It may have been this, or death. Can you imagine how cruel it is to Lacer to be compelled to potentially unknowingly kill his apprentice? Or a friend that might have twigged on to a Red Guard Secret?
He does seem like the human experimentation type though, doesn’t he?
He laments in this very chapter about his own involvement: “He had gotten himself into this situation when he got involved with the Red Guard.”
So no, that is not an assumption. It is just fact.
Yes, it may have been a choice between mind manipulation and death, but Siobhan already covered that: “Except that for her, she might legitimately prefer to die rather than have her mind tampered with once more.” (Chapter 241.)
Given how desperately she was trying to escape, rather than meekly submit to the memory modification, Thaddeus should at least suspect this.
Yeah I think this event and the betrayal of getting mind raped by your mentor/greatest living model you have should fundamentally jolt S.
I dont think she can ever feel safe with Thaddeus again. Not that she really ever did but yk.
Hmmm can he delete even old anchored memories?
The way Thaddeus described as spider webs hints that they are essentially neurons. He basically removed neurons from her brain and reconnected some.
I dont think he should be able to delete old memories just those at the forefront of her mind.
Which reminds me, she was like on a ton of quicksilver potion and earlier chapter it was described as bringing your memories to the forefront. How will this affect his mind rape/surgery? If at all?
Or am I just looking too much into a one off detail?
If there is a will then there is a way. Cmon now he is always harping on and on about the Way and how magic is basically bending the world to your Will and he couldnt find a weak point in the compulsion?
Hopefully she learns about the oaths before their relationship becomes unsalvageable.
Yes, we know he was forced to do this because he joined the Red Guard and is being mind controlled by them. That doesn’t come even close to making this his fault.
Again you are blaming the person without a choice in the matter other than to stop resisting the oath and kill her instead of the person who bound him with the oath or decided that everyone asking that question needs to die.
He is nearly without a choice here, yes. He is ALSO ultimately responsible for being in the situation that left him with no choice. Period. If he hadn’t gotten involved with the Red Guard, he wouldn’t be in this position.
I can blame both him AND the person who decided that everyone that asks that question needs to be mind wiped or killed, as well as whoever bound him with the oath (who could also be the same as the second person). I’m flexible that way.
Is Thaddeus less culpable than that person? Arguably, yes. But he is still the instrument of the invasion, and we know nothing of the other person aside from the fact that this action was made necessary.
As for being mind controlled? I would argue that he is not. He isn’t forced to think in certain terms; his actions are bound, not his thoughts. He does manage some small rebellion against the oaths (even if it’s incidental rather than deliberate, his forgetting to ask something until it was too late).
It might have been covered by the vows but I think he could have tried steering the conversation in a different direction when it started getting into dangerous territory.
And if he has erased her memory of the fake secret order (since it’s tied to the discovery) it’s really not going to help Damien get “better” x’D (eg: not thinking he’s living in one of his detective novels)
She knows about the oaths.
Sometimes knowing why isn’t enough to forgive. Sometimes it is. We’ll see.
The Red Guard are supposed to be protectors. They’re meant to guard people against the worst monsters, but no one knows what happens within their ranks, there’s a high degree of secrecy involved in everything they do.
How was he supposed to know what they were actually doing and what ends seemingly innocent oaths might lead to, or how they might have escalated?
I wonder how much choice he had in joining the Red Guard in the first place, or in swearing those oaths.
You can’t wholeheartedly condemn someone without knowing what led to that moment. Yes, murder is murder, for example, but you still need to know the circumstances around it. You wouldn’t judge someone who snapped and killed their abusive spouse the way you would judge an abusive spouse who killed their victim.
Lacer is a mystery. His childhood, his background, his war efforts, his feats in killing a dragon, his work with the Red Guard - we know nothing or next to nothing about him. All we know is that he was compelled to kill her and that he bent his vows such that he could take her memories instead.
Where there’s life, there’s hope. Hope she can recover her memories, hope that she can become more powerful, hope that he can break free of his shackles.
Death would be the end of her story.
