In Defense of Violet Sorrengail (Empyrean Series) (Long Rant below)
But—but Carley, she’s a small petite FMC and that makes me mad 😡
NO SHUT UP and read. If you’re able:
1-Ever heard of write what you know? I’d like for you to use your brain cells and look up Rebecca Yarros’s height. Just for fun. Now come back here.
I am a writer. I have written exactly ONE tall FMC in my 20+ fanfictions and original stories over a whole-ass decade. Just one. Because for me, my experience is being short.
How short am I, you ask? 5’2. Sometimes 5’1 when my posture is shitty. I see NOTHING. Tall people rule the world and it’s an unfortunate truth. 🤷🏻♀️ unfortunately, we live in a world with other people. So your 5’5 or 5’8 ass doesn’t get to exclusively claim all female characters in books should be that height. If you’re mad, be mad at a woman YOUR height or a man YOUR height that refuses to write a tall girl 🤷🏻♀️ I’m NOT petite though. I’m a thick chronically ill woman and that brings me to point 2.
BUT caRLeY it’s not EXPLICIT that she’s chronically ill
2-Shut the f up. Please. Go and google what illness the author Rebecca Yarros has. Then understand that the REAL WORLD scientists that discovered Ehlers Danlos Syndrome are (GASP) from Earth?? And not from?? A fictional world?? That doesn’t have?? Modern medicine?? So OBVIOUSLY the terms are not going to be the same here. DUH. It’s basic writing world-building. 💅💅💅💅 now go back and read the book. She wraps her joints. Violet’s bones are brittle. She bruises easily. She’s called weak because in a world where chronic illness is not recognized as anything OTHER than weakness, this is what she’s working with.
But CarLeY!! What exactly qualifies you to talk about this illness huh? You don’t have it!!
3- Correct. I do not. I am, however, A CHRONICALLY ILL woman. And ALSO, the only person in my family to not have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Let me explain—my ENTIRE family sans me and dear old dad, are HEDS people. So I’ve been seeing double jointedness, flexibility, splits, and hyperextending of muscles since the time I was a little tot.
Some examples:
One time, my sister and I decided we were going to play catch. With a rock. We were 5 and 3 respectively, it’s not one of my better oldest child moments. I threw it. She caught it with her head. IT LEFT A PERMANENT BRUISE.
Another time, my sister did a cartwheel in our dining room. Her leg brushed against our dinner table. Which was only slightly sharp on the edge, as table edges are. If I had touched it or bumped into it, well OUCH, but whatever.
My sister? Flayed her leg open. FLAYED. Skin hanging, tissue visible, blood gushing.
So I’d say that as someone who grew up around this illness, I SEE it way more than people who had never heard of it. Now here’s the thing—Violet was training to be a SCRIBE. You wanna know the physical qualifications of that?? Breathing ✅. She wasn’t training to be strong or physically capable.
My mom was an athlete growing up who did dance. My sister is lovingly referred to as the macho-man of our family because she can lift my body weight any day of the week ON TOP of being a flexible and strong dancing queen. My brother was a tight end in football all through high school who endured multiple lacerations from getting CLEATED. HEDS at its finest.
So NO, Violet who has never trained her body or tried to make it strong is (gasp SHOCKINGLY) not going to be strong. She’s starting at ground 0 with NO MUSCLE MASS. It takes time to get built and to get strong.
but CarLEY!! Her experience isn’t my experience!!
4- You mean to tell me. That your experience. As a tall woman. Or an average height woman. In the modern world. With medicine. And diagnostic tests available to you. Is not the same. As a fantasy book. With dragons. And a war college. And a short woman. Who didn’t train at all for this life path.
I’m SHOCKED. It’s almost like….chronic illness. Is. Individual??? Like, my experience with PCOS/PMOS and endometriosis is not going to be Sally or Karen’s experience with it? And we can experience different symptoms? And different timelines of highs and lows?
ALSO, Rebecca Yarros has said that she is NOT trying to shoehorn every HEDS/EDS experience into one character. That’s literally. Not. Possible. She is doing what books do best.
Giving people three things—
A mirror to see themselves within.
A window by which to see an experience that the reader has not had before.
A sliding door that creates empathy for those that have not experienced these things but are now seeking to understand more.
but CarLEY—Violet should have problems with sex!!
