i don't feel coherent or together enough to express this as well as i'd like to, but there is something so juicy for me to sink my teeth into about Thancred and his tendency to adopt teen girls, specifically wrt like...
(under a cut because this is long, discussing the specter of sexual abuse and jealousy and protectiveness in the father-daughter relationship)
we have the patriarchal construction of the father-daughter relationship, right. there is an unavoidable incestuousness to this relationship, because the patriarchal construction of this relationship includes the concept of a girl being her father's property until she ages into a woman who is then passed into the keeping of her husband. it is therefore the duty of the father in this system to control and safeguard the daughter's sexuality and to selectively deny the wrong men sexual access to her while allowing the right ones to have it. this is not an unfortunate implication so much as the explicit purpose of the relationship as it is constructed. the end result is a high degree of sexual jealousy and possessiveness on the part of the father and an attempt to train the daughter into reserving her sexual and romantic interests for her father until he finds her a man similar enough to him that she's now allowed to transfer them.
so even if we abstract this relationship somewhat and remove the biological relation and therefore the ideas of patriarchal lineage-tending, this sense of sexuality is still a core part of the original relationship upon which the current one is modeled. various techniques are employed to either address or avoid this (it is usually either avoided or presented as a normal, natural state of behavior.)
(there was a great post talking about how the tendency to make the adopted daughter a lesbian both sidesteps the need to address this uncomfortable truth and at the same time soothes the father-anxiety of being replaced by another man, what's his face and whosit from The Last of Us as an example)
if we take another level of abstraction away from the father-daughter relationship specifically and look at simply the idea of guardianship of a young girl, specifically an adolescent girl, we arrive once again at the issue of sexual safety. the patriarchal society which creates the relationship where a father owns his daughter until he transfers ownership of her is also one where sexual violence exists abundantly, and an un-owned girl is especially vulnerable to it. it is the prohibition against the taking or damaging of another man's property which best protects her, and if there is no man to whom she can be seen to belong, then she's at high risk.
now if we get more specific again and think about Minfilia, one thing that interests me wrt all of this is that she ended up in the care of a woman, while Thancred hung around as an intermittently present source of distant protection. in that short story, for instance, he's walking her home at night, which is sort of the classic example of Protecting A Woman From Implied Sexual Harm.
(there is another post i read analyzing Thancred and his relationship to Minfilia and Ryne and his arc there which also used a phrase that has stuck with me, about how him being possessed led to him becoming the monster under Minfilia's bed, which of course inevitably made me think about sexual abuse. that was not i think the intention and the post does not really analyze the relationship through that lens or with that as a framework, but it's another post that has gotten me thinking about the subject here.)
then if we think about a Ryne, we see an even more vulnerable girl, because she has none of the knowledge or experience that Minfilia did. she's far more sheltered and isolated, far more naive, and at far higher risk of victimization. Thancred's guardianship of her therefore carries the implication of protecting her and teaching her to recognize and protect herself from that sort of violence.
all of this is a lot of probably only half-coherent bullshit to sort of maybe imply there's something sexual to Thancred's relationship with Minfilia and/or Ryne? which is not really what i'm trying to say. in fact i firmly think that it would be quite out of character for him to have any interest in either of them that way or to make any kind of sexual overtures there.
however the relationship is one that is unavoidably shaped by the weight of the Potential Sexual. there is the potential for sexual abuse, there is the potential for (and expectation of) sexual possessiveness and jealousy on Thancred's behalf in his role as father, there are the roles of sexual ownership and submission baked into the roles of father and daughter, there is the understanding from those looking in that Thancred, in his role as father and protector, is also the primary vector of sexual threat to her. there is the protective effect of Thancred's presence, marking her as owned by a man and therefore riskier to perform sexual violence upon.
while i don't think Thancred actually represents a meaningful threat to either Minfilia or Ryne sexually speaking, i do think he must be aware of these factors. maybe consciously, maybe less so, but a man whose arc is so Very Much about the performance of a very specific brand of masculinity and the resulting years-long descent into outright suicidality when he's unable to successfully do so simply cannot NOT be aware of all of this. he understands on some level what his role is here, what the shape of that role is, what harms that role is capable of, what people expect of that role. the fact that what they need to be protected from includes him. is in some cases primarily him. maybe not him as a person but him in the abstract as the role he occupies.
this is already all very compelling to me but where it really gets juicy is if we consider the likelihood that Thancred himself has been sexually victimized. the game does a very typical sort of sidestep around the reality that children in Thancred's position (street orphans in a place with zero legal protections for children and, in fact, basically no laws at all) quite frequently end up either doing sex work to survive or* being trafficked by only ever mentioning vague 'shady schemes' or undefined criminal actions or robbery.
(*there is an entire other conversation to be had here which i am not qualified to host but i do draw a distinction here between exercising what little autonomy one has to choose one of a number of repellent options in a desperate situation vs having even the ability to choose in what way one will be traumatized taken from one)
but like... come on. he was a street orphan in the pirate city. sexual abuse and exploitation is simply a reality for children in a situation like this. maybe he managed to avoid it, but it would have been a present threat and possibility. his relationship with sex as an adult does not contraindicate having been sexually exploited as a child. plenty of people use casual sex as a way to engage in desperately needed intimacy without having to be emotionally open without having been abused, but also, it's not NOT diagnostic. again: Come On.
what i have here is really just a lot of "i think it's neat" while gesturing to a red string board of nonsense. no real conclusion. these are things i like to think about and that i think add body and flavor to any analysis of Thancred and his relationships. i also think that there's something even more piquant and painful about his desperation to assign himself a vulnerable girl to protect, despite how objectively fucking dogshit bad at it he is, if it stems at least in part from having been victimized and unprotected in the past.
