I finished Steel and Promise and liked a lot of it until a certain point. IIRC, you've said you regard Teran Nivrai as a good person and an ethical dominant. Am I correct about that?
I’m sorry about the terseness of my ask. I just… I’m hoping I missing something important and have misunderstood you somewhere.
Thanks for your feedback! I especially appreciate that you’re willing to tell me you liked part of it, when clearly something else deeply upset you. A lot of people get very nasty about that.
I have a couple suspicions about which bit might have soured you this deeply on the character, and both of them are close to the end. So I’m going to write a response that’s generally spoiler-light now, for anyone who might want to pick up the book and decide for themselves. If it doesn’t address your concern, please feel free to send another ask and I’ll get more spoilery. :-)
There ARE spoilers in what follows, but I’ve tried to keep them general and not related to the ending.
Is Teran Nivrai a “good person?” I don’t know, because I don’t know what “good person” means to you here. But she is meant to be a morally gray character–hell, she’s literally color coded! So if “a good person” is “someone who doesn’t do awful things” or “someone who immediately realizes when she did an awful thing and puts it right in ways that don’t make it worse,” then… no, she isn’t.
By that definition the only “good people” in the novel are Cailyn and Mariel. Everybody else does awful things and justifies those things to themselves.
Teran Nivrai is a socially stunted person with PTSD and not much of a support system. She pushes away almost everyone who would serve as such a support system, and although she has love and kindness from people like Cailyn and Mariel, she hasn’t dealt with her trauma much at all. She was repeatedly and systematically raped, in a society that doesn’t even label what happened to her as rape, and forced to carry a child, who she can’t deal with because he reminds her of her trauma.
Not only that, in the course of the novel she’s traumatized again. I don’t know for sure where I read this, but I recall hearing somewhere that PTSD is the worst for people who felt forced into doing things that go against their own morals–soldiers who kill in the line of duty, for example. I wanted to explore that possibility with this character, showing her not just as a victim but also as someone manipulated into the role of perpetrator. Her dissociation and tendency to self-harm is far heavier when she has just returned from doing things even she acknowledges as awful, and that was intentional.
Is she an “ethical dominant”? Again, I think there are several things the question could mean, but on most of them I think the answer is, unfortunately, no (at least not for most of the story.)
She’s acutely mentally troubled and doesn’t handle it. She relies on intimate partners to provide all the support she needs, and she uses manipulation and sometimes even coercive tactics to find those partners. She does scenes when she’s acutely dissociating without realizing that’s not something she should do, or should negotiate about first, at least.
A BDSM community (the dark channels) exists in her society, but she mostly ignores it and the people who participate in it, except when such associations are useful to her. So the odds that she understands the nuances of its social norms, especially those designed to peer-pressure people into behaving well, are… not great.
Did I intend for her to be a sympathetic character? Ultimately, yes.
She’s legitimately fond of the people she cares about, and she’s fiercely devoted to protecting them from the beginning.
She doesn’t really know how to deal with loving someone, because although she clearly loved Mariel, she just sort of… fell into a TPE style relationship with him that happened to work for both of them. She doesn’t realize how much of that was intense compatibility and dumb luck.
(Cailyn is someone she is far less surface-compatible with, which was, again, intentional.)
The intention was for her to learn how to deal with it as the story goes on, and for her to have grown as a character by the end.
