I love the Mighty Nein but their allergy to nuance is deeply annoying. (I could stop there; that's a statement that covers a variety of sins lol). The particular thing I'm complaining about is their insistence that the whole Assembly and everyone in it is 100% evil when they had only met some of them and one member actively helped them and was actually really nice. Oremid Hass, the guy that really likes cute fuzzy animals and told Jester she was feeding Sprinkle the wrong food? Yussa's former student? That guy is a member of the Cerberus Assembly! I'm not saying he's flawless, he's probably got his skeletons, but the guy seems relatively ok. (And frankly, the M9 can only judge people so hard, their baggage is very big lol).
Ludinus and Trent are evil, but that doesn't mean they are ALL the same level of terrible! Yet Beau and Caleb seem to completely forget/ ignore this.
Also, they treated Astrid ascending to Trent's vacated position as some sort of mark of her dubiousness which was so incredibly irritating. Caleb declined the position for various reasons, some good ones based on his mental health, and some stupid ones like supposed integrity and honor or whatever when in fact if he took the position maybe he could have had access to the inner workings of the very corruption they wish to eliminate. I think that level of subterfuge would have been bad for his health so I'm glad he turned it down, but judging Astrid for it is ridiculous. Especially when you can be her friend and companion and help steer the decision making if you get involved. (Judging by the limited info offered by the Astrid& Essek interaction in C3, it's difficult to tell the level of interaction but it still seems deeply complicated and like they haven't spent much time together, which is so annoying.)
I think it's a decent example of the difference between reform vs tear it down, burn it to the ground and start over mentalities. I think Beau and Caleb (or maybe Marisha and Liam as DnD players) are stuck in anarchy mode and can't think about a more realistic painstaking reform of the Assembly rather than just tearing it down. Several different NPC's that we trust have mentioned infighting and not all of the members agreeing with Ludinus. Those are what we call in the business: Allies. At the very least for this situation if not longer.
Seriously, once they get rid of Ludinus, they have a real chance of making the assembly into a half decent organization. A big problem with it was that long lived bastard siting in the middle encouraging bad behavior. Part of the set up of the Assembly was supposed to be like a mini cold war of checks and balances of each member keeping the others in line, but Ludinus was too powerful, with him gone, the power structure would be more even, and the checks and balances might actually work. Now, they're still all wizards of various dubious natures, but at least that's something.
And there's a fresh crop of wizards in the world that have taken an ethics class via Caleb, the second wizard in the world after Allura to consider Ethics in Wizardry! So eventually there will be new blood in the fold and maybe some of them will have taken Caleb's classes!
