[Analysis/Rant] Stop Sanding All the Rough Edges Off these interesting Characters
"Ppl ask for morally grey female characters but then can't handle them"? I've really seen a lot of takes that remind me of it.
The characters in questions aren't even all that morally grey (I guess the Weavers would be the closest fit), but for the most they just exist in a dark setting without easy answers or satisfying clean catharsis & nuanced writing that doesn't slot into easy categories
#1 GMS did not "redeem herself" or "care deep down"
So. This one's a villain. Garmond's Hometown and Verdania ("our lands fell to thread and ruin") was explicitly conquerred during the haunting era. The lights have been out in the citadel for "generations" (seamstress dialogue), she's been back in charge a while, she's responsible for all we see.
Now there's definitely a point made that you can't blame it all on her alone & that the Weavers & Conductors are also super duper guilty for perpetuating the empire while she was incapacitated, & that's an important point - you can't blame it all on the evil other/ 'lizard person', no one's incapable of evil. (She's defo, evil, but ultimately I think not intrinsically evil, though the idea is introduced, presented & examined... Hornet got some internalized shit about believing she's intrinsically evil (ironically as a result of some of the Weavers living what they'd learned from their maker), but if that was the final intended takeaway, WL would not be the one handing out the plot McGuffin!
Ultimately GMS just got a bunch of entitlement ("ours by birth... ours by right..." "they are ours... bound forever") & toxic destructive pattern that both her offspring & political sucessors partially perpetuated. She's a person who listens to her instinct/id above everything, not someone who lacks other parts, we see her display emotions and "cunning" - she ought to be as capable of free will as WL, PK or Hornet herself. Due to being born into privilege she had a huge blast radius, but in the end her antics brought misery even to herself & her power didn't even truly protect her from becoming victimized. - Note the wardenflies as an obvious microcosm parallel, & how Hornet spares the baby one in the end, hoping she'll have a better upbringing so the cycle won't repeat... & does the same with Lace.
While it IS genuinely ambiguous how much influence she regained at which point / when exactly she began regaining control, & it's clear that the subsequent rulers don't have clean hands/ made everything worse (in part because they were seduced by the power she represents) the conquests are put squarely at her feet in the narrative (arms? pointy bottom part?)
Now, I personally LOVED her final moment & it stuck out to me as something a lesser writer wouldn't have thought of but that is very lifelike to how possessve parents are. Like a lesser writer would've had her say or do one less evil thing to prove how evil she is, but instead, they have her be a person with feelings & a consistent goal & agenda, in all her might and monstrosity.
Her final action is not a change or contradiction. As the moss mother journal description reminds us, motherhood is a base instinct. The same base instinct that drives her greed and domination also fuels the desire to protect her offspring - which, first, is an interesting & multifaceted way to explore the theme of "beastly instinct". The same beastly instinct leads her to protect (something we'd label "good") but also to conquer & subjugate (something we'd call "bad")
It remains on this beastly, conditional level & falls short of true altruism because it's been previously established that she doesn't really see Lace as a person. Especially when you contrast it with Herrah who is also like a tough badass spider monster who was in a position of power & sacrificed herself for her child. What differentiates them is that Herrah, while she might have a similar basic temperament/disposition, had wisdom & self-awareness to temper it - she thinks not just about what she wants, but about what's good for Hornet: Wanting her to be empowered & her own person, caring what she wants etc.
If GMS cared about what's good for Lace she wouldn't have crafted her to be weak & controllable. Also she clearly had no idea of Lace's emotional state until that pin cut through her arm.
It's that "Id die for my child - your child wants an apology" text post.
She cares about Lace (and Hornet!) as extensions of herself, her legacy. There's genuine emotional attachment, she'd probably tell you she loves all her children so much & sacrificed so much & they all just keep using, dissapointing & backstabbing her (with the combined self-awareness of an entire estranged parent's forum)
But you can't make her "just misunderstood" without completely erasing the perspectives of First Sinner, Phantom and Lace, & turning all their emotions frivollous.
Ppl already idealize parenthood & it's supposed "sacrifice" (even though it's the parents who choose to be parents. They give themselves a kid to realize their dreams the way someone else might buy themselves a fat car) & instantly disbelieve victims of parental abuse so like... cut it out.
Also don't defang this cool villain! She's a roman emperor ok? She's tenacious & formidable & domineering & the sort of id-driven villain female characters rarely get to be.
She's an evil female monarch without falling into the "hysterical vain evil queen" tropes.
Hitler may have loved his dog, but he was still Hitler.
Villains are still people, but being people doesn't make them not villains.
I'd like to stress that I love her character, I think the aesthetic is carried out so consumately but like. She's a villain. A dimemnsional villain with feelings but, like, she kept getting betrayed for a reason. It happened a second time cause she took exactly the wrong lessons from the first.
#2 Comerade Lace the Perfect Victim
Now Lace. She's an antagonist but you can't call her a villain, a tragedy probably fits it best, cause one of the fundamental facts about her is that she's a kid who doesn't know better, & never had a chance to know better. That's why the narrative treats her differently than, say, Widow.
