I remember one snippet of dialogue in OWAW where someone asks her about growing up and she replies she's happy being a little sister. Soon as I read it, I was thinking -something- was going to happen to make her rethink that plan, and then Freiburg happened. And I was like, 'Yep!' Glad to see it.

>
>>And now the word about Neuroi-chan is...well, not getting around, so
>>to speak, but getting to the point where hopefully some real progress
>>can be made in finding out just what the Neuroi -are- and what is
>>going through their minds. (And, no, I have no idea what canon says so
>>far about it. And I largely don't care. This is precisely the kind of
>>issue where fanon is often better than canon, and Eyrie hasn't
>>disappointed me on that front yet.)
>
>Well, I don't know about the manga, but for the anime, the cannon
>is...well...entirely silent on the matter. As is mentioned several
>times, "Neuroi-chan" got vaporized during Operation Trajanus,
>and for the anime that appears to have been that. I think it was
>something like a plot arc that just got completely tossed.

Gryphon addresses this topic elsewhere on the boards in much greater detail than I'm qualified to discuss--I don't know a lot about it--but the gist was, 'the creators seem to have tossed it on purpose because they rethought the wisdom of making the Neuroi relatable to the audience'. I can't agree or disagree with finality, but they certainly started on that interesting story arc and threw it out with alarming speed. (Arpeggio went the other way--the Neuroi are quite relatable once they're not blindly following that silly Admiralty Code business--and it worked out quite well.)

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

You're probably referring to this post, from the discussion of episode 15. Those are, I hasten to add, my own speculations. As noted, the canon itself has nothing at all to say about what the Neuroi are, what they want, or whether most of them are even intelligent. (A lot of the time, particularly in the anime, they don't especially seem to be. They're a lot smarter, tactically speaking, in the light novels - at least the one I read the comically stilted English translation of - but still never actually attempt to communicate in any way.)

>I can't agree or disagree with finality, but they certainly
>started on that interesting story arc and threw it out with alarming
>speed. (Arpeggio went the other way--the NeuroiFog are quite relatable
>once they're not blindly following that silly Admiralty Code
>business--and it worked out quite well.)

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is in a slightly different position, in that - despite its occasional flashes of incongruous, scratch-your-head zaniness - it isn't really a Wacky Comedy Romp like Strike Witches usually tries to be. As such, the creators aren't as conscious of a need to avoid depicting The Horror of War - although it's worth noting that very few of the Fog characters who have a human face (as it were) actually die in Arpeggio. I think the writers set up the "ships below heavy cruiser don't have Mental Models" thing specifically so that the cannon fodder wouldn't be as relatable. (And even then, Iona is routinely saddened when they have to sink Nagara-class ships.) When they did end up killing off a couple of the "face" characters, they spent a whole episode on it despite having only a dozen to work with, and had pretty carefully established beforehand that those two were assholes who shouldn't be missed.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...what kind of assholes do you think we are?

Seriously, I had major reservations about including Lavrentiy Beria in a story as a demon functionary of the government of Hell, and you think I'd bust out Mengele? Even in a context where the heroes give him the what-for, OWaW is just not that kind of setting.

I strongly suspect that Karlsland isn't Germany specifically to explain why you never see any of those names or faces in Strike Witches.

Besides - if we were thinking of the peril-of-mad-science thing, there are more genre-appropriate casting choices.

--G.
"You will find, Frau Doktor Vahlen, that His Majesty the Kaiser takes a dim view of attempts to dissect persons to whom he is indebted. A very dim view indeed."
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, if you were going to introduce Dr. Vahlen in a Strike Witches context, she'd presumably be Karla Theodora.

Sigh. Yeah, I might have known.

Anyway, no, there will be no Nazi war criminals.

--G.
-><-
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I fully concur. Japanese kids may be being taught a -very- rose-tinted view of their own Axis involvement, but I doubt even they overlook what the Nazis did. I suspect all the other name changes were there just to justify the Germany change.

That said, I have no doubt Hitler died in the Neuroi campaign that conquered Karlsland, a destitute and depressed failed painter.

>
>Besides - if we were thinking of the peril-of-mad-science thing, there
>are more genre-appropriate casting choices.
>
>--G.
>"You will find, Frau Doktor Vahlen, that His Majesty the Kaiser
>takes a dim view of attempts to dissect persons to whom he is
>indebted. A very dim view indeed."

