Sovieshu's three potential wives and why all of them will inevitably fail. {Remarried empress rewrite}
Compared to characters like Heinrey, Sovieshu is actually a decent emperor (for the most part), he had a positive relationship with King Wharton when the latter was still alive after the two countries temporarily established peace when Heinrey was still a prince, and instead of wasting time complaining about Navier marrying another man, he has to force himself to move on and focus on the current mana shortage in the country after the mines start to run out and Hiltonian nobles are buying up every remaining conductor possible before the supply permanently tanks.
Sovieshu is a good emperor, but is he still a good person?
Navier of Trovi. The most suitable bride for the empire
Despite often being thought as the perfect match for Fahlgren's emperor, these two would only work best as friends, their marriage was what doomed them to fail in their partnership to begin with.
Navier and Sovieshu are on two sides of the same coin. Navier is completely incapable of viewing herself as anything other than perfect, she can do no wrong, nothing is truly her fault, and only she can repair any problem the empire may come across, if anyone thinks otherwise than they are simply ignorant of her struggles.
Sovieshu on the other hand is aware that his actions are negatively impacting other people, most notably the women in his life. Unlike Navier, he is the one completely in charge on the country as a whole. His first wife might hold more respect since she's not the one enraging nobles and running the pure bloodline upheld for so long into the ground, he has to live with the knowledge that he isn't a good person and thus, he has the ability to at least feel bad for what he did.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that he actually tries to GROW from those mistakes. There's a difference between feeling bad for yourself and learning from yourself. That's ultimately what makes these two so similar, they might be savvy as diplomatic nobles but as people, they are novices. Navier has no reason to even think that she could be selfish and Sovieshu is too busy feeling sorry for himself, which ironically, they both resent each other for.
Navier thinks that Sovieshu is a foolish man and a gullible husband, a man who was so easily swayed by the allure of a pretty little thing he found in the woods despite claiming in their youth that he would never treat Navier the way his father treats his mother, but now that her infertility is well known by this point, all of his morals went right out the window. She's the one who has to act as a PR for her husband while he's out trying to uproot everything, they ever stood for together in favor of placing the blame for the country's mistreatment of slaves on her.
Sovieshu thinks Navier is a cold and bitter woman who would rather allow her friends to continue business as usual with collecting innocent people like pets then give Rashta the benefit of the doubt. He knows that Navier is more ticked off that Rashta is a slave rather than the fact that she's a mistress at all and he thinks its mighty hypocritical for her to not consider Rashta as one of her people when one of Nian's slaves is currently working in the palace as a maid. She's the one who can't understand that the empire still needs an heir whenever she likes it or not, and he needs to put his country first at the end of the day.
Both of them are right and wrong, and they are both so dead set on the idea that one of them is completely in the right and the other is completely in the wrong that nothing truly gets fixed, not the slave problem, not their terrible personalities, and not their marriage. Even if they never divorced, they would still be sleeping in separate bedrooms.
Rashta, the empress with no surname
The idea of Rashta and Sovieshu's relationship sounds romantic on paper, key word: on paper.
This marriage was the most disturbing compared to Sovieshu's other options for wives. Unlike Navier and Beatrice, women he might not get along with but still holds some sort of respect in mind for them, he doesn't think he has to owe Rashta basic decency, after all, why should he? HIS family never owned slaves so the fact that he WANTS to love bomb her in the first place is evidence enough to him that nothing is technically wrong with their relationship. Sovieshu in this case is like a lot of female leads in OI with slaves as a mechanic in the narrative, he isn't whipping Rashta, he isn't branding her with the symbol of House Vict, she isn't telling him NOT to call her his pray and she's not actively fighting him off when he wants to sleep with her, so there's really nothing wrong here.
