people still insisting werlyt isn’t a redemption arc makes me schmuckle and smumble a bit. the “you don’t have reading comprehension if you think it’s a redemption arc” is constant. i think it would hold water if the story were written in any way that didn’t imply pretty much every major problem in it could have been solved if he had continued to be werlyt’s governor. the problem was just that power was given to the wrong person. anyway everyone has heard what I think already so whatever but another angle im whipping out the beating bat out for is that they could have veeeerrrrryyyy easily critiqued the patriarchal values he embodies and come out with something of substance, but instead we get the tataru quest bit where you get the portrait of him sitting in the center of his family surrounded by his imperial orphan children. instead you get allie doe-eyedly accompanying him to seasonal events and living in a sort of post goldenage casca trauma-mute state of near childish regression and through this he has At Least Saved Something He Should Have Protected As The Man Of The House. instead you get people calling you a nasty sick in the head pervert for interpreting “come to my bedchambers” to his adoptive daughter in arr as sexual because they did want to retcon it later, simply because they didn’t want him to cross that boundary and frame his fatherhood as exploitative and even disgusting without the interference of Eviler Men. valens represents a perverted, evil inversion of the ideal patriarch figure he presents. duty tore him from them by circumstance. he remains the tragic figure of the ideal rational father being ousted by the sick greedy pervert and pretty much nobody ever really breaks open the weirdness of his position over the orphans vs playing up the tragedy of What Could Have Been: A Good Father And His Loving Loyal Children
