Violence flows downhill: how institutional brutality to and by Red Heron students prevents their success

The Red Heron is introduced late into Pale as a dark inverse of the main trio. They are a group of children from St. Victor’s of Kennet, taught by ex-forsworn Practitioners, so they can advance Charles’ political cause as something between role models and child soldiers. However, they use significantly more brutality in conflicts and have more infighting compared to Miss’s chosen trio of Lucy, Avery, and Verona. There has been a lot of fandom debate over why this is the case. Does their unconventional Awakening make them less careful about harm to others, knowing they can escape the consequences? Is it the fault of Abyssal influence? Or do they simply lack some moral fiber intrinsic to the main trio, causing them to be uniquely bloodthirsty and terrible?

I have a different take. The Red Heron is organized around institutional cruelty from the very highest levels. Teachers are given free reign to do anything they want towards their students in the course of training, including physical and sexual abuse. Through this, students learn that any violence is acceptable; any reticence cause for potential punishment. Far from helping the Red Heron win, this is ultimately counterproductive and leads to their defeat.

No ideology just violence

Before going any further, let’s do a quick recap of how the Red Heron came to exist, how it is organized, and what it is intended to achieve. From the very beginning, it is built around the idea that abusing students to make them commit extreme brutality to the enemy leads to success.

The Red Heron starts as Lis’ project to subvert the trio’s efforts to increase Awareness in Kennet, by turning magic-curious residents into her own personal Practitioners. Charles tries to stop this, but Lis insists she “‘deserve[s]’” something for the “‘sacrifices’” made in helping Charles take the Carmine throne.¹ So he adjusts, saying that she can have it as long as it is used to “‘cultivat[e] cutthroat, dangerously effective students’” that will “‘send a message.’”² In essence, the Red Heron is a bribe to Lis to keep her cooperating further with Charles, not a part of his original plans.

The basic structure of the group is this: Lis runs the group and picks new recruits. A combination of Marcicia, Charles’ created Lords, and the Judges provide the students with power. Teachers cover everything else, including tactical decisions in combat. Each of them is allowed to take charge of one student to train in their Practice, and has the power to revoke their Awakening and memories of Practice with the approval of at least one Judge.³ There are loose plans for these teachers to infiltrate St. Victor’s as officially hired, Innocent teachers on payroll, but the Red Heron doesn’t last long enough for this to come to fruition.⁴

Officially, Charles does not have any specific role in this arrangement, though he makes it clear that the students are expected to fight for his cause later. At the first Awakening of the Red Heron students, he tells them, “‘It’s common to… turn [children] into soldiers and tools. I won’t lie and tell you that your potential teachers here won’t have expectations.  Or that I won’t.’”⁵ At the same time, he does not elaborate on what those expectations are. He tries to disclaim responsibility entirely, saying, ‘“‘from here on out, until you withdraw or are withdrawn, you are in Lis’s hands, your teacher’s hands’” — notably omitting himself from the list.⁶ Over the rest of the story, he continues to take a laissez-faire approach to the Red Heron, refraining from issuing any specific commands or even telling them his ideology directly.

Though they are allies, Lis’ ultimate goals for the Red Heron differ from Charles’. When attacking the Blue Heron, she tells Helen:

“When I have my school, I want people like you teaching at it.  Ruthless.  There are families that would be glad to send their children somewhere ruthless, that imparts and teaches power in a way others are scared to.  And if Charles has what he wants, then we’d be more untouchable than the Blue Heron.”⁷

Far from hoping to crush the Practitioner establishment, Lis wants to court it. This is incompatible with Charles’ desires. What he wants and the tactics he uses to pursue it change a lot over the course of Pale, there is a general theme of causing mass Practitioner death. If he gets his way, there will hardly be any Practitioners left within Ontario, especially of the establishment type who are willing to put their children at risk to further their education of the Practice. Lis’ goals and Charles’ goals cannot possibly be achieved together. However, by relinquishing control of the Red Heron to Lis, Charles allows her to decide what students hear.