5. Um. No. Just no. Unless Violet is out here HYPEREXTENDING HER HIPS, there’s no reason that sex is bad. Chronically ill people have sex. Chronically ill people can have kinky sex. And chronically ill people can reproduce. Get over it. In fact, half of the scenes are possible BECAUSE Violet has HEDS and is hypermobile and flexible. Ask any chronically ill person you know. Unless of course, you’re arguing with me, a stranger on the internet, because you DONT know anyone with chronic illness.
What you take away from the books are up to you. Just PLEASE, for the love of every written text before the internet was invented, USE MEDIA LITERACY and actually read instead of complaining online and being bitchy. Like, you have agency. You know that, right? You don’t have to read the book if you don’t like it.
AND ALSO, if Violet’s experience as a short chronically ill woman and FMC upsets you that much, go read something else.
Don’t be ableist. Don’t be rude. It’s not that hard.
XOXO,
Op I love you for this. I am also disabled/chronically. I like Vi as a character because Yarros didn't shy away from describing how Violet struggles because of her disablity because a long time ago (circa 2024) I had to consciously chose to breathe whenever I was awake because if not the respiratory diseases just wouldn't do it automatically. Also, critics, ever met chronically ill person on a bad day. We bitch and moan internally and personally if four flights of stairs or the hyderabad airport are involved, externally.
Shoutout to OP for the rant, all extremely valid points and I'm not trying to counter her argument - Violet is a pretty solid representation of a person with a disability and even though it's not entirely my own experience, I'm still glad RY wrote her that way.
My issues with the character don't come from her being a petite woman with disabilities; they come from the fact that it feels like she can't fail, and from a purely writing standpoint this is a bad trait to give your character.
Sticking the rest under the cut for those interested, but if you want to reblog for the disability points, go to the original post and reblog it directly because it deserves that visibility.
My issues with Violet don't stem from the disability, the pushiness about getting with Xaden, or anything in how her physicality or emotional impacts of said disability are portrayed; they stem from the whole "If I die you lose two of your most powerful dragons and riders so I'm untouchable" arrogance and like, babes I KNOW that we hate old men telling us what to do but can you PLEASE try to listen to someone who is over 25 and not related to you? Please? I promise not all of them are shitstains on the gutter tag that is your society.
She gets a free pass with Grady because that entire situation was a dumpster fire waiting to happen, but I'd like to see her be wrong. Fight the patriarchy and show us that you can't always enter the political arena and immediately start winning. Like, every single one of her failures is always something outside her control, and I'd like to see her make a bad decision that has serious impact just once.
With Xaden basically gone I'm hoping we see her fail a lot more though I doubt it with Brennan around. And it feels really shitty to even say that, like I don't normally root for a character's downfall but the longer it gets put off, the longer her decisions keep leading to net positives overall (and the more her "failures" are actually blamed on circumstance, environment, or others' poor judgement or whatever), the bigger that fall is gonna need to be for me to reconnect with her as a character.
It's an issue I keep seeing in more modern stories and it's like, LET YOUR MCS MAKE BIG MISTAKES. Real people fuck up all the time, real people struggle with pressure and make spur-of-the-moment choice that fall apart, real people want to connect with your characters. But when your main characters are virtually untouchable outside of their ONE (1) weakness (which coincidentally IS her disability and I will probably dig into that another time) (love as a weakness is such a cop-out don't get me started), it makes sympathizing for her a lot more difficult ESPECIALLY for those who don't share her experiences with disability.
So yeah I like her as a representation of disability and disabled people and short queens and allosexual women and all that. I just struggle to connect with her because she can't fail - and if your MC can't fail, there's no stakes. It's basically emotional plot armour and I'm tired of the side characters like Liam, Lilith, Trager, Quinn, etc paying the ultimate price so we still feel like there's failure involved.
But she lost Xaden!
Xaden chose that path himself, and she fought like hell NOT to lose gim
But she lost the Irids!
I may have to reread but doesn't Leothan point out that she (and Andarna) are a result of their environment? Even if he doesn't say it, that's the vibe I was getting from that scene, and in the end they rejected Andarna because of Xaden, not Violet.
But she lost Liam/Trager/her mum!
