Dalinar, Amazing Dad to Everyone But His Kids
Ok, so I love the man as much as the rest of the fandom, but I think we need to discuss how much Dalinar dropped the ball as a father to his own kids (and still kind of does!) @andromeda-lv nailed it on the absenteeism and the alcoholism.
-He left his wife alone for her pregnancy with his second kid, and then just griped about the name.
-He made no meaningful attempt to bond with his youngest, especially after he developed medical problems around age 1.
-Then he took his 6 year old war camping for half his childhood, separating him from his sick brother and exposing him to danger AND violence.
-Then that kid got to watch his parents have incredibly dysfunctional interactions and probably overheard a bunch of arguments.
-He also got to watch his mother spiral into depression because she was a pacifist foreigner in a war camp and she was uma le to be an effective scribe because she was not a native speaker/ was probably left handed in a society that pretty much removed all use of left hands for women.
-He left his sick kid back at home in an intensely unforgiving society that would have no tolerance for a "defective" child in the line of succession (Given how the Alethi are, Renarin was probably the victim of assassination attempts as a baby to "cleanse the bloodline")
-Then he moved on to being fully absentee as the boys got older, leaving Adolin to protect a kid who absolutely got bullied while he walked around being obviously half foreign in a society that is aggressively nativist. Could have used dad, but war gotta war.
-AND kept their mom away from them a lot of the time, but it's not like kids need parents, they were only (checks notes) elementary school aged.
-Then he got their mom, the only loving and functional parent they had, killed in a genocidal rage.
-And fell hard into alcoholism while they were grieving, leaving a 9 year old Renarin scared and isolated while Adolin tried to care for him at 13.
-And fell hard into self pity until his brother was murdered and he decided to repress all of that.
-Oh and hid all of that nonsense until he published a book about it and never bothered to warn them before the prerelease got leaked.
-And he's still patronizing to Renarin.
-And incredibly judgemental and demanding of Adolin.
-And the whole family needs therapy. Bad.
-This doesn't even include the stuff about their uncle being abusive to his wife at minimum, their cousin being treated like a madwoman and then excommunicated, and both of them going to war while they were teenagers.
So yeah. Dadlinar is great. But remember he absolutely failed his two rather stellar kids and gets treated like the god of Fatherhood.
Let's see more fics exploring their backstories. Adolin started sword training with a master at 6 when the norm is 10, you think protecting his brother might have been part of that? Having the royal family bully their mother openly, did that impact them? Being left alone together so much, and separated so often? Being used to one kid nearly dying from illness, and the other one just seeing that as a child? Their parents mostly arguing via spanreen?
Just... seriously, get those boys some therapy.