Even as Charles rampages through Ontario trying to destroy the Practitioner establishment, Lis is busy at work recreating its cruelties with the tools, power, and people he gives her. These two creators of the Red Heron cannot decide what they are fighting for, only that the fighting be exceedingly vicious. Kira-Lynn sums up the plan when she tells Verona, “‘We’re going to be bastards about this.  We’re going to hurt people, we’re going to do worse.’”⁸ There is no other coherent ideology for students to receive, no vision of the future to motivate them with.

In the next sections, I will dive into the abuse that teachers are allowed to perform upon their students, the ways this behavior ripples outwards in how Red Heron members treat each other and outsiders, and how this causes him to lose his conflict with Kennet.

With great power comes great unaccountability

Teachers are allowed to do whatever they want to their students without supervision, as long as they train them to become proper child soldiers. Students have no recourse if they are being abused, exploited, or otherwise harmed by their teachers. There are far too many cases of this in the story for me to list comprehensively, so I will look at four moments: Lenard and Joshua at the Belanger compound, Seth and Cameron’s inappropriate relationship, Griffin’s uncomfortable behavior towards Kira-Lynn, and Freeman’s difficulties teaching Adrian.

Lenard and Joshua

Joshua’s apprenticeship with Lenard is marked with a constant, continual fear that Lenard will hurt him. From the very beginning, Joshua chooses Lenard not out of any particular affinity, but as a dutiful decision “to take the scariest teacher, to protect younger kids like he wanted to protect his three younger siblings at home” from his abusive father.⁹ And Joshua’s judgment of Lenard proves correct. Lenard’s Bedlamite scream causes the Practitioner invoking it to “inflict… and suffer… insanity in roughly equal measure.  A detachment from reality, hallucinations of all kinds, emotional turmoil and darker things.”¹⁰ In other words, use of this Practice inherently hurts Joshua (to a level beyond the moral injury of using it on a human being).

Across multiple scenes, Lenard continually pressures Joshua to use this scream on other people, even when he doesn’t want to.¹¹ This culminates in the moment at the Belanger compound. After Joshua opens the raid with the scream, Lenard brings Joshua with him into direct combat for no reason other than to observe the brutality on display, even though this puts Joshua at unnecessary risk. When the Belangers threaten to hurt Joshua, he tries to retreat, but Lenard grabs his collar, physically preventing him from leaving even as he begins to visibly have a panic attack.¹² This is fratricidal coercion, when military authorities use threats or actual violence against reluctant soldiers to deter undesirable behaviors such as retreat, failure to attack the enemy, or surrender.¹³ Use of it is a recurring trend within the Red Heron.

In the case of Joshua, this use of fratricidal coercion temporarily works. He stays on the battlefield as the Belangers and Lenard fight each other, and winds up using Practice against the Belangers. Then Lenard flees to the Abyss and Joshua is captured by Lucy and the Dog Tags. They debate over what exactly to do with him, including whether to shoot him in a (potentially unavoidably lethal) manner. With Lenard gone, Joshua has no reason to stay. He forfeits his Awakening right before the gun is fired.¹⁴ Fratricidal coercion gives Joshua motivation to stay while Lenard is around, but once Lenard is no longer able to credibly harm him in ways worse than the Dog Tags will, he takes the chance to flee.

Much hay has been made in the fandom over whether the Unawakening is fair. I will not discuss that here, as that is too large a subject for this post. What I will say is that Joshua is a child who Lenard brought into multiple active combat zones, forced to harm others and himself, and physically restrained from fleeing the combat zone. Being coerced into acting as a child soldier should be considered a grave wrong done against Joshua, not a sign of insufficient character.¹⁵

Seth and Cameron

While acting as her teacher, Seth begins a sexual relationship with Cameron. Obviously, this has a huge power differential that would not be allowed in many schools. Beyond the usual power imbalance that real-life teachers have over students, Seth is additionally capable of taking away Cameron’s Practice and wiping her memories of its existence. When the Red Heron takes over the Blue Heron, Seth tries to pressure Cameron into having sex with him, to the point where he uses his combat decisionmaking authority to have her assigned to sleep in his room overnight, despite her clear discomfort.¹⁶