Literally they died as a result of their own or others' actions, not Violet's.
But she lost the potential alliances with--
She walked out of every encounter on those islands having won over the right people, or in Courtlyn's case, scaring the right people.
But she lost Andarna!
Because that was set up from the beginning, and Andarna was the cost she paid for raising the Aretian wards - and it still wasn't her decision for that to happen.
Violet Sorrengail has never made a decision that ultimately led to a failure, even a temporary one. And idk about anybody else but "let your characters objectively fail" is one of the most common pieces of character advice I've seen floating around. I'm praying we see it in Book 4 - and I still feel ick for saying that because at heart I want her to win, but I want that win to mean something.
re-watching the original trilogy is great because you really get a sense for how weird luke skywalker is, just how quickly he becomes that weird AND how quickly he commits to it. Like he's honestly pretty chill in a new hope, but the absolute INSTANT he figures out he can move shit with his mind he goes full send on the cryptic off-putting bullshit. Walking around in full black robes, speaking in riddles, aura farming and backflipping whenever physically possible. He's clearly annoyed when he first meets yoda in empire, but he dismisses that pretty quickly in favour of ALSO becoming an over-dramatic space wizard. The combination of his two teachers being yoda and obi-wan kenobi and him being the son of anakin and padme creates the single most intense and fundamentally kind force sensitive perfectly embodying the heart of the jedi order whilst also serving egregious amounts of cunt and being bizarre to be around. He would have THRIVED as a jedi master during the high republic. he would have been every padawan's favourite and every other master's worst nightmare
This is a difficult signet to identify, and would work perfectly as a secondary signet for a Marked One.
Perception Filtering is the living definition of "flying under the radar". You're able to divert attention away from yourself, and at later stages targets of your choosing, so as to go all but unnoticed. While it can be considered an intinnsic ability, it doesn't involve truly getting inside another person's head - more just forcing their eyes to look elsewhere.
The effective range can increase with training, and while in the early stages the wielder might only be able to affect themselves, their skill can be trained to extend to others either through touch or just proximity. At advanced levels, the wielder might be able to select targets they can see but are a sizeable distance away, using their signet to enable the target to go almost undetected.
Of course, doing anything to draw attention would effectively negate the signet's effectiveness - but this could be extremely useful for enabling covert stealth operations into enemy territory, or assisting with ambush maneuvers.
Perception filtering as a signet is most likely to manifest in those who have a strong need to go unnoticed, and might manifest instead of an invisibility signet where a less experienced or perhaps weaker dragon is bonded. Despite being easier to manifest for less powerful dragons, perception filtering can be trained much faster than invisibility or other, similar signets, giving it a larger potential than most signets in the same field.
being a kid and hearing adults say stuff like "woah 2011 was 4 years ago haha" didn't really convey the fucking horror of a youtube video crossing my recommended labelled "9 years ago" and it's from 2017. that's not true. 9 years ago is 2010 or something. don't lie.
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
The Shadow Wielder and the Silver One. Finally sharing my piece of Xaden Riorson and Violet Sorrengail! 🖤⚡️
I've been working on this for what feels like forever—obsessing over the lighting and getting those shadows just right. It’s been such a journey, but I’m so happy with how it turned out.
hi welcome to my kitchen this is my box that makes things cold and my box that makes things hot and my box that makes things wet and my box that makes things full of EM waves and my box tha
there are infinite versions of every story. the author gives you the text, gives you the basics, but with every person who reads it, a new story is born. Every person reads between the lines, fills in their own blanks, and draws their own conclusions, and a new story is born. And I love them all <3
You gotta be tough if you're gonna be stupid. You can do stupid shit all you want but you're not going to avoid suffering consequences.
If you can't be tough, you gotta be nice. People can forgive a lot of stupidity if you're polite about it and pleasant to be around.
You can't tell whether you're stupid or not. There is literally no way to know in advance, for absolute certainty, whether the thing you're just about to do is genius or stupid before it either splendidly succeeds or blows up in your face.
Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.
This was low-key the reason I opted to write a fanfic just for my own enjoyment. I'm not focusing on the narrative structure, I'm trying not to force myself to think about the plot relevance of certain scenes, I'm not even worrying about the word count - it's a story about people in a situation and that's all I'm trying to write.
