my analysis

That's why in 6.4 she commissioned Alice to create a virtual reality game for people to experience the 1.0 events.

That's why she enjoyed taking part in it herself.

That's why her fav book is Vera's Melancholy.

That's why she takes winning in TCG so seriously.

That's why she suggested to Klee to go fishblasting together during the 1.6 GAA event because she knew (and explicitly expressed) it didn't cause any harm here.

That's why when Noelle yeeted a sword in the ceiling of Jean's office, Jean wasn't mad. Instead she made a joke to cheer Noelle up and helped her train.

That's why she accompanied Diona who wanted to play in Dragon Spine out of all places.

That's why she appreciated Kaeya's entertainment during the 6.4 event.

That's why it's so important to her that the events she plans for her people (Weinlesefest, return of the expedition) are fun and exciting (including significant amounts of alcohol).

That's why she turned it into a little Kaeya-style tease when she surprised Klee she'd take her to lunch at Good Hunter (no really, it felt like she channeled her inner Kaeya there lol).

Seriously, what a stuck-up loser, man.

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Jean's only crime is that she doesn't like it when people blow up Mondstadt for fun or put it and its people in danger.

She accepts Klee's bombs when she knows they won't be a danger to others.

But no, this is clearly proof that she is an unreasonable, neurotic killjoy.

Shame on her. Who needs wildlife or functioning city walls anyway.

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Hoyo will constantly slander and often down-right mischaracterise her by making false meta claims about how she "lacks a fun side" and so forth, so that they can uplift other characters at her expense.

The "funny" thing here is, he was 100% honest here, not acting. The acting part was acting as if he was acting.

ok so. I promise more of the Charlotte/family drama deep dive is still coming, I am simply marinating in primary sources at the moment and need a palate cleanser before I subject myself to more of that headache. But something clicked for me recently while reading about Lafayette of all people, and I think it's worth a quick detour before we go back to the sibling trenches..

Here's the thing that got me: Lafayette is constantly described as a "moderate." Augustin is constantly described as a "moderate." And yet these two men are about as politically opposite as it is possible to be within the same six-year window of French history.

Lafayette ends up fleeing the country in 1792; having effectively becoming an 'enemy of the Republic', and getting declared a traitor by the Convention. Augustin is a hardline Montagnard who helped purge the Girondins, signed off on reprisal executions at Toulon, and died voluntarily alongside Robespierre rather than disavow him.

So clearly "moderate" cannot mean one single thing here. The word is doing a lot of unexamined work, and I think it's worth actually taking it apart.

Lafayette's moderation, briefly

Lafayette's moderation is moderation relative to the revolutionary trajectory itself. He wanted a constitutional monarchy, a managed transition, the Revolution stopped at roughly the point where it had already inconvenienced him personally (sorry Lafayette it's true/j). When the Revolution radicalized past that point — when the monarchy fell, when the Republic was declared, when the Terror began — his position essentially no longer aligned with the direction of events (or rather no longer aligned with the political structure that emerged). He did not adapt to the new political structure, and instead moved into opposition from outside it. This culminated in his attempt to resist revolutionary forces militarily and his eventual flight from France after being declared a traitor, when remaining in place would likely have meant arrest and execution. His moderation is a brake applied from above, by someone who fundamentally distrusted where popular sovereignty was heading.

In that sense, his “moderation” functions less as balance within the Revolution and more as a limit placed on it from an earlier political horizon — an unwillingness to follow its logic past a certain point.

This is moderation as retreat from the project.

Augustin's moderation, by contrast

Augustin's moderation was never retreat. He never stopped being a Jacobin. He never stopped believing in the Mountain, in the Republic, in the legitimacy of revolutionary government as an institution: He helped purge the Girondins in 1793. He pointed a pistol at a colleague during that purge, by his own admission. He was present and complicit at the height of the Toulon reprisals, signing orders alongside Barras and Fréron without, as far as the record shows, much hesitation in the moment.

What changed wasn't his commitment to the Revolution. What changed was his read on whether the machinery of the Terror — as actually practiced, in the actual provinces, by actual representatives on mission — was serving that Revolution or destroying it from the inside.

His own language on this is unusually precise for a man who didn't otherwise write like a theorist. He arrived at something close to a formula: that a country which had already been revolutionized could not, and should not, continue to be revolutionized — that endlessly re-applying the Terror past the point of necessity wasn't vigilance, but instead self-sabotage. And he was explicit about the mechanism by which this happened: that nothing was easier than maintaining a reputation for revolutionary zeal at the direct expense of someone else's innocence. He'd watched representatives build careers on denunciation, watched local committees use "counter-revolutionary suspicion" as a vehicle for settling personal scores, watched the whole apparatus of revolutionary justice get hijacked by people who had no actual interest in justice.

