Tainted Blood

Old history:

Marienkäfers started as a smaller branch of Siegel family and with time, through military service and warfare, earned their own title and lands. Even though the family was never very influential, they were considered a reputable family which stayed patriotic to Koben and loyal to it’s roots. Many generations of Marienkäfers produced talented officers to the Koben military. However, when relatively peaceful times laid upon Empire that served as the beginning of the family's downfall.

With time, male heirs of the family, who did not have a lot of sibling competition with girls being born more often than boys, started to become spoiled and lazy, treating their military service as a mean of achieving things unrelated to its primary cause. Generations of spoiled Barons changed with even worse generations, and soon there was nothing left of the previous glory the name Marienkäfer held, now only being associated with gamblers, revelers and womanizers. Naturally, such a lifestyle caused the family’s wealth grow thinner and thinner with every new generation, while the family grew smaller and smaller in numbers with lesser and lesser amount of noble families wishing to be associated with a tainted bloodline.

New history:

A glimpse of hope for the family came when Martin’s grandfather, Cristoph Marienkäfer, inherited the title after his father, who was murdered by robbers while having a rackety night out. Disgusted by his father’s behavior and treatment he was giving to his mother, Cristoph grew up to be a completely different man from the previous Barons, immune to the vices his family was known for. The man put a lot of effort into rebuilding his family’s reputation, doing everything he could to arrange successful marriages for his sisters and later daughters. However, when it came to his only male heir, Dietrich Marienkäfer, Cristoph had to deal with a failure, as his son turned out to be an embodiment of everything that their family was ‘famous’ for.

Seeing his own mistake in putting too much hope into the male side of his heritage, Cristoph was eager to fix it once the new generation arrived with the birth of his grand-daughter Freida. He was delighted to see the little girl showing the traits of the character he wished to see in his son and decided to entrust the fate of his family into Freida’s little hands, understanding that he had no luxury of hoping for a ‘better’ male heir. However, all the effort he put into raising his grand-daughter into a decent Baroness was crossed by Dietrich’s narrow mind. Once Cristoph  was gone, Dietrich managed to destroy his relationship with his daughter, driving the young promising lady away from the family. In the following years Dietrich continued the ‘honorable’ tradition of loosing Marienkäfer’s reputation and erasing everything that his father has achieved. The last ‘legacy’ he left for his son was the loss of the lands that the family owned in a drunken gamble. He died shortly after that because of poor health.

His son, Friedrich Marienkäfer, was not a gambler, nor was he a womanizer. Marrying the woman he loved, he seemed to be content with the life he was having, doing nothing to ruin his family’s reputation even more, though doing nothing to rebuild it as well. He could lead his life simply as that, living with his wife and their children in the last remaining property of theirs - an estate in the borders the the capital. However, this was not bound to happen. After his wife’s death during childbirth, Friedrich became addicted to alcohol, selling almost everything the family owned to buy more and more wine, and neglecting his only child. The only thing that saved Marienkäfer’s estate was Friedrich’s soon suicide, which placed a huge cross on any connections the family had with the last remaining nobility that stayed kind to the family.

Current days:

Despite Freida reclaiming her title and becoming a guardian to her nephew - the young Baron Marienkäfer - as well as the effort she put into rebuilding their estate and returning financial stability to their family, Mrienkafers’ name became a joke among nobility, forgotten by most, and ridiculed by the rest. While Freida Marienkäfer herself is being respected among aristocracy for her personal merits, no one places high expectations on her nephew - Martin Marienkäfer, who is looked down upon by those who are familiar with his family name and is assumed to walk the path of his male ancestors once his respectable aunt would pass away.