"...what?" I'm sure you're saying. "Pickle has literally never voted for Johann romance. What gives? Has he been replaced by three gherkins in a trenchcoat?"
Well, here's the thing: my top choices didn't really pan out. The potential I thought I saw in Oswald, way back in October 2019, didn't materialize; he's cool and all, but neither his social action nor his romance action won much in the way of fellow enthusiasts. At some point, I need to admit that I was jumping at shadows and overly reading into things, and I think that point is now. And while Roswita is adorable and I love her, again, her romance action didn't seem to really win hearts and minds.
But Johann? Johann's zeroth date won me over.
Mathilde has protagonist powers up the wazoo. Her magical talent expresses itself potently and evenly, not restricting her magical growth at all, and the upshot of that is that she's butting up against potential Lady Magister status at barely thirty-five. She spent longer as a
Journeyman than she has as a Magister; her growth has been nothing short of meteoric. She's capable of gaining remarkable skill in any field she chooses to set herself to, in a fairly short span of time. She's got a god in her corner, one of the greatest books of magic ever written in her vault, and the some extremely significant movers and shakers in her social calendar. And, most significantly, she has seized every opportunity to leverage her resources into opportunities to gain more resources. She is, in short, a quest PC.
Johann has none of that. He has a magical handicap, a distinct lack of highly-connected friends as far as we know (save only for Gehenna and, well,
us), and can't roll a fucking boxcar to save his
life eyes. Here's what he's got:
"Probably do to most, but you need to be at least theoretically capable of Alchemy to take the class." He keeps his tone light, but it's clearly artificial.
"Ah." You remember a few of your classmates who ran into similar roadblocks. Most of them are still Apprentices to this day.
"Yeah. I was lucky that my Master gave me the chance to prove myself instead of dropping me right into Perpetual. I decided if I was going to be stuck at one third of a Gold Wizard, I'd have to be three times as good to break even. Eventually I had begged, borrowed, and stole enough coin for my first Gilding. Got made Journeyman on the spot. Who needs alchemy?"
Johann is
scrappy as fuck. We already know they get along great and collaborate well, but above and beyond those bare essentials for a relationship, that is the sort of attitude that I think can really generate a positive dynamic with Mathilde: challenging her by example. Mathilde has the classic Grey Order pathological need to appear in control at all times -- and, in fact, she really
is in control of the situation at most times, because she's incredibly talented, invested her gains in more gains, and has a committee of extremely dedicated nerds planning out her career path. But Johann
isn't in control of the situation, seems to almost never have been, and
hasn't let that stop him. To quote the We:
But not-We are only ever one not-We, but they still hunt, and they hunt such that if they were other-We, we would consider it mating-suitability.
Johann hunts
magnificently, despite being only one (or, to use his words, only one-third). I consider that mating-suitability. He has my vote.
