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Dietrich von Lohengrin: puppeteering only goes so far
In regards to the character of Dietrich one of the thoughts that keeps cropping up again and again when I consider it is just why he fails time and time again to manipulate Radu. Not that he doesn’t fill Radu full of biothread and fixed parts and so on but there is, right till the very end, an essential part of Radu that he just can’t control because at no stage can Dietrich make Radu believe that his actions are honestly what he wants to do and therein Dietrich fails. As a manipulator he seems to somehow fall on his face completely when it comes to Radu Now this could be for one of two reasons, either because Radu is especially resilient to Dietrich’s charms or because Dietrich’s just not half as good as he thinks he is. Either is a possibility.
In the case of the former possibility, that of Radu being particularly resistant to Dietrich’s manipulation this could easily be the case because while Dietrich is purporting to support Radu’s goal of changing the system, he’s asking Radu to do that by betraying the one person he seems to have genuine feelings for. If Radu had been able to sabotage the meeting in Carthago in such a way that would start a war without involving Ion in proceedings events might have transpired quite differently, especially since Ion himself seems to have fairly strong anti-terran tendencies anyway. In fact, had the wheel of fate been turned just a few degrees in another direction the end result might easily enough have been Ion painted as the extremist leader with Radu quite gladly following behind him, and occasionally making one of two ‘helpful’ suggestions of course. Granted, part of the problem there is that while Radu evidently holds the idea of revolution in enough esteem to risk joining a terrorist organisation he hasn’t quite managed to or perhaps deliberately hasn’t bothered to weigh up his devotion to the cause against his love of his tovarăş. In fact, by the look of things it’s never occurred to him that he might find himself in opposition to Ion possibly because Ion is so blatant a racist to begin with. So from Radu’s perspective there really shouldn’t be a problem at the end of the day since all he needs to do is get the revolution started and then it would be a given that his tovarăş would side with him.
In opposition to this, Radu’s devotion to Ion seems like a very good reason for Dietrich to try to get Ion killed right away. From Dietrich’s perspective Radu killing Ion would signify that Radu had committed himself wholly to the cause, though of course they are both fighting for different causes, even if Dietrich himself doesn’t quite seem to grasp the nature of the cause he’s supporting anyway. Nevertheless, to have Radu cut all previous ties that have bound him and do so willingly really scores a point for Dietrich’s manipulative ability. It would signify that Dietrich has succeeded because what greater proof of his control than to have his puppets act as he would have them entirely willingly. After all, he’s managed it before hasn’t he? Except he hasn’t.
Esther as far as Dietrich’s concerned must be counted as a success, he manipulated her and she danced merrily to his tune without a second thought. It was phenomenally easy for him to manipulate her so why then should things suddenly be harder with Radu? Because at the end of the day Esther had been doing what she was going to do and would have done with or without his contribution. Esther was the terrorist leader fighting the vampires, regardless of whatever moral and practical opposition there might have been. She would have fought even if Dietrich had never arrived to tag along. Which is to say that while Dietrich may well have influenced details such as how exactly an attack might be coordinated and he may have potentially given Esther some false motivation so that she could deliberately ignore any nagging thoughts she might have had which suggested that what she was doing wasn’t all that great an idea at all, he wasn’t ever persuading her to do something she wasn’t already prepared to do. The only difference Dietrich probably made was in the manner and rapidity of their attacks. Those attacks were still going to happen and regardless of the when and how, Esther would have seen them through anyway. A quiet Hungarian nun who wasn’t going to fight the vampires wouldn’t ever end up leading a terrorist group regardless of how persuasive one of her associates might be after all.
Esther then was a false victory for Dietrich. He hadn’t persuaded her to do something against her will at all and had probably just helped her fine tune the things she intended to do already. This also would be the reason that she could make a conscious decision to revaluate her own sense of self rather than just complain that she was blameless and that it had all be the result of Dietrich’s manipulation. When she leaves for Rome Esther doesn’t cast herself as the victim who has been acted on by other parties but as someone who has made some decisions that she’s no longer sure were right. Dietrich hasn’t really done too much at all and Esther has just done what she was always intending to do, which is exactly what she carries on doing.
Quite possibly Dietrich regards Esther as his greatest success, entirely without irony since he seems to be quite angry at the failure of his manipulations when it comes to Radu. And if he does believe that he’s succeeded quite brilliantly with Esther of course he’s quite aggravated when he’s suddenly met by someone, with a very similar specification, who fails to bend to his will. From his perspective here again he has another young, angry, potential terrorist on his hands and from that similarity he expects that the course of events should follow in the same vein. Granted, Esther has killed before but either Radu has as well or there’s something in his willingness to that suggests that he wouldn’t balk at it anyway so with that comparison there’s no reason for Dietrich to suspect that events wouldn’t unfold as he expects them to. Unfortunately for him that predictable chain of events rides on his ability to manipulate Radu into not only acting as Dietrich would have him act but also into believing that said actions are the best recourse.
