[quote=Lucas Chandler]
Well, someone doesn’t like the Manager. What’d he ever do to you, take your brass buttons?[/quote]
He’s my absolute least favorite character in the game. His characterization is one-note and grating (listening to someone constantly whine about an a-hole ex gets tiresome FAST), he has a HUGE crime against humanity staining up his hands and doesn’t give a crap because "waaaaah I miss my boyfriend" and the game expects me to sympathize with him, and his opportunity card is one of the most annoying mechanics in the game.
See the Duchess and the Widow for this type of character done well. Both are guilty of the same crime as the manager but are given far more layered treatment by the narration, both are given more to do in the plotline besides cry over the person they were screwing back on the surface, and they rarely harass you via opportunity cards.
The Manager feels a bit like a Creator’s Pet to me. I’d love to see him put down :P
I agree about what the presence of the snake-ish thing meant in general. I was referring more specifically to the "feline" description.[/quote]
It is interesting, considering that in FL lore a snakecat is a combination of two things that are supposed to hate each other, a Neathian hippogrif if you will. From Attendants, we know that the Royal Family of the Second City had/has great knowledge of dreams, so it might be that cats and snakes were once closer together, but the cats mannaged to change into something more real? This might be a hint to the Mystery, but it might also be, as PSGarak says, just a sigh of the infection.[li]
[quote=Kukapetal] His characterization is one-note and grating (listening to someone constantly whine about an a-hole ex gets tiresome FAST), he has a HUGE crime against humanity staining up his hands and doesn’t give a crap because "waaaaah I miss my boyfriend" and the game expects me to sympathize with him, and his opportunity card is one of the most annoying mechanics in the game.
The Manager feels a bit like a Creator’s Pet to me. I’d love to see him put down :P [/quote]
I think the game has recently added more about the Manager, so he is definitely not just about his old love. For example, he is involved in the Liberation: http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Menaulon?fromEchoId=12296558
Additionally, I don’t think he can really be called a Creator’s Pet because in-game characters do make criticisms of him that are treated as valid. His old lover is certainly not very fond of him anymore. Finally, some leniance may be given despite his crime because he was the first to commit it, without an ability to know possible consequences. That said, he is definitely a bit obsessed.
This was a wonderful story, and I absolutely loved it! You guys write dreams so very well! ^_^[li]
(Giant Imaginary Spider transport coming soon? Please confirm! LOL)
I like the manager. He’s pitiful but in the way that inspires protectiveness rather than raw pity or disdain. I’m unsure of his motives but his insane asylum appears to be helping people and keeping potentially dangerous individuals off the streets. He also doesn’t appear to be actively doing anything gruesome to anyone, which seems rare in FL.
He just needs to move on and find a new boyfriend. Maybe I can volunteer~
[quote=menaulon]
I think the game has recently added more about the Manager, so he is definitely not just about his old love. For example, he is involved in the Liberation: http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Menaulon?fromEchoId=12296558
Additionally, I don’t think he can really be called a Creator’s Pet because in-game characters do make criticisms of him that are treated as valid. His old lover is certainly not very fond of him anymore. Finally, some leniance may be given despite his crime because he was the first to commit it, without an ability to know possible consequences. That said, he is definitely a bit obsessed.[/quote]
Selling your people to space bats is evil regardless of what said space bats end up doing with them.
But yes, it’s definitely nice to know his boyfriend was appalled and horrified by what the manager did to his people, to the point where he fell out of love with him…oh wait, no he wasn’t. He didn’t give a rat’s behind about them either. Just mad at the manager for the ONE thing that wasn’t his fault…and uses that as justification to to treat the supposed love of his life like crap.
What a vile couple of people. They’re like the very definition of careless, self-serving aristocrats and it irks me I’m meant to see them as tragic lovers instead of the selfish jerks they are.
[quote=Kukapetal]
Selling your people to space bats is evil regardless of what said space bats end up doing with them.[/quote]
Well I’m being a bit of a devil’s advocate but, technically, from his perspective, he’s just selling his city to some weird tall cloaked people. Not many know about the master’s true nature and I don’t think they would suddenly strip and reveal themselves. The manager probably thought they just had some effective medicine and, since to him they were likely just some representatives from another city, he wasn’t expecting his city to take a trip to hell and his lover to turn to stone.
Selling territory between nations in treaties is pretty normal though. It’s generally not assumed you’re selling them into slavery. IRL - sale of Alaska to the USA, Louisiana purchase, Hong Kong/China.
I can absolutely see how switching from “I used to rule this city, now somebody else will” comes across as morally neutral, unless you know the details of what the Bazaar has planned (Lacre-vats…)
(This ended up a bit long - to clarify, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with hating a particular character, and can sympathise with that. I just found this an interesting moral debate and wanted to chime in)
The only way the Manager would have known what he was signing his people up for would have been if the Masters told him all the bad sides of the deal up front - which doesn’t sound too likely. He does say he’d do it all over again since he could still not bear to have his loved one die, but that’s honestly not a surprising attitude for someone who’s spent millenia pining after said love.
