#gilgamesh wolfenbach
If you don’t read Girl Genius, this will probably not interest you. If you do, read on…
The scraps of information we’ve gotten about the Heterodyne family basically boil down to this:
1. They were terrifying monsters.
2. Yet somehow, they had a lot of incredibly loyal followers.
3. They did not seem to grasp the concept of empire. They would conquer a place, sack it, and then just… leave. Lose interest. Go home.
4. The dynasty has lasted for around a thousand years. That is an INSANELY long time for a single family to survive, let alone a family that a) doesn’t have a high birth-rate, and b) picked fights with the entire known world on a regular basis.
These four things do not go together.
So… what if some very early Heterodyne, possibly the same one who figured out the secret of loyalty, realized that that they couldn’t rely on their descendents to have the sense of a freaking garden snail (Sparks are like that) and took steps to make sure that they wouldn’t fuck up too badly?
(VERY LONG RAMBLY HEADCANON UNDER THE CUT)
For a Spark with a basic grasp of biology, this wouldn’t actually be too difficult. It might not even have been intentional. Plenty of early Heterodynes were very interested in Nature, specifically the parts of it that bite, sting, or otherwise do terrible damage to squishy humans, we know that. How unlikely is it, really, that one of them decided to improve the bloodline with a spot of Essence Of Predator? A few useful traits borrowed from mountain cat, or wolf, or other sexy murdery beasty ting?
Because (and I say this as someone with much more knowledge of narrative convention than of actual animal biology, so take my speculations with a grain of salt), what the Heterodynes are, as far as the reader can tell, is insanely territorial. They’ll go out raiding, reaving, conquering, what have you, on a regular basis, but they invariably return to their own territory, of which they are intensely protective and extremely (for Sparks) careful of. The fields are fertile, the land is tended, the people (assuming they don’t break the rules) are protected and, insofar as a Spark is capable of doing so, cared for. Even the vilest, maddest, most vicious members of the family, so far as we know, never visited their horrors on their own place. That is what other people’s territories are for!
Incidentally, if the murals of conquered cities are anything to go by (as cited in the novelisation of Zola’s entrance into Castle Heterodyne), they didn’t do a lot of permanentdamage even then. Unlike the works of most Sparks, as far as we know, most creations of the Heterodynes tend to run down, wear out, or shut off after a while. (The Beast being a notable exception, of course) After all, if you kill off the whole herd, or poison all the water, or salt the land, or whatever, you can’t come back again later and do it again.
This might also explain the apparent willingness of the Heterodynes to just recruit stray monsters, Sparks, minions, etcetera. Plenty of herd, flock, or pack animals are perfectly willing to adopt in new members, recognising on an instinctive level that outbreeding is good. And the ones who succeeded in adapting to the Heterodyne’s pack mores would have contributed more ‘team player’ genes to the pool while strengthening the guard over the young and the ability to fight for territory.
Faustus Heterodyne, of course, really brought it all together, building the city and the Castle, but I suspect it started long before that. Look at the loyal armies they kept building up, and the Jaegermonsters. That kind of loyalty doesn’t just happen, it’s a product of knowing that as long as you’re part of ‘us’ you’re relatively safe, and can gang up on ‘them’. All of ‘them’. And I wouldn’t put it past Faustus, brilliant as he was, to realize that this fierce territorial instinct was a huge asset, and to take further steps to make certain that even his most lunatic descendents would, on an instinctive level, return to and defend both Mechanicsburg and the family. After all, the Castle is obsessively devoted to the preservation of the bloodline, and it was both his masterwork and originally a copy of his own brain. It’s not exactly a leap. (This also explains why the Heterodynes don’t seem to have done a lot of serious infighting. Even the Red and Black Heterodynes didn’t actually kill each other, after all)
Now, this would have been an absolute stroke of dynastic brilliance. Given that Sparks appear to be as much of a danger to themselves as to others (which is saying a lot), managing to instil an instinctive level of self-preservation (don’t damage our own territory, don’t eat our young, don’t hunt out our own ground) would give a truly enormous advantage to the Heterodynes over other Sparks. It may also be why the Heterodynes we’ve seen (Bill, Barry, Agatha, etc) seem to have a much stronger temporal awareness than most other Sparks, insofar as they grasp that a) tomorrow will almost inevitably come, and b) the possibility of failure exists and I should consider that before hitting the switch, because c) if I am still alive when tomorrow comes I will have to deal with the fallout of what I did today.
