Mircea and family loyalty
(spoilers for Shadow’s Bane)
I already mentioned in my general review of Shadow’s Bane that this book contains my least favourite Mircea scene in both the Cassie and the Dory books. It’s the one after the fight at the Consul’s palace, where he tries to talk Dory into banishing Dorina again, permanently this time. For Dory, this scene serves as a catalyst on her way to understanding how Dorina must have felt all these years, finally making her see that Dorina has never, in fact, hated her or been the bloodthirsty monster that Dory made her out to be. Looking at it from the perspective of someone who’d love to see Dory and Dorina bonding, this sudden burst of protectiveness from Dory for her twin is heartwarming. For someone who loves Mircea and wants to see him on the right side of an argument (as defined by the story, and also ethics), this scene made me cringe more than any other so far. He has been shitty towards other characters before, but all his questionable actions came from his deep sense of loyalty for a specific group of people - his blood family, his vamp family, maybe the Senate - and were sometimes fueled by incomplete information. In this case, however, it seems to me that he has all the facts (maybe even more so than Dory because he has more experience with vamp nature and knows how bad the situation was before he put up the wall) and he still wants to take action against Dorina, who is his daughter just as much as Dory is, and who therefore belongs to his innermost circle of people for whom he feels responsible and whom he owes loyalty. Why?
As I see it, there are two reasons. First of all, Mircea harbours a deep hatred for his vampire nature. It’s pretty obvious in his little speech during his and Dory’s discussion in chapter 49:
“We vampires have no choice but to blend our two natures, to come to equilibrium or to go mad - and some do. Unable to reconcile the monstrous part of themselves that every human has, but that every human does not have to feed. We cannot hide from what we are; we have to prey on others to survive. But we cannot give in to it utterly, or we risk becoming the monsters we are so often thought to be. It is a constant balancing act and there are times - oh, yes, there are times - when we would love to banish one part or the other.”
Horatiu even calls him out on it directly in chapter 27, accusing Mircea of not being able to accept what he is because his turning into a vampire indirectly lead to Elena’s death and Dory/Dorina’s abandonment (as a side not, I’ll be using the name Doryna when talking about the two of them because this whole backslash thing is too awkward). This self-blaming is, of course, a natural reaction after going through a traumatic incident which he really couldn’t have influenced at the time, but just because it comes from the emotional side of the brain rather than the rational one doesn’t mean that it feels less true.
Mircea’s attitude towards vampirism is radically different from that of other vamps: instead of seeing it as a blessing, a higher state of being, a superior race, he treats it as a sickness, a curse that is threatening to corrupt his positive character traits by forcing him to satisfy his negative ones. Which, again, makes sense considering how he came to be a vampire in the first place, but it leads him to automatically associate being human with moral (if not physical) superiority. So when confronted with Doryna’s life-threatening fits, which are clearly the results of Dorina straining against the constraints of sharing a body with Dory, he automatically sides with Dory, whom he pictures as what Doryna should have been were it not for his “illness”. Dorina, however, is the direct result of said illness, which not only violently upended his entire life, but is now threatening to take away the “better” part of his daughter, too.
I don’t think that he doesn’t love Dorina - there are a few scenes where he’s quite affectionate with her, and anyways it’s hard to compare this to how he behaves with Dory because all the memories that we have as evidence come from Dorina - but when he’s faced with the choice of saving one of them at the expense of the other or risking both of them dying, his instinct tells him to choose Dory. The fact that it’s the only pragmatic choice, the only one with any chance of helping Doryna, may have influenced his decision, too, but I’m pretty sure that his own issues with his condition played a big part in his decision to separate his daughter’s two natures.
Skip forward 500 years, and he’s faced with a very similar problem: putting Dorina back in her cell, or risking her taking over their body entirely, which would lead to Dory not being imprisoned, but killed. His old biases against Dorina, fueled by his resentment towards vampirism, are still very much there, as evidenced by the speech I quoted above where he calls it his monstrous side. Add to that that he had 500 years to get to know Dory (however fraught their relationship might be) and hear accounts of what Dorina is capable of when she slips her leash, and it’s not surprising that he sides with the more human version of his daughter yet again. He doesn’t want to kill Dorina any more than he did back then - fortunately, although I guess that would have been an option now, too - but if he has to pick one of them, it’s sure as hell going to be Dory. His loyalties are clearly split here, but for the above-mentioned reasons Dory ranks higher on his list of priorities than Dorina does, and one of them dying is a lot worse than one of them being imprisoned, so he’s going to throw his full weight into protecting Dory, even though doing so comes at the expense of significantly reducing Dorina’s quality of life (on a sidenote, this is an explanation for a good part of the incidents when he’s a prick towards Cassie. It’s not that she’s not important to him; only that other people rank higher among his personal priorities than she does).
Second, Mircea really isn’t the type to just fly by the seat of his pants. At some point in Shadow’s Bane, Dory points out that he always has plans A through E in place before he attempts to do anything, and he hates not being in control of events. This is probably as much due to personality as to life experiences: He was brought up to be a leader, the one in charge who’s responsible for the people around him, and the one time he wasn’t in control, everything went to hell around him - something he’s been trying to turn around ever since, as evidenced by his obsession with bringing Elena back to life and basically turning back the clock as much as is reasonably possible.
So it’s understandable, if not exactly commendable, that he’s become a bit of a control freak over the years, which sometimes leads him to rush into things prematurely as soon as an opportunity takes shape instead of waiting how things play out and collecting more information. This is exactly what happens here: he’s painfully aware of a problem - the possibility of Dory dying - and as soon as a possible solution presents itself, he pounces on it, because he’s the one who is supposed to fix things. Especially to keep people from dying, and especially to keep his daughter from dying, whom he has forsaken before (not really, but in his mind) and who is his last living connection to Elena. It may be a risk, but no one has ever accused Mircea of not being decisive enough, and judging from the information he’s got, it would be a much bigger risk to wait and see if Dorina - monstrous Dorina, mad Dorina - might take pity on Dory, the daughter he should have had. Which is too much of a gamble for someone like him, especially when the stakes are this high and the drawbacks at least bearable, and a lot less final than the alternative. Just as 500 years earlier, he picks what he thinks is the least bad option.
Unlike 500 years earlier, however, his daughter gets a say in the decision. It’s this confrontation that makes it clear to Dory that Dorina is, in fact, not the monster everyone (including herself) made her out to be, but someone worth protecting. And as much as I love Mircea and understand his reasoning regarding this dilemma, in this case I’m very glad that he didn’t get his way and that he got proven wrong by the narrative. It doesn’t mean that his actions were necessarily a mistake when Doryna was a child; but it does mean that you can’t always fall back on previous decisions when faced with new situations. It does mean that you have to learn from past experiences. And in this scene, Dory rises up to do just that.
