#I could probably fit in some of the guilt from the Cadre and Aedion in as well

[bookfandomtalk]

So I got to thinking about Throne of Glass for reasons, and specifically the way one of the main themes throughout the series is guilt and responsibility.

The three main characters in Throne of Glass are Chaol, Dorian, and of course Celeana/Aelin. In a way, Chaol and Dorian are both foils to Aelin, and that is what causes most of the conflict between them.

In the first book, all three of them work together, but Dorian and Aelin both work for their own benefit, whereas Chaol spends the entire book basically ensuring the other two have their success. Dorian is Aelin's sponsor, but Chaol is the one who ends up actually having to do everything, where Dorian stands to gain the most. During this book, while Aelin starts off disliking both of them, and they both dislike her, they grow closer together. Aelin forces them to see her as human, rather than some abstract monster, and she succeeds with that with Dorian first, partially because he only sees her when she's not doing anything to do with her alias as Celeana. With Chaol this goes slower, he has to be more careful around her, keeping her in line is his job, so he can't afford to see her as human. It's also interesting that she mostly goes about life as Lillian Gordaina during this period. It's the third alias she has, but it's the least provocative, the only one that doesn't come with a heavy load of trauma.

Then in the second book, she's fully Celeana again, and this is where things get interesting. Because Chaol knew this side of Aelin well. He'd gotten to know her as the killer Celeana Sarthothien, and it wasn't strange for him. Dorian, however, suddenly kept away. He'd only allowed himself to see Celeana's soft side, and now he was confronted with the fact that she was more complicated than either a good or a bad person. As a guard, Chaol understood that serving a kingdom comes with getting your hands dirty, that sometimes you have to shed blood to keep the peace. As a prince, Dorian had been spared from ever having to get his hands dirty himself.

Then they realize she's Aelin (First Chaol, then Dorian), and things change. Now Chaol is the one who simply cannot understand Aelin's motivations anymore. He's always been a simple person, he's loyal to Dorian and only him and he protects the people he cares about. Even when Chaol realizes that serving the king is not protecting anyone, and he's been serving a tyrant, he simply turns against the king but maintains his original logic. And so he cannot understand Aelin, whose plans turn out to be really complicated, and whose loyalties are not exactly straightforward either. Celeana might've been dangerous and no fan of the kingbut she wasn't a threat to Adarlan as a whole, but Chaol's been told his whole life that he has to protect Adarlan against outside threats, and Queen Aelin definitely classifies as an outside threat.

Dorian, on the other hand, actually starts understanding Aelin again. This type of big picture thinking, putting your country first, making plans in which other people do a lot of the work for you? That's the way Dorian was raised. He still doesn't fully trust Aelin (he only just found out she had get another facet to her identity) but he gets along with Aelin much better than he did with Celeana.

Now, if you've read this whole thing, you might be wondering, where do guilt and responsibility come in?

I've kind of already alluded to it, but they're opposites, and their flaws are opposite.

While Aelin is living as Celeana, she spends most of her time avoiding her responsibility. She just wants to be free for once. However, she's always carried the guilt with her. She knows she's been avoiding her people's plight, and with every moment she does that, it becomes harder to pick up the responsibility, because the guilt keeps growing.

Chaol and Dorian both spend their entire life devoted to a goal. In the case of Dorian that goal was to become a great king one day, and in the case of Chaol, he rejected his responsibility as lord to instead be Dorian's right-hand man. (Which again comes into my earlier point of Chaol putting individuals first and not trusting Aelin the second he suspects she might put her country first instead of the people she cares about, but I digress) For them, they have the responsibility, but they were proud of it. Their journey was about accepting that their dedication to their country had caused harm.

And this too contributed to all of the tension between them. Because in order for Dorian to accept that Celeana might not that bad, he had to learn that getting your hands dirty wasn't the only way to get blood on your hands, but making the calls was just as bad.

Where for Chaol to understand that Aelin had good intentions meant he had to learn that the way he was serving his country and his royalty with all the devotion he showed made him culpable to the atrocities committed, that the country he'd served so proudly had caused serious harm, and he couldn't shield people from accountability just because they had loyalty to their country.

Basically, in order to accept all sides of Aelin for who she was, they had to accept that there was blame laying on their shoulders, and that just resulted in them both initially going the complete opposite way, and once vilifying her. Because the worse they made Aelin out to be in their own heads, the easier it was to look themselves in the mirror.