So his response, once given administrative authority in the Haute-Saône, wasn't to soften the Revolution's goals. It was to apply something closer to due process within them: investigate whether a denunciation traced back to personal grudge (haine) rather than real counter-revolutionary activity; release the elderly, the pregnant, the economically essential; restore freedom of worship on the grounds that persecuting harmless religious practice wasn't protecting the Republic, it was manufacturing enemies where none previously existed. And, crucially, this came paired with real institutional rigor in the other direction — he annulled a corrupt sale of state property in Nice, arrested his own agents for abusing their authority, pursued anti-corruption measures with the same energy he applied to releasing prisoners. This wasn't generalized leniency buuut a man trying to make the revolutionary government actually function as the thing it claimed to be, rather than as a vehicle for local score-settling and careerism.

This is moderation as internal correction. A believer trying to save the project from the people claiming to defend it most zealously.

The Danton problem

"Isn't this just Dantonism?"

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, because Augustin wasn't the only one moving in this rhetorical direction. Danton and the so-called Indulgents had been making a structurally similar argument months earlier — that the Terror had outlived its greatest necessity, and that mercy and de-escalation had become the patriotic course.

Augustin arrives at a related conclusion from a different angle. In his own administrative summary of the Haute-Saône mission, he argues that one "cannot and must not revolutionize a country already revolutionized." That's a remarkably concise statement of the principle running through his mission: not that revolutionary government should abandon its objectives, but that continuing to apply emergency measures indiscriminately after the emergency had changed risked undermining the Republic itself.

The word "indulgence" does appear in connection with his mission from Augustins own words, though more narrowly than as a "watchword". In the Précis it is used in an administrative context — arguing for leniency toward secondary agents in a specific case — and later accounts associate him more broadly with the language of indulgence. That still creates an intriguing parallel with Danton, whose political language had become inseparable from the word only months earlier, but the stronger evidence lies in Augustin's administrative practice and in his own formulation that a country already revolutionized should not be endlessly revolutionized.

The mention of indulgence, however, makes the apparent parallel difficult to ignore, even if the evidence is stronger in his administrative practice. The irony is striking, as "indulgence" was the very language that, only months earlier — by his own brother's hand — would cost Danton his head.

The difference in outcome wasn't simply about the substance of the argument. It was also about what that argument became associated with politically. Danton's calls for indulgence became entangled — fairly or unfairly — with allegations of corruption and with suspicion that he was challenging the legitimacy of revolutionary government's emergency structures. Augustin's moderation, by contrast, remained narrowly administrative. He never challenged the authority of the Committee of Public Safety or rejected revolutionary government as an institution, and his efforts at restraint were framed as attempts to make its machinery function more justly rather than to dismantle it. Similar impulses toward de-escalation therefore carried very different political meanings depending on who articulated them, when, and in what institutional context.

The retroactive moderates

And then there's a third category worth flagging, which is the moderation that only shows up after the fact. Carnot is the clean example — The Desk-Chair General who, by his own later self-presentation, was 'always quietly horrified by the Terror's excesses', except this horror only becomes documented and vocal once the Robespierres are safely dead and he needs to explain why he wasn't implicated. This performance by The Paper-Pushing Patriot is moderation as alibi, constructed after the political wind changed, and it's genuinely difficult to distinguish from the contemporaneous, documented version Augustin was practicing in real time, with real administrative and social consequences, while the Terror was still very much ongoing and very much dangerous to be seen restraining.

So, in short

When people call Augustin a moderate, I think it needs a footnote every time: moderate in application, not moderate in conviction. He wasn't a Lafayette, trying to put the brakes on the Revolution from outside it. He was closer to a true believer who'd watched the machinery of his own cause start eating people for sport, and decided that saving the Revolution meant restraining the very instrument — the Terror — that he'd helped build and was still, in other contexts, willing to use.

It is a genuinely strange position to hold, and an even stranger one to die for.

So like. Ok. I have pointed out before that there have been two symbols established to be related to Asriel that have been referred to in weirdly cryptic text as having half taken off. And now this, along with asriel not showing up at all

Three occurences of this (asriel symbol being in half) feel pretty significant, so im confident something isnt quite right with him, but he seemingly isn't dead - if we take the Tenna board flower dialogue to mean something about his current state it pretty clearly indicates something different than death. The flower is torn in half, but still stands. (Plus like. He messaged with Kris somewhat recently idk he isnt dead)

(and yes pizza is established to be associated with asriel lol, that dialogue is from his bedside drawer, and he wore pizza scented deodorant and ribbicks call him "smelly boy" bc of it)