PrePub - Ascendance of a Bookworm

I thought on it some more... and actually Sigiswald behaviour makes more and more sense to me. He was happily married with the woman he loves, but for the sake of the country he not only agreed to marry another woman, but was also forced to demote his beloved to second wife, and take this stranger he barely ever met as his first wife.

The first wife of the king is the highest position a woman can realistically be expected to ever reach in Yurgenschmidt right now, as far as the general nobility know. And the vast majority of noble women would kill to become the first wife of the king, or successor to the king.

Adolphine didn't actually do anything to earn this highly coveted position, but was just born into it, so it's easy to see why Sigiswald would assume she'd be happy to have stumbled into it.

And to top it off Adolphine was also guilty of only putting in the minimum effort, the same thing she's accuring Sigiswald of.

Of course that does not excuse Sigiswald's behaviour, but it certainly explains it. And in context it is clear that Adolphine is far from guiltless here, after all she didn't put anything but the bare minimum of effort into this engagement either, which coincidentally is one of the things over which she is angry with Sigiswald.

But there's also the motives. Why is Sigiswald doing it? Maybe to secure his own position, but maybe he genuinely does it for his country. We haven't been in his head, so right now we can only speculate.

But with Adolphine, we damn well know she's only acting selfish. She didn't - NOT ONCE - think even in her own head how someone else being Aub instead of her is bad for Drewanchel and how she would be do a better choice than her brother or some other potential candidate. She only thinks that she wants to be Aub.

So yeah... Sigiswald might be a selfish piece of shit, but so is Adolphine. She does the exact same things she hates in Sigiswald and has the same absence of self-awareness. The only real difference, apart from their respective positions, is that Adolphine puts in the extra effort to word her manipulations nicely... unless it's toward her brother.