Joking aside, how bad do you think the empire really was?
They must have some justification for their horrible experiments. I think they might have been trying to stop abherrants.
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We know that the Red Guard uses Aberrants heavily. And alters memories to make people believe that blood magic makes you vulnerable to becoming one.
I have to believe that there is a connection between this and the Blood Emperor. Is the Red Guard trying to change what magic believes to block off the path for becoming the next Blood Emperor? Is the Red Guard attempting to monopolize both Aberrants and blood magic for themselves? What is the Red Guard’s ultimate goal?
Again, I have no idea of what the answers are. But I’d be surprised if these things didn’t get tied together at some point. Azalea’s approach seems to be, “loose threads create plot opportunities”.
Maybe we’ll learn more as Siobhan learns about shamanism.
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Late thought about this. Why is the Red Guard called the Red Guard? Red is obviously a reference to blood. But are they guarding the secrets of blood, or are they guarding against blood?
It seems extremely likely that they are tied to the Blood Emperor. Whether for or against is unclear, even though they portray themselves as being against. And they discourage people from blood magic and shamanism…why? What do they know that they don’t want people like Siobhan to know?
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Its supposed to be existential threats to humanity. I can easily see that the Red Guard has to be very careful about allowing people’s belief to get out of hand. Having followers of the Raven Queen is one of their concerns when beliefs can change reality.
I also think they are older than the Blood Emperor. Certainly humanity needed an organization like this for a lot longer than past 600 years or so, because that’s only six generations of archmages.
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They are indeed older than the Blood Empire.
The conquest and Third Empire’s reign is one of the examples of things they allowed to happen because it wasn’t part of their “jurisdiction” to handle, which I think is arguable at that point. But even with their vows, it’s not like the Red Guard is truly incorruptible.
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Truly, I have concerns that the blood empire wasn’t very much worse than the current regime.
…I mean, I’m also pretty sure that them being the, “third empire” was intentional, and that makes it a little hard to even question that they were genuinely evil. “Empire” is just the translation of “Reich”.
I would also imagine that it would make hypothetical German-language localization of these books a little tricky.