![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
❚❚❚❚❚ TL;DR
CANON SETTING
The matryoshka-style conflicts of Last Exile all revolve around the basics of Economy 101: supply and demand — and Earth's failure to deliver. At some point in time, the world suffered an anonymous "calamity," prompting its primary tech-based organisation, the Guild, to assume an enviable amount of command and improvise a high-cost Earth regeneration programme, along with an evac initiative for the majority of the population. Having concluded that when life gives you lemons, you make shiny, shiny spaceships, the Guild created enormous vessels with exceptional terra-forming and self-defence abilities (Exiles) and deployed them with a sizeable chunk of humanity to weather out Earth's Age of Calamity on colony-planets.
Since you don't send off wannabe Star Trek extras in space without token scientists, the colonists were babysat by Guild representatives, who had to help refugees terraform their respective colonies and keep the newly-inhabited planets in decent shape. They were also to dole out sufficient technology so that the travellers might enjoy a decent lifestyle, but not progress to an industrial point that might exhaust their temporary planets' resources. Lucky them, the colony Guild branches were additionally entrusted with Mysteria — riddle-like poems that awakened the ship-controlling abilities of human 'keys', whose genetic material connected them to Exiles. Once Earth advanced from its awkward apocalyptic years, the Guild and keys were meant to activate Exiles and ferry colonists back to their home-planet.
Or so the plan went.
LAST EXILE: PRESTER
Last Exile opens on Prester, an hourglass-shaped colony-planet that its moochers have long repressed is actually only a home away from home. The Prester branch of the Guild has been 'perverted', forgetting both its manners and its original purpose. The absent Exile itself is a misunderstood myth, speculated as a mass-destruction weapon and as the golden ticket to worldwide military leverage.
And then there's Greenpeace's worst nightmare: unknown to Prester's inhabitants, the terraforming once triggered by Exile is showing its wear, and the planet's climate is dissolving disastrously. One of the hourglass regions, inhabited largely by the Disith nation, is taking the way of dinosaurs and experiencing a rapidly falling ice age. The sudden brutality of this onslaught leaves the Disith just desperate enough to dare the Grand Stream - a deadly, torrential air corridor and the only way to cross between Prester's co- joined lands. The Disith hope to find sanctuary in the kingdom of Anatoray, which is barely surviving its own weather woes caused by inexplicable aridity: the crops are down, food's hardly there, and water is in such short supply that highly-filtered fluid, First Water is a luxury, and the average man is thrilled to afford the Third.
It's safe to say that when the Disith come a-knockin', the Anatoray pretend no one's at home. War is on – and, since neither nation should ever forget just who is Head Bully In Charge, hostilities are arbitrated via 'chivalry' regulations enforced by the Guild.
Incidentally, said war is also airborne: the Disith can only invade by ship, and the Anatoray respond in kind, having forcibly focused on aviation due the mountainous geography of their lands. Since the majority of Last Exile's events takes place in Anatoray, we get a closer look at their tech perks: while the kingdom is firmly situated in
Ten years prior before Last Exile, Anatoray finally clued in on human decency and sent the Disith a peace treaty by way of two courier vanships. Realising that a unified Disith-Anatoray faction might endanger the Guild, new Maestro Delphine Eraclea had the couriers intercepted in the Grand Stream, where the hidden Exile's self-defence mechanisms brought the intruding bugs down. After only pilot Alex Row survived, no further peace negotiations were attempted.
Over the course of the series, the war ends with an Anatoray-Disith union, and most eyes turn to the race between Alex Row and Delphine Eraclea to secure Exile and consequent dominion over Prester.
Later, once Exile's true purpose is revealed under the command of key Alvis Hamilton, the ship is used to rejuvenate the colony-planet and to shepherd pat of the population back to Earth…
FAM, THE SILVER WING: EARTH
…where they're shortchanged of their warm welcome. While the colonists were out enjoying their galactic cruise, those abandoned on Earth took their time nursing both a strong grudge and stronger instincts for self-preservation. After centuries of making do in small shelter-communities, Earth's survivors united under the Ades Federation and enjoyed their planet's return to environmental glory in peace and relaxation.
