💎 Oswald from Rune Factory 5 🪶
I participated in the 20th Anniversary Collab hosted on bksy!
Below the cut, you'll find my thoughts about Oswald.
Oswald is a character who grew on me over the past few years, and he became one of my favorites without me even realizing it. I enjoyed his dry snark and how he cares for Ludmila when I first played RF5, but since he became a major character in my fic, Who Remembers a God, I've come to appreciate him so much more.
Though Oswald in canon is an orientalist caricature (complete with racist donut lips...), I love building complexity into his character and exploring how he and his past fit into the greater world of Rune Factory and its history. To me, he's an old man who was one of the many people victimized by the war with the Sechs Empire, but unlike most, he managed to turn his situation into a profit.
How does one become known as a Bandit King? By leading a kingdom of thieves and smugglers. It's never clarified exactly how large his band is, but I like to think his network is similarly-sized to SEED, or at least it was in its heyday.
At Oswald's peak, before he began working with Gideon, I imagine he was nearly singlehandedly responsible for all of the smuggling trade between the Empire and Norad during the last decade of the war. Trade certainly wasn't legal between the warring nations, but Sech oligarchs and Noradian nobility could count on him to get phlogiston engineering to the rune-rich, rural nation and magical, enchanted materials to the rune-starved, urban nation. Whether the goods he smuggled were shipped between mutally consenting business parters or obtained through not so ethical means for specific buyers, he got them through the border.
Sechs citizens, Earthmates, and people of annexed territories who wanted out of the Empire could also count on him and his people to help them defect or escape. The reason I have this particular headcanon is because I wanted to give Gideon a fact-based reason for him to trust Oswald specifically, and not just pay off any old criminal.
By his own admission, Oswald doesn't consider himself a hero or even an anti-hero, even if he did objectively help a lot of people (and possibly even saved hundreds of Earthmates from Ethelberd's implied genocide). He's just a man with standards and a knack for business. At the end of the day, he was providing a service with the network he already had — it just made good business sense.
Helping Gideon with his "dirty work" follows the same principle. With the war over and trade reopened, Oswald's smuggling empire was reaching its end even before he meets the MC. Gideon's dirty money benefitted Oswald in two ways: it funded his downsizing operations and paved the way to let his "employees" get fired or retire. Criminals who volunteered retire would be paid off by Oswald and recieve leniency in their trials, thus allowing them to return to polite society with enough money to have a fresh start and a relatively clean record. Anyone who couldn't or wouldn't go willingly would go through the justice system without additional aid.
Oswald was likely planning a way out for himself and the remainder of his bandits even before SEED raided his base. It is a tragedy that the system he supported for so long ended up betraying him so brutally. Yes, most of his bandits have robbed countless travelers and peddle illegal drugs, but I imagine his base also housed those bandits' families or people like Ludmila, whose entire existence is criminalized due to the difficulty of finding people who would consent to her feeding on their dreams. Thankfully, Oswald and Ludmila end up with relatively happy endings (Ludmila gets a new life in Rigbarth, Oswald gets away with whatever he has left), but I can't help but feel we got a consolation prize instead of something better.
Then again... if we had gotten a better ending, I wouldn't be having so much fun writing about him. 💜🪶💎
