#their destinies are entwined like no other and we're along for the ride!

[applepixls]

theres a relatively small scene in grian's episode 4 of secret life where he's caving and accidentally breaks a stalactite that hits him in the face and he expresses a large amount of grief over losing silly hearts. later in the episode he crawls home after nearly starving in the mines and finds scar in his egg to which he sorta chases him out and then decides to go try to make friends and regretfully goes to his neighbour who's also not got really any friends.

i drew a small comic about it in November but there are a few parallels there between secret life and double life. first of all, grian reveals that they're bonded at the end of the first episode by dropping a stalactite on scars head at which point they share the damage and scar realizes they're soulmates. additionally, a smaller piece, many double life pairs were incredibly concerned about starving because of how much food they were constantly using because it was so easy to lose hearts and kill both yourself and your partner. then there's the grian chasing scar out of his flammable newly built base, this time without the jellie pandas

the premise of my mini comic what the idea that in getting hit in the head with the stalactite c!grian sort of flashed back to double life and then with all the time to ruminate in it as he was crawling back from the mines he realized it was kind of messed up what he did to scar back then and was going to try to make friends with him again (all the art I've seen of grian asking scar to be friends again with a bouquet of sunflowers genuinely breaks my heart a little bit each time with all the parallels between that and 3rd life-)

[copperhawks]

Hot take: George's behavior throughout In the Hand of the Goddess and Woman Who Rides Like a Man (at least up until he and Alanna officially get together) is worse and more sexist than Jon's behavior in Woman Who Rides Like a Man.

Jon gets a "maybe" from Alanna when he asks her to marry him and makes the assumption that that "maybe" is just nerves that will ultimately change to the yes that he thinks Alanna ACTUALLY means. Is it wrong? Yes. But Jon at least has the backing of having been in a romantic relationship with Alanna for a long time by this point and she's verbally confirmed that she's in love with him more than once. He also has confirmation that their destinies are intertwined and that their partnership is blessed by the gods, which he's interpreted to mean that he and Alanna HAVE to be together, that "all along this had to happen." He's obviously interpreted things incorrectly, but he's not actually wrong about their fates being connected to each other on a divine level.

Tamora Pierce mentions in her afterward from 2014 that Jon also starts to get a lot of attention from girls and it goes to his head, making him assume that Alanna will want to marry him simply because he's the prince. And while that is clearly true, I think that his dialogue from when they get together shows that there's even more going on that makes him believe their relationship to be inevitable. Jon is assuming the two of them are going to get married and be together forever from day one and Alanna just doesn't pick up on it and thinks he's just being kind-of flowery when he's actually being dead serious.

We also get a lot of discussion of Jon feeling restless and frustrated with the way his life seems to be going during Woman Who Rides Like a Man. He mentions wanting to rebel against the expectations placed upon him, but that he also feels trapped. Given by his words to Alanna when they get together, the relationship with her is, in its own way, also a trap he thinks he can't escape. It HAS to happen, and it WILL happen, regardless of what he and Alanna do or don't do, and so it's just perhaps really convenient that the two of them love each other, or perhaps their feelings were inevitable because of their shared destiny. He loves her, and he seems to see her as an escape from his life as a prince, but she's also intrinsically entwined with his life as a prince and his future as a king, and so the frustrations he is having with his life are tainting his feelings for her, too.

So yes, he's being arrogant and making assumptions about Alanna's answer to his proposal and his behavior towards her isn't okay, but there's an entire book and a half helping explain why Jon makes the assumptions he does, why he FEELS the way he does. It's entirely understandable, even if it's still wrong.

And then there's George. George who gets a really negative reaction from Alanna when he kisses her the first time and proceeds to keep pushing his feelings on her a few times after that, including kissing her AGAIN. Alanna once describes his behavior towards her as "stalking" and "terrifying." When he tries to propose to her after that (again, all he's gotten so far are NEGATIVE reactions to his advances), Alanna thinks that she wishes he wouldn't and tries to divert the conversation away from that, but George refuses to be deterred, going so far as to say that he'll keep waiting for her answer to change when she gets older even though her answer was a pretty unequivocal no.

He also promises in this scene to never speak about this again. He kisses her a second time after this, despite the fact that she's reacted negatively to his advanced and just turned him down really clearly (Alanna's reaction to this is more positive, but we're not discussing Alanna, we're discussing George). George really quickly breaks that promise to her, too, sending her a letter when she's out in the desert that Alanna describes as letting her know he still has feelings for her, and then when Alanna shows up in Port Caynn to see him and finally opens up about her break-up with Jon, he takes the opportunity to shoot his shot again.

