Talk:Ladies of the Wood/@comment-26470367-20150606114757/@comment-4134582-20150608001812

Well reverse the roles here. Imagine it's a world where women are enlisted to fight in wars while men are expected to stay at home in relative safety. So Anna is enlisted and goes off to fight war after war, spends all this time away from her family just so she can kill strangers for a king she doesn't personally know. After years like this, she returns home and finds out that Phillip has been fucking a woman behind her back the whole time, while sending love letters pretending to really miss her.

Anna is upset by this, and it's made worse when Phillip says "To be honest, I don't really love you anyway". Anna is so distraught she kills the woman who has taken her husband away from her and who's been living her life for the past several years while she herself has been away risking herself every day, away at war. Seeing his illicit lover slain, Phillip would fly into a rage and try to kill Anna with a knife. Wouldn't that seem like he's kind of lost his mind? Anna defends herself by punching Phillip and this temporarily calms him down.

From then on Phillip repeatedly tries to kill Anna, and Anna repeatedly defends herself by attacking Phillip back. Anna turns to drink her life is so miserable, Phillip has even turned their daughter against her. Eventually Phillip and Tamara decide to run away after numerous attempts to kill Anna. Worse still, Anna is pregnant (this can't be switched, so bear with me) but Phillip is so vengeful he doesn't want a child related to Anna to come into the world, so he makes a deal with three clearly evil crones to kill the baby. The baby is killed and Anna is convinced it's her fault for getting into fights with her husband, where it's actually her husband that asked evil crones to terminate the pregnancy. Phillip ends up living in a bog, nuttier than a pile of squirrel shit, where he looks after children before his mistresses come and eat them.

So reading all of that, doesn't "Phillip" seems like a complete and utter nutcase whereas "Anna" seems massively betrayed by most people around her? Even putting aside the pregnancy part which admittedly doesn't translate smoothly across a gender role reversal. You say the Baron is a monster, but switch it around and see who seems more monstrous then.