This is where Dietrich’s powers of persuasion would really come into play but strangely enough he doesn’t quite seem to have any. He doesn’t attempt to persuade a reluctant Radu that Ion should be glad to be martyred for the cause, he doesn’t suggest that perhaps if not martyred then Ion is in effect betraying everything he personally believes in by attempting his mission and that as a good tovarăş Radu ought to take mercy on Ion and put him out of misery, he doesn’t even attempt to convince Radu that Ion never cared about him and is a self-serving coward. Instead what Dietrich does do is attempt to threaten Radu into obeying him, which is not by any means the mark of a good manipulator. If you have to intimidate someone into doing something then there’s no conceivable way that they think they’re doing it of their own volition and this is where Dietrich really seems to miss the point. He can of course stick Radu full of wires and carefully sew him back together again but what he can’t do is create in him that devotion that I’d hazard a guess that people like Süleyman inspire. Nobody wants to follow Dietrich or believe in him precisely because riding on one presumed success it doesn’t seem to occur to him that fear creates enemies while love creates loyalty. This is a man who’d founder with the Riddle of Steel for centuries.
Added to Dietrich’s lack of persuasion when it really counts, he’s also set himself up for a fall because he’s asking Radu to make a value judgement and place his loyalty to the cause above his love for Ion, which isn’t the sort of decision that Esther faced. Esther was simply encouraged to carry on doing what she was doing since she’d already made her choice that protecting her mother-figure and fellow terran by not aggravating conflict wasn’t as important as killing Gyula. Radu on the other hand hadn’t made any such decision, got forced into acting for Dietrich’s benefit and then found a way to both save his tovarăş and royally screw Dietrich’s plan up entirely in the process. Now whether Radu did that out love for his tovarăş or because by that point he just wanted to make Dietrich pay is debatable but the end result is pretty much the same.
Dietrich then doesn’t inspire loyalty or devotion and doesn’t even try to because he doesn’t understand the need for it. While it would have been better for him to have an ifrit begging on his knees to be sent off to massacre whole swathes of the Methuselah population, Dietrich instead takes great delight in petty displays of strength where he forces Radu to do things that he evidently doesn’t want to. And this really proves nothing other than that Dietrich’s the bigger school yard bully. Which quite evidently concludes that Dietrich isn’t quite the arch manipulator that he fancies himself. He certainly seems capable of manipulating circumstance and ancillary detail but when it comes to people themselves he seems to fall far short of the mark, though of course his failure may stem from a similar source to Seth’s since neither of them really understand human nature due to the flawed lens of their own perception.
In the case of the former possibility, that of Radu being particularly resistant to Dietrich’s manipulation this could easily be the case because while Dietrich is purporting to support Radu’s goal of changing the system, he’s asking Radu to do that by betraying the one person he seems to have genuine feelings for. If Radu had been able to sabotage the meeting in Carthago in such a way that would start a war without involving Ion in proceedings events might have transpired quite differently, especially since Ion himself seems to have fairly strong anti-terran tendencies anyway. In fact, had the wheel of fate been turned just a few degrees in another direction the end result might easily enough have been Ion painted as the extremist leader with Radu quite gladly following behind him, and occasionally making one of two ‘helpful’ suggestions of course. Granted, part of the problem there is that while Radu evidently holds the idea of revolution in enough esteem to risk joining a terrorist organisation he hasn’t quite managed to or perhaps deliberately hasn’t bothered to weigh up his devotion to the cause against his love of his tovarăş. In fact, by the look of things it’s never occurred to him that he might find himself in opposition to Ion possibly because Ion is so blatant a racist to begin with. So from Radu’s perspective there really shouldn’t be a problem at the end of the day since all he needs to do is get the revolution started and then it would be a given that his tovarăş would side with him.
In opposition to this, Radu’s devotion to Ion seems like a very good reason for Dietrich to try to get Ion killed right away. From Dietrich’s perspective Radu killing Ion would signify that Radu had committed himself wholly to the cause, though of course they are both fighting for different causes, even if Dietrich himself doesn’t quite seem to grasp the nature of the cause he’s supporting anyway. Nevertheless, to have Radu cut all previous ties that have bound him and do so willingly really scores a point for Dietrich’s manipulative ability. It would signify that Dietrich has succeeded because what greater proof of his control than to have his puppets act as he would have them entirely willingly. After all, he’s managed it before hasn’t he? Except he hasn’t.