All of this behavior could be considered sexual harassment. Alanna gives him no indication that she wants in and in fact gives several indicators that she DOESN'T. The narrative tells us that some part of her MIGHT want it, that some part of her enjoys his attention, but her actual words and actions to George are telling him she's not interested and he's choosing not to respect that boundary. Even if George thought that Alanna was lying, or if he felt like she couldn't admit it to herself, the respectful thing to do is to listen to what she's SAYING and accept it and leave her alone. But he doesn't. With zero actual encouragement on Alanna's end, George continues to pursue her.

George also has a tendency to push boundaries with Alanna in other places, too, through his feelings of protectiveness about her. Alanna seems to take this in stride and kind-of seems to enjoy that protective streak to some degree (it seems to satisfy a part of her that wants to be treated like a delicate little flower sometimes), but some of his behavior when being more protective or even jealous veers into questionable territory for me. When Alanna is with the Bazhir, he sends two men out to spy on her. They're specifically told not to be caught by Alanna at all, so it's not even like he just sends a messenger out to try to hear from her and make sure she's okay, they're just spying on her for him. After she comes to Port Caynn, she shows an interest in getting to know the Shang warrior he has staying with him and George immediately sends him away because he thinks that Alanna might get accidentally killed as a result, which feels pretty insulting to both Alanna AND the Shang warrior's skills as fighters. Alanna takes both incidents in stride and brushes them off as slightly annoying but not worth expending lots of effort being mad about it, but I personally feel like it's odd for her not to care given that similar behavior from anyone else would've netted them a lecture.

Jon's behavior is arrogant, yes, and he's wrong, but I feel like it makes so much more sense for him to hear "maybe" and assume that it's just nerves and that he and Alanna are on the same page about their relationship, than it makes sense for George to keep pushing for something Alanna has made very clear that she's not at all interested in.

George's narrative is STEEPED in "no means yes" trope. And while the "no means yes" is also present for Jon's storyline in Woman Who Rides Like a Man, it's directly criticized by Alanna and, simultaneously, by the narrative itself. But George's behavior is SUPPORTED by the narrative. His behavior is okay because the narrative supports that he DOES know Alanna better than she knows herself despite a distinct lack of any proof of that, while Jon is wrong for making the exact same assumption due to a LOT of proof of his conclusion. George's behavior isn't really criticized because, even when Alanna describes him as stalking her, it's represented as a sort-of romantic thing for him to do instead of creepy.

None of which means I think George is worse for Alanna than Jon ultimately. I think that Jon's entire approach to their relationship was doomed to failure and flawed from the beginning. Jon's interpretation of their relationship as inevitable was always going to butt heads with Alanna's need to always go against what the world tells her is inevitable for her. It's actually really brilliantly written as a relationship, it's entirely understandable why Alanna as a teenager would be swept away by someone she's been so divinely connected to for YEARS and who has been a close friend and confidante from the moment they met. He's also closer to her age and she spends more time with him when she's younger.

But it's also so clear from the jump that this relationship is never going to work because Jon and Alanna clearly aren't on the same page about things and they don't communicate enough about their feelings for that to change. Eventually, inevitably, it was always going to explode in their faces, and then it does. Jon takes his duty seriously and he knows that it's vitally important for him to take a wife and have an heir (and several spares, ideally), so he wants to move forward with that now that they're both adults and Alanna's secret is out. But Alanna had never really considered that the relationship would really go that far and balks when faced with that reality. Alanna's desire for independence butts heads with Jon's dedication to his duty as a prince. It doesn't take away from what they mean to each other or what they'll accomplish together, but I love how well that relationship is built over the first two books so that their end doesn't really come as a surprise.

Conversely, George has no real responsibilities that he couldn't set aside if he really wanted or needed to. He has no grand destiny with Alanna causing him to pursue her. He just likes her. This makes it a lot easier to start the relationship on equal standing once they DO make it there. George has been pretty forward with her, but this also means that Alanna is under no illusions about his expectations of her and what he wants from the relationship. She already knows he wants to marry her, she knows he's protective of her, she knows that he's in love with her. There will be fairly few surprises in store down the line with George in a way that wasn't true with Jon.

But unfortunately, I only really like George and Alanna's romance after it begins. I don't like the build up for it the way I like the build up that Jon and Alanna had. I think that George and Alanna's romantic scenes prior to them getting together are questionable at best, so while I can tell where the narrative is trying to lead me, I don't really find that it works. I think it's very dated and it shows. There's a lot that's so good about these two and that I love about them, but I do wish that George was given the same sort of scrutiny that Jon gets for his behavior, regardless of what the narrative is trying to say about it.