So there's a really fun thing about the de Rolo massacre flashbacks in TLoVM 1x03 I've been wanting to get into. Which is that every other backstory flashback in this show—even the one of Percy & Cass getting tortured later in the season—is a straightforward depiction of literal events that occurred in the past. But the massacre is not. It's a trauma nightmare that Percy is having about the massacre and it is deliberately not a reliable depiction of it.
Maybe it's an unrelated happy memory of Percy's where his family was being more convivial than normal, but my opinion is that it's something his subconscious fully invented. Speaking from experience, whenever I have dreams about my dead family members, they're never representations of memories of mine—they're stuff my brain made up. And then because Percy's brain is a fucking asshole, this invented happy scene that he'd love to just sit in for as long as possible is transformed into the massacre (and the torture, and Cassandra's apparent death) via dream-logic.
And this is my interpretation either way but I do very much think it's the intent, because the first Whitestone Chronicles comic does show a literal depiction of these events as they happened (albeit one slanted from Ripley's perspective) and the differences between it and Percy's nightmare in the show are very clear and intentional—they're at a formal dinner, siblings who didn't appear in the show like Vesper are present, etc.
This extends to the escape, too! In Percy's dream recollection in the show she's shown still in her bloodstained dress from the dinner, having just been tortured by Ripley—because that's the worst version of her that exists in his memory and his brain is, again, an asshole. Whereas in the comic it's shown they had time to grab some weather-appropriate clothes for her before they tried to make it through the snowy woods.
Maybe that's too much a difference for some people, but I for one love it—it reinforces how Percy's perspective on what happened in Whitestone is unreliable and warped by trauma. Each telling of it—from Percy's perspective, from Cass's, from Ripley's, from whoever's—is never quite the same, because it's such an all-encompassing destructive event that you can never quite perfectly capture it.
To quote another story about vampires and unreliable narrators: Was it raining that night, Percy?
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