Esther as far as Dietrich’s concerned must be counted as a success, he manipulated her and she danced merrily to his tune without a second thought. It was phenomenally easy for him to manipulate her so why then should things suddenly be harder with Radu? Because at the end of the day Esther had been doing what she was going to do and would have done with or without his contribution. Esther was the terrorist leader fighting the vampires, regardless of whatever moral and practical opposition there might have been. She would have fought even if Dietrich had never arrived to tag along. Which is to say that while Dietrich may well have influenced details such as how exactly an attack might be coordinated and he may have potentially given Esther some false motivation so that she could deliberately ignore any nagging thoughts she might have had which suggested that what she was doing wasn’t all that great an idea at all, he wasn’t ever persuading her to do something she wasn’t already prepared to do. The only difference Dietrich probably made was in the manner and rapidity of their attacks. Those attacks were still going to happen and regardless of the when and how, Esther would have seen them through anyway. A quiet Hungarian nun who wasn’t going to fight the vampires wouldn’t ever end up leading a terrorist group regardless of how persuasive one of her associates might be after all.
Esther then was a false victory for Dietrich. He hadn’t persuaded her to do something against her will at all and had probably just helped her fine tune the things she intended to do already. This also would be the reason that she could make a conscious decision to revaluate her own sense of self rather than just complain that she was blameless and that it had all be the result of Dietrich’s manipulation. When she leaves for Rome Esther doesn’t cast herself as the victim who has been acted on by other parties but as someone who has made some decisions that she’s no longer sure were right. Dietrich hasn’t really done too much at all and Esther has just done what she was always intending to do, which is exactly what she carries on doing.
Quite possibly Dietrich regards Esther as his greatest success, entirely without irony since he seems to be quite angry at the failure of his manipulations when it comes to Radu. And if he does believe that he’s succeeded quite brilliantly with Esther of course he’s quite aggravated when he’s suddenly met by someone, with a very similar specification, who fails to bend to his will. From his perspective here again he has another young, angry, potential terrorist on his hands and from that similarity he expects that the course of events should follow in the same vein. Granted, Esther has killed before but either Radu has as well or there’s something in his willingness to that suggests that he wouldn’t balk at it anyway so with that comparison there’s no reason for Dietrich to suspect that events wouldn’t unfold as he expects them to. Unfortunately for him that predictable chain of events rides on his ability to manipulate Radu into not only acting as Dietrich would have him act but also into believing that said actions are the best recourse.
This is where Dietrich’s powers of persuasion would really come into play but strangely enough he doesn’t quite seem to have any. He doesn’t attempt to persuade a reluctant Radu that Ion should be glad to be martyred for the cause, he doesn’t suggest that perhaps if not martyred then Ion is in effect betraying everything he personally believes in by attempting his mission and that as a good tovarăş Radu ought to take mercy on Ion and put him out of misery, he doesn’t even attempt to convince Radu that Ion never cared about him and is a self-serving coward. Instead what Dietrich does do is attempt to threaten Radu into obeying him, which is not by any means the mark of a good manipulator. If you have to intimidate someone into doing something then there’s no conceivable way that they think they’re doing it of their own volition and this is where Dietrich really seems to miss the point. He can of course stick Radu full of wires and carefully sew him back together again but what he can’t do is create in him that devotion that I’d hazard a guess that people like Süleyman inspire. Nobody wants to follow Dietrich or believe in him precisely because riding on one presumed success it doesn’t seem to occur to him that fear creates enemies while love creates loyalty. This is a man who’d founder with the Riddle of Steel for centuries.
Added to Dietrich’s lack of persuasion when it really counts, he’s also set himself up for a fall because he’s asking Radu to make a value judgement and place his loyalty to the cause above his love for Ion, which isn’t the sort of decision that Esther faced. Esther was simply encouraged to carry on doing what she was doing since she’d already made her choice that protecting her mother-figure and fellow terran by not aggravating conflict wasn’t as important as killing Gyula. Radu on the other hand hadn’t made any such decision, got forced into acting for Dietrich’s benefit and then found a way to both save his tovarăş and royally screw Dietrich’s plan up entirely in the process. Now whether Radu did that out love for his tovarăş or because by that point he just wanted to make Dietrich pay is debatable but the end result is pretty much the same.
Dietrich then doesn’t inspire loyalty or devotion and doesn’t even try to because he doesn’t understand the need for it. While it would have been better for him to have an ifrit begging on his knees to be sent off to massacre whole swathes of the Methuselah population, Dietrich instead takes great delight in petty displays of strength where he forces Radu to do things that he evidently doesn’t want to. And this really proves nothing other than that Dietrich’s the bigger school yard bully. Which quite evidently concludes that Dietrich isn’t quite the arch manipulator that he fancies himself. He certainly seems capable of manipulating circumstance and ancillary detail but when it comes to people themselves he seems to fall far short of the mark, though of course his failure may stem from a similar source to Seth’s since neither of them really understand human nature due to the flawed lens of their own perception.