You know what really irks me about how ppl make Lace more mature/competent/heroic than she actually is?
Besides the fact that ppl are transparently doing it for the dumb, inane reason of making a crackship work that & isn't based on anything in the actual story/ requires you to actively twist & ignore it. They're basically doing the same thing as all that big tiddy art of Hornet, ignoring the actual character to make it sexy... but at least horny artists aren't sanctimonious & victim-play-y about it.
But the main reason I'm so persistently annoyed about it when I have better things to do is that it erases what was done to her & how painful & vulnerable her situation really is.
Like no, let's not gloss over this.
She's a neglected, sickly child (or preteen at most) who is physically and emotionally dependent on an abusive parent. (& no, not gonna debate this again, we're explicitly told that she has the "mind of a child" in the whole game no one ever thinks or states otherwise including herself - the LL journal entry, the last word on her character, even emphasizes this.)
She parrots her mother's snobby attitude, skewers innocents in her name & mimics her cruel behavior because that's the only way she knows to get respect.
She's fucked in the head enough to crave the praise & attention of someone who isn't worth it, casually murder the commonfolk in her name & be murderously jealous of someone who was napped against her will. Like Hornet decided to collect GMS' head and have her for breakfast sometime between being 'napped & seeing Haunted Bellhart but all Lace can think of is that "its you she wants"
she's completely concerned with her emotions (the Weavers have the same damage of humiliation & wanting to get revenge/ put themselves on top to compensate, but they go about it in very adult ways (elaborate plot using inventions, plotting in secret etc.), including very adult cruelties (like how they too abused the commoners & their own descendants like Eva). They have adult concerns like freedom, political power, & having their own families) This applies even to Widow still under GMS' control - pathetic old woman still under her parent's control, rationalizing it through her religious fantacism etc. though ultimately driven by loneliness.
While she's not weak per se, she ends up appointing herself the 'rival' of someone much more compotent than her & ends up being no match for her. You can punt her in the lava. Hornet gives "worthy opponent respect" to many characters but Lace is not one of them. it's just "fool child you're no match for me".
Likewise, Hornet deduces everything about Lace/sees straight through her, while Lace fails to clock the first thing about Hornet. "you must quiver at the sight of our great citadel! tremble before our Higher Being" without clocking that Hornet IS a pale being herself... & then she slinks off & lets her mom takes over the intimidating.
this is central to what triggers her crashout. Violence is usually an attempt to turn humiliation into self-esteem, & her story is that of someone enduring humiliation & disregard until she could no longer take it.
when she realizes she will never get that praise/love / cannot compete, it's the end of the world to her to the point she tries to kill herself & take a whole country with her, & cheers/laughs at its destruction, too. She didn't do that to save Hornet (& indeed tries to turn it into a power play/ humiliation right away like she "let" her live)
All of this is not framed as an indictiment of Lace herself, but as proof of how badly she's been failed - indeed we're told she's still worth saving & being given a chance at being something better (once had some desire of being a hero though it wasn't nurtured)
She's someone who needs freedom, but it isn't even on her radar as something she'd want - she's too low on the maslow pyramid for that; She's more concerned with having worth & being loved... or rather how she thinks she's unseen and "pathetic" (kinda like how kids need to be securely attached to explore independently)
You kinda cheapen all this by having her be mature, politically aware, competent & emotionally independent to begin with. She's not!
Are you implying that, if she's not, she wouldn't be worth saving or would deserve her abuse? Or is it too vulnerable to relate to someone in such a humiliated position?
You know it could be so interesting to explore how she learns to be mature/considerate/perceptive etc, how she'd deprogram herself from the aristocratic snobbery, come to have healthier sources of self-esteem, learns better outlets for her feelings etc but ppl just skip over that to make her a Perfect Victim.
She doesn't have to be a perfect victim (or an adult) to be worth something/ worthy of respect.
#3 Hornet totally KNEW about the void
Now we get to the take that she was totally duped by the Snails, which is just sooo boring. No. She's smarter than that.
Let her have made a potentially dicey/risky decision. Let her whole guilt/atonement/self-forgiveness arc afterwwards actually mean something & not just be perfunctory whining. Let her have dirtied her hands.
Her first response is to confront her co-conspirators aggressively (she definitely tends toward "fight" out of the four Fs), yes, but they immediately point out that she must have suspected / that it should have been obvious. They imply that she knew about as clearly as they could have without explicitly stating it.
It is made clear in advance that she 100% clocked the snails
when Sula does void shit, she recognizes it from looking at his abandoned camps. She knows what void spells look like.
We're explicitly told that she personally helped to assemble the trap ("your silk & claw will be needed...")
She must've at least suspected & glossed over it because she really wanted it to work.
Note that at any point before this, Hornet is always several steps ahead of everyone - much of the exposition is delivered by her deducing it, not by NPCs telling her. At half the reveals she goes "it's as I thought". She recognizes many of the mysterious things she encounters. She goes "think of the potential" at any source of power (to the point of saying she kinda gets the plasmium guy... that's there to tell us how she'd react to any Mysterious power that doesn't happen to be the same one her father screwed with. She's like "this shit is dangerous but I know what I'm doing...")
