#sophie hold keefe accountable and stop letting him in without actually learning his lesson challenge

[bookwyrminspiration]

the sophie & keefe parallels with jolie & brant 🥺🥺🥺

oh this one hurts. this one hurts real bad. if we take it far enough then we could say Sophie and Keefe's relationship is leading to inevitable ruin because they love each other too much to acknowledge their faults and hold each other accountable

but to break it down further

Sophie and Jolie/Keefe and Brant:

We can draw some pretty obvious parallels between Sophie and Jolie. They're both Ruewens, they're both members of the Black Swan, Jolie wanted to make the world a better place and that's what Sophie is trying to do now. There's also the element of forgiveness and leniency, Jolie still trying to save Brant and reason with him and understand him when he was past redemption for everyone else, which ultimately killed her. Sophie keeps forgiving Keefe because "I could never hate you," when he's given her plenty of reason to do just that. She keeps giving him chances and if it continues they'll never learn and they might go down in flames, too. We can also touch on the elements of secrecy and privacy, as Grady shared that Jolie was a very private person and didn't talk about her life a lot and Edaline shared that she'd seemed closed off and worn out before she died.

There's the obvious Neverseen parallel between Brant and Keefe, though Keefe joined as a ruse and Brant was a real member. They both thought they knew what was best and they both tried to convince everyone around them they were right (Keefe later admitted he fucked up bad, tho). They're both incredibly determined and aggressive in a fight, throwing around a lot of cocky attitude and threats (when Keefe isn't being emotionally devastated by his mother). A minor detail that I can't help but notice is the notes. Brant wrote Jolie love letters constantly while she was in the elite levels as an expression of his affection. Keefe leaves notes behind when he wants to see her and when he's leaving, as those are expression of him wanting to connect with her and just be near her. If we look specifically at the note from Unlocked, it's him saying he loves her by trying to protect her--in this case, by not being near her.

however, I also want to present this perspective

Sophie and brant/keefe and jolie:

what are some of the defining characteristics of Brant? What makes him, well, him? Passion. Drive. A willingness to do things no one else is (like torture a child, but not saying that's a good thing). Still held guilt and grief over Jolie, saying "If she doesn't get to live--no one does" in Everblaze. A lot of these traits are reflected in Sophie too. She's incredibly passionate about her friends and keeping them safe, making choices no one else agrees with (burning down the storehouse, which notably uses fire) and always wanting more. more success and progress, more results, to be getting somewhere. Brant has delivered several passionate speeches and lines throughout the series, but a lot of the times it's Sophie who responds to them and talks back. They're both burning their way through life and blazing a breakneck paced trail, frantically running towards something/someone (note: also the bad match situation for both of them, denied something everyone is supposed to have access to)

Jolie and Keefe both give me the vibe of gentle souls, of people who have been hurt and are just trying to live with it (although Jolie died with it). Jolie was quiet but determined, willing to take risks and put herself and her personal safety on the line, same as Keefe when he ran away to join the Neverseen. Actually, I think we have an even better parallel between Jolie and Keefe's time with the Neverseen than his comparison to Brant. They tried to play double agent, and it didn't end well for either of them. They both lost something--Jolie, her love and life, Keefe, the caches and the trust in his relationships. The journaling interests me too. Keefe has his sketchbooks and Jolie had her notebook about Brant, both of them organizing their thoughts on paper and trying to make sense of things. I also want to briefly make the point that Jolie kept asking people (the reader of the journal) to give Brant another chance, that he's just misunderstood, and Keefe is constantly asking Sophie to trust him, to let him back in. There's this element of clinging to the past and trying to make things right without acknowledging how everything has changed.

and then we could also touch on how they're both childhood friends sharing something--Brant and Jolie had that gremlin, which is how they bonded, and Sophie and Keefe had that element of both sticking out and garnering attention, Sophie being the new/weird human-girl (though she isn't human) and Keefe skipping a grade and having a bad family life. They were both challenged by distance and communicated through other means--love letters and transmitting.

I could probably keep going but!! there's so many similarities between the two relationships and their past, but we can only hope that Sophie and Keefe don't end up the way Brant and Jolie did. this is a super interesting comparison tho, so thank you for the prompt! I hadn't even realized how similar they were until I started writing this