If he is responsible for something in the distant past like that then Damien is also responsible for getting involved with Sebastian. Sihoban is responsible for pretending to be the raven queen to meet with Thaddeus in the first place.
There are thousands of choices which if made differently could have avoided this and similar situations. That is why it is important to consider intent and if they knew this sort of situation would occur not just blindly lash out at the most visible cause.
The only thing Thaddeus can be held culpable for is choosing to remove her memories rather than kill her.
Yeah I would totally understand if she doesn’t trust him again after this. Thaddeus has just been my favourite character for a while so I hope their relationship recovers.
If nothing else she does have to act normal around him as Sebastien. It could be quite interesting.
Thaddeus choosing to go through with that violation is precisely what I have issues with.
Yes, they are all responsible for the consequences of their own actions.
These are Thaddeus’ actions, thus he is responsible for what he is doing as a result of them. If we were speaking of Siobhan and her actions, then yes, you could trace it back to earlier actions as well, if it made sense to do so. But pretending to be the Raven Queen would not be the action to trace it back to, because this situation is not the direct result of that particular action. She could have been more cautious and not met with Thaddeus alone. That is her most recent action prior to the incident itself that influenced the outcome.
Thaddeus’ most recent action that influenced the outcome is accepting those oaths that locked him into not having many options.
Swearing oaths that are magically enforced is always going to be restrictive, and Thaddeus is smart enough to know that. But we don’t know exactly when or why he swore those oaths, that’s true. It may be that there are mitigating circumstances there. But it doesn’t sound like it from the little we hear of it – he isn’t lamenting about being forced to take the oaths, he’s livid at the restriction itself. That isn’t conclusive, but it is indicative.
We also don’t quite know how difficult it is to fight back against the compulsion of the oaths. Could he have accepted some consequences against himself in order to let her escape? We know he’s trying to fight against the oaths, but we also see that he deliberately shuts that part of himself down in order to perform the task to the utmost of his abilities. That’s seemingly a choice he makes, but is it also forced, or could he have tried to go through with it in a way that risked failure? Would that have been more dangerous to Siobhan, or was he avoiding risk to himself?
On deleting old memories, I don’t think we can definitively come to a conclusion on that but there are two main avenues I can see it going:
There are probably a couple of other variations of the above such as Lacer didn’t mention that he was doing something different to remove long term memories as he was working.
Unless Azalea missed mentioning it in this chapter I’m inclined to assume what Lacer did treated long and short term memories the same which would indicate she could have lost memories from multiple books ago like some of the stuff she did because of Newton’s break or giving Damien the info gathering mission around break events.
Your thought about the quicksilver potion is an interesting one - maybe it made it so her memories were more easily accessible to Lacer too in this process. I’d hazard a guess that it probably should have worn off by the time he started his invasion of her mind. However, if it hadn’t I’d also like to think it probably helped her already exceptional mind to put up the fight it did as Lacer noted multiple times.
This is one of the consequences of this fight that I think will lead to some very interesting scenes over the next few books (possibly not the next book given that seems to be entirely a prequel story)
My guess is it’ll be a severely damaged relationship that they have to continue to make use of as they give each other access to useful information/places.
Then over time it’ll begin to repair as well as suffer some backwards steps possibly culminating in them both being in a dangerous situation and Lacer making some sort of self sacrifice play so she can survive close to the end of this series.
Thaddeus didn’t choose to attack her, he was forced by the oath that mind controls him.
Thaddeus would have taken those oaths years before the book started, probably before Sihoban was even born. It is true that if he hadn’t done this he wouldn’t have been mind controlled into attacking her, but to say he is at fault for not predicting this would happen more than a decade ago is ridiculous.
He does say in the chapter that he has had success at slowly chipping away at what his oaths force him to do but that he can’t resist this bit of his oaths yet. Not only that we see him struggling as much as he can against them anyway.
The only choices he made were to not kill her and not strip search her. Everything else was forced by the mind control oath.
To claim he is still responsible because of the butterfly effect of him swearing the oaths at least a decade ago is farcical. Besides a much more recent choice he made that would have prevented this event was not making Sihoban his apprentice.