#tl;dr Frey is a dear and I have a very tender soft spot for her

[cruelfeline]

One of my Forspoken pet peeves is the rather common complaint that Frey is an unpleasant character. Or that she's too mean, too rude, too unsympathetic. I can understand personal character preferences, but I feel like the opinions I see, particularly in various reviews, move past personal preference and into "this is an objectively bad character" territory. Which vexes me for multiple reasons.

First and foremost: Frey has every reason on Earth to be sullen, snarky, unpleasant, and negative. Her life has been terrible. She spent the functional entirety of it growing up in the NYC foster system, only to age out and end up living alone, on the streets, with zero support network, zero safety net, and all of her trauma unaddressed and untreated. She's left in abject poverty, vulnerable to unsavory individuals who have zero issue literally trying to burn her to death.

She knows she was abandoned as a baby, and this is awful enough. But worse, in my mind, is knowing that she lived in the system her whole life, and no one claimed her. No one adopted her. No one decided they wanted her. And she was a newborn! It's one thing to have an older child not be adopted; that's a known difficulty. But a few-day-old infant? Just the notion that she entered the system at like... day three of her existence and was there the whole eighteen years with no one deciding they wanted her in their family has to be unbelievably crushing. Like... I can't imagine. I can't imagine how much it hurts to not only believe that your birth parent didn't want you, but that literally no one else did, either.

Now, moving on to her demeanor in Athia: people seem to find it off-putting that Frey behaves selfishly upon being asked to help Cipal's inhabitants. I can't say I do. What the Athians are asking of her is tremendous. To the point that, honestly, I find it a little bizarre that people, both real and Cipalian characters, are annoyed by her reluctance.

I mean... Jiminy Christmas, think about what they want her to do! They want her to go out into the wilds, a place filled with countless monstrous horrors, and fight them. With magic she's just barely learned to use. And because they don't know that she has Cuff with her, we can infer that they want her to do this all by herself. Just. Go ahead, kid. Go run around outside, in the Break-mist, with hundreds of mutated monsters and vicious zombies and maddened Tantas attacking you from all sides. Use the magic that none of us can teach you to use. Use the fighting skills none of us can train you in. And if you... I dunno, break your legs out there? Welp, none of us can come and get you! You'd better hope you can drag yourself back. Alone.

the irony of this is that Cuff's motives are terrible but the fact that he is there to guard and teach and guide Frey makes him more useful to her than all the Athians combined

It's absurd. What they ask of her is insanity, and while I appreciate that they are desperate people with no other options, I also think it's perfectly reasonable for her to balk at their demands. They're asking her to just... walk into hell for them. For them: the people who tossed her into jail the moment they met her. Who can blame her for not throwing herself recklessly into the role of "hero," in those circumstances?

And y'all know what? Ultimately, past that thick shield built upon years of trauma and pain? Frey is sweet. She's innately kind. She strives to be empathetic and helpful. She can be silly and playful and kind of dorky. She can't always get there because she is so accustomed to being in Defense Mode, but she still manages! She's absolutely precious with Homer and literally every other cat she meets. She's a sweetheart to the Cipalian sheep and clearly enjoys feeding them, plus is acutely aware of how they, too, might feel trapped in Cipal's walls. She empathizes with someone like Jennesh, who treated her poorly from the get-go but has potentially suffered in ways she's familiar with. Most telling to me is that she extends a hand to a creature like Cuff, seeking to understand and offer companionship to someone who has done nothing but harm everyone around him since his creation.

also she's interacted with Pilo multiple times and not killed him, which makes her a better person than I will ever be

Frey's character works for me because she has every reason to be as she is, both in terms of her past and in terms of what is happening to her now. She's built an incredible emotional shield to protect her from the abysmal circumstances of her life, and she's not shy about using it to protect herself. That doesn't make her off-putting to me. That makes her deeply sympathetic.