At least, until Exiles reappeared over the decades, bringing hundreds of thousands of additional mouths to feed. Several Ades tribes found themselves starved out or displaced as the immigrants (re)settled, and, inevitably, resent rekindled.
Notably, Ades Empress Farahnaz Augusta tried to pre-empt full out war by pursuing peace with the new Exile refugee nations — Farahnaz's assassination during a pacifist event led to the Federation's later extremist anti-immigrant politics and the start of the Ades Unification War.
Last Exile's sequel, Fam, The Silver Wing picks up ten years after Farahnaz's death, and roughly two years after several Prester refugees crawled back to Earth. While the Anatoray-Disith faction develops a foothold here, its presence is divided and its authority is slim. Meanwhile, the Ades Federation is taking the crush-kill-destroy approach to annexation and slowly, but surely conquering Earth's remaining nations.
Speaking of ye old green-and-blue: like the planet-colonies for which it was jilted, Earth is primarily dominated by aerial travel, with the Earth Guild having provided similar Claudia Units. Unlike on Prester, this Guild selflessly serves the people and supports the Ades. In spite of the threat of overpopulation, food and water are significantly more accessible, and the returned refugees seem to have cozied up for good, even allowing their Exile ships to gravitate around Earth like sinister satellites that the Ades Federation will surely not somehow manipulate as part of a genocidal plan against them. Surely.
Also, Earth's got space pirates. The rum is probably gone.
GUILD (GONNA GUILD)
To frame Dio within this tl;dr soup, there's no getting around a closer look at the claustrophobic microcosmos of the Prester Guild – a viciously caste-driven society that more or less "supervises" the rest of the world from a XXXL-sized fortress-ship.
The organisation's diplomatic approach is straightforward: don't call the Guild, they'll call you. Frequently content to let Prester's nations go about their self-destructive business, the Guild peripherally remember to perform a minimum of their original duties (primarily awarding Units and monitoring conflicts), and only intervene when their interests run at risk. Beyond that, their policy is fairly isolationist, with most Guild members ending up with rudimentary exposure to land, people and basic human sights and experiences. This essentially leaves them technologically superior, intellectually prodigious, and emotionally stunted to the point of instantly qualifying as Christopher Nolan film leads.
It doesn't quite help that they treat their charges with the bored condescension of a government bureaucrat, reserving the 'Guild Right of Boarding' on any bloody ship at any time, and freely enjoying First Water, lavish meals, superior flight technology and A/C. Delphine Eraclea might not be anyone's top model of moderation, but her stance that the entire world belongs to her as Maestro (Guild leader) doesn't seem to fall very far away from the organisation's general outlook.
Still, life among Prester's 1% isn't exactly a breeze: status is everything in the Guild, with birth right, genetic background and affiliation determining your assigned role, your skill set, the colour of your clothing and the extent to which you even have the free will to ponder your sartorial alternatives. Most low-ranked Guild members are mentally conditioned and stripped of agency, joining the nigh-zombie crew that oversees control over loaned Units 24/7. The privileged few with exceptional private merits and genetic enhancements are raised as aides for the nobility, and they're allowed to retain their personality, while being severely indoctrinated to serve and depend on the societal hierarchy.
And then you've got the Guild nobility Houses, of which the four leading families – Bassianus, Dagobert, Eraclea and Hamilton – each inherited a fragment of the Exile Mysteria, along with a genetic marker that passed down the bloodline, ensuring the (oblivious) existence of a key within the Guild. Since it's not an aristocratic party without nepotism, the Houses also supply principals, who occupy high political, administrative and martial positions within the Guild, and who also vote to choose the next Maestro.
If it seems as if no one's looking after a certain giant planet-powering ship, that's because Exile becomes little more than a rumour over the centuries, with the vessel's key, purpose and location entirely forgotten.