On top of this being a teacher-student relationship, there is also the matter of age. Cameron is 16 years old.¹⁷ Seth’s age in this story is not consistent — he is presented by narration as 18 years old in 20.f and only 11 months older than Cameron in 23.b — so it is unclear if this is a discontinuity in the story or if he is deliberately misleading Cameron about it. Either way, even with the younger age, this relationship does not past legal muster. The standard age of consent to sexual activity in Canada is 16, with close-in-age exceptions, but in cases of “a relationship of trust, authority or dependency,” a 16 or 17 year old is not considered legally capable of agreeing to it.¹⁸ Any sexual activity between Seth and Cameron, including what they have canonically done onscreen, is actually a criminal offence in the region where the story takes place. (Though chances are that if Canadian authorities are notified of the Red Heron’s existence, other issues will take priority first, like the massive amounts of illicit gang warfare they are performing on people who may or may not have Canadian documentation of existence.)

Given his existing history of sexual harassment and assault, it is very likely that Seth entered this relationship specifically because of the power differential.¹⁹ To anybody with any knowledge of his past behavior, such as fellow Blue Heron classmates Griffin and Helen, or the near-omniscient and omnipotent Charles, giving him total control over a single student like this should be seen as inviting trouble. The lack of any attempts to stop it, even in the form of a casual chat from another teacher, shows just how little care is given to Red Heron student wellbeing.

Griffin and Kira-Lynn

Joshua and Cameron’s situations are both very bad, but none of them have tried to do anything about them on an institutional level — Joshua because he feels he must sacrifice himself for the sake of the other students (until he can bear it no longer), and Cameron because she is isolated from her former social circles and looking for any positive attention in her life. But what about a student who does try to switch teachers?

Kira-Lynn has an extremely bad working relationship with Griffin. She feels he is “creepy” and is uncomfortable being around him.²⁰ However, she can’t do anything other than dodge one-on-one meetings and endure other interactions, as “anyone who’d hear what she had to say about that either wouldn’t budge or already sympathized.”²¹ In Griffin’s interlude, we see Kira-Lynn is correct that he has sexual intentions toward her, and the only thing stopping him from acting more overtly is his belief he is hallucinating.²²

Some have argued that as Griffin is not actively assaulting Kira-Lynn, his private thoughts do not matter. However, his day-to-day behavior is still bad enough that Kira-Lynn would rather suffer slowdowns in her Practice education than meet with him in private, which is a remarkable breakdown in teacher-student trust.²³ This is incredibly bad for cohesion, the level of group solidarity and trust within a military force. To Kira-Lynn, it sends the message that the Red Heron does not care to protect its students. Later on this results in her future usurpation of hierarchy, seizing de-facto control of other students, and debatably deliberate friendly fire upon her own teammates, which is generally not considered ideal in militaries and will be covered in more detail later. 

Freeman and Adrian

There is only one way in which Red Heron teachers are meaningfully constrained. Even if they genuinely want to help students, the fact remains that the Red Heron is intended to create child soldiers. Freeman has good intentions toward Adrian, but feels he must prepare Adrian for involvement in Charles’ conflict. This results in him pushing Adrian into dangerous situations that Adrian isn’t comfortable with, such as astral projection, defusing an elementalist car bomb, and taking a more active role in the Whitt raid.²⁴

When Adrian is hesitant encountering the car bomb, Freeman tells him this:

“We belong to a group, we have responsibilities as part of it.  So long as we’re loyal, they won’t twist our arms too much,” Freeman explained.  “We can skip some, if we need to, if they’re uncomfortable, if we feel it’s too dangerous-”

“This feels too dangerous.”

“-But if we skip them all, the people handing us power may start pulling their hand back some.  They might start making us take another metaphorical step forward every time we want some.”²⁵

In other words, Freeman is telling Adrian that they can either take initiative in Charles’ conflict and retain some degree of freedom, or be given orders they cannot refuse. There is no way for Adrian to avoid taking part entirely, so it is preferable for him to control the terms under which he fights for Charles. This is remarkably similar to the logic used by Eloise’s family to extract obedience from her, where Gemma tells her, “You can do as they wish.  You can excel, you can thrive, you can comport yourself so that the people marking you have nothing at all to write.  If you do, they will give you choices.”²⁶ In each case, both are arguing for preemptive capitulation — complying with the expected demands of the powerful before they are even spoken. The end result is a softer form of fratricidal coercion than what Joshua receives. Freeman is telling Adrian to expect some consequence from other Red Heron authorities for shirking, even though he is not willing to carry it out himself.

