I saved this ss to my phone cause i love how sinister he looks and i love love love thinking about this scene
To rozemyne, and to us, he's sinister here, teaching a child to scheme and plot someone's death
But by his personal and social values, the ones of the world she now lives in, he's granting her an immense kindness. By his own values, the amount of consideration he's showing her stuns even his longtime personal retainers who greatly admire him.
By his values, he should harshly teach her about reality by eliminating the entire town. He should not 'waste' his time on a lesson on how to comport herself, he should be destroying her innocence so that she isn't weak as an archduke candidate. He should not be giving her a way to save as many lives as possible. This should be a lesson in how little commoner lives are worth in this world.
But instead, he gives her a way to bring her own values in, and find a middle ground, to make his world a better place. He teaches her how to isolate a problem to minimize collateral damage. He teaches her about the weight of rank, which she is still learning about, and how dangerous she can be if she's careless. And he does it in a way that minimizes how hard that lesson will hit her, by helping her reduce casualties.
I just really love his brand of softness okay Ferdinand is such a good boy