At least until Darius Eraclea – a Guild principal with more archaeological gumption and political ambition than actual savvy – learns that Exile is both real and within reach, and sets out to secure the ship as an express ticket to becoming Maestro. He is killed before he can achieve that, as part of a bloody Guild coup organised by his daughter, Delphine, who has the instinct to pay mind to his Exile findings, but not the foresight to obtain the three other Mysteria and the ship's key, before culling the main Houses. It comes down to a bloodbath that a few principals of the leading families and Exile key Alvis Hamilton escape, finding refuge in Anatoray. Of the Eraclea household, only Delphine's very young brother Dio is spared.
With Delphine as Maestro, the Guild takes a turn for the whimsical worse: where the previous Guild leader, James Hamilton had tried to introduce stability in the organisation's internal and external policies, Delphine further separates the Guild from the kingdoms of Anatoray and Disith and refocuses it on gaining access to Exile. The Guild increasingly neglects its official duties and starts to show partiality in the Anatoray-Disith conflict. Internally, the hierarchy is strengthened as a personality cult centred around the Maestro, who receives an oath of obedience from all principals who reach maturity at 17, and who apparently now allows mental reconditioning to be used even on 'restless' members of the upper classes. A likely Battle Royale fangirl, Delphine at one point determines her heir by having Guild principals fight to the death in the Trial of Agoon, with the survivor emerging as the new Maestro.
Within this hot mess, Dio is initially a principal of House Eraclea, then the nominal Maestro, after winning said Trial of Agoon. He never truly acts on the position, and the Prester Guild itself is more or less disbanded after the Anatoray-Disith Empire takes control of Exile. It's uncertain what Dio's standing is within the Earth Guild, which is technically the primary & leading branch of the organisation, but he is never exactly called to report in either.
CHARACTER HISTORY
Born into Guild prestige, power and pay, the young Dio Eraclea experienced few worries beyond the unfortunate fashion statement of his permanent orange eye marker and the increasing paranoia that his sister might try to kill him. Unknown to Delphine, Dio witnessed her execute their parents during the coup that decided her ascendancy to Maestro and freaked out accordingly.
Dio's skittishness displeased Delphine, who cycled through abuse, rage and mind games, before settling on good old-fashioned bribes as a last-ditch attempt to appease her brother. Finally, she gifted him the Guild equivalent of a boy's first pet – a genetically impeccable, emotionally stunted and possibly soulless fellow, whom Dio named Luciola ('firefly').
Having apparently meant for Dio to grow into his tsun roots and like his present, but not show it, Delphine tried to stifle the children's blooming bromance by inflicting discreet punishments on Luciola, such as helpfully ordering him to starve. Dio somehow realised the danger and began to privately feed his aide, decreeing that they're friends.
Over the years, Delphine's focus regrettably shifted from terrorizing kindergarteners, and Dio gradually reciprocated his sister's subtle manipulation just well enough to keep himself out of her reach, but within her favour. Not much is known about his upbringing, other than that he took to flying Guild solo ships (Starfish!) easily, and that his behaviour was considered anomalous by organisation standards. In particular, he openly defied societal norms by refusing the wear the colour assigned to principals, and instead condemning himself and his household (by now comprising aides Luciola, Apis and Coccinella) to the white robes of the lowest-classed Guild rank. Delphine allowed his eccentricities, as tacit recompense for the fact that he abstained from actively involving himself with Guild politics.
At the start of Last Exile, we have a Dio who is increasingly unpredictable, whimsical and 'restless' under the auspice of his upcoming 17th Birth Week and his inevitable debut into Guild maturity. He seems to anticipate how his sister's lobotomy kink will affect his adulthood prospects, but only outwardly opposes her by taking increasingly more off-Guild assignments.
If Dio's career horoscope prospers, then his stalker one is in stellar form: around this time, he's drawn into the Guild's hunt for Exile key Alvis Hamilton (now in the custody of Silvana captain Alex Row) and he repeatedly encounters courier Claus Valca. It's harassment at first sight, with Dio abandoning his principal duties during a Guild engagement with the Silvana in order to join in on the remaining 7min 20 seconds of sortie fun and engage Claus in an aerial dogfight. Creepily impressed with Claus' flying skills, Dio forces the poor boy into a cat and mouse chase, but refrains from shooting him down in spite of several opportunities.Their fun/trauma is interrupted by the formal withdrawal of Guild ships, at which point Dio presumably decides that ruining Claus' self-esteem and dubbing him 'Immelmann' is about as far as he's willing to go on a first date.