Ah, yes, Dr. Vahlen. One wonders if Dr. Shen could have been Dr. Miyafuji in this alternate timeline.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

This is a can of worms I should probably not open, and I'm certainly not going to open it in-story, but what the hell, for the sake of a small Forum thought experiment, here goes:

Having read as much as I have about the formative influences that led Hitler to found the Third Reich, I find myself suspecting that his life will have unfolded very differently in the Strike Witches setting. So many of the toxic influences that made him the butcher he became simply don't exist in that world (unless you believe in a massive primacy of nature over nurture in the formation of a human being's mentality, which is its own giant can of worms).

Just as an extremely rough sketch:

The seeds of National Socialist politics (as opposed to National Socialism's deeply dubious racial and religious principles, which came from older sources, and which I'll touch very briefly in a bit) stemmed largely from the massive social and political disorder that consumed Austria and Germany when both of their ancient monarchies were destroyed at the end of the First World War. The postwar German Republic, in particular, was an utter mess politically and economically, with many of its institutions actively working against its own survival, and the only force that could realistically have saved it - the army - quite deliberately chose not to do so when the moment arrived, largely because its leaders were themselves authoritarians who had no time for weak-wristed concepts like republicanism. For the most part, they were perfectly happy to let the Nazi Party tear down the Republic; they thought they could subsequently sweep the Party aside in its turn and re-establish a proper military state along the lines of old Prussia. (Spoiler alert: It didn't work out that way.)

Hitler and his cronies were able to co-opt so much of the right, and effectively wreck the center and left, of the Republic's political structure largely because they played more effectively on popular misconceptions about the end of the war than anybody else. The "stab-in-the-back" ideology - the idea that the German Empire would have won the war if the left hadn't seized power from the Kaiser in November 1918 and immediately embarked on a cowardly surrender to the Western Allies - was bunk bordering on silliness, and most of the people who parlayed it into popular support knew it. Certainly the generals did, since they had declared the war impossible to win and forced the Kaiser's abdication, not the left; but they were more than happy to let the detested leftist politicians who proclaimed the Republic and signed the surrender documents take the blame for losing the war.

There's more - a lot more - but my point is, none of that happened in Karlsland and Ostmark. They weren't up against the rest of the world in a pointless losing war that no one could even remember the reasons for. Their monarchies weren't destroyed, their people's way of life not turned upside-down, their economies not crushed by massive punitive demands for reparations, their armies not outlawed. Ostmark wasn't reduced to a miserable, destitute shadow of its former glory in 1918, and Karlsland was neither humiliated before the world nor economically crippled. Instead, they were both prominent members of the great alliance that had (it appeared at the time) saved the world from the Neuroi scourge. In neither country in that world's 1930s was there suitable soil for a movement like National Socialism to take root.

If you add on top of that the fact that the setting's earlier history doesn't lend itself to such key factors as antisemitism (because no Christianity, and for all we know no Judaism either, come to that) and weird 19th-century pan-German racial theories, that's basically all three sides of the Nazi "fire triangle" significantly thinned, if not knocked out altogether.

So, weird as it seems to say it, I suspect that if Adolf Hitler existed in the SW/OWaW world, he was probably both a happier and a better person. Almost certainly obscure, but rather less miserable about it than the real one would have been in obscurity, because most of the forces that made him a megalomaniacal mass murderer with a head full of semireligious pseudoscientific bullshit simply didn't exist. He may well still have perished in the fall of Ostmark (his native country) or Karlsland (where he might still have emigrated before the war), and even if he's still alive in 1946 there is no reason to suspect that anyone in our cast has ever heard of him, but who knows - absent all that weird ferment roiling around in his head, he might even have been a decent architect.

--G.
-><-
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And also thanks for providing unique female wedding attire since Symphony 2.

Anyway, I finally caught up on all of OWAW, reading over the last couple of weeks. It was quite enjoyable, more than I expected.

Quoting from the other thread:
> So, because I've got to do things the hard way, I went and brought
> (Neuroi-chan) back, and am now trying to keep the thing acceptably
> light anyway.

In a nutshell, this is the reason why your story is far better than the original Strike Witches. I gave up on it after the first season, because it had little going for it dramatically. I don't think I ever felt like the cast was ever really in a war; it just felt like a weird setting for moe and a sort of tribute to ace pilots.

Freiburg was brilliant, because I actually felt the danger. I love the interaction with the other wing divisions, and I thank you for the mental image of HRH Elizabeth in her knickers. It feels like an actual war is going on out there, with more gun shots than panty shots. While still containing wacky cuddle hijinks. And Hannelore von Hammer, a woman who fights for many different forms of love, is just superb. I'm jealous of Fritzchen, more so than of most monarchs :)

So please continue to take the hard way, ad astra per aspera.

