#and do not even get me started on my silna/hickey/crozier triangulations

[dogmotifz]

no no no pleaaaaaaaase say more re: hickey and silna. Because now I'm thinking like they are both "frauds" in a way bc Hickey is Hickey and Silna really doesn't want to be a shaman never commits to the role/can't do it like Hickey can't caulk. They're both in the "wrong" place with the wrong people as neither one should be on these ships! Please keep elaborating. Also. Love the Lestat profile pic.

Ok after thinking on it a while I think it's way more accurate to say that they each have the personality and social standing that the other one needs, rather than just "self recognition through the other" (though I think that's still 100% accurate, wrt them both being failures of a sort in their roles)

Hickey desperately desperately wants to have power, which silna has the potential to have-- ideally, she would have power through her role as a shaman with the ability to control the tuunbaq, and she would have a community of people who respected her, all of which hit hickeys main motivating factors (power, respect, community-- see the mutineers)

Silna, on the other hand, needs hickeys assets; drive, charisma, his follow-through. Look at how Silna, apparently, took several tries to work up the courage/ability to cut her tongue off with her ulu, vs how hickey could do it in 60 seconds flat with his dull knife. Also compare hickeys constant rebelling against authority vs silna... Kinda just rolling over and taking it, when the netsilik hunter tells her to get a hold of herself (this isn't 1:1 comparable to hickeys situation, obviously, but she's definitely very meek compared to him). Hickey has all the attributes ideal for a shaman (at least, a shaman in the early stages of controlling the tuunbaq), but none of the reverence (or inherited ability lmao) needed to actually gain control of the tuunbaq.

At the same time tho I think there's definitely a lot of similarities between the two-- I'm thinking of Dave K's comments about how every character has a moment they switch from an adventure story to a horror story, but how ironically neither hickey or silna have one; they're both in horror stories from the moment we see them. I think they're both incredibly (for lack of a better term) scrappy characters, who're doing everything in their power just to survive on a ship with people who hate them for something immutable about themselves (though this is notably much worse for silna-- nobody ever suggests that hickey be left out on the ice for the crime of being gay). Then there's the million other little similarities between the two that drive me crazy: both operate under assumed/assigned names, both are out of place on the ship, they're the two with the most crying scenes (I think, don't quote me on that).

Tldr; teach hickey inuktitut so he can give a "we're not so different, you and I" speech and silna can curse him out.