He later accompanies Delphine to the venue of a private auction for the Hamilton Mysterion, and detours to enter the eight-hour Horizon Cave vanship endurance race, once it's apparent that Claus and his (amazing) navi Lavie are competing. Dio and Luciola do honourably throughout the competition, for people who've never backhanded a vanship into shape before, but lose to Lavie's Slytherin cunning to only fuel Claus' ship halfway and gain a weight/speed advantage. Only catching on around the last lap, a race-frenzied Dio notably asks Luciola to solve their unfortunate excess load issue and jump off the speeding vanship. For some reason, Luciola abstains.
With the Horizon Cave track enjoying a post-race blackout thanks to Alex Row's environment-friendly sabotage, Dio and Luciola end up putting their Guild lighting gadgets to good use and towing a stuck Claus and Lavie to the Silvana. Some might call this dubcon, others pure love, but most agree that two Guild members casually strolling in to deliver the crew of an enemy vessel isn't the wisest idea. Dio volunteers their capture, then negotiates their extended stay on 'the safest ship in the world' by offering Alex Row the Eraclea Mysterion. In a blatant testament to his fondness for trolling Claus, Alex names the boy as Dio's minder. Claus' joy understandably can't be contained.
Dio and Luciola's stay on the Silvana plays out like an extended E.T. comedy segment, with both slowly learning the subtleties of human interaction, such as not speaking Mysteria before Alvis in order to briefly re-wire a defenceless loli as a legendary mass-destruction weapon accessory. Bad Dio.
By the end of his Birth Week, it seems as if Dio may have succeeded in his plan to get Claus to almost tolerate him, and to avoid forced entry in the Guild's Rite of the Covenant coming of age ceremony. As it turns out, if it's too good to be true, Maestro Delphine is probably knocking at your door, and Dio and Claus return after an Exile recon mission to find that the Maestro's arrived to fetch her brother, and she's taken over the Silvana to while her wait. Adding feelsy angst to injury, Luciola gets the dubious honour of shackling Dio in Delphine's name, with plain-faced betrayal marking the last time they see each other. Alvis, Claus and Alex Row are also collected, earning front seats to the gladiator-style bloodbath of the Trial of Agoon, which determines Delphine's successor.
Dio, meanwhile, receives the best of all traumatic birthday gifts, suffering a (heavily implied chemically-induced) personality alteration (Dio himself summarises the process as having his mind "broken" during Fam, The Silver Wing, but doesn't expand.) He walks away the average Guild member: analytical, flawlessly controlled and entirely unhesitant to pursue mass-murder as an acceptable career choice. In fairness to Delphine, this may well be what saves him during the Trial of Agoon, as Dio's 'upgraded' personality allows him to efficiently cut through dozens of fellow principals and effectively become the acting Guild Maestro.
There's no arguing that Guild drugs are the good stuff, but they're not quite enough to keep Dio going after the shock of the Trial: he more or less "shuts down," reaching a point of complete mental disconnect from the outside world. Faced with an extensive guilt trip, Luciola arranges for Claus to fly Alvis and Dio out of the Guild, and sets out to secure Delphine's word for her brother's freedom. Dio's other aides, Apis and Cocchinela kind of help along the way, but Luciola is the only one to face Delphine — and the one who dies for it.
In more upbeat news, Claus defends his title as the series' single reliable pilot and delivers his charges to the Norkia region, where Dio remains hospitalised, until the chemical haze wanes enough to remove his catatonia, and he can sneak off on his own. By this point, he's still very much trippin', with scant awareness of his surroundings or recollection of the past few days.
