#1 Rose Red Enthusiast

I really like RQG I've gotten so attached to his character it's not funny, he's sad pathetic and a bit suicidal AND he's Egyptian he's literally just like me fr

Admittedly, a lot of what I’ve written is extrapolation from what we do know, but there is so much more lore than what’s in the album! It’s hard from just the songs to get clear pictures of who most of the characters are, but there are more hints in the fiction on the Mechs’ website.

For more context, here are the pieces of canon behind all my assertions in the tags:

Midnight is a short story about Cinders’ backstory. In it, we get glimpses of Cinders and Rose’s courtship and their wedding. Relevant to this post, we learn that they met through Rose being assigned as the commander of the prison Cinders was being held in (more on the implications of that here) and that Cinders broke out for the wedding, which suggests it was not sanctioned by Cole. From that, we can guess that Rose subverted or disobeyed her orders when it came to her relationship with Cinders.

We also learn that Cole had Cinders’ father shot in front of her, and that she is being held in prison rather than facing a worse fate as an example of Cole’s “mercy.” This makes it extremely unlikely she holds any level of positive sentiment towards Cole, and very likely he would find her troublesome as a free member of his nobility (let alone as a mother to the next generation of said nobility).

We learn in the album that Rose and Snow belong to “the noblest family in the kingdom”. From this, it seems likely that they would have some level of personal relationship with Cole (and some level of expectation to serve and obey him), hence my belief that the Wedding Day Slaughter was also to punish Rose for betraying that relationship.

Given that height of nobility and the vastness of Cole’s imperial holdings (“a thousand suns”) to extract wealth from, we can infer that their family also has an amount of money larger than is even possible on our single planet Earth.

That height of nobility is also what leads me to think that, while Snow’s politics were more peaceful than the Empire’s as a whole and probably irritating to Cole, her position still kept her from standing against less overt forms of imperial violence and likely even led her to condemn resistance against that imperial violence (more on why I think that here).

In A Fireside Chat, we see some of the propaganda that emerges out of the Wedding Day Slaughter, and how Cole’s government blames the rebellion for a senseless tragedy that inspired Rose to give her life for the Rose Red Project. The slaughter gave Cole weapons both in the form of the Reds themselves and in the rhetorical opportunities their origins create (if you twist the truth), both of which were opportunities he seems to have happily taken.

not because he cares about whose 'right' and whose 'wrong'

not even because he cares about what King Cole is doing.

She's a clone. She got her name from having a fuck ton of freckles, generic quirk of her batch. The rest of her sisters got them too, bit shes the only one who lived last 3.

He didn't really understand names, properly, and was really frustrated by them when he had to pick a last one. Chose the one thing he had going for him.

no such thing as heroes chapter 2: fractals in rainbow, devil in red