Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28171999-20190208002539/@comment-14909251-20190301233401

Arkantos95 wrote: Problem with all of this being brought up: Ironwood effectively runs Atlas. If he says Blake is getting out of a cell, she's getting out of a cell. Jacques is his little bitch-boy on his best day.

As for Weiss and Jacques- Jacques has almost nothing to gain from fucking with Weiss. He did nothing wrong when it came to stripping her of her inheritance/grounding her when she honestly should've been detained. People are really seizing on like one line to argue Ironwood is some all-powerful dictator. I am honestly going with the assumption that Ironwood having two seats on the Council means it is probably five people and he just needs one person to agree with him. When arguing national security on broad-based policies and a need to prevent any Kingdom from having the ability to make war on Atlas for what they believe they did in Vale, he has no trouble getting at least one other vote. However, intervening in a criminal case to protect an accused anti-Atlesian terrorist who illegally entered the country because he personally knows her friends is probably one of the few things that could seriously damage his credibility with the rest of the Council.

The thing about Jacques is an unfortunate consequence of certain people detesting Weiss so much they can't really see Jacques for his true nature. Weiss defied him, again, by fleeing the Kingdom. Everything about what happened at that charity event and after boils down to Jacques feeling a need to control Weiss in any way he can, including with physical force, and not in a protective manner either. Nothing Jacques did was done with consideration for Weiss or her circumstances and it is ultimately what led to her accidentally activating her Semblance. He wanted Weiss to stay trapped in her room for a reason and it wasn't to punish her, but to keep her quiet and out of the way. Nothing about Weiss gallavanting about Atlas free as a bird saying whatever she wants about whoever she wants is something Jacques has any interest in tolerating. He needs to be able to control her.

I can imagine Jacques seeing it as necessary to protect his own image to tear Weiss down so much he can essentially paint her as a rogue disreputable child who goes against everything the Schnee name represents. Part of that would also be punishing her for daring to go against him and perhaps to essentially extort her into basically denouncing herself in some sort of public, humiliating press conference then returning home to stay locked away for as long as he deems necessary. Using the possibility of letting Blake go free as leverage could be part of such a scheme.