Except, no, there is EVERYTHING wrong going on here. Sovieshu only really liked Rashta during the early beginnings of her stages of grief when she was still in the denial stage. As reality starts to inevitably creep back in, Sovieshu himself starts to feel weird calling Rashta prey (which in my universe, is his reasoning to explain why he suddenly stopped calling her that if she claims he always calls her his prey) He notices eventually that Rashta is disassociating from reality every time she has to perform her "duties as a royal mistress" for him and this leads him to eventually stop sleeping with her all together. He used to find himself excited by Rashta because she appeared to love him the way he always wanted Navier to love him, she wanted to do regular couple things like going out to a picnic, eating dinner together, cuddling up close during the cold, raising a family, etc.
But she was never eager to do any of those things because she genuinely wanted to, she was eager to do those things because they allowed her to live in denial that everything was getting better even though it wasn't, she didn't want to raise her daughter WITH him, she just wanted to have the right to raise her child at all. Sovieshu can't feel like he's in the right anymore the longer he is being forced to acknowledge the truth that he is no better than Lotteshu or Alan, Rashta might as well be his kept slave at this point.
But of course, Sovieshu doesn't take this as a wakeup call. He does as he always does, feel sorry for HIMSELF. He still doesn't see Rashta as an actual person, the things he did to her might as well just be extensions of his own pity party. Rashta isn't her own person, she's just reduced to the slave Sovieshu took advantage of, effectively erasing her as a person by giving all the power to Sovieshu, it was never about her; it was always about the man holding the other end to her golden leash. Who cares what she thinks, Sovieshu said he felt really bad for what he did, and she should just shut up and be grateful that she got to be the empress at all.
Beatrice Arwen, could everything be better in another life if he chose her instead?
As one of the main candidates for marriage back when Sovieshu was still a crown prince, it sounds logical, right? Everything is destined to go wrong between Navier and Rashta, so why wouldn't a relationship with a mocked noble girl end up working out?
To start off, Bea thought that Sovieshu was handsome exactly one time when she was a young teenager, she never really had any close feelings with him to begin with, if anything she's rather intimidated by him. Sovieshu also just finds her to be too annoying in general, and he'd probably disparage at all the things she'd like.
There's only one timeline where Sovieshu would willingly marry Bea and that would be a timeline where Bea rejects Rashta's offer to run away with her after being framed for cheating on the emperor, Bea cherishes Rashta but she doesn't know what will happen to them if they get caught and only agrees to give her friend the tools needed for escape. Unfortunately, without an additional person to help protect her and fight off the bandits, Rashta is killed and Glorym is lost.
Sovieshu lost his daughter, Beatrice lost her best friend right after losing her entire family, both are in a dangerous headspace, and the empire still needs an heir. With Bea as a previous marriage candidate and lady in waiting to his previous two wives, Sovieshu basically says "Fuck it" and makes the rash decision to marry Beatrice purely out of sentimentality of what was familiar of the good times, since Bea has no title to fall back on and is relying on staying in the emperors good graces if she wants to continue living lavishly, Bea relents and becomes the third empress in Sovieshu's reign.
Technically, the title of Bea's entry isn't entirely wrong, she is the wife who would end up having the closest sense of "stability" with Sovieshu, but the marriage isn't good, far from it actually. Similarly to his first marriage, these two don't actively try to do anything as little as having dinner together, after the birth of their one and only son, that's it, there's no reason to try anymore unless the heir dies young. Bea lives the rest of her life unconfrontational and unremarkable, she isn't popular with the people nor is she popular with the nobles in her social circle, everyone knows that the only reason she is an empress is because of a very special set of circumstances that brought her there.
Just like Rashta, Bea isn't remembered as her own person. She's remembered as three things: The last wife of emperor Sovieshu, the mother of emperor Osis IV, and her reputation as the white elephant of Roth. The years pass as she watches her son grown up to eventually marry Navier's adoptive daughter, Lari, she becomes a grandmother to the future emperor, Jules, and passes away before she can see the birth of her first great grandchild. Though she is mostly unrecognized for much outside of her relation to Fahlgren's emperors and her appearance, some say she also got along well with Glorym after she secretly returned to become a knight.
