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Maren, Alden, and Irving are our trio of predecessor characters, and they all dealt with their positions in life differently
Maren hated what being the Grandmaster did to Irving, and the way it made her less of a person and more of a position, so she left.
Alden has a role that he can’t escape. There’s a constant push and pull between Alden-the person and Alden-the-Archmage, and in a lot of ways being a mage denies him opportunities and actions he wants to take as a person, because if he did take that action, his role as Archmage would subsume his existence as a person.
and then there’s Irving.
Irving has been eaten by his role. Irving is his role. Irving occupies his role with such skill and such conviction that there is never any doubt that he wants to be here
...but. Did he really have a choice?
If Gwyn is anything to go by, the answer is no.
for the last third of the game, Gwyn gets power, influence, and accolades she does not want and does not know how to manage, but is in no position to refuse.
But what is she going to do, not rescue her father? Refuse the help from the local Grettanians in the middle of a war? She almost didn’t march to Asravel’s capital, but it turns out that she actually had to, because the entire city had been converted into horrible zombies. We don’t really get a clear picture of like, if Orlov’s plan from there involved an apocalypse spell courtesy of the giant green vortex or if he was just going to roll over the land with a torrent of zombie shaped abominations against nature, but for Gwyn that question is a little academic.
The important thing is that she had to go over there and stab the guy.
And she’s still stuck once the war is over. The promotion she got turns out to be permanent, and now all of the friends she made on campaign want to work with and talk to her about the rebuilding efforts. She’s the savior of Veroa, and well on her way to making the title of Grandmaster in her own right.
And there’s nothing she could do about it.
She could leave, maybe. Abandon her friends, leave her home behind, move somewhere far away.
But even if she could bring herself to rip her own heart out like that, doing so would kill her.
It would kill everyone.
Because Leonid wasn’t stopped easily, or by a large group. They were stopped by the people around her, and they succeeded by a very narrow margin.
If Gwyn hadn’t been there, everyone would have died.
And when the forces backing Leonid come back for another try, that will still be the case! Something in the shadows has a grand plan, and Gwyn’s friends will rally around her, and, if they are very lucky, they’ll stop the shadowy plot before the death toll gets too high.
That’s how Srpgs work- the fate of the world hinges on a combat unit held together by duct tape, prayers, and, crucially, their mutual trust in One Guy.
if Gwyn does not personally tilt the scales of fate, then destruction will win, the world will burn, and whatever horror she’s running from will follow her to the ends of the earth.
That’s the thing about being charged with the fate of the world- the world is everywhere. You can’t leave it behind.
Sooner or later, the death of the world will always be the death of yourself.
It’s an impossible situation to be in. It’s also just Irving’s life. It’s been Irving’s life for the last 25 years.
He stopped Empyrean from ending the world. He succeeded by a very narrow margin
And once that’s done, he sails across the sea, joins the Order of Eternals, and is slated to be the next Grandmaster before he’s even done been sworn in.
Sure, he didn’t have to do that. Or, at least, that’s what Alistair says.
But that would mean leaving the fate of the world in the hands of the people that just failed to stop a major threat. It would mean coasting by on the hope that the thing that killed his brother was just a freak accident that won’t happen again.
It would mean living every day looking over his shoulder, wondering if he’s going to be struck down by some grand design he has no way of knowing about
and of course he can’t do that.
So he joins the Order, and sees it go from a secret cabal barely anyone knows about to a popularly known, internationally recognized disaster response group.
We don’t really know the details of how that happened, but we have a pretty good idea of how magic works, and that, quite frankly, is more than enough to keep Irving busy. Hell, it’s enough to keep three Irvings busy.
You see, the dark deity setting has a problem. A big problem.
That problem is that it only takes one evil wizard to destroy the world. Just one.
And it doesn’t even have to be a particularly evil wizard, either! They can just be misinformed, or overconfident, or simply ignorant.
And then they cast the wrong spell and everyone dies.
This would be nervewracking enough on its own, but humans have this whole “mortality” thing where old people die and new people are born to replace them.
