something in rowan stills at that. not visibly, maybe... she’s too composed for that, too practiced at keeping her reactions tucked beneath the surface where people can’t immediately grab at them, but rue’s words hit somewhere DEEPER than she expects. because THAT is the thing she spent years trying to articulate when she wrote amy. not the violence. not the body count people always latched onto in interviews with their carefully rehearsed concern over “female rage” and morality and whether rowan worried about what her work said to women. as if men hadn’t been writing brutal, angry antiheroes for DECADES without anyone treating it like a social contagion. the frightening part of amy was never that she killed people. it was the intimacy of her anger; the awful recognition of it. the way readers saw pieces of themselves in her before they remembered they were supposed to recoil. rowan watches rue as she speaks, REALLY watches her, and there’s a strange kind of relief unfurling slowly beneath her ribs. she hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been bracing herself for someone to misunderstand amy until now.
“yeah,” she says after a moment, softer this time, gaze dropping briefly to the coffee between her hands before lifting again. “that’s EXACTLY it.” her thumb drags once along the rim of the mug, grounding herself in the motion. “people always think she’s supposed to be empowering in this clean, uncomplicated way. cathartic revenge fantasy, girlboss with a body count, whatever.” a faint breath leaves her nose; almost amused, but not quite. “and parts of her ARE cathartic. there’s satisfaction in watching someone stop apologizing for their anger. but i didn’t write amy because i think violence makes people free.” her expression shifts slightly then, thoughtful in a heavier way. “i wrote her because i think rage changes the architecture of a person when they carry it long enough. it reshapes how they love, how they trust, how they move through the world. eventually it stops feeling SEPARATE from you.” rowan leans back a little as she says it, eyes lingering on rue with sharper focus now. “amy scares people because she forces this confrontation with capacity. not monstrosity, but CAPACITY. everybody wants to believe there’s a clean line between good people and dangerous people, but there isn’t. there’s pressure, and grief, and humiliation, and loneliness, and eventually there’s the point where something inside someone gives way.”
for a second, rowan goes quiet again, gaze drifting toward the window where afternoon light warped across the glass in uneven streaks. that fear had been the reason she resisted the adaptation for so long. film had a habit of sanding difficult women down into symbols; making them easier to consume, easier to MARKET. she’d spent years terrified amy would become another hollow aesthetic: blood on a pretty face, trauma repackaged into spectacle for audiences who wanted to feel shocked without ever being implicated in the uglier questions underneath it. but rue doesn’t sound hungry for spectacle. she sounds UNSETTLED in the right way. that matters more than rowan can really explain yet. a small smile finally pulls at the corner of her mouth, tired but genuine. “honestly? i think the fact that she scares you a little is probably a good sign.” her head tilts slightly, dark bob brushing against her jaw. “not because i think art should destroy people or any of that tortured artist bullshit. but because amy only works if you let yourself get close enough to her that it costs you something emotionally.” she pauses briefly, eyes narrowing with thought before softening again. “the trick is making sure you can STILL find your own way back out afterward.”
