I just want to clear up something. What are your view on Dorian having a huge character change (as a lot of fans/antis might put it) after Sorscha's death and he is with Manon? He feels guilt for getting over Sorscha so quickly but it still feels a bit forced.
So I’ve talked about this before.
Dorian’s character change is a realistic result of being possessed and imprisoned by a valg. Maas, at several points in EoS, used the word “violated” to describe his experience. And that’s not an accidental word. That’s a word that holds a lot of weight. And it was meant to get at the idea that someone used his body without his permission. And they used it repeatedly to do horrible things. They violated him. Controlled him. And he screamed and ripped and clawed and tried to fight his way out—and he couldn’t.
He stopped fighting. And he stopped fighting because it was easier to dissociate from what was happening than to consciously live through it.
He wasn’t raped, but he had an experience that was so traumatic, that the only way for his brain to keep him safe, was to pull him from reality and put him in a dissociated state. And we see that with rape victims, victims of sexual assault, people who have been tortured or experience something so traumatic that their brain kind of splits off from reality. A lot of people talk about it in terms of it seeming as if they were watching their attack, or their life, from outside their body. Or as if it were a movie. They see it happening, but they don’t feel it. It’s less traumatic.
And Maas can’t use a movie screen analogy for that trauma because movies don’t exist in Erilea, but she tells us that Dorian pushed what was happening away, and hid in the dark. That he let the Valg do what he wanted because it was easier and safer to hide inside himself.
And it’s that loss of control, and trying to mediate who he is now as a man who’s murdered and tortured people—coupled with the fact that he kills his father and is suddenly king, and the fact that Chaol (his best and closest friend and brother) is suddenly hurt and unable to help Dorian and is gone. Then Aelin and them leave him. And then Dorian is alone. And there is a war coming.
Dorian went through something traumatic, and then is left alone. And the only one who comes to see him, is the same one who came into his life at his darkest moment and brought back the light. Manon walked into the clearing in Oakwald and suddenly Dorian was able to get control of himself. Suddenly he was free. And he knew that if he could just provoke this miracle in front of him to kill him, that he could be free forever.
And when she leaves, he holds onto her face. To the beautiful death she could give him. And when he is finally released, he remembers her name. Dorian who has never remembered the name of any woman he’s ever slept with, remembers the name of the one woman so deadly that even the valg quake in her presence.
And Dorian likes dangerous things.
And the other thing he remembers when he wakes up free, is that the last thing he saw before the collar went on, was Sorscha’s head rolling across the floor.
Valg violation and your girlfriend getting beheaded are enough to alter anyones character.
And where Sorscha plays into this is Dorian’s guilt for not being able to help her. He has all this magic, but still he was not enough to save her.
And I don’t think Dorian loved Sorscha in a way that would’ve sustain a long term relationship. She was too different from the dangerous women he usually liked, and I think it bothered him that she was a spy. I think a part of him felt as if she couldn’t trust him with that information. And I think another part of him felt stupid for not knowing.
He liked her a lot, probably loved her, but he felt as if he’d been swindled, or conned, by her when he found out she was a spy. And all the trust they’d built was gone after that. That’s a huge omission. And in that book, Dorian has struggling to deal with lies, and with keeping secrets. It was a big theme. And we can’t overlook that fact. Because it’s important.
And also, Dorian and Sorscha never had sex. And I think that played into the feelings Dorian had for her and for the nostalgia he feels after she is gone. He likes the chase. And I think if they ever had sex, he’d likely have gotten bored with her same as he got bored with all the other nice girls he slept with.
But I kind of think Sorscha’s lie and the fact that they never had sex, are almost irrelevant to the Dorian we meet in EoS.
And what I mean by that, is that when someone we care about dies, we tend to forget all the bad or annoying qualities they had. We focus on what we’ll miss about them and everything else sort of falls by the wayside. Or seems trivial in comparison. And I think this happened, understandably, to Dorian.
His guilt at not being able to save her, and seeing her beheaded, and then being shoved into a collar—were enough to make him not care about her being a spy. It doesn’t matter to him. The trust he lost in her doesn’t matter. Nostalgia (the longing for a real or imagined past) is a bitch. And it erases all the negative thoughts and zeroes in on the “if I can just get back there things would be different. If I could have just used my magic, we’d still be there, she’d still be alive.”
So Dorian in EoS, is depressed for many reasons, and he’s stuck on this idea that it’s his fault Sorscha died. Not that she was a spy who knew the risks. It’s his fault. And all EoS, Dorian is in his head thinking. He talks about the threads that whisper to him in languages he’s never heard in his dream. He thinks about how no one knows that Gavin came to visit him. He is the first one to verbalize that they are a group of ancient warriors and heirs without thrones. He’s trying to put stuff together and he’s staying quiet about it. (He’s also struggling with the fact that he ran away from his people to try to save them. That’s a heavy choice.)
And when Manon shows up, and their bond/the thread that runs between them is constantly pulling them together—Dorian feels even more guilt. Because how dare he be attracted to anyone when Sorscha just died.
But at the same time, he can’t stay away from Manon. His magic reacts to her on instinct. He pulls a sword on Fenrys when he thinks Fenrys is going to shoot an arrow at Manon. Him, Dorian, utterly human and with little control over his raw magic, thinks he is going to fight Fenrys?
