the thing i love about the hawke family is that it's entirely a reflection of hawke. hawke is shaped by the family, in the sense that all people are shaped by where and how they grow up, and the family is shaped by hawke in turn, because you create the family by your choices.
carver is your surviving sibling because you chose to be a mage, but carver is also carver because his siblings were both mages. i'm not here to tell anyone what to think, if you think carver would have been the same person regardless, that's totally fine, but i think the carver who grew up with an "ally", a non-mage sibling who was like him is a fundamentally different person than the carver who grew up having to protect two mages.
similarly, the bethany who grew up with self-loathing isolation... i think that's a different person than a bethany who grew up with a mage sibling, particularly if that sibling felt differently about their magic. that's a bethany who couldn't blame only herself for the family's situation, who wasn't always the odd one out, the one with the biggest and worst secret.
i love that the narrative bends around hawke, creates an arc where the defining feature of the surviving sibling is isolation. loneliness.
malcolm is the ghost in the machine the haunting at the center of the narrative, yes, but he is also shaped in your image. hawke is canonically like malcolm, which means that malcolm is canonically like hawke. leandra, who loved him, who gave up everything for him, then changes too, maybe more subtly. but who hawke is has to reflect on who leandra is, because leandra becomes the type of person who would anchor her life around a person like hawke.
