I am going to assert that it's virtually always incorrect to presume "Anduriel is only pursuing the simplest and most-straightforward plan, here" in any scene where Nic/Anduriel is onscreen (they are like Mab (and Odin) in this regard).
They don't play 7-d chess, they live and breathe it 24/7/365 and have been doing so for centuries.
In fact, Occam's Razor is the least-valid approach to these sorts of characters.
Not really.
I actually disagree about their 'living and breathing' this stuff. Yes, they're good at it. Yes, they're often playing a deeper game, and usually a deeper one yet within it when they do. But they still have limits. Nicodemus is still a human being, an incredibly long-lived and very smart one, granted, but it's a mistake to see him as all-foreseeing, all-calculating, nigh-infallible. Sometimes he's just doing what he appears to be doing.
We've actually seen in-story that Nicodemus can be, and has been, outplayed by Harry, Mab and John Marcone. Now granted both the latter are masters at this themselves, but it's an example of Nicodemus' fallibility. Nicodemus is very good at this, but he's not necessarily the best there is. Though I think he thinks he's better at it than he really is.
(I think Margaret had some of the same thing going on.)
Remember what Uriel (a
true 17-dimensional chessmaster) was doing during the Hades adventure. Even as Mab and Marcone played Nicodemus, Uriel was using that to destroy Nicodemus' illusion of omniscience and Ultimate Badassness with his own minions, in hopes of freeing them and eventually saving them. Seeing Nicodemus run away, totally outplayed, wiped out the perception they had of him as being a mega-infallible badass...and left them potentially open to better things.
And even the master-level players are not always playing at master level. I think it's a mistake, for example, to ascribe that sort of ability to the Black Council, or Nemesis. They too are to some degree playing it by ear, I think.
You're right, it's very possible they knew one another (I think inevitable that they at least knew of one another) . I'm betting there were some sort of meetings between them: it's exactly the sort of thing I think Jim would use to torment Harry!
Good point.
We just don't know enough about Margaret's motivations, back in the day, to assess what her attitude toward Kemmler would probably have been. Even if she was corrupt at the time herself, that doesn't guarantee they'd have gotten along, as an old line from a Disney show goes, sometimes 'the last thing a villain needs around is another villain'.
3) Anduriel has found a partner in Nic who already had a closely-aligned agenda, and millennia to subtly influence & adjust Nic's outlook to be even closer. Anduriel "called his shots" over millenia, with that subtle influence; and now mostly just sits back and "lives off the interest of those prior investments." He still steps in on Nic, occasionally. We saw it in the fight in Hades' vault, when Michael & Harry tried to get Nic to give up the coin: I don't think Nic was allowed to hear them.
I might need to reread that scene, but I don't think Anduriel was blocking Nicodemus' ears, so to speak. I'm not sure he'd have been
allowed to do that, under the circumstances. IIRC, my impression was that Harry and Michael almost reached Nicodemus for a moment, he seemed to waver, and then Anduriel whispered something to him and fed his pride and ego and got him back on the evil track again.
Nic boasts to Harry that he's a "full partner" but that's honestly delusional of him: he has only the "independence" that Anduriel permits him (but that's a fair amount because Nic began close and only got closer as the years passed).
Absolutely. No mortal is ever
really the one in control with those Coins in play. They'll let a mortal have his or her head if it's useful, but the final say is always in demonic hands. Deep down, Nicodemus probably knows that, even if he can't admit it to himself. The only way a mortal gets the last word with a Coin is by refusing it, or surrendering it.
