Spoilers for TLOVM season 4, Downfall, and Matron lore from campaigns 1 and 3 below
Musing about what would have prompted the mortal Matron to break off her relationship with Gideon/The Whispered One to pursue godhood on her own (because that is 1000% what actually happened there) and jotting down some thoughts about their differing approaches to power.
"I referred to the Strife Emperor as our leader, and she corrected me. She said, 'Our ruler.' And I said, 'What's the difference?' And she said, 'A ruler goes on top.'" And he points to the stones, "'And a leader goes underneath, gets under something, a town, a family, a cause.' A person who leads 'finds a way to hold the weight that others cannot hold, to be sturdy and strong.'"
The Matron is a leader: her role isn't to dictate when any given person should die, it's to make sure they reach the other side safely when they do, and Laura's flavor text for Maddening Darkness in Downfall vividly illustrates that the burdens she places on Vax are light as a feather compared to the ones she herself carries.
In that darkness, anything here is going to hear wails of grief, racking sobs, the sound of somebody grieving over the loss of a loved one. It's all of the sounds that I hear every moment of every day as people die.
The Whispered One, by contrast, can't wrap his brain around the concept of leadership (hence the vague declarations of 'gods bad' without any coherent thesis for what he actually thinks they should do), and so establishes himself as a singularly cruel and tyrannical ruler: in the moment he attains the power he's sought for five centuries, his first order of business isn't doing any of the oh-so-altruistic things he claims to have wanted that power for, it's to find the people who tried to stop him and grind them under his heel on live TV.
The Matron locking him out of her own plans on the grounds that he couldn't be trusted with the kind of power was clearly the objectively correct choice there, but if the Whispered One was in fact someone she respected and cared for once upon a time, realizing that about him had to have hurt. What shattered the illusion? Her relationship with the previous god of death likely contributed to her viewing divinity in terms of leadership and understanding that free will isn't compatible with micromanaging reality to spare 'deserving' mortals from experiencing anything unpleasant ever; did she go to her partner with these realizations, only to find herself coldly rebuffed by someone who didn't want to hear her sincere engagement with the problems he claimed to want to solve, only his own self-centered tantrums about the Dawnfather not giving him a pony? Who took so much perverse satisfaction in cursing the gods' supposed darkness that he was actively hostile to any hint of candlelight? How quickly did he come to hate the woman he claims to have loved, to have respected as an equal, for daring to have her own journey and form her own opinions and exercise her own free will in ways that ran counter to what he wanted?
