#but there is enough out there JUST about rosana and hadrian and their family that it doesn't grind my gears quite so much

[deep-hearts-core]

am i the only one deeply frustrated by hieron fandom's treatment of emmanuel as like... the mediator in lem and fero's supposed relationship as opposed to someone who loves and cares for lem very deeply and gets frustrated with him sometimes? i have loved someone like lem king and i have been in the position of waiting and worrying and feeling that frustration and two-mindedness about the future and idk i wish that emmanuel were treated like a multidimensional person by fans because he really is in the narrative

[gurguliare]

Ok, ok, Hieron wrapup notes, pending epilogue

Hadrian: Strengths and problems of Hadrian’s arc are for me aptly summarized in the jump from 1) Hadrian eking out a moral victory of sorts over Samot and the gods at the not inconsiderable cost of taking judgment into his own hands one last time---it’s all well and good to talk about Hadrian being in no position to pass judgment, but then, he wasn’t with Jericho, either, and sending Samot to Aubade is not a neutral choice. Of course no neutral choice exists! and the important thing is he no longer considers himself a mere weapon in the hands of a higher justice, but a person making a decision, which (as it turns out) simplifies the decision exactly as much as being a weapon did back in the day.---to 2) Hadrian cracking a joke about how, if his wife and child were hurt, of course he would pursue Samot to hell and back. Hadrian the family man exists, conflict-free, on a planet of eyewatering sentimentalism. I don’t really understand why. It has something to do with how they chose to handle Hadrian’s “redemption” or anyway recuperation as a character capable of normal communal life, after what I guess we’re now supposed to understand as his antisocial spiral in s1---laugh with me, it’s good to laugh---with his somber diagnosis of Samot as having spent Too Long Away From His Family also applying to his past self. Um. 

Of course Hadrian was never intended as a reliable narrator, but it’s hard for me to do much with that when his narrative isn’t countered by anything else in the text; we meet Benjamin and (less often) Rosana in other contexts, but we don’t get their view of Hadrian, much, and when we do it hews to a narrow pattern of concern and exasperation, as if Hadrian were only an aging action hero this close to claiming his retirement benefits. They lament his recklessness but seem not to notice the dogmatism or the listless doubts that replace it. (That’s with the fact that doubt, if anything, makes him a worse husband and father.) Despite her often-stressed importance to the surviving followers of the church, Rosana’s religious feelings are largely a cipher, and she’s almost never in a position to witness or comment on Hadrian’s most dramatic struggles with faith. So “family” and “faith” remain separate, unable to complicate or inform each other. It’s a shame, because I theoretically am really charmed by the story where a man’s incrementally degraded---not even broken!---faith is the mechanism of his salvation, and by the end he and Samot have swapped places, Samot incapable of not pursuing bitter, futile, barbarous justice and Hadrian very relaxed. The problem for me is that Hadrian ironically restored to his devout family through heresy is never treated as the strange accomplishment it is, and it’s not something he has to work for; I know we get Benjamin scenes this season, I understand the narrative function is to gesture to the very thing I’m describing, but I don’t mean “work for” in the sense of “carving out more time for family dinners.” I mean “acknowledging and accounting for Hadrian’s failings,” rather than glossing his escape almost as a matter of removing the temptation of belief, problem solved.  

Hella: I’m in a similar place with Hella; I like the skeleton of her complete arc, I don’t think it ever got the development it needed and it’s missing some key connections. I got a lot of joy from Ali affirming the thread of Hella’s relationship to Ordenna, from s1 avoidance to s2 voluntary exile to s3 final, reluctant return and assumption of responsibility. For me, it’s compelling to look back and realize that Hella essentially begins in a place that Hadrian only reaches circa Winter: having not rejected, but unobtrusively fled, a culture which failed to inculcate her completely with its horrible values---in part because she was too cowardly to adopt them---but that left her with a tangle of blind prejudice and bravado, the relief of freedom making her that much happier to perform “big tough Ordennan,” as long as she stayed far away from Ordenna. I love... of course I love Velas, in concept, I love and will always love FATT’s shitty compromise cities, cosmopolitan and democratic of necessity rather than out of any high ideal. Yes! We get it! I imprinted on Terry Pratchett, I don’t need to say it every time! But the fact that Hella identifies with Velas and befriends Calhoun in Velas and that they have this common experience of “shit, maybe the world is a bigger place than I realized, maybe it’s not actually a choice between tyranny and anarchy every time” ... makes me really verklempt. And in Nacre they both fall back on old habits and Velas barely seems real; for both of them, Nacre has an unpleasant tinge of “reality” asserting itself over a dream---for Calhoun, returning there is obviously something he’s always feared, but for Hella it’s the discovery that the Ordennan state was more right than she knew, that gods and magic exist, and aren’t just bogeymen used to keep Ordennans off the mainland; and, on a deeper level, that Ordenna’s narrow pride is a reaction to a far older and more arbitrary authority.

So she kills Calhoun---“If she’s going to, then why don’t I?” Escape is so unlikely, caught between Ordenna and Nacre, that helping others find it would be a frivolous proposition: the only person Hella hopes to save is Hella. Then she goes home to learn that Velas is also in mortal danger, that the whole world will soon be Ordenna (and Nacre.) She’s ensured it. No wonder her nihilism at the start of Winter is much more marked, and she finally starts to accept that escape isn’t there for the seizing, that there isn’t an outside.

And then she... goes to Aubade?

This is where it starts to break down for me, as with Hadrian and his family. In theory, I get why actually showing Hella what it means to live away from savage god-eat-god imperialism gives her the courage and vision to face Hieron head-on. I think the line about “surrounding herself with clever people” is great and gets at the point that her education, her personal growth, are not meaningless just because they’re the product of artificial intervention, fantastical prosthesis. But, I dunno, in execution it’s so spotty. Part of it is that Adelaide has to come to her senses at the same time, but that process happens very quietly and never gets free of Hella’s orbit---the scene where she asks Hella for a reason to leave Aubade is good, but comes at the price of other scenes in which we see them, for example, negotiate the terms of Adularia’s existence together. Hella as Death’s Servant reads too much as "running Adelaide’s errands,” not enough as her ardent champion, and I’m not saying that every Ali character has to become a zealot before they’re done for me to be satisfied, but hey! If this is you redeeming Nacre and its ideals from the start of the show, then redeem those things! And give Hella the space for her return to Ordenna to feel like atonement, rather than “one last job”... it’s such a good atonement, is the thing, the only possible one, because for all that she’s changed, Ordenna is still the one place where you can imagine Hella Varal having something to teach people. 

Probably the solution to this would involve triangulating with the sentience of the Anchor; since Ordenna got the plans from Nacre, Adelaide should take partial responsibility in the cleanup there, as well, and not only in releasing Hieron from the curse. Keep the two plots in conversation to the end. But I’m not sure what exactly that would have looked like; something with Hella’s new body, maybe. 

Fantasmo: I love Nick. Thanks to Nick for half-assedly speedrunning Fantasmo through Fourteen’s bit of “in lieu of character development, what if: uplifting character regression?” I cracked the fuck up at him using “Dominate” solely to make Samot captive audience. Audience... to the world’s most insipid power-of-heart lecture, which was honestly very sweet as an obvious truth Fantasmo once knew, or knew well enough to mouth. I did love all the grace notes about the Last University in the finale, still nameless, still a refuge.