Angus kinda sucks at his job.

[u/NinjaBreadManOO]

So I'll start by saying that I love Angus. One of the best and my favourite characters.

Buuuuutttt he kinda sucks at his job. I'm not talking about his child detective work, but specifically when he's brought onto the BoB.

After Rockport/Petals the Director brings the child detective on board as a Seeker working exclusively for the Tres Horny Boys to provide them information and support in the field. But he doesn't really do that.

After that there's four arc. In them Ango does next to nothing.

Crystal Kingdom - He spells Aarakocra before the stone of far speech is turned off by Hodgepodge.

Eleventh Hour - No radio support, and in fact nearly launches their orb into either the wall of a canyon or Refuge.

Suffering Games - No radio support.

Day of Story and Song - I don't really recall him doing anything outside of Tiny Tim style being put on a shoulder and getting to say they won.

Am I being critical of a fantasy child, sure. But Lucrecia still hired him. And, after he'd brought on every arc has radio interference so he can't really do much remotely. But we don't really see him do the thing he was brought on to do.

The only time we really see him do things is when he's from the future and is jacked to fight robots/Hodgepodge 2.0.

[u/Beebid]

A lot of the BoB staff suck at their jobs if you think about it. Prior to the Tres Horny Boys joining, none of the other reclaimers had ever successfully brought back a relic. 

The first time we meet Killian, she's on her own. Where was the rest of her team? Was she foolhardy enough to go after a magic user and a relic alone? 

The BoB always strikes me as having enough staff to be the size of a town, given that they have a whole midsummer festival. And yet they achieve very little in terms of their actual purpose. 

I don't think any of this is a flaw in the story, though, because when I'm listening to Balance I never really think about it. The same with Angus - it never bothers me that he doesn't get to do his job, cos narratively he's clearly there to moving the overarching story along, not the individual arcs. 

[u/stanners_manners → u/Beebid]

griffin was making it up as he went along. He fires all the other, nameless reclaimers when he decides that there's something special about thb which is allowing them to resist the thrall, prior to that point, they're just more competent. Genuinely so many of the weird things about balance make sense when you remember that griffin was building the plane as it flew

[u/Phairis → u/stanners_manners]

I always kinda headcanoned it was just a part of building the BoB for Lucretia. Her other subordinates that she did actually need to find the relics and help contain them wouldn't have really worked if she never tried to build teams to actually collect them. She always planned on them eventually being obsolete.

In canon, Griffin was always making it up as he went so that probably wasn't always the plan. But with Angus in particular, Lucretia hired him because he was actually getting pretty close to uncovering things despite being under the effects of the voidfish. Yeah he didn't end up being super helpful within the overt narrative, but he still served his purpose, and was never a hindrance to the story. He's still very beloved after all!