Just a reminder in Wings and Embers, Nesta’s monologue says: “She didn’t know what to do with it, that rage. It still burned and hunted her, still made her want to rip and roar and rend the world into pieces. She felt it all—too keenly, too sharply. Hated and cared and loved and dreaded, more than other people, she sometimes thought. Could sift between them all in a matter of moments, like she was trying on different sets of clothes, and no one could tell or care. Except him. He could see it, feel it.”
And also: “That first afternoon, he’d looked at her— not at the face and the body that human men marked, but her— and he had seen it all.”
No one sees or understands Nesta, but Cassian does. This little tidbit also shows that Nesta isn’t as cold and unfeeling as most people read her to be at first. It showcases that she feels intensely and deeply, and her cold demeanour is just a facade she uses to protect herself, probably because she hurts deeply too. I love Nesta Archeron because she’s a complicated and complex female character. So often in literature, it’s always the male characters who are written to be cold and complicated and then are absolutely celebrated and deemed “the cutest bean” despite any problematic behaviour we see from them, but when it’s a female character (re: Nesta Archeron) people see her as “a bitch” or “problematic”. In fact, if Nesta was a male character, she would be described as “well-written” and “complex” and “sexy”, but she’s a woman so she’s automatically labelled a bitch/cold/unfeeling/problematic and the list goes on. Nesta Archeron is the complex and angry female character that we have needed in literature.
YES YES YES