Not being a history major, there's a lot about the causes of WW2 I was only vaguely aware of, and I certainly did not sit down and do research before my casual comment above. This all sounds like reasonable educated speculation to me.

That said, I do agree that this is not the kind of thing that ever needs to appear in story. I'm actually rather fascinated by the backstory, possibly extending thousands of years and across ancient civilizations, of this setting and what the existence of magic would have done to alter it. My lack of anthropological experience is kind of hitting me pretty hard, here. =)

For example, I'm starting to believe religion simply isn't a prominent part of the culture because one of the primary purposes of religion, in their inception, is to explain the unexplainable. In this universe, the answer to all those questions could simply be 'magic', with a matter-of-fact conviction that simply didn't require blind faith as we know it today.

With that in mind, I do begin to wonder about a couple things that may end up having a place in the setting, even if not in this story. People will always categorize themselves and split off into cliques, and if religion isn't a sticking point, something else will be. There will always be things like racial and cultural differences, but I'm wondering what positions people will take around witches themselves. Parents who are proud of their witch daughters versus those who never allow them to be tested. People who all but hero worship them versus bitter men, and even more bitter mundane women.

It's mentioned in the story that witches are usually viewed as inconveniently willful weapons or with silly, slack-jawed awe and it's difficult for them to have normal social lives with people who aren't witches. This makes me wonder if they're ever publicly shunned, or if there's publicly acknowledged anti-witch groups. (There's certainly private ones, such as the clique of Allied personnel personified by Reichenberg.)

Story-wise, it may make efforts to locate and deal with Reichenberg and Skorzeny...interesting. I'm fairly sure we'll see something involving them in the next installment, given the last scene in OWAW #18...

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

At least during the Great War, the our time line Hitler had no shortage of physical courage. It doesn't seem unlikely that in this time line he/she also won Iron Crosses...possibly posthumously.

-VR
The one I'm wondering about is Fat Hermann
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

Brunnhilde "Go-Go" Göring is the fattest, raunchiest drag queen in the Neukarlsland scene... and a former fighter pilot, having been a contemporary of Rittmeister von Hammer during the First Neuroi War, though not one with an especially distinguished record. Fritzchen was oft overheard expressing his amazement that Göring's planes ever managed to get off the damned ground.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Y'know (he said, resolutely ignoring Traitor's disturbing but amusing antics off to the side), I actually considered mentioning Hermine Göring as one of von Hammer's First War colleagues, but again decided that it was a can of worms I didn't want to open. I feel like I've talked about this before, but it might've been in a studio conversation rather than out here.

The thing is that of all Hitler's henchmen, Göring is in some ways the most confounding in terms of what he became after the Great War. Hitler, for all that by all accounts he served honorably and well in the war, was a fairly marginal character before and immediately after it. A lot of the other infamous names in the inner circle of the Third Reich were, and without the Nazi era would have remained, utter nobodies. Alfred Rosenberg was a philosopher widely renowned for being the only person who actually believed he was a philosopher. Josef Goebbels mainly made his living out of posing as a disabled was veteran. (He was disabled, but it wasn't from a battle injury.) Rudolf Hess was in the dictionary next to the word "feckless". Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer, and I do not mean to impugn the honorable tradition of poultry farming here, but can you name more than three* famous chicken farmers ever in the history of human civilization?

And then there is Hermann Göring, who became one of the most infamous and rapacious of them all... but who was an actual dang flying ace in the Great War. Evidently an unlikeable asshole, it's true, but still. Lots of people are assholes without ending up being the number-two man in Nazi Germany. And again, I suspect the outcome of the Great War had a lot to do with that transition.

The scene I considered Göring for hasn't appeared yet; you'll probably spot where she would've been when it does. In the end, as I say, it was a can of worms I just didn't want to open in the text.

--G.
* HINT: The other ones are Frank Perdue and Joan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo, the Catalan-born WWII British double agent.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You can almost picture her there, coming to her office every day with boasts about how "important" she is to the service, while her long-suffering aid nods along and wonders which gods she angered to deserve such punishment.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

Speaking of witches influential in the early Luftwaffe, I would bet/hope that Ernestine Udet made out considerably better than her real-life equivalent.

--G.
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Remember how I was speaking about the long-suffering aid?