We only later glimpse Dio again as the Silvana, now commanded by new Anatoray-Disith Empress Sophia Forrester, makes a last-stand effort to wrest control from the Guild and take over Exile. Claus and Lavie are assigned to escort Alvis to Exile in the Grand Stream and to awaken the ship with the Mysteria collected by Alex Row (R.I.P.). The group's merry family trip is interrupted by Dio, who, seeing ~ Immelmann ~ storming in a vanship, mentally rewinds to the episode of their Horizon Cave; like then, he urges (the now absent) Luciola to leave the vanship in order to ease their weight. Actually having a job to do, Claus concedes the lead to Dio, who revels in his "win". Since the best gloating goes shared, he pauses his victory lap long enough to celebrate with Luciola, only to find the navigator seat empty. Lacking the details of his friend's death (along with most of his senses), Dio assumes Luciola simply obeyed his earlier order and jumped off the bloody ship.
Distraught, he ends up losing control over his vanship and crashes…
…only to be saved by fan popularity and his remaining aides, Apis and Coccinella. The Aerial Log novel connecting Last Exile and Fam, The Silver Wing recounts this fine and noble feat as stage one of a convoluted scheme to avenge Delphine and the disbanded Guild. By this point, the organisation lives as a handful of drifting survivors who pine for the golden days of Delphine's abuse — and the nominal Maestro, who is just mentally checked out enough to essentially take their word on it when they say the Disith-Anatoray is totally behind Luciola's death and every other imaginable horror.
In perhaps his single claim to seme glory, Dio assumes command of a Guild assassination attempt against Empress Sophia, who is now organising the colonists' gradual return to Earth by Exile cab. Happily, the coup's a complete corpse-filled bust, leaving it for Claus Valca to bring the show with a Final Stand dogfight challenge. In its aftermath, Dio walks away in possession of both his senses and more aerial angst than a Top Gun AMV. Reduced to a wheelchair due to his substantial injuries and indefinitely grounded until he maybe heals, Claus can't walk away at all.
Not one to abandon his stalker/stalkee commitments, Dio commits to protecting Alvis and to ensuring that the skies will be there and at peace to welcome Claus whenever he can fly again.
With a shiny official pardon from Empress Sophia (with love), Dio acts on that promise by joining the Silvius, an Anatoray-Disith intelligence vessel that's snooping around Earth under the loving tyranny of Tatiana Wisla. Since crushing guilt can't cure all bad habits, he ends up straying from the Silvius and mooching off a band of sky pirates that operate in Earth's independent Kartoffel docks under the leadership of Atamora Collette.
And this is how we stumble on Dio at the beginning of Last Exile: Fam, The Silver Wing: entirely restored to whatever inkling of sanity he may have once possessed, earning his keep by trolling pirates (and their uncrowned princess, pilot Fam Fan Fan), and continuing the Guild tradition of doing whatever the hell he wants. His role this round's more peripheral, connecting the Atamora/Turan and Anatoray-Disith interests, and pretty much carrying the courier/recon duties no one else wants to pull.
Notably, he joins in on Fam's fun and gives Turan princesses Millia and Liliana a helping hand when the kingdom's flagship, the Lasas, is surrounded by Ades Federation enemy vessels. As far as Ades scouts can tell, the Lasas suddenly, mysteriously and regrettably 'scuttles', and by no means reappears later under pirate protection. Ades: 0, mini-Prester Guild: 1 – at least, until Ades' Earth Guild assassination squad, led by Prime Minister Luscinia's brother, Alauda, sweep in to collect princess Liliana. Glares, tacit Guild feud oaths and UST go exchanged, as Dio is too fashionably late to do more than watch Alauda blitz away with Liliana.
Having cut the world's least profitable alliance with Turan, the Atamora fleet is now stuck babysitting the remaining princess, Millia, while Premier Luscinia treats Liliana to the Ades hospitality of tea and assisted genocide: drawing from his Earth Guild savvy, he awakens the princess as a key to one of the "moons" merrily orbiting Earth — actually, the Exile ship on which the colonists now reunited under the Turanian crown had returned to Earth, usurping land from Ades tribes. Having at some point discovered poetic irony, Luscinia has Liliana crash the overwhelming mass of Turan's own saviour-ship down on its capital.
