant to make and forgot to include: We've been trained by books and film to root for and even cheer the death of the bad guy, but even if you believe in an eye for an eye, that's not always an appropriate punishment in reality. Stelios was a bad guy, and may have deserved death for killing and eating humans, but Althea does that too. Within the confines of their relationship, even if it were a Lifetime movie about a human couple, he didn't deserve death for his wrongs to her.

In addition, she was tried not in a modern legal system, but by the black and white whims of the Dark Powers. Many of the darklords' Acts of Ultimate Darkness come from a place of insanity. That's par for the course.

I know there's more to it than that. But you can see why I'd note that it could be seen... problematically.

I can see it, but I can also see other interpretations. And I'm not convinced that it should be the goal of an author to stamp out any possible problematic reading of the text.

And, honestly? Yes. It would have worked a lot better if you'd added that element. Because that would have been a truly inexcusable act. Killing her husband is justifiable - he was an emotional abuser, there's no questioning that - and even her attempt on her son's life is understandable. But letting her jealousy lead her to murder her sisters? Or, even worse, to destroy - perhaps even consume - their unhatched daughters out of sheer spite and jealousy?

OK, like I said, if you like that part, feel free to mentally edit it in.

Let me just say that I do take your critique seriously, and don't mean to be dismissive of it. I will take it under advisement and consider the possibility of a bit of a rewrite when the final Gaz is produced, or if we release any revision of the Qtr issue.