Call me pretentious but I believe that viewing Thalia as just a tragic hopeless romantic is incredibly shallow.
Knowing how the story will go based on the spoilers I have received, I am very likely in the wrong about the message Kim Suji wanted to send to their readers, but art is known for its ability to be interpreted in various ways separate from the canon by its audience, and my interpretation is that Varkas and Thalia are not only a terrible match, they have one of the most toxic relationship dynamics with each other in all of the historical fantasy genre of manhwa.
Thalia is no doubt a tragic character. We as the readers see her childhood firsthand, we know that her mother uses her as a political pawn, we know that her half-brother is physically abusive towards her and that her half-sister is the golden child to her scapegoat, and because we know why she's like this, we see how older men would take advantage of her vulnerabilities growing up to sexually exploit her, we are more inclined to take whatever she says as an adult at face value because she is the protagonist who has been wronged time and time again.
Now, I personally find it unrealistic that a survivor of such trauma would ever grow up to be a perfect person, it's certainly possible for a survivor with experiences identical to Thalia's come out as a better person but that usually only can happen if the survivor has access to some sort of support system, which Thalia never gets and it partially explains why she continuously stoops to the same level as her abusers.
With all that in mind though, I still hate her, I want to suffer some comeuppance for her behavior, and I don't feel all too bad for her when other characters such as Ayla see her as a monster.
For once though, I don't hate her just because I think she's badly written entirely. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of critique for her character writing that further my disdain for her, but that's not the entire reason I dislike her. I dislike Thalia because she's a grown woman by the time the story takes place. While the evil maid trope is a lazy method of convincing readers to feel bad for the wealthy protagonist in general, at the very least, a child acting out is easier to defend in comparison to an adult because a child does not have the cognitive ability to always be the bigger person, especially if they are living in a stressful environment, ESPECIALLY if those negative behaviors are encouraged and rewarded. I can't feel bad for a woman who can retain her ability to use her brain, think for herself, and make her own choices, she at that point should know better regardless of how she was raised because can adult can cause far more damage than the average child.
I think it's great to see a doomed protagonist like Thalia, we have so many "safe" examples of villainess female leads but The Forgotten Field doesn't play it safe with Thalia, she is almost always portrayed as a hostile, envious, and obsessive woman and I like how Kim Suji plays it to us straight that she is a dangerous individual in spite of her tragic her childhood was. However, while I currently think that she is a breath of fresh air for the villainess subgenre, that doesn't mean I should have to like her beyond that.
Thalia isn't a misunderstood tragic heroine like her fanbase paints her as, she's a self-destructive abuser who believes she is entitled to a man simply because he was the first person to show her a sliver of kindness. The fact that she fell in love with Varkas when she was still a little girl should already tell you that what she feels for him is not really love, she was a vulnerable child with no proper reference of love to off of because she was never around any healthy relationships, she didn't know what actual romantic feelings are supposed to feel like. What if Varkas wasn't the one to get her out of that ditch and it was another knight instead? Their first meeting was entirely circumstantial, there's nothing specific so far that we know of that explains why Thalia is obsessed with Varkas, we just know that he was nice to her a few times.
Their story is tragic, yes, but not for the reasons the fandom claims. It's not tragic because they were genuinely happy together only for that happiness to be snuffed out by an outside force, it's tragic because they're so obsessed with each other that it's sickening. Thalia "loves" Varkas but she's quick to abuse him if he even slightly moves from the pedestal she placed him off, she has shown that she is completely willing to verbally, physically, and sexually abuse him throughout the course of the story because she thinks that she is entitled to do so, she is in love with him, so only she deserves to have him all to herself, and she will "correct" his misbehavior if she thinks it is in her right. Lashing out at him because he didn't kill her attempted rapist does have its nuance no doubt, but ignoring his lack of consent has no nuance, it's just pure evil and the peak of Thalia's selfishness.
These two were never going to have a happy ending, they were doomed from the start.
I would preferably like to go on a deep dive for Varkas but he's genuinely such a blank slate of a character so far that there is nothing to go off beyond what we already know. Honestly, next to Gareth, I have to say that he's the second worst written character in the story since as far as I know, he exists solely to be Thalia's prize she will get as a reward for screwing over Ayla. If anyone has proof that Varkas is a deeper character than just being the resting bitch face male lead, I will happily eat my words and redo this essay to include a Varkas section.
