Apo's story as a metaphor for wartime. Forced into service by the military, beginning as a desire to protect people, coerced by a powerful man into becoming a being that feeds on blood (requiring violence to sustain itself) out of the belief that it will protect the people who she cared about (while it clearly doesn't). Being a dehumanised other to one side, and a traitor to the other, even as she tries constantly to not give into the violence that grows around her. Breaking down and deliberately killing an innocent as a way to relieve the stress she's faced. Ultimately every effort undertaken to protect people only ends up with them killed and her blamed for it. Even when the soldier gets to return, she comes home forever changed, while the closest entity to a legal body (Abolish) tacitly accepts the perpetrators of the violence that affected her.
