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Leopoldine Jäger Blog Entry |
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February 2, 2024, 12:00:10 AM November 25, 2024, 8:43:38 PM 2/2/24: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." This week's character from my anthro WWII storyline is Leopoldine Jäger. She's the young (around eleven years old) daughter of Magdalena Jäger and adopted daughter of Major Ludolf Jäger (her mother was pregnant when they met). She's also the oldest of nine children (and counting). She's every bit Daddy's little princess; despite them not being related by blood, they adore each other, and she's plainly Jäger's favorite. She's also a budding fanatic just like her parents. There'll be more about her later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se. Regarding her design, she's leucistic, not albino. Since she's a child, I tweaked her design, and made her eyes and ears about 10% bigger. TUMBLR EDIT: I've already gone over most of Leopoldine's role in the story in her mother Magda's entry. Magda is pregnant with her, via a one-night stand with an SS officer when Magda is around eighteen or nineteen, and he has no interest in marriage (and Magda's family is no help), so Magda goes to a Lebensborn maternity home in hopes they'll help deliver the baby and put it up for adoption (abortion of Aryan babies is illegal). While there, she meets Jäger (a captain at the time), a former Waffen-SS officer who's recently transferred to the Allgemeine-SS and is touring the maternity home; he'd recently been involved in the other part of the Lebensborn project, offering his own services fathering children he'll never get to meet. He's looking to start his own family, and something about Magda sparks his interest; the two of them pretty much see it as fate that they meet when they do, and quickly end up engaged and then married. Magda worries that Jäger will be disappointed in a daughter, much less a daughter who's not even his by blood; yet Jäger latches on to little Leopoldine immediately, declaring her his "perfect little Prinzessin." He officially adopts her without a second thought, and always treats her as his own. He and Magda just as quickly start their own family--Lisbeth, Liesl, twins Lars and Lara, Lothar, twins Lilli and Lotti, Liane, and another baby on the way by the final story--yet it's Leopoldine who holds the first place in Jäger's heart until the very end. These two just adore each other to bits, and Jäger spoils all his children, but he spoils Leopoldine the most. Leopoldine is his heir, and his most promising pupil. He plans for her to one day take his place as leader of the Fourth Reich. Leopoldine is bright, she's devoted, and she's motivated. She'll do anything to make Papa happy. She's the perfect Nazi daughter. Jäger easily uses his powers of persuasion on Magda, who's not terribly intelligent but loves him dearly; still, Leopoldine is even more devoted than she is. Magda tries to believe in the cause but at times she has her doubts, especially as time goes on and the Third Reich begins to falter. Leopoldine never doubts. Not once. So of course, Jäger deduces quickly that she's the one he has to groom to make the perfect Führer. Sure, she's a girl. But that's just a tiny inconvenience. Jäger has his own bizarre vision for the new world, and if he and Magda can't lead it, then Leopoldine will. Leopoldine is kind of a pathetic figure in that really, she has no will or vision of her own. Everything she believes and does is for her father. She exists merely as an extension of him, a personification of his own hopes and dreams. From the moment of her birth, she never really stands a chance. Sure she's happy, she fully believes in the plan. Just that she never had the chance to believe in anything else, or to know that there are other paths she could have followed. Jäger does such a thorough job of ensuring her devotion that even if someone had the chance to show her what else is out there, she wouldn't care; Papa's plan is all that matters. In this way, despite her reprehensible belief system, she's basically an innocent. She doesn't know it's wrong, or any other way to be. She's just the empty vessel an SS officer fathered, Magda bore, and Jäger filled to the brim with his plans for a new Reich to replace the old. The Fourth Reich is never to be, of course; but Jäger is smart, he comes up with an emergency plan for that, too. He hopes it never comes to pass, though it does. He shares this backup plan with Magda and Leopoldine shortly before the end. Magda is anguished, and tries to refuse; Leopoldine holds steady. At the very end, when Jäger is gone and the time comes to implement the final plan, Leopoldine still has full belief it'll work out, even if in a different life and not here; she reassures her mother that Jäger had promised it would be so. Why would Papa lie? As Magda gathers the children and gets things ready, Leopoldine brings hot cocoa for all to drink until they fall asleep. She's the last to doze off; she's also the last child Magda shoots and kills, her mother sobbing her eyes out the entire time. Magda takes her own life shortly afterward, all part of the plan. And just like that, the sprawling Jäger family is no more. The sad little bodies, all bundled up lovingly in a row and with their heads covered (except for Magda, of course), are discovered by the same group which defeated Jäger. Among them is Otto Himmel, a former SS captain; he previously worked for Jäger as a secretary and trusted confidant. He was well loved by the Jäger children, including Leopoldine, and despite his feigned cranky demeanor he loved them as well, slipping them candies whenever he could, tolerating their cries of "Uncle Otto" as they would clamber over him. Himmel had longed for a large family yet was never blessed with one; the Jäger children served as a sort of surrogate. Upon finding the children's bodies, he breaks down weeping, kneeling and gently clasping Leopoldine's small cold hand in his own. "Why? What was the point?" he cries; "I gladly would have taken them in." The actual point--that either the Jägers were to live and thrive together, or be defeated and die together, no in between--is too alien for him to understand. Himmel's always believed in life, unlike the fake professed beliefs of the Nazis, who believed in life under particular circumstances only. He doesn't see a defeated Reich, a noble sacrifice, in the end. All he sees is an immense waste of what could have been. A family tragedy. Indeed, that's all that becomes of Jäger's grand plan for his wife and children and himself. A new world that collapses before it's born, and the annihilation of a family. A tragedy, and nothing more. [Leopoldine Jäger 2024 [Friday, February 2, 2024, 12:00:10 AM]] 11/25/24: Rough concept sketch I didn't intend to save but SIIIIIGH. An idea I have ("Papa's Little Princess") but perhaps not the skill to pull it off yet. [Papa's Little Princess Rough Sketch [Monday, November 25, 2024, 8:43:38 PM]] |