Pretty sure Luitpold was pretty upfront about being an Emperor needing an Heir.
Wilhelm III is also Luitpold's grandfather*, who was the first Reikland emperor in the current succession.
I'm not saying she isn't doing good things and that it's bad for the Empire. But I would completely understand Luitpold if he was absolutely livid when hearing the truth like the Eonirs wouldn't be pleased.
No, but it's wrong to marry someone who probably loves you sincerely (because she hadn't really much to offer) under false pretences.
The post I was answering to compared Heidi ´s scheme and our bluff of the Eonirs😉
Well the only practical way she could have married Luipold under 'True Pretences' would have been to be born a noble.
Irrespective of what anyone in the thread thinks, members of the Empire's nobility invested in maintaining their inherited social status would 100% see Heidi as the bad guy and Luitpold as an innocent victim, and we do need to account for that when planning and discussing.
True. But it doesn't change the fact that she lied about her entire backstory to the man she's married to.
And that's the important thing, apparently. I guess Heidi's true crime is striving above her station while being born to the wrong parents.
No, it's lying to the man she's marrying about all her life. I'm not saying she's evil, and maybe in her position I would have done the same. It doesn't change that she married a guy under false pretences. I'm not saying she's evil, but she's not in the right here.
I dunno, become a crime boss with a golden heart, create a commercial organisation like the EIC (who is headed by a unmarried woman), marry another Ranaldite? She's an intelligent and powerful person, who certainly had lots of money from her days as a « vampire ». She could have done many things.
I wouldn't read too much into it. It's all about how you frame it, and if we look at it purely from the relationship lens, then yes, things can be questionable, just as if we look at every other character, we could find something to object to there. It's a credit to Boney's writing skills that everybody has interesting motives and strengths and qualities.
The more.. morally ethical thing Heidi should have done was.. create a …criminal... organization? I'll ignore that one. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of creating a successful commercial organization, and 'marry another Ranaldite' is... ugh.
Hence the « golden heart » thing. I mean by that that she could create a Robin Hood-like organisation, who uses illegal methods to better the life of other people.
She became empress, and before that managed to impersonate a vampire for 15 years while meeting other vampires. With a little help or Ranald and her fortune she definitely could have created a commercial organisation (and maybe even use it to support her criminal organisation). And what about marrying a Ranaldite? If she wants to marry someone, a person of the same religion as her isn't a bad option and she could tell him the truth about her past.
Also requires you to be pretty cynical about Shallya, or at bare minimum take a rather firm stance on unresolved questions like "how much influence do gods have over their magic once it's out in the world?"
The actual morality and ethics of her actions don't matter to the current argument. We all knew from the start that if she's revealed she'll get kicked out. Nobody is arguing over whether people will forgive her for it. People are arguing over the real life ethics of it, which I'm starting to get sick of.
Ah yes, the more morally ethical option is to repeatedly conduct significantly more morally dubious acts like stealing and create an organization to facilitate such activities. Or even more proper, stay within her proper social class that she was born into and marry someone of the same strata as herself. Next we'll assert that it was morally wrong for Heidi to have ruled under the false pretenses of a vampire for thirteen years and unjustly collect the taxes that were the rightful ownership of that vampire.
One also has to consider how hard such 'good deeds' are when the vast majority of individuals in the Empire pretty much will never hear about or get life-extension magic from her. Heidi might have made it sound easy, but they had to have been very difficult to pull off. At the very minimum it had to be significantly more exceptional than.. I'm not sure what the baseline is really.
Even if Luitpold loves her anyway, if the circumstances in which her identity is revealed occurs in such a manner that it's revealed to more than the Emperor, then she's out regardless. Nobles don't care about morality, they care about the status quo and their bottom line. A peasant and a charlatan sneaking her way into the throne is unacceptable and unforgivable.