And this happens at several points in the story. When Manon can’t breath because of Rowan, when Dorian tastes the lie in the Bloodhounds words and sees how the lie stopped Manon dead (he kills the Bloodhound and his eyes are “utterly merciless”), later that night when they’re on the deck after the ilken attack—Aelin laughs at Manon in a bad way and Dorian’s magic flares in his hands because he’s ready to defend her, days/weeks later when they’re trudging across the marshes and Rowan lets that animal through the shield—Dorian stops it even before Manon (or anyone) can process what’s happening. There are more instances too, and there are just as many for Manon and her pull to Dorian (which start in QoS).
And in the marshes, I’d argue that Dorian was shielding himself from Manon. Because he wanted to keep her away from him. And when she talks to him, he doesn’t hear her at first. He’s lost in his thoughts likely thinking about her and Sorcha and his guilt. And she has to ask again. And then he tells her about Sorscha and why he’s there. And there is that moment where he grabs her wrist. Why grab her wrist, Dorian? I argue he can’t stay away from her and he cares about what she thinks of him. And at every point in the story where his emotional struggle/thought process is called into question or somehow showcased, Manon (and maybe Gavriel and Rowan to an extent) is the only one who offers him her understanding. She validates his feelings out in the open/in front of the group. No one else in the book does that (except maybe Gavriel when Dorian asks to let Manon out). But in this scene on the marshes Manon says, “Good.” And she sees the “glimmer of relief” cross his face.
And that’s not the first (or the last) time she validates his feelings, or that he touches her etc. It’s one of many. And I think that by the time we get to the end of the book they can’t stay away from one another, and they have sex.
And that sex scene is really intimate. There is a lot of open trust verbalized between them in that moment, mostly on Dorian’s part, but also on Manon’s acceptance of what he says and what she allows him to do. And I think part of that scene was 100% a “if we have sex, then I’ll get this person out of my system and be done with it.” Only that’s not what happens. And I honestly think that Manon and Dorian, on some level, know they’re mates. Because they’re the only two (at least that I can think of right now) that tell us they know Rowan and Aelin are mates. So I think it’s safe to say that even if they can’t identify the bond between them (Manon and Dorian) they can at least feel it to the point that they know something is between them.
And that’s why I think Dorian, after sex, says that stuff about sex with Manon not taking the edge off. He had fully thought it would, and I think it only made it worse for him. That’s why he says that thing about “we’re not done here you and I” or whatever it is he says. And I think he leaves because it’s morning, but also because he needs to think about what he feels and what just happened.
And then, on the threshold of the door, he solves the riddle. Old Dorian Havilliard pops back up there and is able to start thinking clearly about the riddle. As if some fog had been lifted. Two thoughts on this:
1) In the visual arts, threshold symbolism is HUGE. And I’d argue that this could be a happy accident (informed by exposure to movies and art that utilize the threshold as a symbol), or it was deliberately planned out. Maas tends to write cinematically, so I’m inclined to think that this was purposeful. (And if it wasn’t, if all her cinematic scene writing is just unknowingly informed by movies and TV, then it’s still not wholly separate from the symbolism of the threshold because on some level that’s what she was getting at here regardless of conscious awareness.) But whatever the reason, this is important. Dorian is literally on the “threshold” of something when his brain snags on the riddle and the word “iron” and we can interpret it many ways. We could see it as a new beginning (him and Manon), we could read it as his depression has ebbed or gone and old Dorian is returning etc.
2) And in many romance stories the trope of the “magic penis” is overused (except in this case, I’d argue for Manon’s “magic vagina”). You know, the emotionally fragile female lead is somehow “broken” but after sex with the hero/male lead, she is somehow cured. It’s as if he has a magic penis. Well, we could argue that Manon’s vagina is magical and it cured Dorian’s depression, or healed his mind in some way that allowed him to solve the riddle.
Then before Aelin and Manon go into the witch mirror, Dorian has a moment where he wants to say something to Manon likely about being careful or coming back—we don’t know. But it’s more evidence for his healing. Then on the beach he is the one who picks up the mantle of the king and is comforting Rowan and Aedion. And he knows what Manon is asking him to do when he take up the keys and Maas writes that Dorian knew Manon wasn’t just talking about the keys or the war when she agrees that the quest does not end here—she’s talking about what’s between them. And then when he gets on Abraxos and puts his hands on Manon’s waist she says something that makes him truly laugh.
So, I think Dorian’s character change is legitimate and if he hadn’t changed, people would complain about how unrealistic it is. And I think the reason he seems to recover so quickly from Sorscha when Manon is around, is because I think he knows that he could never have felt as strongly for Sorscha as he does for Manon. He and Manon are drawn together the same way Rowan and Aelin are. If they’re not mates in the Fae sense, then they’re mates in some other kind of way. They are meant to be together. All the signs that were there for Rowan and Aelin are there for Manon and Dorian. And I think that’s what allows him to move on at least physically. I think he’s started to move on emotionally, but that’s going to take a bit more time. But it’s coming. Because I think he already loves her. He certainly protects her like he does.