Yknow how we always joke about Tarvek being the Damsel In Distress?
He is, but more specifically, he’s The Villain’s Beautiful Daughter.
Think about it! He starts out corrupted by his family’s influence, he ends up The Damsel In Distress often due to his own family’s machinations (or even his own machinations), he is ‘redeemed by the love of the Lady Heterodyne’(while Othar is sometimes wildly off with his trope assignments, he’s still good at this), he has critical information about the villain’s plans due to his connection with them, but gives that information to the hero(lowercase h) after his change of heart. It just. It all fits.
I’m starting to think Othar is right to trope assign everyone he meets. I mean, the whole deal with the Heroic Freestyle fighting style almost proves that your narrative role effects what happens to you; what you can and can’t survive. I think Lucrezia was getting at that when she was explaining how she was going to marry Bill; ‘it must be something about their philosophy’. She was the Villain and the Villain’s Beautiful Daughter, and they don’t get the same kind of plot armor as Heroes.
But Othar’s problem is that he sees the narrative assignment as the whole of people’s character, but they are actually different roles that people can fall into and slide between.
I’m sorry I’m just losing my mind about tropes in gg
I had a dream where a jagermonster from girl genius was teaching me how to cook a chicken breast. Step 2 was “grapple with the moral quandary of eating another living thing.”
you have to admit, “a Spark fugue” is a much cooler name for it than “adhd hyperfocus”
Anonymous: There's more than a few Jagers who believe that if people know that they can read and write, they will be promoted and given *shudder* PAPERWORK to do.
(x) That’s actually pretty reasonable during the period where most of them were working for the Wulfenbach Empire. Especially since they went out of their way to get on Boris’ bad side, and he’s basically He Who Controls the Paperwork. When Boris has a grudge against you, a sham of utter illiteracy suddenly stops being a matter of maintaining your aesthetic and becomes a critical matter of survival.
It’s amazing how unimportant Bill Heterodyne is to the story of Girl Genius.
He’s the Heterodyne. He’s the biological father of the protagonist. He love and romanced and married the main antagonist.
And he is almost never mentioned as a solo entity. He’s either one of the Heterodyne Boys, or he’s one of Agatha’s parents. In both cases, he’s the least relevant member of the duo. I don’t think we have a single comic panel of Bill that is just Bill.
How often do we see Bill’s name not immediately followed by “and”?
So far as we’ve seen, he’s done two things on his own that had any real impact on the story: he married Lucrezia thus bringing her into Mechanicsburg, and he fathered Agatha.
He’s a plot point. A footnote.
The Jägers say Agatha is more like her uncle. Lucrezia is upset at Bill for not rescuing her, but he’s one of a list of many men who failed to rescue her; she is terrified of Barry.
But even discounting Bill’s role in the story structure, ignoring the fact that the narrative revolves around Agatha who has never met him, thinking of him as a person in the grand scheme of the universe…
The Heterodyne boys left their mark on Europa. Lucrezia definitely made her mark. Barry did too, for what he did with Agatha.
Bill…was there.
Hell, he wasn’t allowed to go to England because he’s the Heterodyne, so Barry went instead! The only time we’ve ever seen the boys be split up in an adventure, and Barry is the one who actually went and had the adventure!
It’s just fascinating to me that Bill is, even historically, the most and least important Heterodyne to ever live.
After Tarvek becomes the Storm King (officially) (finally) it’s in his best interests to carry around a wasp-eater, just in case there’s any revenants lurking in his court who are still trying to act on their final orders from Lucrezia
Except that there’s quite a few official breeders, now, and it would be a political affront to favour one over the other, so he has one from each breeder and rotates them daily (if he just so happens to pick the one that matches his outfit for the day, that’s all the better)
But the wasp-eaters really REALLY like him and have a habit of escaping from their cages and following him around, and it kind of becomes his Thing, to have at least one on his shoulder and another couple following him wherever he goes (and of course the Lady Heterodyne has one too, that she’s never seen without)
And the court collectively decide that if two of the three rulers of Europa have pet wasp-eaters, so must they, because it’s clearly high fashion now - obviously this is a Bad Thing for the revenants and Lucrezia’s supporters, which makes it a Good Thing for everyone else (technically, anyway)
But literally everyone at court has a wasp-eater, and it’s become one of the things the Palace of Enlightenment is known for (that you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a weasel) and it becomes so synonymous that they’re permanently associated with it
All his official portraits have a weasel in then somewhere, people embroider them on clothes and carve them into locally-made furniture and machine parts (you can buy plushie wasp-eaters in the Palace gift shop)
And they kind of become a symbol of the new Valois legacy - originally a tool to fight against the Other, now associated with peace and nobility and stability and unification because of their links to the court and the Palace
Tarvek Sturmvoraus, Storm King, direct descendent of Andronicus Valois, consort of the Lady Heterodyne and Baron Wulfenbach, Weasel King
This is his legacy
Tarvek hates it, Agatha sympathises, Gil finds it hilarious and will never shut up about it ever
I love the notion of the Wasp Eaters becoming his equivalent of QEII’s corgis. This is hilarious.
AU where Aaronev somehow sucked EVEN MORE and he tries to transplant lucretia into Anevka a lot earlier, when shes like 10. Tarvek doesnt have the knowledge to build her a new body, or to keep her alive, and the circus isnt in town so they dont have that advantage either. Tarvek, in a panic at the impending death of his only ally, figures that siblings should be similar enough to fascilitate consciousness transfer, and manages to get Anevka in his head too. He’s still in charge, but shes there and intact and can still help him out until they have the chance to make her a new body. Just. Girl Genius but Tarvek also has Anevka giving snarky advice and occasionally taking control of his body, like a benevolent version of lucretia with Agatha, until they manage to get her her own body
ALT