After Adrian nearly dies from attack by Ruins predators, Freeman becomes worried that he is pushing Adrian too hard. He seeks advice from Helen and Yiyun, asking three separate times, “‘what happens in the new year’” when the truce with Kennet expires.²⁷ Each time, he expresses insecurity over Adrian’s readiness and his ability to get Adrian into fighting shape. The responses from Helen and Yiyun are vague and not very helpful. Helen suggests, “‘What if we… just accept he’s not a fighter?’” but is interrupted by the other teachers announcing that they want to perform a raid on the Whitts, which Adrian does not get an exemption from.²⁸ The most he gets is informal permission to avoid performing direct violence to enemies, while still being expected to assist in the attack through other means. Freeman is not able to release Adrian from the expectations that he become a good child soldier.

Overall, the Red Heron gives teachers total freedom to do anything they want to their assigned student, including abuse, harm, and exploitation. The only thing they cannot do is prevent their students from acting as child soldiers. The Red Heron will not do anything to rein their teachers in, even when students express problems, as Kira-Lynn did. This is not an accident. This is policy from Lis and Charles, who think that brutality will make the Red Heron more powerful and dangerous (though they disagree on what exactly that danger should be used for). In the next section, I will explore how effective this is.

Student see, student do

The abusive training that the Red Heron students are put through make them significantly more willing to act cruelly towards others, whether their enemies or their own members. This gives them a tendency of using more brutality than is strictly needed to achieve their goals. At their worst, their violence is so uncontrolled that they hurt their own side more than the enemy. Some Red Heron students are consciously doing this to avoid punishment from the group, but sometimes they are more unconsciously influenced by the behavior the teachers have modeled for them. To go over this, I will discuss the cases of Adrian in the Whitt raid, Teddy threatening to torture Horseman, and Kira-Lynn’s multiple spirit surgeries.

Adrian gets with the program

Adrian is warned that he must be seen contributing to Charles’ conflict or else be discarded, and eventually he takes that to heart. When Adrian goes to the Whitt raid, he initially attempts to stay back with Cameron, who is in the support group and thus given a pass on direct violence. For this, Cameron subtly rebukes him, and “there [are] looks aimed backward at Adrian.  Even his cousin seem[s] impatient with him.”²⁹ This pushes him to take a more active role in the raid, most notably leading the charge to steal the Whitts’ cars.³⁰

Within the context of the raid, this is actually a significantly escalatory action that raises the danger to both sides. The original goal of this outing, as expressed by Griffin, is to perform a quick smash and grab for loot (though mission creep sets in by the second paragraph when Seth begins speaking). For the students, it is lowest risk to them if the Whitts either surrender immediately or flee without fighting back. By taking their cars, Adrian significantly reduces their ability to do the second. Then Lenard decides that the house the Whitts are in should be set on fire.³¹ Together, these two actions of removing the Whitts’ method of escape while making it impossible to stay where they are form an extremely dangerous combination, one that is typically deadly in real life. It is surprising that the Whitts end up taking no casualties.³²

At the same time, stealing the Whitts’ cars does not significantly advance the original goal of gaining loot. Profiting from car theft usually requires sending it to a chop shop and selling the parts, or disguising the car with advanced techniques such as VIN cloning and reselling it domestically or internationally. All of these require some level of knowledge or connections with organized crime to perform.³³ The story provides no indication that the Red Heron has the capability to do this, and they do not last long enough to make it plausible that they have achieved this offscreen. In addition, these cars belong to a family of emotion manipulators, who are likely able to track down lost possessions with connection Practice. The most help that stealing cars provides is a getaway method, which is made redundant by the teachers’ already existing personal vehicles they brought on-site.³⁴

Despite the above, there is one way the carjacking helps Adrian: he is no longer seen as insufficiently dedicated to the cause. His actions are motivated by the brutal incentives of the Red Heron, even if the actual result only raised the risk profile of the raid for loot of dubious value.

