CHILDREN OF THE LAST RIDE - Toby Daye Fancasts [8/9]
Amandine could find a single drop of blood in a field of love-lies-bleeding. You’re Dóchas Sidhe, children of the last Ride, and your blood knows how to become something it’s not. (Adapted from One Salt Sea and The Unkindest Tide, Seanan McGuire)
Featuring Brit Marling as Amandine the Liar, Pom Klementieff as August Torquill, Melanie Scrofano as October Daye, and Kaitlyn Dever as Gillian Marks-Daye. With images from The OA, Ingrid Goes West, Wynonna Earp, Them That Follow, and Byzantium; all other photographs from Unsplash.
Every time you post about how much you hate Janet I am filled with glee. Toby should only have to deal with Janet when she's also in the presence of the Luidaeg from now on. (I also just Do Not Get why Janet hates Toby so much? I assumed that Janet jumped at the chance to be Gilly's mother because she's Amandine's granddaughter, so why would she hate Amandine's DAUGHTER so much? I don't understand at ALL)
I HATE JANET! SO MUCH! IN FACT I HATE EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN TOBY’S BLOODLINE EXCEPT TOBY AND GILLIAN.
And I guess Oberon is decent until proven otherwise but I can’t say my hopes are high. His track record isn’t, you know, pristine.
But in case this is not a rhetorical question, here is a non-rhetorical answer to your question of why Janet hates Toby so much, as far as I can tell. The short version is “toxic behavior often goes hand in hand with a LOT of self-justification, and Janet and Luna are actually a lot alike,” so if that’s enough for you, be free, but if you want the spoileriffic long version it’s under the cut.
So, first off, disclaimer that this is heavily colored by my own experiences and knowledge, but here is my take on why Janet hates Toby so much.
The three things you need to understand here are:
Janet is looking to replace the daughter who did not live up to her expectations (Amandine) with a daughter who will love Janet and be what she wants (Gillian)
Janet feels profoundly threatened in Gillian’s life by Toby’s presence
Most important, Janet thinks she is a good person
You’ll notice this is similar to my rant about Luna, which hinges on ‘Luna thinks she is a good person and feels that Toby is a threat to that reality.’ They have a lot in common, as toxic behavior goes, because they are both prepared to manipulate the world and people’s views of the world in order to maintain that belief that they are good people. A lot of toxic behavior becomes instantly clear when you think ‘how does this serve this person’s need to see themself as the hero of the story.’ We all want to be the hero of the story, even people who claim they’d rather be the villain, and that means that a lot of people are willing to do a lot of shit in order to support that desire.
On Luna’s part, this looks like deciding to blame Toby for “failing” to save Luna and Rayseline, as a way to internally justify her willingness to sacrifice Toby for her own daughter and wellbeing. If Toby failed Luna first, then it’s okay for Luna to have chosen other people over her--heroes are allowed to send people into the jaws of death to spare themselves a meeting with their abusive father, for example. This is also evident in Luna’s anger about Rayseline being offered a genuine choice about whether to be Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd. Luna can’t deal with the fact that she selfishly wanted Raysel to choose Blodynbryd, nor can she deal with being angry with Rayseline for choosing Daoine Sidhe instead. Neither of those fit with her idea of herself as a “good person.” So she splits the difference and blames Toby, because Toby is there and Luna is in the habit of blaming her for emotions she can’t handle.
On Janet’s part, this looks like doing everything in her power to paint herself as a savior to Gillian. If Toby died tragically, she’s a martyr, someone whose memory Gillian can love unconditionally. That might be fine while Toby is presumed dead because it means that Janet is the new mother, here to fill the void, etc. (I doubt it was in any way fine, as far as Janet was concerned, actually, I’m guessing Janet got rid of all the pictures under the guise of ‘moving on’, etc.)
But then Toby is back! We never really get a blow-by-blow of how things proceed while Toby is in the pond, but regardless, we know that Toby comes back. She comes back and has a story about being kidnapped, about amnesia, about not being able to return to her family, and suddenly Janet has been handed a perfect way to keep her role as the hero of the story, and even more importantly the hero of Gillian’s story. Toby is not a martyr. Toby is an even worse mother than Janet was, because she didn’t even stay. Toby is a bitch who abandoned her family--and you can bet that Janet sold that shit. My guess is that she told Gillian constantly that it wasn’t her fault Toby left. That she staged conversations with Cliff about Toby leaving where Gillian could hear. That she let Cliff find the pictures of Toby, and then let Gillian find the pictures he’d cut up. There’s a lot of ways to subtly drive home a point without ever sitting Gillian down and saying “I’m the good mother, not her. She left you because she’s a monster, and I found you and loved you and saved you because I’m a good person.”
