Talk:Lodge of Sorceresses/@comment-70.68.221.255-20180831235622

Shadow rulers who can't stand to be held accountable - even privately to themselves - for the consequences of their edicts and hide behind others to deal with the resulting infamy aren't fit to rule. The Lodge's mistake is believing they're above the kind of egotism and neurotic need for control over positive results they attribute to other rulers, particularly glaring if you look at Philippa creating the cunning monster that is Radovid by going out of her way to belittle him instilling backhanded lessons he unfortunately took to heart after arranging for his father's assassination and usurping the very free will of Saskia who she expressed nothing but admiration for via what was essentially magical rape. She needed personal control more than she needed a stable magic friendly nation with her absolute trust open to potentially radical policies if she suggested them and in the end blew it entirely reducing Saskia who might as well have been the physical incarnation of hope to a murder weapon to cover her own tracks destroying the newly reformed Conclave who had the exact same stated goals as the Lodge. Goals they seemed to even have made progress towards working in the open before the Lodge was exposed and further scapegoated. The massacre leaves Saskia dead or personally disgraced and the Pontar Valley/Aedirn to collapse without her either under the banner of the barely competent self-serving Stennis or much more likely in the fires of a now directionless revolution and robbing all of the Northern Kingdoms of a bastion of sanity as well as completely obliterating any chance of mages reorganizing and regaining a respected foothold in politics.

And don't forget the assassinations. While Letho went beyond what they originally planned they DID intend to create a power struggle and subsequent war with Demovend's death and all it took was slight exaggeration of their machinations to spark an all-out war of extermination against magic and leaving the North wide open to Nilfgaard's planned invasion.

Personally I like strong women and I've even got some respect for women willing to get their hands dirty for their principles but the Lodge does not live up to their mission statement and most of their members are too far up their own (admittedly magnificent) asses to learn from their disastrous hubris and continue to demonstrate a pathological need for duplicity that works against them demonstrated pretty well by Keira Metz. She wasn't even up to anything questionable but she went about it in a way that dicked around the person she needed help from and made her look like she was planning world domination or something else ridiculously sinister. In the end her goal was to make a suicidally ill-advised attempt to bargain with Radovid with medical research as a bargaining chip that literally anyone could have told her was a stupid idea if she didn't reflexively obfuscate her goals.