As far as Dio can see, at this point, T stands for all the Turan tears, but also the distant, if inevitable Threat to returned Anatoray-Disith colonists and Alvis Hamilton, should Luscinia continue with the Exile: SMASH!! strategy that's served him decently so far. Dio's gears, they start a-turnin'.
Lacking an army, kingdom, resources and a decent haircut, Millia accepts Fam's offer for the sky pirates to assemble her a bootleg fleet of captured Ades vessels. They pawn off a fair few, before Dio just so happens to mention a close-by sighting of the infamous 'reaper' ship, the Silvius - and wouldn't that be a dazzling prize for Millia, Fam? Indeed it would. Fam and her line-faced navi Giselle Collette try to woo the Silvius into joyful commandeering, until Tatiana has quite enough of that nonsense and traps them in return. After Dio sheepishly strolls in to actually do his job on the Silvius with a negligible two-year lag, Tatiana hears out the woeful tale of Turan's mission and agrees to release Fam and Giselle on condition of their capturing fifteen ships. The Silvius also takes over protection of Millia.
Dio, meanwhile, is assigned to fly out to Anatoray-Disith fleet commander Vincent Alzey, and let the Empire know that, Houston, they have a(n Ades) problem. He returns just in time to celebrate Fam's birthday, settle an angsty pilot-navi domestic, and introduce the arrival of the man of the hour, Vincent "But why is the Starbucks gone?" Alzey himself. In addition to Sophia's blessing for a Turan-Anatoray-Disith treaty, Vincent also brings [1] Loli unit, Alvis Hamilton, who confirms that the Exile "key" marker is genetically transmitted through the bloodline of a choice few women of royal bloodline.
Alas, the (literal) party breaks when a now allied Luscinia and Liliana crash in, with the Turan heir-princess, now queen, asking Millia to surrender her military forces to her and to accept Turan's annexation. Millia, Vincent and the Silvius crew cannot "nope" out faster, and the Ades only afford them a few minutes' reprieve to decide whether they'll stick to their guns and have Luscinia break out his. Like many a Stephen King house owner, they soon learn that the real horror always comes from the basement, as Alauda's troops infiltrate the Silvius and kill off its support crew, rendering the ship too poorly-manned for flight, let alone fight. Dio intercepts Alauda before this one asshole and his miniature team can take down half the show's cast, and they duel it off to a stalemate.
It later emerges that, following a similar move on Vincent Alzey's Urbanus, Dio prioritised his promise to Claus and dashed off with Alvis, sustaining a few injuries while cutting down enough of Alauda's men that Ades surely had to advertise for new assassin background dancers. Dio and Alvis remain in hiding in forgotten secondary character hell for some time.
There's far too much political plot mileage to cover in detailed nuance, since the Ades Unification war essentially starts as a two-party skirmish, stews as a six-faction free-for-all, then culminates as "everyone and their dog against Luscinia." Dio isn't heavily involved again until the very end, when he helps deliver a ceasefire between Luscinia's still-loyal forces and Ades child-Empress Augusta Sara, who has deserted her Premier to ally with Turan-Anatoray-Disith (and newcomers Glacies).
Deus ex Machina strikes, and Augusta Sara herself turns out to be the oblivious key to the biggest, baddest, so-much-better-than-yours Exile ship. She ends up abducted by Luscinia, who activates and takes off the Grand Exile with her on board, purposefully turning them into the world's most glaring target. As it turns out, forcibly uniting the entirety of humanity against a common threat was Luscinia's attempt at regulating Earth's resources and achieving the world peace intended by his assassinated mistress, Augusta Farahnaz.
The Turan fleet play decoy for Grand Exile's defensive mechanism, while Fam and Giselle fly in to rescue Sara. Throughout this, Dio drapes on every conceivable surface, but also gives Millia military counsel, and awakens her Exile abilities (made active after Liliana's death) to control the ship as a shield against Grand Exile's cannons.
Inevitably, the good guys win – it just so happens that Luscinia, who turns over Sara before sacrificing himself in Grand Exile, may have been one of them all along.
(And Dio not only survives, but gets to win the first post-war international vanship race. His ego, like his kokoro, is greatly appeased. )
