okay so i saw your tag "always ready to cry about yuna hollander" and was suddenly (and kind of randomly) reminded of how you write and think about isobel cartwright, particularly in 'le jeune soldat des arbres'. objectively there aren't really similarities between the characters themselves but i was stuck with a wave of appreciation for 'let's think about the mothers'!!!! let's take a character who is kind of unknowable and make her complicated and tragic and sympathic!!!
i love looking at them both and going "hmm. why did you make the choices you did"
this is such an aimless ask so feel free to ignore it but yeah. ❤️
I LOVE A MUM CHARACTER!! I think Yuna and Isobel are so fascinating and on totally different ends of a spectrum - where with Isobel she’s totally uninvolved in River’s life, and we know so little about her motivations - how much did she really know about Frank, did she know what she was getting into when she went to Les Arbres, (which I kind of lean towards… yes?) and is her total disinterest in River, and giving him up to this other masculine authority in her life at a similar age to when she’d have to leave a Les Arbres River because she wanted to raise a soldier for Frank and then dip?
And then for Yuna you can understand so much of her motivations, and why she’s over-involved in Shane’s life - from where she had to learn to protect him and help him navigate the world of professional hockey and scouting from a very early age, which you don’t imagine a teenage Shane would be great at, and also would have been crazy intense - for Sid specifically but stories about the abuse star hockey players can face from coaches and kids and players and parents in their early years are crazy! And how building this image of him, and training him to be this perfect, unimpeachable media darling, and surrounding him in these images of (traditionally white) luxury, like Rolex and Wimbledon, is to protect him from a world that will always see him as lesser and different because of the part of him that is her. And how much of propelling Shane on this wild career has an element of wish fulfilment on her behalf - her being ‘the biggest metros fan ever,’ making these correct observations about players (Ilya playing injured, it being Scott Hunter’s ‘year’ that no one else can/understands), being the most obsessed about hockey in the Hollander family and yet being the only one who doesn’t get to play.
They’re just both so. Ahh!!!!!!