Just kidding, history has been kinder to her than that. Like her RL counterpart, she was a Great War ace and during the interwar period a star of the screen, renowned for her good looks and dashing figure in uniform, with many boys (and a few girls) secretly keeping pictures of her. And like IRL, Hermine talked her into joining the new Luftwaffe, though as a comrade rather than as an underling. But while many credit her with her having the forward-thinking to see the usefulness of dive-bombing, seeing the virtues of air witches as flying artillery, she's earned a bit of a rep as "antiquated" after voicing skepticism about the future of jet strikers. Still, she enjoys the Kaiser's favor, being seen as a realist in a service where some overestimate the power of their "wonder weapons" and underestimate the danger of the Neuroi.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

And now after reading that I can't stop thinking Hermione Göring, with the requisite (and obvious) witch references. <sigh>

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Well, to be fair, they are very similar names. Although not related; Hermine is the feminine form of Hermann, which is old German for "soldier" - heer, army, mann, uh... well, man - while Hermione is a name from Greek mythology (she was the daughter of King Menelaus and Queen Helen of Sparta).

Hermione Granger would not make a terrible RAF witch, come to that, though she would be anachronistic. :)

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oh, I know. It's just a consequence of my memory being (mostly) phonetic.

>Hermione Granger would not make a terrible RAF witch, come to that,
>though she would be anachronistic. :)

Like that's stopped certain other people in this story. <grin>

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

That's an awesome image, except I can't see him having already met their DC's from his universe, who are at the Jedi Academy on Alderaan. =)

That said, this makes -perfect- sense for them. So obvious in retrospect.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

Let's be fair, the need for a gigglefit over the Strike Witches universe would have hit Gryph well before this meeting. After meeting Eleanor at the very least.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

I don't know about that. IIRC, Hermione never really liked flying very much...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Striker > broom. That's even canon. :)

--G.
-><-
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Everyone focuses on Hermione's incredible brain, but there's a reason she's a Gryffindor and not a Ravenclaw. There's a great deal of physical and moral courage there. I think she'd be a perfect fighting witch. Sort of a complement to Ursula, in fact, except researching magic as opposed to strikers.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

<headdesk> Now I can't get That Scene out of my mind...

I bet Hermione never left a witch-shaped hole in the top of a tree, or got dumped into a nice big thorny bush.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

>* HINT: The other ones are Frank Perdue and Joan Pujol
>Garcia, codename Garbo, the Catalan-born WWII British double
>agent.

Eddo Brandes
http://www.herald.co.zw/most-famous-chicken-farmer-in-the-world/

-VR
Insert Saying Here
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

i have hesitated to comment on this because, by my way of thinking you opened that can early on in story and either do not recognize it or well there are any number of reasons i guess. in a way the decision not to tackle retconning some of the big names of the nazi regime is a bit disappointing in light of the alt already used but it is understandable. the person you did retcon in is the 'least offensive' by western standards because he became a hero over here, idol to millions and inspiration to generations. at one point myself included.

... I did? Hmm. I guess I don't recognize it.

>in a way the decision
>not to tackle retconning some of the big names of the nazi regime is a
>bit disappointing in light of the alt already used but it is
>understandable. the person you did retcon in is the 'least offensive'
>by western standards because he became a hero over here, idol to
>millions and inspiration to generations. at one point myself included.

I can't for the life of me figure out who you're talking about here. The only original witch character I've mentioned in Our Witches at War that I can think of right now who had any connection to Nazi Germany is Heinrikke Knoke, and frankly, if I had remembered the last chapter of I Flew for the Führer when I wrote that episode I'd have found somebody else. I had clean forgotten, at the time, that although a fine aviator and the author of a gripping memoir, Heinz Knoke was also an unrepentant Nazi who ended that memoir with a rant in which he chided the Western democracies for removing civilization's only defense against Bolshevism and predicted that They'd Be Sorry.* (As such, I'm going to assume he's not the one you meant, since I don't know a ton about German politics at the moment, but I can't really see that guy as an idol to millions. Besides, he wasn't a Big Name in the Regime by any stretch.)

Now, Erich Hartmann might fit that description, but a) he wasn't part of the inner circle either and b) I didn't adapt him, Erica's one of the original stars of the show. So presumably he's not who you mean either. As such... yeah. I'm missing something here. Please elaborate, because now you've got me thinking I may have stepped in a gopher hole without noticing.

--G.
*Admittedly, there is precedent in canon. Hans Ulrich Rudel was similarly unreconstructed, a National Socialist to the last, and the witch based on him is a prominent character in the original Strike Witches novels - the ones Ursula Hartmann is from.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

i chose not to name the person because, as i said, he became a major hero stateside and history has whitewashed some of the things he was party to to preserve the image. thinking back on it i realize it was actually in the New Tricks story but as that is part of the continuum i tend to lump them all together as OWAW. if i am completely off the mark and there is another person of historical note then i withdraw my statement entirely but it seems unlikely there is another von braun to template the von braun sisters from.

i was hestitant to comment on this because while the image he(von braun) produced while working here was rather sparkly and other appropriate adjectives there is a lot of lesser publicized information that illustrates how he comported himself at Peenemunde and little of it is good.