Teddy threatens torture of a PoW

Not all cruelty the Red Heron students perform is due to immediate pressure from others. Sometimes it is done relatively of their own will, though it still should be understood as occurring within the wider context of Red Heron abuse.

Teddy is having a panic attack over his recent actions in battle when he comes across Horseman, who is bound to preserve the life of all Red Heron members and then to follow student orders. Horseman worries he may be distressed enough to attempt suicide and tries to calm Teddy down. This doesn’t work, and his very presence adds to Teddy’s distress. In a bid to make Horseman leave, he says, “‘Hey.  If I ordered you to leave, take that gun and fuck yourself with it, and then pull the trigger right before you got to the happy part, you’d have to, right?.’”³⁵ This is a threat of sexualized torture. In his moment of crisis, Teddy is falling back on the Red Heron tendency for teachers to threaten students to extract compliance. As Japanese historian Saburo Ienaga notes, “‘Individuals whose own dignity and manhood had been so cruelly violated would hardly refrain from doing the same to defenseless persons under their control. After all, they were just applying what they had learned in basic training.’”³⁶

Ultimately, however, this threat doesn’t work. Horseman is not convinced Teddy won’t jump off the roof after saying that. It is only after Teddy verbally commits to going back to his room that Horseman feels his orders to preserve Teddy’s life have been satisfied. This achieves Teddy’s goal of getting Horseman away. Even then, however, he can’t resist a parting shot of ordering Horseman to stay permanently silent except when mission critical or asked to speak by one of the teachers, and then to stand up from where he sits.³⁷ Just as the teachers can do anything to their assigned students with impunity, Teddy is able to do whatever he wants to the bound Horseman, and he abuses that power.

Kira-Lynn embraces Red Heron philosophy

Of all the Red Heron students, Kira-Lynn is notable for reproducing the abuses of the teachers onto her fellow students. She follows the Red Heron theory of victory to a T: hurting students to make them willing to commit atrocities and overwhelm the other side with violence is how one wins. To this end, she performs invasive spirit surgeries on the Red Heron students, including herself. Her first target is Stefan, who she threatens into it:

“We have to be ready,” Kira-Lynn said, to Stefan.  “But it’s your choice.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of trust to ask from me,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kira-Lynn said.  “But if you say no, I’m going to tell the teachers we can’t count on you.  I’m going to recommend they withdraw you.”

“What?  I’ve helped, I’m-”

“You’re not an asset, Stefan,” Lis said.

“The fuck?  What?  You’re going to take my magic?”

“Let me do this, and I promise you, I won’t let them.  For at least three months.  We can decide if you want to keep the adjustments later.”³⁸

Stefan eventually agrees, but it is clear this is only done under duress. At best, this is a coerced kind of consent-in-name-only. The spirit surgery that follows carries the subtext of unwanted penetration, acting as a coded form of the harm that Kira-Lynn fears from Griffin.³⁹ Kira-Lynn has learned from Griffin that teacher-on-student harm is permissible, so she tries out student-on-student harm and finds she has Lis’ active support.

The goal is to psychologically prime Red Heron students to commit great levels of harm, while reducing any form of shirking from conflict. With Stefan, she aims to make him “meaner”; with herself, she aims to “‘kill [her] mercy and compassion.’”⁴⁰ She does not put in traits that increase teamwork or loyalty to the cause. She explicitly decries surgically improved bravery as “‘too much work.’”⁴¹ The Red Heron does not value these traits, only increased aggression. Later on, she implants new recruits with false memories of abuse at home in order to make them feel they have no option but to stay with the Red Heron.⁴² These two forms of spirit surgery don’t seem to be stacked, creating a demarcation between students recruited earlier who are given Abyssal influences to become more violent and students recruited later who are given false memories to motivate them with fear.

Is this effective? No. The main effect of either types of spirit surgery are that it makes students more willing to attack recklessly, even when it doesn’t make sense to. Their violence is poorly directed, resulting in unnecessarily hurting themselves or their teammates. This can be seen in the final battle against Charles’ side. 

