I’ve been reading the Broken Earth trilogy and was thinking of a Day of Fallen Night, and realized that I don’t dislike Esbar because she’s a bad mother, but because we rarely get any interiority or insight into why she’s a bad mother. I’m on the second book of the Broken Earth trilogy and we just got Essun’s daughter’s perspective and we find out that Essun is actually not a great mom at all to the point her kid genuinely thinks she doesn’t love her. And we can fully understand why the daughter feels this way when we learn about how Essun treated her, which is not something that was known to us in the first book. But even though I was disappointed in hearing this, I still haven’t stopped liking Essun as a character. I think it’s because we see Essun’s whole life and the horribly abusive ways she was treated as a child and we understand that she is just replicating this with her own parenting because she doesn’t know how else to raise an orogene child in a place that wants to kill them. And it’s also a parallel to her complicated relationship with Alabaster. It doesn’t justify her treatment of Nassun, and I think Nassun is justified in how she feels, but we understand what made her this way. (Which is also a parallel to how generational trauma and racism irl can have negative effects on Black parenting) But with Esbar we don’t get as much insight into her trauma and what’s going on in her head so she just comes off to me like an asshole, and it feels like the narrative kind of hand waves her treatment of Siyu. I really wish that she could be explored more as a character and we could explore more of how the Priory itself causes this sort of trauma, because I feel it was touched on but I’d really like to dive deeper.
