This conversation could be about a lot of things, but when I wrote it I was in the middle of rereading Ascendance of a Bookworm, Part 4 Volume 2. I love this series and I aspire to be the kind of worldbuilder than Miya Kazuki is. She does an absolutely phenomenal job setting up her world and showing it to us in a natural way.
This bit of dialogue is not in the series, but it is based off an event that happened in the book where one of the main character, Rozemyne’s, retainers proved that keeping him on was not a good idea. I won’t go into it too closely in case you haven’t read the series and want to, but Rozemyne had two choices in front of her. Both would bring dishonor to both him and his family and that isn’t exactly something she wants to do. The choices she makes in this situation are the ones that will cause her the least trouble, but they also leave this preteen child in a better position that he would have been had she made other choices to get rid of him.
I don’t know if he will ever appreciate that his punishment could have been far worse and that the dishonor on his family could have been far worse, because he destroyed his own life before he even entered his teens. This prompt is based off the idea that maybe he didn’t see it, but maybe in the future someone in his family line did. And it’s not a shock to anyone reading the series that Rozemyne is going to be a well known name, so the idea is that they are talking about her and the speaker is explaining how Rozemyne affected his or her life.
I am probably making it out to be a bit more than it is, but the thought that he completely ruined any chance of ever doing what he wanted to do in life at such a young age and he still has never told her he was sorry for what he did just keeps hitting me.
When I started rereading this book, I went through the pages of characters and translated the year in school everyone who was in school was to how old they were and my jaw just kept hitting the floor. The idea that they are at the ages they are making the decisions they are in life to say nothing of our oft times impulsive main character barreling head first into things she does not understand and making decisions that change the lives of those around her at very young ages is very different from what I saw in people of that age when I was that age and what I see in people of that age now, though I think perhaps my assessment in third or fourth grade that sixth graders got older every year is still holding true and kids these days are considerably less carefree than kids of the same age where when I was a child and young adult.
Obviously while I used this post to go on an on about my inspiration and I do love this series quite a bit, the idea is not to go in and take the actual situation, but to use this dialogue as an inspiration. Who in your story got a very well deserved comeuppance at a young age? Who gave it to them and years later, who is glad that it happened because it made things better than they might have been had it not happened?
