Panther wrote: ↑Sun Jun 10, 2018 8:29 pmI would enjoy to learn more about Rose : she's captured young when she tries to visit Euchre at the magic school but Raine's mother frees her . Then she says , in the mansion , she was belonging to Saria . This puts a lot of questions :
How Rose has been caught again , and finished as Saria's slave ? If she has no collar , why she hasn't tried to fly away when Trace is become mad after Saria's death and begun to kill keidrans ? Rose's different eyes means she's under a mind control spell ?
We don't know that Rose was Saria's slave, or how exactly she got from where we last saw her in her original appearance to where she is now, but we do have some clues.
First, we don't actually know whether Mary freed Rose or not. While
this comic might imply that, it's an april fools day comic so it's not canon. It does have the alt-text "No, but seriously, Rose ends up okay", and obviously she *does* end up ok, but there's nothing saying whether it happened in the specific way that non-canon comic described. (It *could* have happened that way, but it doesn't *have* to have.) And along those lines in particular, while the sketches are also non-canon unless stated otherwise, Tom's description for
this color sketch certainly seems to be written (at least to me) as if he's intending it to be canon. At the very least, it doesn't contradict anything else we know, and seems to fit fairly well with the in-comic portrayals.
After that, Rose's next canon appearance is in
the Dragon Masquerade side comic. Unfortunately, you can't read this one for free, but in short, Rose shows up again in the company of Saria. Notably, it's quite obvious that her and Saria are very close friends, and Rose is referred to as Saria's servant, but not as a slave (and is wearing regular clothing, rather than a slave's drab stuff, and no collar). Again, it seems to fit with the description of the sketch linked above.
Apart from that, of
the other sketches that Rose has appeared in, a number of them also feature Saria in contexts that again seem to fit with the depiction in TDM and the above sketch of Rose as being both Saria's servant and close friend. Again, sketches aren't necessarily canon, but the theme seems to be pretty well established. Note again regular clothes all around, and no collar in any of those. Overall, if we take all of the above at face value, the picture seems to be of Rose having been rescued from a templar jail by Saria and having become Saria's servant and good friend, but NOT having been a slave. (Note that she still doesn't have a slave collar in the current comics either, and that she uses the word 'employed' to refer to her state, suggesting that she's not a slave now either. Personally I just put the appearance of her eyes down to her being old.)
This leaves the period between Saria's death and now as the major remaining unknown. The interesting question, of course, is how Rose ended up in somewhat of a position of authority under Grand Templar Trace, given that Trace did *not* seem to have been a person of importance at the time of Saria's death. After all, Rose was Saria's servant, not Trace's. Especially given Trace's attitudes, how did she end up working for him? The only real comic evidence we have for that period are Rose's statements in
this comic, which aren't exactly a complete explanation of anything. If anything, they raise more questions - if Saria died before Trace came to power, how could she be the reason Rose is "still here"? After all, given that timeline this mansion wouldn't even have belonged to Trace at the time of Saria's death (given that
Nora's narration here doesn't seem to imply that Trace was a duke yet), yet that line almost seems to imply that Rose had already been a feature of the mansion at that time.
If we didn't know better, that'd almost make me wonder whether Saria was actually from a noble family - specifically, whether she was the (only?) child of the *previous* duke of Edinmire. I've wondered a bit in the past how Trace managed to snag that position, and his having married into the line could have given a pretext for him to claim the title if the previous duke died sometime between Saria's death and Trace's rise to power, in addition to explaining how Rose could have been associated with the mansion even before Saria's death. Unfortunately for that theory, Saria's
character page entry kinda nixes the idea of her having been nobility.
Absent interpreting that line of Rose's literally as her having been part of the mansion's staff already, one might interpret "still here" as "still with Trace". Which, of course, invites the question 'why?' What about Saria would have resulted in Rose staying employed by Trace and coming to such a position of authority and trust under him? The one thing I'd speculated before was that Trace may have kept Rose on due to her being a sort of piece of Saria to him, or something like that. It probably wouldn't have been instantly apparent just how twisted Trace had become, either, so perhaps Rose similarly stayed out of respect for Saria - to take care of the man she had loved. And later, once it had become obvious just how thoroughly off the deep end Trace had gone, it probably wouldn't have been particularly *safe* to rethink that choice. Under the circumstances, I doubt anyone could blame Rose for simply riding things out as best as she could. She's at least reasonably safe in a personal sense where she is, and she does seem to have at least a little practical power simply as Trace's proxy. If she cherishes any hopes of using that power, or whatever influence that her history with Saria might give her with Trace, to try to restrain his excesses, this is the only place she could do that.
I do hope we get some more time with Rose. The
chapter title page seems to indicate that her and Raine will be spending some time together, at least, and one might hope that that would include Rose telling Raine her story. Right now, speculation is all we really have.