Which would be a lot easier if Toby really were a deadbeat bitch who abandoned her family. Hard to sell that one when the person you’re trying to demonize keeps showing up to save the day. Hard to keep believing you’re a hero when the person you’ve spent years painting as the villain risks her life to save someone who won’t even speak to her.
Janet hates Toby for being Gillian’s mother, when all Janet wants is a replacement for Amandine, a daughter who will love Janet and be loyal and never ever be taken away by Faerie. Janet hates Toby for being Amandine’s daughter, proof of Janet’s failure with her first dalliance with the fae, her royal lover, and her only daughter, all in one person. But most of all Janet hates Toby for putting her worldview at risk.
TL;DR: If Toby is the hero of the story, Janet can’t be. Janet intentionally took Toby’s place, intentionally turned Toby’s daughter against her, and intentionally used that position to hurt Toby more than once. That means that Janet can only be a good person if Toby is a monster.
You’re supposed to hate monsters.
Incidentally, I think this is also part of why Gillian is having such a hard time. Everything she’s spent years being furious about, when it comes to Toby, has been fed and stoked by Janet. Janet, who Gillian loves. Janet, who stayed. Janet, who was the hero.
Now Toby is back in Gillian’s life, saving the day. Saving Gillian’s life. Risking her neck to make sure Gillian lives. Fighting the good fight to protect humans and changelings and children.
All of Gillian’s very justifiable feelings that Toby’s line of work is putting Gillian herself in undue danger aside--
Well. It’s hard to love your mother when you’re starting to realize that she’s only your hero because she’s been twisting reality to make it seem that way, that she’s been lying through her teeth for fear that you look up and compare her to the real deal, and it’s very, very easy to be enraged at the person who triggered your realization of that.
If you are interested in who in the Toby Daye verse is not this much of an emotional trashfire about the bad things they do, may I suggest: basically any Daoine Sidhe villain. Eira? She’s not out here having a fucking crisis about whether or not
So I just finished Night & Silence (and read the novella twice) and just. Gillian. Every time Gillian thinks about how she wants to punch Jocelyn in the throat six or seven times or decides to poke the Luidaeg because she's scared and gets it confused with bravery or just . . . I have a lot of feelings about the fact Gillian is VERY MUCH Toby's kid with Toby's fear responses and everything.
(my hollering about N&S)
FUCK, I so much want someone (Quentin, okay, if we’re all being honest I want it to be Quentin, beloved level-headed knightling that he is) to sit Gillian down and tell her that Toby never wanted to leave her, that Toby had no choice but to be gone, that Toby would have died to give Gillian even the slightest hope of safety, that Toby was ready to never see Gillian again if it meant that she was secure and happy, that at the first sign of interest from Gillian, Toby would do anything to have a relationship with her. I want to see Gillian and Toby painstakingly build a relationship from the ground up, while Gillian sifts through all the lies that Janet ever told her and Toby learns that sometimes you have to push, sometimes a relationship won’t just emerge from the ether, you have to fight for it. Because Toby is so, so good at fighting for the people she loves, and so, so bad at pushing them to stay present in the relationship.
(Remember when I said “Toby knows how to be second in a mother’s eyes even if she never realized it”? That’s true in basically every relationship she has. In other news, I would cheerfully dropkick Amandine, August, and Simon wholesale off a cliff. I powerfully dislike them all, I just never came around on Simon even though he’s objectively a tragedy, and Amandine is personally responsible for this crucial inability of Toby’s to recognize herself as valuable. So fuck the lot of them, but Amy especially.)
(Also, please let Gillian realize just how MUCH Janet has orchestrated and manipulated and lied, in order to land where she is now, and take her stepmother to fucking church over it.)
I also really want to Cry Forever about Gillian being the first innocent Selkie, and the first Selkie that the Luidaeg has ever been able to love without complication or shadow. I cannot BELIEVE that Seanan Mcguire loves me personally so much that she wrote The Unkindest Tide. Ma’am I would die for you.
[Image Description: Digital artwork of Gillian Marks and the Luidaeg from the October Daye series. They are shown from the waist up leaning against the rail of a sailing ship at night, both looking off into the distance. Gillian is slender and light-skinned with long wavy dark brown hair streaked in silver, green eyes, slightly pointed ears, and webbed fingers. She wears a black Green Day T-shirt. The Luidaeg is slender and brown-skinned with acne scars on her cheeks, thick curly black hair in pigtails, and green eyes. She wears denim overalls over a white tank top. /end ID]
