I've been thinking about this for a while, but there's something in how easily Occtis can be read as a rape survivor. Like, he's the victim of a crime in which his bodily autonomy was violated by someone he should have been able to trust because someone wanted to use his body for their own purposes and goals with zero regard to the fact that that body had a full person attached to it. The act itself involved him being held down and strangled so that Ethrand could more easily do to him what he wanted to do. Ethrand literally reached a hand into his torso to leave the Stone of Nightsong there before ripping out his heart, and Brennan narrated that Occtis felt all of that. And all those things are now something he has to live with the consequences of.
As a result of his murder Occtis' life has sharp delineation of Before and After with After being defined by his relationship to his own body being radically altered. He feels, in his undead state, both more consciously aware at all times what his body is doing and also more detached from it. Despite loving food while he was alive not only can he not taste food at all now but the results of trying to eat it anyway are decidedly unpleasant. As a result of happened he also can't sleep anymore. This is reflected in his understanding of his sense of self as well, when Thimble asks him if in spite of everything he is still himself he hedges, and says that he is as far as he can tell. There's also the fact that as part of what happened something -his heart specifically- was quite literally taken from him. He continues on, but the fact his lost something so fundamental remains true.
There's also the multiple indications of what happened having been understandably extremely traumatic for him. He has visibly panicked responses to things that remind him of the event (his nervous reaction to Cyd mentioning that Ethrand was part of the group he saw heading to the Sundered Houses meeting; him briefly freezing after hearing ghouls on the other side of the aviary door). His instinct to keep himself hidden from his family while in public, which was already present during the Overture as a result of him realizing that if his violent abusive father found out he tried to help someone the family marked to die it would be bad for him, has also been reinforced by these events. Occtis is very careful to make sure he's not revealing his presence, even when doing so might be potentially helpful, because he's concerned his family will do something to him again if he isn't that careful.
There's also his conviction that if people find out what happened to him they're going to react to and treat him differently. He's constantly worried while encountering druids, even after the meeting in the Schongarten goes very well for him, because he fears they'll only ever see him as an undead, and therefore a threat, rather than as a full person who, due to circumstances mostly beyond his control, also happens to be undead.
Something can also be said for the absolute lack of regard Primus has for the severity of the crimes committed against Occtis under his orders. He starts the Sundered House meeting denying that anything happened, even when confronted with a letter in Occtis' handwriting claiming his family killed him, instead claiming the letter is a forgery meant to ruin his reputation. And when that falls apart he moves on to minimizing how terrible what he actually did was because there's more important things to worry about, and claiming that since Occtis had already betrayed the family he had to die anyway so really trying to use him to create an angel of death wasn't that bad at all. And although he is eventually brought to account for doing this the consequences amount to a slap on the wrist because he is wealthy and powerful to enough to make any more lasting consequences go away.
All these things cohere on the level of the text, because Occtis was literally murdered and that does have very literal consequences in the form of him being undead, both in terms of what that means for him and how other people relate to him. But when zooming out from that to try and apply understandings of what he's dealing with from our real world, where murder victims notably can't walk away from what happened to them, a rape is the clear analogue. Because it is a traumatic violation of body and autonomy that does change how you relate to yourself and others where the perpetrator, especially if they are wealthy and powerful, may get away with diminishing and denying what happened while the victim is struggling to cope and adjust, which is emotionally exactly what is happening to Occtis in the text at this narrative moment.
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
2087
tangentwithtanner