This means you have a constant influx of new mages that have no idea what they’re doing. And, because there’s new mages, there’s always a chance that a particularly dangerous specialty will turn up, like soul magic or rifts or something
(Cassandra is an example of this- she’s an otherwise unremarkable mage whose natural talents lie in spirits, something that Alden thinks is so precarious he asks her to stop talking to ghost animals entirely)
the world would really benefit from some sort of international standard that makes sure that all young mages get training (so they don’t explode something on accident) and take an ethics class (so they don’t explode something on purpose). But if such a standard exists, it’s clearly not doing its job- Alden has to warn Cassandra off of spirits personally, Aya has never heard of ethics in her life, and Saxon is entirely self taught. It’s very lucky that Saxon can just shoot lightning and not do something *really* dangerous, like blood magic
(this is, in a sense, saying that it’s lucky that Saxon is and Adept. However, the guy responsible for figuring out the freaky soul staff in the first game was an Adept, so Adepts can have dangerous specialties, it’s just rare)
and the problem is getting worse. If you split the mages in your army into an older group (that’s Alden, Cailith, Laurai, Haoran, Mashal, Tal’dera, and Khamari) and younger group (Arthur, Aya, Cassandra, Saxon, and Zuhair) a clear trend emerges. Of the older group, only Alden is really noted as having a perilous amount of power. (Khamari could probably make a mess too, but it doesn’t really come up). But in the younger group, Zuhair alone is the only “typical” caster- even Saxon has a plot relevant amount of raw power at his disposal.
That’s a 400% increase in dangerous casters (if you ignore Khamari), and a change in overall ratio from 2/7 to 4/5 (not ignoring Khamari)*. That’s insane. It’s a wonder Irving even has time to sleep.
This probably didn’t happen overnight, which means that the frequency of major incidents has been going up throughout Irving’s entire career in the Order.
You can also make draw some conclusions just from the fact that the Order has the position it does in international politics.
Cailith says that the moon elves consider Irving difficult to control, but easy to rely on. Emran is so sure that the Order can repel a demon invasion that he plans around it. And Saxon, a random guy from a small town, knows that he can call the Order to check out some spooky ruins.
Since Irving’s one (1) specialty is finding problems and stabbing them, this indicates that there have been a large number of highly stabbable problems, often enough for the Moon Elves to have an opinion on it, recently enough for Emran to consider it relevant, and big enough for Saxon to have heard of it.
That’s… kind of horrifying.
Irving has the political acumen of a shrub, and a considerable amount of soft power in the form of trust and legitimacy, and the mismatch is drawn directly from the fact that his skills as a warmaker are necessary often enough to give him influence he doesn’t know how to handle.
(this might also tie in to why the Sun Elves are so willing to think the worst of him- if there have consistently been an unusual number of disasters, and the Order has consistently benefited, then that would indeed be very suspicious. Unfortunately, Halamar seems to have forgotten the part where you actually investigate suspicious things and don’t just jump to conclusions)
So between all that, I think it’s safe to say that Irving had even fewer options then Alden did when it came to making life choices.
Irving’s choice, such as it is, was to lean into it
where Alden decided that he might have to be the Archmage, but that’s not all he is, Irving decided that if he had to be the Grandmaster, the Grandmaster was damn well going to be him in turn.
He moved in to the Order’s greatest fortress and made it his home. He married a fellow inductee, and when that fell through, he focused on his kids and brother in law- the people that were still there. He made friends from the Order’s contacts, and made his friend group into the Order’s network.
He’s entangled himself so thoroughly that he lives at the center of a nexus where love, duty, and selfishness are all the same thing.
When you keep poison from the water you drink, is that duty or selfishness? You saved the others that drink from that well. Maybe you were even thinking of them when you took action. But can you really say it was a matter of principal, when that choice marks the difference between your own life and death?
When you keep your home from burning, is that love or need? You love your home because it has cradled you. It is more then a place to rest because you chose to love it. Your life is here.. you don’t want to leave it behind.
