#mandragora

I love Mandragora so much, she's such an utter piece of shit. She's irritable, unreasonable, short-sighted, and a bigot in several different ways. She's given multiple chances to save her own life and ignores all of them in favor of temper tantrums and self-loathing. When she fights for her beloved cause, she does it with nothing but hate in her heart for everyone who has a wronged her without a moment of consideration for the future she's fighting for. Her introductory scene involves her dismissing the very culture that she proclaims to fight for in a single-minded obsession with revenge. That's part of why her sympathetic qualities hit so hard for me, because there's so much shit wrong with her. Sure its only burning anger that sustains her, but she's basically the only one of like... two? Dublinn captains who aren't actively trying to undermine the war effort for their own gains because she's so singleminded that there's no room for duplicity. She has unexpected moments of compassion and humanization all over and every one makes me feel something about her. She truly cares about her soldiers and they care about her back. Growing up she was so poor and desperate that she spent most of her time in a cemetery. She clearly likes to dress up bc she has the only entirely unique Dublinn outfit, but needs Harmonie to paint her nails for her. At some point I lose all of my ability to be coherent about this and just start rambling about her. I love her way too much.