The news that Kyrsten Sinema is withdrawing from the Democratic Party... sorta... except that she will still caucus with them… maybe; apart from making me think “And how is this different than before?” also reminds me of a character from an old Anime series. Allow me to introduce you to Karla, the Grey Witch.
Record of Lodoss Wars was an OAV series (Original Animation Videos), animation created for the direct-to-video market back in the ‘80s. It was based on a series of light novels which grew out of a role-playing game, and it was part of a wave of D&D-inspired heroic fantasy that came out of anime at the time. My friends in our local gaming group considered it the best Dungeons & Dragons cartoon ever.
The initial series followed the adventure of a young man named Parn who leaves his small village desiring to become a knight. He meets up with other adventurers and eventually becomes involved in a great war for the fate of the Island of Lodoss. For generations, Lodoss has been wracked with war between its competing kings and from attacks by various monsters and dragons. King Fahn, who thirty years previously had led a party of adventurers to defeat the Demon King, is trying to build a coalition of some of the island’s kings, but he is opposed by one of his old comrades, Emperor Beld, who desired to conquer Lodoss with his own personal Army of Darkness.
Karla appears at first as an enigmatic figure, lurking around the sidelines. She seems to be advising Beld, but he doesn’t entirely trust her. She also was one of the Six Heroes of Fahn and Beld’s generation (although she looks much younger; it’s complicated). We see her in a conversation with a wizard named Wort, who lives alone in a tower because frankly he’s too old for this crap, and she admits to him that she is on the side of neither Beld nor Fahn. She is neither black nor white. She is the Grey Witch.
“The balance of the universe is more stable when it shakes a little,” she tells Wort. Karla is all about balance. Centuries ago, her nation and her people were wiped out by a conquering despot, and so she has become convince that the only way to protect the land from such catastrophes is to make sure that no single faction ever becomes too powerful.
And so she is using Beld and his army of monsters to break Fahn’s alliance. And at the point when it looks like Beld is going to win, she will turn on him too. So that there’s balance.
Of course, this policy of manipulation and double-cross, while preventing a single king from ruling the whole schmeer, guarantees that Lodoss will eternally remain at war between tiny rival fiefdoms. But hey, Karla’s the Goddess of Balance. As long as there’s equilibrium, she’s cool. And if the balance starts to tip, she’ll caucus with whomever she has to in order to balance things out.