Oh! That.

Well, see, that wasn't intended to be some kind of significant continuity hook or anything; it was what we in the industry refer to as a "throwaway joke". You know... rockets... Wernher and Magnus von Braun... rockets...

(You will also note that there has been no mention of them since. That is another of the features of a throwaway joke.)

Oddly enough, despite being a huge space nerd, I'm not a particular fan, as it happens; I tend to think Tom Lehrer's classic song "Wernher von Braun"* paints a more accurate picture of the man than the Walt Disney's Pet Scientist edition. But hey - I had a joke to make about Karlsland trying to develop rockets. There were only so many ways that could go.

(Also, my mental image of Wanda and Magda von Braun involves a lot of Warner Brothers cartoon-style blinking out of blast-blackened faces and mumbling, "Well, that didn't work," which is not perhaps the most glamorized of interpretations. :)

--G.
*Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Nazi, schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
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regardless i am looking forward to whats next.

Also, points to Perrinne (sp?) for not punishing her on the grounds that she's French, and punishing someone for defending someone's honor is against her personal code of conduct :)

Another excellent chapter!

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Heh, we considered for some time exactly how we were going to lead into that, our deliberations largely focusing on (as another poster has indicated wondering about) how he was going to announce the unexpected change to the program. And then - plot twist! - it occurred to us that he just wouldn't; he would simply go ahead as if he'd meant to do what he ended up doing all along and people would have to take notes if they couldn't keep up.

He did presumably speak to his original fiancée privately beforehand, and though we have seen what her younger brother made of it, we have no information as yet regarding how she took the change in plan herself.

>Lucchini continues to fascinate me. While the location might not have
>been appropriate, she definitely follows the philosophy that some
>assholes just need punching.

Backpfeifengesicht, as it turns out, is not limited to Ostmarkers.

While we were working on that sequence, the question of where Lucchini learned to put her back into it like that came up, and we concluded that she must have learned it from Shirley at some unspecified point during the period between the TV seasons when they were roaming around North Africa. Massive bar fight in Tobruk, probably, involving various members of the 31st Joint Fighter Squadron (Afrika) and some Britannian soldiers.

"Hey Shirley! Show me how to punch a guy!"

"Why, it's dead simple, my dear. You just make a fist, lean well back, and assert yourself."

--G.
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Not exactly "L'etat c'est moi.", but Fritz seems a bit more sensitive to his people than Le Roi de Soleil. Plus, you know, more modern all that. Still, I have to think that there's a bit of "I'm the King. If you don't like it, tough."

>He did presumably speak to his original fiancée privately
>beforehand, and though we have seen what her younger brother made of
>it, we have no information as yet regarding how she took the change in
>plan herself.

One would think with a bit more decorum and manners than her rather stupid sibling. Still, the German/Karlslander sense of machismo (of which I'm sure there's a perfectly good word in German, but I can't find it on a brief search) does seem to go hand in hand with a certain level of stupidity. How else would you explain Mensur fencing?

Ebony the Black Dragon

This is not to exempt other nations' forms of machismo from that stupidity. We've already seen it in the Liberion senior officer corps.

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Stummeralseinerlastonziegel.

no, not really.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

My German is nonexistent, and Google seems stymied. Something about a load of bricks?

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

I think it's "dumber than a load of bricks."

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Also entirely made up.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

To be perfectly fair, Werner's family does have a legitimate grievance here. They were promised a very influential connection with the Crown and then had the rug pulled out at the last minute for what seems to them to be extremely spurious reasons.

That doesn't excuse the boy's vile personal conduct toward a blameless member of the bride's family - it was a clear example of punching downward - but his motivation for doing so is not entirely without foundation.

--G.
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

To say nothing of the fact that His Majesty knows that you don't just pull this kind of change-up on a ally in the court without some sort of compensation. I'm sure his former bride-to-be's family would have some concessions handed their way (royal appointments, juicy national business contracts, that sort of thing) by way of consolation. Fritz may have been a bit of an idiot when it came to courting Hannalore, but he's clearly a competent monarch and politician. (That bit of rubbernecking with the faux-Neuroi and the rocket soldiers notwithstanding.)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."