#obviously osaron was ultimately responsible it just would have been so preventable if they had acted differently

[shouldprobablybereading]

Second time reading acol and I hate the beginning just as much, not in a it's badly written way but because I'm so frustrated with emira

(Putting the rest under read more because it got long and ranty, tw for some discussion on self harm and a suicide adjacent moment)

Like there is something that bothers me so much about the attitude surrounding kell being imprisoned and basically tortured, only focusing on how this is bad for rhy. Like emira is sitting there praying saying that kell would never let rhy die, but she doesn't know that his magic is cut off. From her perspective rhys death means kell is off somewhere dying painfully as well and there is no sympathy for that. What happends to him is just a (albeit horrible) side effect of something happening ti kell, it's like the fire alarm going off and being upset that it's loud instead of being concerned by a fire.

"a mother never abandons her child" - Ma'am you have two!

Which is why their hug when he returns rings so hollow to me. Narratively it's the moment where they make up (to some degree) and they recognize that he truly is the only thing keeping rhy there. But it doesn't recognize that this is their fault, he ran away from them, their actions where the ones that actually put rhy in danger. Kell was hurt and that isn't just bad because it hurts rhy as well, its bad because it matters because kell is a human being and it matters if he's in pain. It just feeds into the idea that his life only had worth if it's for the purpose of protecting rhy

I actually kinda wish for that reason that lila hadn't healed him before them reuniting, when he comes back to them he's fine and they don't get to see the horror of what he experienced, what situation their actions pushed him into. Because I wonder if to some degree kell constantly using his blood for magic and his antari powers making him heal better has made them think of it as less of a concern like he's invincible (which to be fair he kinda is but that doesn't mean it's pleaseant). There is something fucked up in general about desensitizing a child towards hurting himself to the point that he doesn't hesitate to slit his own wrists. Cutting yourself is not some easy casual thing to do, it takes a lot of willpower. The antari have to use their blood and it's for a reason but it's always struck out to me how often they are just expected to hurt themselves because of it. Which is not specifically emira and maxims fault but fascinating none the less, tho I should probably end here since I'm rambling away from the subject.