So, even the maddest Heterodynes had enough of a sense of self-preservation to grasp the idea that there is a fundamental difference between winning the game and breaking the board. They didn’t poison their own lands, they didn’t eat their own young, and they protected, insofar as they understood the term, what was their own.
Then the Heterodyne Boys showed up. Thanks to their mother’s influence, they weren’t raised entirely by people completely out of touch with reality, and grew up relatively sane, BUT with a strong learned aversion to the Castle and Mechanicsburg. No wonder Saturn wanted to kill them. They were a clear and present danger to the pack and to the territory, something which would even override his own instinctive desire to protect his young.
But they still had all those protective instincts, the drive to preserve what is ‘mine’. The urge to destroy other predators. The desire to form a pack, or pride, or clowder, or whatever it is they have. Thus the adventuring, the drive to stabilise and preserve, the willingness to befriend and recruit others. They were very bad Heterodynes by Heterodyne standards, in that they abandoned Our Territory And Our Pack, but the instinctive imperatives were clearly there, even if they were expressed incorrectly. Unfortunately, this also led to the Lucrezia Problem. The traditional willingness to accept mates from outside the pack meant the Jaegers, the Castle, and the other inhabitants of Mechanicsburg were too slow to realize that this one was a serious threat, because until now no Heterodyne would have brought in someone who was a clear and present danger to the territory (so far as Heterodynes understand the concept of danger), and Bill didn’t think of the Castle as ‘mine’ and wasn’t interested in protecting it.
Buuuut.
BUUUUUT.
Someone else did. Someone else had a strong grasp of temporal inevitability. Someone else was incredibly territorial. Someone else grasped the concept of recruiting, building a ‘pack’, protecting the young, and maintaining a territory.
Klaus Wolfenbach acts exactly as one would expect a moderately sane person with this built-in set of instincts to do. It’s repeatedly stated in canon that this isn’t normal Spark behaviour. In fact, he takes the unprecedented step of rounding up the offspring of other Sparks and important people and protecting and teaching them. The original Castle Wolfenbach is one of the four fortresses almost within hailing distance of Mechanicsburg. Surely, over the centuries, there’s been at least some Heterodyne by-blows. Powerful Sparks with strong survival instincts would naturally wind up in positions of power, and while known offspring would have been welcomed into the fold, unknown ones would have grown up thinking as the Heterodynes as monsters. As enemies. So it makes perfect sense that Klaus, the strong Spark and next-door neighbour, has a few Heterodynes in the family tree somewhere. Probably not enough to pass the ‘Test of Blood’ or smell like Family to the Jaegers, but enough to produce someone with the right instincts to appeal to them.
And then Agatha is exposed, and Agatha is a Very Good Heterodyne indeed. Agatha instinctively responds positively to the Jaegergenerals, despite all the terrible stories. Agatha is deeply protective of any person, place, or creature that she considers hers. Agatha has no instilled dislike of the castle or the town. She shows up in Mechanicsburg and has an intense, visceral ‘mine’ reaction literally from day one. MY people. MY castle. MY monsters. She goes from zero to ‘I will hold my city or die fighting’ in a couple of days. Now, Nurture obviously plays its part, as well as Nature, but Agatha was primarily nurtured by Adam and Lilith. Constructs. Monsters. Quite certainly without realizing it, Barry gave Agatha something approximatinge a traditional Heterodyne upbringing, in which she was raised and loved by ‘monsters’ whom she trusted implicitly. Of course she wasn’t put off by Mechanicsburg’s monster collection and insane but devoted Castle. Both her nature and her nurture combined to tell her ‘this is Home. This is MINE’.
A strong support to this idea that the Heterodynes built in these instincts on the genetic level, rather than simply conditioning them in early, is that Agatha displays no Mongfish tendencies at all, aside from happening to sound like her mother. And she should! The Mongfish family specialised in genetics. Their breeding programs are notorious. They’re a family of profoundly selfish survivalists who barely tolerate their own offspring. And all that heredity, that Lucrezia put so much faith in when she planned to possess the mind of her own child, hit the Heterodyne DNA like an exquisite vial of poison hitting a stone wall. Agatha is So Pure A Heterodyne that she’s immediately identifiable by smell. She’s so strong a Heterodyne that she regained control of her mind from Lucrezia within minutes when one of her people was in danger. She confuses and frightens Lucrezia, because Lucrezia doesn’t have those instincts and doesn’t understand them.