When you look after the people you command, where do your motives end? You love them because they listen to you. Their lives are in your hands, and you have to live up to that trust. Filling those obligations means you must care for them as people, and practice your love for them. You love them, so you hoard them jealously. You have taken them from the other lives they might have lead, so you have to make it worth their while. around and around it goes.
(Where does Alden fall between love and duty? When does taking care of the youngest of your group become maintaining relations with the strongest archmage? When you can’t help him with his struggles, are you failing him as a friend, or as a leader? When he leaves you to fight alone, is that because he doesn’t believe in the cause, or doesn’t believe in you? You miss him terribly. It’s harder without him)
Where do his kids fit into all this?
Irving doesn’t think his kids can live a normal life. His mom was taken hostage once, back when he was just some guy figureheading an army. She was kidnapped by a necromancer in a bid to keep the army from overthrowing the local king. Irving never even figures out what that guy was trying to accomplish- he was working with Empyrean, somehow, but the most we get about the necromancer’s own plans are a bunch of vague statements that they’re grand things above Irving’s comprehension.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of obvious, concrete reasons to kidnap the Gradmaster’s children. Like the fact that they contain rare and unusual magic, and are obviously related to a major political figure.
But there are other ways to deal with that, right? Like raising them in secret, or away from the Order entirely. Irving’s own dad was a big fan of this idea, and hid his kids an entire continent away from him. In theory, this would let Irving live a normal life. In practice, Irving was raised as a child soldier, drafted into a hopeless war, and handed a mountain of the very magical artifacts that his dad was supposed to be in charge of.
So that didn’t pan out
(Gwyn may have been raised as a child soldier and drafted into a war, but hey! At least she knows her father!)
If this wasn’t the case, then he might have had doubts about raising his kids as child soldiers. As it is, love, duty, and selfishness all push him to raise them as combatants.
Love: Irving loves his kids dearly, and wants them to be safe. He gives them the best love and support he can find (Alden), and the best mentor and guardian he can muster (also Alden). Since true safety is impossible, (see the above paragraphs) he instead focuses on building their ability to handle danger. The protection of a sharpened blade is a terrible thing, but it’s a terror he knows how to give.
Selfishness: Irving is a child soldier. An old child soldier, but at the end of the day, his main craft is warfare. It’s normal to want to teach your skills to your kids, and to seek a connection to them through your shared understanding of a craft. Showing your kids how to lead an army because it’s the main thing you can show off isn’t *nice*, but it’s not like Irving knows any other way to be- all of his closest friends are also child soldiers. (it would be hard to try something new. And he already has too many nightmares about them being taken hostage)
Duty: Even if Irving knew how to raise them as civilians (Irving absolutely does not know how to do that), the fact of the matter is that *someone* has to be the next Guy In Charge Of Preventing the Apocalypse, a position popularly known as “Grandmaster”. And whatever poor sap he picked to be his heir in place of Gwyn would be under exactly the same pressure, but their odds of success would be worse. Which means Gwyn’s odds of survival would be worse, because again, failure means everyone dies. (The Order has had a Sildarin for as long as it’s existed. When Irving was cut off from his inheritance, the Aspects tracked him down and piled themselves at his feet. Would they accept anyone else? Is there even a point in trying?)
So of course it has to be Gwyn.
This overlap is present in all of Irvings decisions: when he gives Gwyn a blank check to recruit whoever she feels like, it’s to encourage her to make friends, to grow her military might, and to give her room to start building her own power base.
These are all the same thing, because that’s how Srpgs work. Your friends are your combat assets and your combat assets are your friends. Throwing strangers into battle is a luxury enjoyed by the enemy, never by you.
And Irving never stopped being an Srpg protagonist
in conclusion:
1) being the main character of Dark Deity 1 convinced Irving that he personally has to prevent the apocalypse, and, because he lives in an Srpg setting, he’s right
2) the rate at which potential apocalypses happen keeps going up, which is making everything worse
3) the events of Dark Deity 2 have thoroughly trapped Gwyn in the same Srpg protagonist torment nexus just in time for things to really pop off
4) Irving expected this and has been preparing for it for Gwyn’s entire life