I… think the beginning of the anime was Wel clearing out the Enchanted
Forest for the sake of w/e. So I guess we know how this ends.
But
I hope they don't oversimplify the transition of power. I do get the
opposite side of the coin, after all. Wel is quite the easy to use
figure. It's not that the brother is despotic - the lack of resources is
just reality in that domain. It's that the villager chief wants to use
Wel - and Wel's wealth that Wel demonstrated. This is not a sustainable
model. And on the other side of the chain, the king prefers to have the
easy to use Wel there, where he is dependent on taking jobs from the
king in order to finance his poor otherwise domain. This way he's at the
same time establishing somebody who will not conspire against him, and
limiting the connections Wel has to others, so that these others can't
use Wel, AND ensuring Wel has to come back to the king for jobs instead
of running away somewhere to adventure freely. In fact, Kurt is probably
the only one in the family who truly knows this part of Wel's nature,
as he was the only one who noticed that Wel hided his magic in the past.
So of course he'd be the one worried and would try to use Wel to ensure
as much independence from the Crown as possible - like the demand for a
50% cut. To begin with, the domain is poor because of geography, not
because of mismanagement: it's too far from the trade routes and the
danger of the Enchanted Forest makes it really hard to expand or to do
any serious new business. It's basically not much more than an outpost.
And they lost a lot of men in that expedition in the past which made
everything even worse.
Of course, that same beginning of the
anime shows what Kurt definitely is not realizing: that Wel is so
overpowered that he can actually turn the domain into a profitable one,
independent of Wel's adventuring profits. With such powers the domain
can actually get much larger, as it's basically a frontier domain. This
means that Kurt could probably get part of the newly expanded domain if
he plays his cards right.
Anyway, I really liked Kurt's wife.
