Easthies and his Knights squad showing up in the anime finally has gotten me thinking again about how tragically ironic they all are. Of the ones we've glimpsed the backstories of, it seems like every one of them is in some way a failure of the system, people who've slipped through the cracks and been hurt in some way, who because of those circumstances are now forced to uphold the very system that left them behind in the first place. Utowin is the most obvious example; he's the Pointed Cap equivalent of a high school dropout who enlists the minute he turns 18. The Pointed Caps in general and his mentor in specific were completely unable to accommodate his needs as a student, and because of that he essentially falls out of the practice of magic. But, because he still needs to play a part in the magical world, he becomes a knight, because that's the only thing he felt like he could reasonably do.
Luluci is something of a different story. On first look you might want to say that the system worked for Luluci. The Knights, specifically Easthies and Vinnana, who hold a lot of power over the Pointed Caps' justice system, sided with her, after all. But beyond punishing the individual who assaulted her and her friend (which as I recall isn't even directly depicted, only implied), there's no active effort to reform the apprenticeship system that put Luluci and her friend into harm's way in the first place. Just like Utowin, Luluci, unable to exist in normal witch society due to her trauma within that system instead becomes a Knight and now upholds that same unjust system that allowed her to be hurt.
Of course, Galga is kind of the most stark example. Unlike the other two aforementioned, the struggles he faces only come about after he becomes a Knight, but it's a similar story. As it stands in the current storyline, Galga's story is about him and Atwert dealing with the consequences of what Ininnia did to him and the Knights' complete unwillingness to help him in a meaningful way. Galga was the victim of an incredibly violating crime that completely altered the course of his life and the best the Knights can do is send him into exile, destroying his life even further because there's nothing better in place to deal with cases like him.
(Side note: I hate Atwert's English name, I miss when he was Atuardo or however the fan translations transliterated it.)
I don't recall off the top of my head it Etlan and Ekoh have any backstory written right now but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a somewhat similar story to Utowin.
And then we come to Easthies. Oh my god Easthies. Unlike the others we really don't know all that much about his past, but his relationship with the Pact paints such a strong contrast with the rest of his squad. Easthies, for all intents and purposes, is the Pact. To him, it is the ultimate moral code, from which nobody should ever stray, even if straying from it would do immense good, because any action outside of the Pact is the start of a long, steep, slope that leads to the return of war magic and the age of strife it created. He is so zealous to the pact that when Vinnana, his literal boss and the arbiter of the Pact in the Pointed Caps' society bends the rules even slightly, he opted to go on a complete rampage to erase the idea from as many people as possible. And being their direct superior, Easthies is probably the greatest force keeping the rest of his squad on the Pact. In this way he comes to embody the perpetual abuse that the system doles out to the people on the fringes, the edge cases who are hurt for no reason because the system is working as intended for most. He does this directly to the Knights that work under him, as the Pact more broadly does to everybody with stories like them.
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