Also, in addition to Amalgamate’s point about how ceding over his lands to another ruler was just business as usual for royals (and if he considered himself to be a bad ruler, he might have thought he was helping his people by turning them over to the wise bats), selling people was not evil back then. Selling people and slavery were normal parts of life back then, and if you’d asked his subjects whether owning a slave automatically makes someone a monster, only the most mistreated and bitter slave would have answered "yes."
Of course one can say that morals are not subjective and that it being acceptable at the time doesn’t mean it wasn’t evil, but in that case we’ll all be considered bloodthirsty monsters soon enough for knowing what beef tastes like, so who are we to judge anyone. To sum up, his actions weren’t particularly evil for someone from his time and culture, and since he doesn’t do it anymore, there’s no reason to paint the poor old man as a demon because of it. It’s fair not to like him for being whiny and obsessed with the past, but that actually makes him the one geriatric from past cities to be described as a normal geriatric, instead of a more awesome but less realistic Power Granny like the Widow and the Duchess.
He was their king. A king has a duty to protect his subjects. Selling them to someone else, ESPECIALLY if you don’t know what’s going to happen to them, is no different than a father selling his own children to some creepy cloaked man he met on the street in order to save his dying wife. It may be a sympathetic motive, but it is still evil and no one would view a father who did so as a purely tragic figure.
While he was certainly a bad ruler (he states at one point he’s never kept a promise to anyone besides Mr. Jerkface, a terrible quality in a ruler), his motive was clearly to save said Jerkface. Claiming another, more noble motive is clearly just justification. Anyway, if you think you’re a bad ruler, you’re supposed to pull your head out of your posterior and do better, not hand over your subjects to creepy cloaked weirdos and say "Here, you rule them. I’m sure you’ll do better." The latter is just dodging responsibility.
Anyway, his suppsedly noble ulterior motive plus the earlier argument that he "didn’t know what was going to happen to them" are both rendered moot by his revelation that he’d do it again. He now knows he’d be selling his people to space bats, to be subjected to a tyrannical rule in an underground cavern full of monsters and other malevolent beings, shut away from the surface and the light of the sun, to eventually be processed into goo (as well as condemning his beloved to state of misery)…and he’d do it again. If that doesn’t prove this guy is evil, I don’t know what does. Yes, it’s because he’s weak and obsessed, but that doesn’t excuse it. Being obsessively in love with someone to the point you’d commit atrocities for them is still evil.
And I’ll clarify that I don’t think the Widow and Duchess are better characters because they’re cool, bad*ss grannies, but because they actually have a character that doesn’t revolve entirely around their ex-lovers. I’d feel the same if they were charity workers or librarians or president of their local book clubs :P
Those are fair points. I still personally wouldn’t call him evil, just utterly unfit for rule - however, as he probably never wanted to be king, I can’t be too mad at him for doing a bad job at it. Besides, he seems very intent on doing good now. Evil’s a very strong word. He’s not saying he’d do it again because he’d like to see all the suffering again, or that he doesn’t care - he’s just admitting that he still could not stand to let his love die if he could do something to stop it. By a "would sacrifice anything to stop their loved one from dying" definition of evil, one would be hard-pressed to find a mother on Earth that is not evil.
I actually find myself agreeing with Kukapetal here. When I started playing, I loved the Manager. He was this mysterious figure that could only reliably be met while going half-insane from nightmares, and who also runs an asylum that just happens to be canonically confirmed to be the single most luxurious residence in London (supposedly even better than the best the Bazaar, the Palace and the Embassy have to offer - depending on how you interpret the text. Note that while the key to the brass embassy lodgings only says that the luxury is "sinful", the key to the beth lodgings instead explicitly states its luxury is "unparalleled".) And, heck, "The Manager" is a delightfully eccentric title for one of such importance - compared to the more boring titles of "Empress", "Duchess", or even "Widow".
But the more I find out about him, the less he appeals to me. Turns out he isn’t some crazy rich, crazy powerful crazy guy who runs an ultra-luxurious asylum because he can, and because he’s probably bored after a few (or perhaps a dozen or more - do we know exactly how old the First City is?) thousand years of immortality. No, he’s just hopelessly in love, would happily betray his people all over again, knowing exactly what that entails - and still hasn’t gotten over it during the last few thousand years. edited by Dudebro Pyro on 8/31/2017
[quote=Kukapetal]Mr. Jerkface[/quote]I don’t know where you get this impression of the King with a Hundred Hearts. They’re quite melancholy, but they’ve spent the last several thousand years as a sapient island.
[spoiler]The bargain with the Masters was entirely the Manager’s doing; the traveler who would become Hundred-Hearts may have been entirely at peace with the fact that their time on the earth would eventually end. If you want more details of the King’s story, you can find those in my journal (this entry, and the two preceding it).