it's so deliberate to me that the writers do not have diva try to seduce kai as herself, which would seem like the obvious route; she is, after all, saya’s twin, her mirror image. diva seems to be aware that kai and saya are deeply bonded to each other beyond a simple sibling relationship ("he really is my sister's precious prince!" she's so fucking funny), why then does she not lure kai in with sex?
while diva was locked up and experimented on from the moment she was born, saya lived as an aristocrat’s adopted daughter, happy and comfortable and loved. saya gets the companion, the servant, the bridesgroom, a sweet little boy whom saya gets to watch grow from a kid to a young man to a devoted chevalier. diva likely does not know that haji was turned under duress. the transition from human companion to chevalier is, to her, the natural order of things, perhaps even an idealized version of how it should happen. to add insult to injury, diva's own chevaliers fixate on saya as a romantic prospect due to the reproductive politics of the chiroptera. amshel has been trying to breed the queens since he first laid hands on them, and so it has been his own political and scientific choices that have chosen diva’s chevaliers. and sure, amshel brought haji to saya with the purpose of having them reproduce as well, but even with amshel’s thumb on the scale saya is the golden sister, the lucky one: she gets the romance, the courtly love of their species, while diva gets raped in every way imaginable as amshel's test subject which the show all but spells out.
it's easy then to see why diva has no appetite for haji. in ep. 40 nathan tells amshel that if he was as devoted to diva as he says he is, he would have brought saya’s chevalier to her early on. amshel says that "she didn't choose him", otherwise amshel would have done so. despite amshel’s possessiveness, he has a vested interest in breeding diva, so there’s no reason to doubt the veracity of this claim. we are never told how amshel is turned, but it is, to me, highly likely that he simply drank from diva's blood without her consent and tied himself to her forever - we know that becoming a chevalier creates a desire to be with and protect the respective queen, but bloodties do not override a man's free will or his interests, and being a chevalier grants a man immortality and power. while it seems that at some point diva became able to refuse forced reproduction, amshel reveres her only inasmuch as she is an object of scientific value to him. he turns to modern science and builds a synthetic chiroptera bioweapon empire with her blood instead.
then, in the 21rst century, saya gets yet another family who loves her unconditionally. two brothers devoted to her in an entirely mundane, human way that diva has never even remotely experienced. diva meets the younger, softer, tender one when he confuses her for saya, drinks from him and kills him, and it triggers the circumstances that force saya to reclaim riku not only as her little brother but as her chevalier in order to save his life.
once again, saya can have it all. but this time, saya’s new chevalier (unlike haji) is frozen in time before he can grow into a man, with all the violence that diva knows men to inflict. and it’s not fair, is it. the boy should be diva’s by bloodright, because saya’s chevaliers are diva’s bridegrooms and vice versa, but beyond reproductive politics, crucially, the boy is diva’s because she is taking something from saya.
her explanation for killing riku in ep. 32 is strangely contradictory. she wanted to give him something in return for "taking something precious from him" (diva's own blood, which to diva is precious, but to riku is lethal), this wording suggests that diva is somewhat aware that raping him is a violent act - was killing riku, then, a mercy?
diva also says that she now knows what it feels like to kill one of saya's chevaliers: it feels divine. in ep. 40, diva tells solomon that she wants to live with saya, but more than anything, she wants to kill her. for diva, love and violence are indistinguishable from each other because that’s what amshel has taught her: he is her jailer, her torturer, her rapist, but also her first chevalier, her caretaker, her father.
when solomon comes to tell diva that he has fallen in love with saya, diva objects: saya wants to kill her. isn’t she supposed to be solomon’s priority? james later says that solomon was diva’s favorite, but diva runs to amshell for comfort. she tells solomon that he can never be saya’s chevalier, so he will have to be her mate and impregnate her.
it is after solomon’s betrayal that diva decides she wants kai.
an eye for an eye, a young, soft-hearted man for another. kai is everything diva’s chevaliers are not. he is even everything that haji isn’t: he doesn’t bow to saya, but he listens to her, he treats her like a person, he fights with her, calls her out on her bullshit. he loves her because he knows her. he isn’t above or below saya but her equal. in ep. 47 diva tells nathan that there’s only ever been either people who bow before her, or people who want to kill her. no one has ever known diva. no one has cared enough to try.
and listen, i know they’re lines, but there’s, to me, a budding fondness in the way diva smiles at kai here. he’s so stubborn. she seems smitten. she’s courting him: she pokes at him, seems to delight in telling him that she fucked and killed his baby brother, because violence and sex and love and family and blood and reproduction are all one and the same to her. it’s the only way she knows how to show him she wants him by her side. it’s intimacy.
and god! she offers him the job! kai is the first and only person diva has chosen to be with her. she asks nicely. she even acknowledges his feelings for saya, offers him the opportunity to be a viable reproductive partner for her (“that’s quite the carrot!” again: she’s so funny), and she does this in the body of kai’s little brother whom he has been grieving for a year, whom she claims lives within her, whom in her hunger for connection she consumed, because she doesn’t want to steal saya’s “precious prince” by being a replacement for saya, she wants to join saya's family.
and when kai says no, diva offers him her body to inflict violence on. that’s fine too. that's love too. if he doesn’t want to bow for her, he can hurt her, and drink her blood, and protect the children she forced out of the little brother kai loved, and in doing so tied herself to him forever - it’s like she merged with him, wears him, wants to be him, wants what riku had: family and innocence. and she rubs it in kai’s face, because to love someone is to torture them is to mock them is to merge with them is to know where it hurts is to be with them forever, mother, lover, sister, brother.
but kai doesn’t want to hurt her, so he rejects her twice. what a drag. let’s go home, amshel.
dededos
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
areudirty
andulkaphoto