When Lucy fights the memory-implanted Gerald, she is able to knock his weapon out of his grasp relatively easily. Instead of retreating or trying to recover his weapon, Gerald comes back at Lucy, insisting on attacking her unarmed and making no attempts to dodge her attacks. His actions are near-suicidally reckless, as he is “willing to be cut twice to try to slam the other edge of [Lucy’s] blade at her to cut her once.”⁴³ In other words, Gerald is choosing to make an unfavorable trade that hurts himself far more than it does his enemy, instead of retreating until the situation is more favorable to him. (For example, he could get his own Abyssal branch back and fire at Lucy from a distance, or find another weapon.) Shortly after, he is wrestled into submission by Lucy and the Innocent Mrs. Flowers.⁴⁴ Just because he has the desire to attack at great risk to himself does not mean those attacks are effective.

Similarly, the spirit-surgeried Kira-Lynn and Del are so aggressive, so unable to hold back, that in the chaos they attack their own side when they can least afford it. In the thick of battle, Seth and Griffin caution Kira-Lynn against using an Abyssal scream. To this, she responds, “‘wasn’t going to, until you two started trying to order me around, now I’m tempted.'”⁴⁵ This is clear insubordination against her superiors, the spiteful fruit of Kira-Lynn’s poor working relationship with Griffin. Shortly after, Del summons Others bound by Charles’ side, against the warning of the augurs. Unbeknownst to many of the Red Heron members present, Avery destroyed the sigil preventing these Others from attacking the Red Heron, so when they are summoned they attack indiscriminately and kill Seth and Griffin. Then Kira-Lynn performs that Abyssal scream. It scares away the summoned Others, but also hurts her own side, too. Lucy and the Dog Tags end up recovering faster, and force the remaining Red Heron members into some form of surrender and imprisonment.⁴⁶ Though she does this in the seconds after Seth and Griffin die, Kira-Lynn’s actions are debatably a form of fragging-in-spirit, when soldiers attack their superiors due to resentments within the force. Instead of having increased effectiveness in battle from the spirit surgeries, Kira-Lynn and Del inflict otherwise avoidable losses on their own side to the point of defeat.

Hurting your soldiers so they’ll hurt everyone else: not a winning move?

As I’ve shown, the Red Heron does not have a coherent vision of what it is fighting for, only the strategy that abusing students to make them commit extreme brutality to the enemy leads to success. Institutionally, it is set up to allow teachers to get away with any harm to their assigned student, as long as they are made into proper soldiers. Fratricidal coercion is applied to students who are reluctant to fight. From this treatment, students learn that cruelty and aggression are mandatory.

This results in the high levels of atrocity that Red Heron students commit. During combat, students perform escalatory actions and take avoidable losses just for the chance of hurting the enemy (or at least being seen to try). Outside of combat, this behavior spills over to other situations, as students harm each other and prisoners of war under their control. It’s a similar situations to real life, as historian Bret Devereaux describes — frequent atrocities aren’t just random occurrences, or inherent to any specific peoples, but are “the product of organizational culture, command decisions, and an institutional structure that shields a military from civilian checks or accountability.”⁴⁷ The Red Heron, of course, does not have any civilian structure at all, but many of the other dynamics he describes in his article hold true.

Ultimately, Pale concludes with a strong repudiation of the Red Heron’s methods. While they do more frequent and transgressive violence, they often crumple on contact against the Kennet trio. Their atrocities done on relatively weak Practitioners, who are not expecting attacks of this scale, do not translate to success against those who are most actively opposing them. They have trouble holding on to their members, as the experience of being a Red Heron student is so terrible that many choose to desert — Joshua, Nomi, Adrian, and Harri. To cap it all off, the amount of time between the Red Heron breaking the truce against Kennet early (estimated December 27) and Charles’ total defeat (estimated January 7 or 8) is less than two weeks, an astonishingly short period of time.⁴⁸ Their unrelenting cruelty isn’t just morally troublesome, it is ineffective on a military level and makes them lose.