You know who ALSO was widely beloved by the Winter City half-wits? Alyssa. Right up to the point people saw her turn into a demon and fly away.
This is deeply silly and you know it. Reductio ad Alissam. Being popular and well-loved is actually a good thing. We know Alissa is bad
in spite of, not because of, her popularity. The late King Dowager did nothing even remotely as awful as
the other things that Alissa did.
Ryn's dad was an absolute fuckwit who had two daughters to raise, a kingdom to run, and a racial schism to fix, but that was too much like work and we can't have that, so the responsibility-shirking motherfucker decided to go boar hunting instead. And by "boar hunting" I mean lazying about on a bridge while Elyon did all the actual work. And he couldn't even do THAT right. That boar deserves a medal. In fact, fuck it, here it is:
I dub thee Sir Bacon, removal of useless fuckwits. You were too good for this kingdom.
Ryn's dad is basically a Leofric, but on a larger scale.
The idea of monarch-as-glorified-office-worker is relatively modern and, for this period, extremely silly. They are not there to write letters, fill out forms, and give orders every second of their waking lives. Monarchs exhibit their prowess in war and, when there's no war, they hunt. That's just a Thing That They Do. It's part of the cultural edifice of monarch as war leader, a way to demonstrate their warrior bona fides to their nobility and their people, a way to network with that nobility...and it's also a way for them to have fun, because people like to have fun. Yes, it's a potentially dangerous activity; this is, of course,
the Bronze Age, and lots of things are potentially dangerous activities, and no less normal because of them.
At no point is the late King Dowager described as only ever being a hunter, or never being interested in actually making decisions that thus went badly because of his supposed laziness. Elyon does not say that he abdicated his responsibilities either parental or monarchical, nor does he describe him as indolent. He even points out that hunting is one of the main causes of accidental death for aristocrats, and he fondly remembers the late King Dowager's hunts with him.
Meanwhile, we've got you over here, praising the boar that killed a basically normal boreal elven monarch and father and that, in so doing, consigned Etheryn to decades of abuse and over a decade of actual sexual slavery to her own sister.
Leofric isn't in the same ballpark. There's no one in the game that portrays the late King Dowager as being a turd. The game text goes out of its way to portray him as a good and kindly man with the intention of giving Ryn a poor-orphan backstory and tugging the heartstrings about how lovely her life could have been with her lovely parents if only they hadn't died before their time. By comparison, there are actual PoV characters who complain about what the Marked Merk Mercs are - or aren't - doing. The difference should be pretty obvious.
Ryn's non-dickgirl grandmother literally starved the dickgirl grandmother and her own entire harem to death, for the incredible crime of checks notes not wanting to fuck her. They've been restless ghosts for the past fuck-if-I-know-how-many-centuries because of her.
As has already been discussed, Synneva wasn't imprisoned for the sex strike. She was imprisoned because she and the other die-hard druids refused to convert - in fact, as her dialogue reveals, she didn't want
any elves to convert to the worship of Lumia. But the druids remaining in power and keeping the rest of the realm from converting was obviously a non-starter. Since the worship of Lumia was what would save them and their children from annihilation, while the wyld trees had successfully managed to do exactly nothing during the war while their people died in droves, the Lumian elves were not terribly interested in staying druid. And you can imagine how the rest of the elves felt about the druids, who had had a lock on power and wealth and religious control for centuries and yet could do nothing to keep elves from being slaughtered by the Wraiths...and who insisted that racial self-immolation was better than trying to worship the goddess who had turned back disaster.
Atheldred and Synneva - and the Godswar-era druids and Lumian elves as a whole - did terrible things to each other, certainly. They were also living during the middle of the apocalypse and faced extremely difficult choices. Even within the context of Crypt Dungeon, which is related mostly from Synneva's point of view, Atheldred isn't portrayed as a complete monster. She's portrayed as someone that Synneva loves, despite everything that happened between Lumians and druids, and the game outcome of reuniting them is a good thing with the best consequences. One would imagine that an actual Lumian elf would hold Atheldred in even higher regard, as the woman who saved their civilization from extinction.
