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Cooking unhinged Wames while waiting Dark Rise book 3 🖤

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Violet Ballard 🗡️🦁

I couldn’t choose between those two colorings so just have both

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DARK RISE FANS RISE

I FINALLY found my people. I’m so glad this fandom is active here. The memes, the art and the theory exchanges literally make my day. So as a thank you I gift y’all with this fanart I made today.

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“I didn’t see myself represented and it’s interesting that many monsters, like vampires, don’t have reflections. When nothing in culture is reflecting you, it can make you feel monstrous. So, there’s a revenge aspect to my writing. I was constantly being asked to identify with heroes who are not like me, so I wanted to force the reader to identify with a villain who is like me.”

—C.S. Pacat, Sydney Writers Festival 2022

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Will Kempen ⚔️👑

I'm so happy with how this turned out I might make a matching one of James...we'll see 👀

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I think one of Will’s weaknesses is he’s loyal to a fault. If he cares for you, he will do anything for you. Even when it’s morally gray.

His mother abused him his whole life. But when she died he swore vengeance on her killers not her. Which is the opposite of James and how he responded to his family betraying him.

It doesn’t actually take much to earn his loyalty. A meat pie for instance. A trace of acceptance.

We know he’s still going to be loyal to Violet and his friends despite the fact from his perspective they all tried to kill him.

I can see this coming back to haunt him later. Not everyone deserves his unfailing devotion.

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James being super protective of Will when he thinks Will was being hurt by Howell and James being terrified of Will getting hurt and still seeing him as an innocent who’s naïve and not thoughtful about things and wants to protect that, wants to protect Will

Meanwhile Will keeps thinking he’s actually terrible, that if anyone found out about him they’d turn on him, that even James would leave him, that James has every right to for the deceit, and feeling like he’s terrible for feeling the way he does towards James due to the actions of Sacrean

Ahhhhhh

I’m so fine about this guys I promise

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How can Will move forward if he's just ignoring his past and listening to people who call him evil– internalizing all that self hatred?

How can James find his voice and master his needs if he actually has no autonomy– if he keeps letting people tell him he has no autonomy?

The battlefield in Dark Heir is really about who controls the narrative. Right now the Light controls the narrative and James and Will are losing because of it. They have to take the control back. They can't do that if they continue to buy into the propaganda against them, their past selves, their relationship, and the desires they harbour.

They need to start facing themselves as they are, who they once were, and start fighting back against the Light's narrative to be free of it.

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Making a collection of these

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i love the strange reality of being a human person with a human brain. one time someone said something to me in a foreign language (japanese, which i do not speak) and i automatically responded in a different foreign language (spanish, which i do not speak well) and then we both said "what?" in english, an experience made more surreal by the fact that everyone around us was speaking loudly in canadian french (as this occurred in Quebec)

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More Dark Rise and Dark Heir thoughts:

My prediction is that Will isn't a reliable narrator about his past self and the text is deliberately misleading about the relationship between Sarcean and the Light. Bait and switch foils are some of Pacat's favourite narrative tools and i'd be surprised (and honestly a bit angry) if it was as simple as the Dark King (with all his queer symbolism) equates to evil and the Lady (with all her Christian iconography) equates to good.

The biggest example of 'unreliable narrator Will' is how he already believes he's evil and that people are right to abuse and want to kill him. As we see with how all his thoughts about his mother in Dark Rise are loving, magnanimous, and illustrating a desire to avenge her death. Then in Dark Heir the reader discovered how abusive she was because of her belief in his 'innate evil'.

The point is, though, that Will isn't innately evil. No one is. Eleanor never had the right to treat baby Will as she did. Just as the Stewards never had the right to treat James as appallingly as they did. No one had the right to abuse and try to kill them. The Stewards created their own villain by treating James like a villain and that same principle applies to how everyone is treating Will.

Sarcean in his pov isn't good, but neither is he evil. He is Will. He's observant, artful, sneaky, scheming, smart, and uncommunicative. He's heartbreakingly loyal to those he loves. He rewards loyalty to him even if they turn on him later. He's ruthless and overly aware of how others perceive him. He craves control. He's obsessively and irrevocably in love with Anharion. I don't think Sarcean is some evil self separate from Will, Will keeps making all Sarcean's mistakes because they are, fundamentally, the same. I do think Will coming into himself and making better decisions will be in his accepting that Sarcean is not a separate person at all.

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what's so refreshing about will as a character is that he doesn't throw a denial tantrum about it at any point like most characters with Darkness Within Them do. he's not a moral paragon, his angst and secretkeeping don't get annoying at any point. and i think it's because there's no contrast between who will Really Is, which is Good and True, and the dark king as his shadow or his dark self.

will is the dark king. he behaves like the dark king. he lies and he manipulates and he's a "sneak" and he's scaringly charming and he's possessive over james and a ton of other messed up shit and he tells himself it's for a good reason, and maybe it is!! and will is clearly you know. a Good Person. while his methods are sneaky, he does not actually do anything wrong. but those are his methods still, and they are cool moments and badass and also kind of eerie.

with the way he's written, i would argue will doesn't have or even need a corruption arc, he's just like that from the get-go and he's not gonna change. and i don't mean he was born evil or whatever other bullshit i mean that he was born a full person, including the dark king and will both, and there's complexity, but no clear line separates them.

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so I know that a lot of people have been speculating that in the dark rise universe returners/the white death are connected to the lady (which I definitely agree with) but that ALSO makes me wonder if there's actually this distinction of powers such that all RETURNERS are of the lady while all REBORNS are created by the dark king. which imo definitely begs the question of whether the light was ever truly "good" given how horrific the concept of how the returners are brought back to life by stealing someone else's body

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Does anyone else think the Elder Steward knew what Will is - knew the entire time and took him in because she believed that Sarcean turned out the way he did because of how he was treated and not because he was inherently evil?

I’d put money on there being a huge moment of catharsis for Will in book 3 when he finds this out. It’s a good explanation for the continued existence of the Elder Stone, too. It’s going to be used again in book 3 and I think this will be the conversation he ends up having with it/her.