#olaf craig

[morgenstern16]

how Richard viewed the Erebonian Empire

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I think one of the things that makes Trails’s writing so captivating as a series is the sheer of amount of details they put in about the characters and the setting for players to figure out without them directly spelling out. 

Elliot’s anxiety is a great example of this. He’s extremely anxious and cautious about stuff for a 16 year old boy. You can chalk this up to his personality, and it’s pretty fitting considering he’s the team’s healer. But sometimes he says lines that feel like there’s more to it than that. He’s not just anxious, he feels like he needs to be MORE careful than his classmates. 

In CS2, you find out why. With the civil war breaking out, the Craig children become immediate targets for the Noble Alliance because of their father’s position. What more, you also find out his dad has made it VERY CLEAR that he’d sooner leave them to die than forsake his military duties. The reason Elliot is so hypercautious is because he was raised knowing he could be a target to get at his dad, and if that happened- his dad wouldn’t do anything to save him. Which is a pretty startling fact, considering up to this point Olaf Craig has been shown to be an EXTREMELY loving father. 

But in CS3, the final piece is revealed. Olaf knew what happened to the Osborne family (minus the crazy ishmelga stuff). He knew Osborne tried to do the right thing by trying to interfere with a plan to commit a massacre, and got his family killed as a result. And because Osborne responded by going off the radar for awhile instead of alerting what happened, it resulted in the Hamel Massacre and the Hundred Days War - both of which were very awful tragedies with  many innocent civilians losing their lives. 

Olaf Craig knew this could happen again. That there might come a time where he’d have to choose between his family and his duties as an honorable soldier. So being a man who always opts to face reality, he let his kids know such a situation might occur. Elliot and Fiona probably grew up on vague stories of a family that got killed in retaliation. That they too might become targets one day, so they had to be vigilant or they might die. And Elliot, being a kid that didn’t fully understand everything, responded by becoming extremely anxious - because what kid WOULDN’T be if their dad kept telling you how people might murder you one day?

This whole thing is left in as clues and subtext, without them directly spelling it out. And there’s a lot of examples of this happening in trails and it’s just cool as heck.