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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6852305" data-attributes="member: 2067">For me, the conqueror angle helps set up his tragic flaw. He didn't get furious over Tatyana because of true lost love - he never even really loved her. He doesn't know what "love" really is. He just wanted her. He's possessive, desperately so, and conqueror-Strahd sets that up nicely. Tatyana isn't the cause of her fall (none of that victim-blaming!), she's just the precipitating event, the thing he wants the most that he is never allowed to have, the last thing in his life that refused to love him, and not because of some flaw in her, but because of some flaw in him that he refused to acknowledge or deal with.He didn't plunge his entire realm into the depths of darkness because he was emotionally hurt, he did it because he thinks he owns them. That works well with the tone of the adventure - nothing escapes. Strahd clings to everything, a miser to the last. That drives home the possessiveness and the arrogance. That's not incompatible with him defending the land at some point and falling at his failure to win over Tatyana, it just means that he didn't swing from "nice guy" to "vampire overlord" overnight. He always had that "vampire overlord" in him. He never confronted it, never redeemed himself, always blamed other people, and then The Dark Powers just drew it out.That said, I like the timeline where he sees and covets Tatyana and THEN makes the pact - her as the precipitating factor in his fall is a pretty key element of the story, and removing her from that moment gives his obsession less impact. If her presence was a bigger event in his life, his obsession makes sense (he died for her, even if she didn't want him to, never asked him to, and is repulsed by the idea of it).</blockquote>

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