#anyway. trevanion is a better man than me because if all of that happened to me devoting myself to the royal family is not the trajectory i

[archersgoon]

ok i know i talked about this a few months ago but i'm doing trevanion maths again. i didn't notice this before, but realising that he was stuck protecting the duke of sayles while his village was attacked and his parents and sisters were killed/captured and then when he asks that the king like, do something, he got thrown in prison only to get released what, 2-3 weeks before bartolina dies? anyway it is doing terrible things to me

[archersgoon]

but then i remember. trevanion and perri are like this because arguably similar things happened to them.

like. trevanion was what, 20 when he became captain of the guard? and the sequence was sisters get kidnapped by dragon boats -> parents are killed trying to save them -> go ask the the king why the fuck he isn't doing anything when this kind of shit is a yearly occurrence -> get thrown in prison for this crime -> have the king come to his cell every night to whine about how he can't do shit -> say alright. let me out and i'll fucking do it -> fucking do it. like he had no other options he had no choices the way f&f technically did. he was basically their age and he had to go bail out this fuckass king who couldn't do shit when his people were suffering because his guard were useless but!!! we don't really have this proof that he couldn't do shit like. your wife is the daughter/sister (unclear who was in charge at this point) of the mont leader have you tried calling up saro and his boys? no. because you fucking suckkkkk. also bartolina must've been like. third trimester at that point so it's like. you finally get released and you set out to make your country a better place for what remains of your family (you your wife unborn finnikin) and then bartolina fucking dies!!! so now it's just him and finnikin and it's like shit. from that point on, what the hell could he do? and he does the same thing as froi does with him with regards to carles in that he never explicitly seems to see this as a catastrophic failing on carles' part and continues to love and admire the memory of this guy when he was a grownass man (three daughters/referenced 'long wait' for a son? i know he was mid-thirties at the least) whose best idea to handle his national fucking crisis was to make some kid he locked up deal with it

and then perri. ohhh perri. i did the maths a while back and he can't have been more than like 16-17 when people started adding 'the savage' to his name and it's like, why? what did he do? all we ever hear about is his insane beef with tesadora, but everyone hated her as well anyway, so was it just like: this societal outcast is getting into brutal fights with this other societal outcast so clearly he is some sort of uncontrollable monster. and yet he so much as enters a house and abian is like "how could you possibly let him in the same house as your son?" as though he's just going to do baby murder there on the spot. so what we end up with is trevanion showing perri some sort of trust (recruiting him for the guard) for the first time in his life and he obviously latches onto that, he's like 17! and then 20 years later he turns to froi and he says "you have to join the guard. there is no other place for you. i know better than you" because he sees himself in froi he has that whole thing where he convinced himself he might be froi's bio father, like to him it is obvious that froi can't do anything else because froi is just a younger version of him with the same problems and the same solutions even when that is very demonstrably not the case. he would trap froi in the corner he was trapped in and call it respect. call it love, even! but it isn't, and i don't know that he or trevanion (who sees froi joining the guard less as the best/only option and more as a debt owed) ever really process that their outlook in this situation just. isn't good

thinking about froi again. like it's so. why are you making this teenager perform your secret executions for war crimes. perri and trevanion telling him he has to join the guard when it is very clearly the worst possible option for him for three straight years then getting on his back when he skips out on lessons with the priestking like what reason would he have to even bother going? like, they clearly believe that they know what's best for him yet fundamentally misunderstand him so continually on every level (see the fact that no one has gotten any of his jokes in three years). like he is happiest doing farmer shit. we see this. he says it himself. and yet he's not allowed to be because he's just so good at killing!!! basically: you fucked up a perfectly good farmer is what you did. look at him he's got anxiety