Agatha and Gil bond almost immediately,because Gil also has his father’s probably-Heterodynish tendencies. And how does Agatha know that? How does she go from resenting to liking him within a day? Aha, I will tell you.
It’sZoing.
Zoing is a construct. A weird, not very strong or very smart construct, that Gil made when he was very young. A ‘normal’ Spark would have discarded him years ago. But Gil hasn’t. Gil loves Zoing. Zoing is one of his people, his pack. He even apologizes to Zoing for letting Wooster do his special job, making tea!
That interaction, right there, is why Agatha takes to Gil. And Agatha’s friendly overtures to Zoing, and her protectiveness of her little dingbots, are probably a big part of why Gil likes her so much. They’re giving each other the right subconscious cues, telling each other without realizing it that this is another person who is capable of loyalty and trust, who loves and respects what a more selfish person would despise. (This is how you make a love at first sight plot work. I saw you and you were beautiful? Not love. The first time I saw you you tactfully pretended to like a dumb birthday present, showed affection for the people around you, then ran back into the fire to save your dog? That’s at least grounds for immediate attraction)
This also applies to Tarvek, incidentally. She doesn’t show any sign of genuine romantic interest in him, as opposed to playing along because she needs him, until she sees him with Violetta. He may be a treacherous weasel, but he does have someone he loves and wants to protect. He gets a lot more attractive to Agatha once she has real reason to believe that he’s capable of loyalty and affection.
Their biggest single problem is that Klaus doesn’t know any of this. Klaus only ever sees Agatha when she’s a) deeply distressed, or b) under Lucrezia’s control. He has no idea that she’s the kind of person who would treasure an early construct or a silly little clank or love her adoptive parents. He believes that she’s like her mother, that Gil got suckered in by big eyes and vamping, not a much more reasonable instinctive reaction to someone being Nice and Smart in a world where that’s a rare combination. Klaus doesn’t know that the Boys’ admirable traits were actually Heterodyne traits (or that his may be as well), or that Lucrezia and her daughter are nothing alike except in voice, or that Tarvek is also capable of genuine love and loyalty.
But Gil does.
And when GIl’s instinct to protect MINE comes into conflict with his father’s equally sincere desire to do the same, well, that’s when it all really goes to hell.
ngl it’s pretty annoying to me when the response to any female character existing in proximity to a mlm ship (canon or not) is either “boo she sucks I don’t want her to be a love interest and get in the way” or “don’t worry she’s their mean lesbian bestie” like have you tried being normal about women for once
tired: the smart, sassy, motherly, ultracompetent girl cleverly arranges for the two boys to get together
wired: the two boys get together by desperately trying to fix at least one of the many, many things that are wrong with this hilarious disaster of a woman (they fail)
#girl genius#I mean I think they’re ALSO going to get together with the girl in that because she’s the main character#and I don’t know that they’re really trying to fix her so much as to make her worse#but yeah there’s definitely an enemies-to-lovers subplot between her two male love interests in that comic#that has nothing to do with her except that their rivalry over her is what forced them together#(they were enemies from before they met her not because of her)
she’s really mostly a “funny to bump into you at this conference” to their relationship than anything else. like 99% of how they feel about each other is based on their PRE-EXISTING RELATIONSHIP. they were friends and they bought thought the other betrayed them and they care and they have a rivalry and Agatha is really mostly just like. a setting. like sometimes they bond over her and sometimes they compete over her and sometimes she brings out the best in them and sometimes she brings out the worst in them. she also cares but mostly is busy with her own stuff. she also sees their vastly overcomplicated relationship and couldn’t give less of a shit so long as they’re not killing each other / sabotaging her.
it’s a FANTASTIC dynamic
(like, it’s incorrect to say that “their rivalry over her” is what “forced them together”! them both having someting to do with her is what caused them to run into each other! they found their way towards being together from there based purely on being each other in each other’s vicinity! Agatha was a convenient stoplight for them to be stuck at! their rivalry is not even particularly over her! they care about her and each other too much to really do romantic rivalry with any degree of investment)
