Character Study of the Week: Romano Liao
Who: Romano Liao
What: Major, Capellan Reserve Cavalry
Lady of Highspire
Duchess of Liao
Prefectress of Sian
Lady of Tikonov
Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation
When: 2992 – 3052
Weapon of Choice: Crazy
After the devastating, humiliating losses of the Fourth Succession War the Capellan Confederation needed someone special just to hold them together if not bring them back from the brink. What they got was Romano Liao.
While it does take something to be recognised as supremely crazy in a nation with one past leader blessed with the epigram “Kalvin the Mad” it should be remembered that Romano only seems like the craziest of the bunch because she is the one we have had the most dealings with. The reality is she had breaks on her actions that Kalvin apparently lacked, though these breaks were not always enough.
If dad was a Bondian villain then Romano was a cartoon supervillain. She has literally railed against her enemies, in their presence and out, cursed them, stated she would have her revenge, revelled in petty acts and so on and so on, hissing and snarling all the way.
In most respects this is simply Max Liao’s later reign carried forward, a theme continued.
Gone are the complex plots, the attempt to build schemes where every outcome has an advantage, this is just more of the same sort of behaviour that made scooping up wedding plates as valuable intelligence seem like a good idea, with an exacerbation of just how utterly anyone recognised this was absolutely correct.
Why use this sort of shorthand? The time jump in the setting from the 3020s to 3050s means that copy pasting of character traits makes it easier for the reader or player to jump right in with little concern for what has happened in the interim. Times have changed but less so the people.
For Romano was never really intended as a long term Chancellor in the fiction, she is a placeholder for Sun-Tzu, her actions in as Chancellor limited to looking a fool and pulling off a successful plan that could have been a devastating self-inflicted wound if Candace hadn’t survived and chosen to take things very personally.
This makes Romano sound like a one note character, unfortunately she is.
Looking at her role in fiction she has served two purposes: she is an internal faction antagonist, and she is a near universal spanner in the works for anyone nearby, both of which stem from her delusional nature.
As an internal faction antagonist she is not unique, each faction has at least one, sometimes more, of these so that threats are not simply external, there is an element of collapse from within. Her precise role as such is to be a threat to anyone who could succeed Max, to whom she is supremely loyal, to the point of acting without thinking if it appears to be even marginally advantageous.
It also means that Justin Xiang must battle her petty machinations as much as Hanse Davion’s, at least that’s what we’re supposed to buy into until the reveal, in the end we learn it was just her petty machinations getting in his way.
It does present a problem in Historical: Brush Wars, specifically how to reconcile the Saturday Morning Cartoon Antagonist with the person who managed to pull a nation through what could have easily been the final humiliating nail in the coffin as a Periphery nation and renegade federal province proceed to wale on the remains of the Confederation.
Indeed, this section of the book is all about reconciling Romano’s previously seen dangerous to everyone behaviour with the simple fact that she had managed to hold the nation together for a quarter century.
And while from a practical standpoint her paramour Tseng Shang makes most of the smart decisions regarding the crisis, the larger solution is that she’s the right sort of crazy to keep things going. Whereas anyone sane in that position would see themselves in the position of having the rest of the Confederation become either the Sian March or a couple of extra federal provinces (or the Sian District if you want to get freaky), Romano is delusional enough to not only think that the Capellan Confederation can survive its current situation, but overcome everyone and conquer all of creation.
This sort of survival is not entirely unrealistic, unbending determination can achieve amazing things.
And to be perfectly honest, considering that Romano’s character is nothing but insanity, it’s the only tool the writers have to work with. She can’t suddenly become a military genius, a rallying figure or anything traditionally useful, so they have to work out a scenario where crazy is just what is needed after the fact.
So, a brutal, delusional dictator who cows the population into remaining a functional nation for decades is how it goes.
It is also worth noting that unlike most antagonistic characters she is not a political operator. She is listed as a Major in a ‘Mech regiment but we never see her pilot, or fight, anyone or anything, so this is little more than a side note, as in this setting most heirs to a nation need some sort of military training.
In terms of politics Romano tries, early sourcebooks telling how she tried to build power bases and continued to play people off each other (one more colourful tactic being taking lovers other than Tseng Shang in order to keep him off balance and consequently there being some doubt over Sun Tzu and Kali’s parentage).
Early sourcebooks also tell that she is skilled with the oboe, violin and zero gravity acrobatics. Let that bit of banality roll around your head for a moment and you’ll probably wind up a little more horrified by her.
However nothing really comes of these stabs at politics. No gain, no advantage, no future mishap. These serve only to add to the pervasive paranoid atmosphere of the Capellan Confederation where the head of state expects everyone to try to turn on her at some point so she plays everyone against each other.
Seriously this is one of her smarter moves because coups happen to far more sensible leaders.
This inability to truly play at politics, that’s part of the crazy, she just plain doesn’t care about the consequences or the ways in which to motivate someone with subtle movements of people and resources, she barks an order and expects it to be done and results to follow, subtle is a foreign concept, along with anything not going her way. These are not the hallmarks of a political operator who weighs up costs and benefits of a situation or action.
This inability to conceive of consequences is what ultimately gets her killed. While her son can plainly see the worst on the horizon and her lover certainly cannot be ignorant of the potential retaliation Romano is convinced that killing her sister and brother-in-law as retaliation for a public embarrassment is the next step to the rebirth of the Confederation.
Since it gets her killed she is bizarrely correct.
However since she thought that killing her sister and the husband who betrayed the Confederation through a twisted form of karmic balance we are given a window into her thinking, and just how strongly she is passing it along to her equally if not more so insane daughter Kali, which has consequences far into the future.
Next week: Sun-Tzu Liao
