The men in Raseir refuse to mention his name, but the women have no problem mentioning his name. Supposedly he hates women. But isn't the fact indicative that he hates men even more?

Geez, i had a post written up and GOG ate it.

I'll try to summarize what I said.

The two men you're talking to are actually benefitting from Ad Avis's tyranny - one of them doesn't *want* you to change things, and advises you against it. And then betrays you at the nearest opportunity. They're afraid of his *ire*, but that doesn't mean that they are affected more. To name Ad Avis would be to openly acknowledge that he is "the man behind the man", which would definitely earn them a trip to the prison.

Meanwhile, the two women you meet are as oppressed as they can get - the princess is forced, against her will to marry an awful man, and her most loyal servant has been made a slave. The only things they have left to lose are their lives, and while it would be easy to just lay down, they're rebellious enough to spite him by naming him.

In short, the women are spiteful *because* they're oppressed, and the two specific men you meet who are afraid to name him are also too comfortable to bother challenging the status quo.

I think Zach's on to something. Al Scurva (the caged beast) mentions his former master by name. He along with the Raseirian women would greatly benefit from Ad Avis's downfall.

The thing about bigoted ideologues is that their ideologies don't stand up to real world scrutiny. This is what makes them bigots, as opposed to "objectively correct." And when their ideologies go up in smoke, they usually fall back on human tribalist instincts - such as rank-and-file feminists justifying a mass attack on women's agency, just because those women used that agency to earn money by being physically attractive, rather than questioning feminism itself. Or everything involving history's recount of Erin Pizzey, or the Suffragettes.

The only thing that surprised me about Ad Avis after I'd played the story is that Katrina wasn't the reason he ended up this way. It would have made perfect sense for the supposed woman hater to hate women becaue a woman ruined his life, with the extra catch that not even death will help.

IIRC, it's made clear that the vast majority of harem girls in Rasier actually enjoy the harem. It's cretins like Ad Avis and Khaveen they don't like. I didn't play a Thief and have no willingness to, so I might be wrong. Perhaps I should climb into the Thief route on my Wizard playthrough if I do one - I think it's skills, not class. I don't blame them. The men, by comparison, do have it a lot worse by many metrics (at least as far as the hero/Ego/Devon sees) being subject to horrors like castration and conscription. (Things like castration are admittedly less harmful in a setting where healers can regenerate lost limbs though) but we don't know what things were like in Rasier, other than Generic Totalitarian State.

So, perhaps Ad Avis did hate women, but also failed to understand how anyone other than himself thought, and ended up accidentally privileging most women in Rasier over most men by keeping them safe in harems rather than sending them to die in the guard.

Nah, I don't think that's it.

Well Ugarte certainly isn't benefitting. He got sent to prison the day after you met him. I guess Ferrari is benefitting in the sense that his business is the only decent place in the city that anyone can go to, so that makes it easy for him to make a lot of money. On the other hand, he did just fine in Silmaria even without that working in his favor.

And I don't think Ferrari betrayed you. You were going to be arrested in your 3rd day in Raseir no matter what Ferrari said or what you did or didn't do, because that was the day the Iblis ritual needed to take place and Ad Avis needed your help for that, and then he needed to get rid of you hoping you wouldn't stop it.

Ad Avis doesn't want to benifit anyone but himself. Women would be more oppressed, but you wouldn't want to be a man under him either. His ideal society would probably look like this:

Ad Avis > > > Iblis and/or Avoozl > anyone useful to him > > > > > > > > > men > women.