Hartmann and Victor (The Dragon Herald)
Part 1: An Autopsy of Christmas (and the Cavaliers that accompany it)
Alright, listen, everyone knows what a Christmas Cav is, the archetype has been done to death and then some. The Christmas Cavs are a pair of two cavaliers, color coded for your convenience, that usually join in the same chapter, usually are opposites in terms of personality, with one being an uptight, knightly snob, and the other being hardly knightly at all, and they also usually have different stat specializations, usually one speedy and one bulky or strong.
Of course, this laundry list of criterion get messed with sometimes, Saizo and Kaze and the sometimes included Mae and Boey are not cavaliers, Kieran and Oscar and Sully and Stahl don’t join in the same chapter, many knightly cavs aren’t that uptight, and the less knightly cavs fluctuate from wanting to be a knight and being bad at it to not wanting to be a knight at all.
Still, the christmas cavs are largely a trope of convenience. Cavs are good, we should give the player two of them. They both have the same class, so they should have a dynamic, and a way to tell them apart character wise, design wise, and unit wise. Easy enough.
Part 2: Hartmann and Victor’s First Map
Chapter 3 starts fairly simply, the Christmas Cavs both start as enemy units under control of General Breunor, one of the main antagonists of the earlygame. Their first appearance gives them some characterization, with Victor, the red knight, barking out orders to the opposing forces to move aside, while Hartmann, the green knight, assures them that they mean no harm, and just need to step by them for a minute. The following scenes make clear that Victor generally is more well liked and well respected among the knights, that Hartmann has his doubts as to Breunor’s harsh methods, and the Victor, while he doesn’t quite understand Hartmann and is often a bit mean to him, respects him as a fellow knight.
You get into the map, check the stats, and wow, Victor’s superiority is fairly obvious (Sorry for the builder screenshots, if anyone has actual screenshots of this stuff, let me know)
Victor has leads in hp, power, speed, defense, and weapon ranks, all the stats that matter. He’s not so much better that you’d never use Hartmann, but the weapon ranks especially are a death sentence for Hartmann. Notably, enemies in DH are not really a joke, they are decently fast, and Hartmann does definitely struggle to double and one round them.
Anyway, you run up to Hartmann, recruit him, and he ends with a line saying that he should go talk some sense into Victor, makes sense. Only problem is that talking to him doesn’t work, he says that he has a job to do, and challenges Hartmann to kill him. That’s chill, combat recruitments are fairly few throughout the series, but not unheard of. You beat him with Hartmann, and get this dialogue
It’s here that we get to the notable thing about the Dragon Herald Christmas Cavs…that there’s only one of them. The strong, confident red knight is too uncompromising, too untrusting to even try to change, and that leaves the weaker, kinder green knight as the one willing to fight.
This is a very simple story, and yet it resonates to me because the archetype is so strongly in place that it’s clear this is not how things are supposed to go. And so Hartmann’s story of one half of a duo sticks out, because it can’t not stick out.
Part 3: Payoff
17 maps go by. Perhaps you’ve been using Hartmann, getting his character development as the knight that believed you from the start and is eager for people to sit down and listen instead of fighting. You get to the very end of a very sloggy map, a hybrid defend and seize a point a thousand miles away map, and as soon as you get close, a thousand ambush reinforcements pile on the defend point (that you definitely didn’t leave anyone good at). It is here, in your time of need, that Victor finally comes back. And he can do the triangle attack with Hartmann!
Is he a great unit? No, not really, filler to the max, but he’s filler when you actually really need filler to kill some berzerkers and choke a point. And despite Victor’s contributions being small, the fact that he shows up at all reinforces Hartmann’s arc, that knighthood is founded on decency, not loyalty, and that even if you have to walk the path of righteousness alone, you should walk it, and be a beacon for other people to join you along the way.