Her protestations that the void, in particular, is Of The Devil & going on about its obvious wicked nature come off as a reaction formation, really wanting to disown any association. She doesn't wanna have Fucked Up Like He Did (especially in the process of how she went against what the Sheming aunties would've wanted for her) cause she'd internalized this idea that being like him makes her intrinsically evil & an outsider, & because when HIS plan exploded in his face he cracked under the responsibility & slunk off to die. (& she's trying very hard not to do that & keep going, judging by stuff like the crawfather journal entry - though, ultimately, she's tougher than him, with WL explicitly having noted her toughness to have come from the maternal side)
Also, an interesting read I've also seen that, if we're in the Dream No More timeline, (OR, if you interpret EtV as having had some major negative fallout), this could also be some guilt over what happened to the protagonist. Cause she was more hopeful about making use of ye olde darkness in the convo after you get the shade cloak. In that case she might've interpreted the aftermath as Ghost having tried to use the darkness & been destroyed by this... & she was the one who nudged them on that path. In this case she wouldn't have known they still existed in any form until she sees them again at the end when they fish her out.
Finally while the snails are probably supposed to have been somewhat reckless & I wouldn't put it past them to have been hoping for a mutual kill (which it would have been, if not for Lace's intervention), they're the only ones mounting a resistance against a tyrant that's been persecuting them & generally plagueing the land, & who vastly outclasses them; Bloodless revolutions are rare & dethroning a tyrant rarely comes without mess. Not to mention they're willing to die to fix it. They're desperate and out of good options (and to be clear, so was Hornet. Prolly why she can get a crest associated with them - they're actually not so different.)
#4 The Weavers are neither wholesome nor the root of all evil
Now these are genuinely morally grey, as a realistic ish case of "the court replaced the king" / "the tyrant's replacement is little better"
& also, as with any large group, probably not a monolith. Herrah is obviously a heroic individual, whoever's remains are left behind in Deepnest seemed to have cared somewhat about Hornet, Camora & First Sinner could be seen as well intentioned depending on how you interpret them, & we're told some pretty neutral stuff about them - they had awesome tech, were respected as badass, they used to climb frigid mountains to test themselves & enjoyed a nice pretty lake as much as everyone else.
But they're also largely remembered in a bad light & responsible for setting up the citadel of song system, & some used to deadass eat the peasants & generally look down on the commoners. One imagines that Hornet goes through a major "broken pedestral" experience as the story goes on. Even so, it's not an issue of them simply being evil, but living what they've learned from their mother, & wanting to put themselves on top so they're not put below again.
Flatvillaining them often comes paired with the "GMS was just misunderstood" or "just a mindless monster" takes. It's true that it looked that way for the commonfolk (as Mask Maker describes it, they did their coup to make off with the kingdom), but from their needolin flashbacks, tablets, rune harps etc and Eva's eyewitness account, it's pretty clear that they were really fucking terrified of GMS & under real duress there, even if they were better off than the commoners.
On the other hand, some parts of the fandom don't seem to have processed that many of them were consistently shitty to half-breeds like Eva ('the despised child') & Hornet, & that if anyone out of the latters' family tried to make her disown any part of her heritage, it was them giving her shit for being part Higher Being, not the other way around. (not that this was likely to begin with, given that WL speaks highly of Herrah even in the 1st game)
Hornet instantly bonds with Eva about how they were not really treated as their kin despite being children of Weavers. (generational fuckery being passed on, pretty comparable with how both FS and Lace felt that GMS didn't treat them as real, worthy daughters, she's abandoned in an oubliette just like Phantom...)
They're not the "good half" of the family (in case Caretaker's line about how he doesn't trust either half of her didn't make that clear)
Think about why she didn't know to play the needolin before she came to pharloom - since it opens the doors & uncovers secret messages, its probably a skill any adult would have.
Of course, Hornet takes it, climbs up mt fay, does the whole dream ritual to reproduce the flower from her silk etc. all sorts of things that have her proving herself as a full worthy member of the tribe, but, it comes off a bit like claiming what they wouldnt otherwise have given her. It's kinda giving "Spock deciding to join starfleet" (while proudly displaying vulcan culture & being a tad ashamed of his human half), doesn't it?
The shaming aunties are clearly the ones who Dun Fucked Her Up (aside from... well, the zombie apocalypse), & the default ending is doing what they would've wanted, that's why it's called Weaver Queen.
In the end the choice wasn't between Weaver & Wyrm but between "i suffered so why shouldn't others" & "we can do better than this".
& in this choice, GMS and the sheming aunties are actually very much on the same team... (team "get mine")
And so are both of Hornet's parents, WL and Vespa, despite their disagreements on some areas, team idealism, & wanting her to do her own thing instead of what they want.
But for all their flaws, & culpability we can see the Scheming Aunties as products of their environment, & in the end Hornet does remember them as having taught her the value of excellence & does seem to miss them somewhat. So yeah, not saints but not flatvillains either.
they're probably well described by the whole "suffering doesnt make ppl better it just makes them suffer" quote.
origamiaround
prguitarman
dededos
janainaart
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
