welcome-to-oslov

[welcome-to-oslov]

"All the Kinds of Broken," Chap. 51

I just got bad news. The actual paying project I've been working on is ... still ... not ... right, so I have to work on a tight deadline for at least a few more weeks.

But for now, I wanted to post this chapter because it's the sequel to the previous one. And it's sad and a cliffhanger, for which I apologize, but, well ... you know Tilrey will survive this. Thank you, as always, for reading. This story is keeping me sane.

[welcome-to-oslov]

"All the Kinds of Broken," Chap. 50

I've gotten some asks about whether Tilrey has limits—things that could make him say no or fight back, despite the consequences. Here is one.

And yes, I got some stuff about health-care inequity in there. What can I say? It's on my mind. A lot of people depend on the ACA to afford health care in the U.S.'s ridiculous, broken system, including freelancers like me.

[welcome-to-oslov]

If we ever truly run out of Oslov sagas, I wouldn't mind a short one written by Vera or her perspective. I mean, I'm not *dying* for it, but I sure would read it!

Her family life growing up in Upstart Redda.

Her crazy dad, mom, *grandpa*. How they seemed to someone they were being normal to.

Her having the experience we've all had: meeting a boy at 17/18 and thinking you have a connection and he never quite leaves your mind, ever - as your paths do keep crossing every few years during your gorgeous youths. But... for him, the connection wasn't quite the same.

I'm sure her novel would romanticize Tilrey. Not just what she felt about him, but about what she learned about him, sadly and painfully, over time. And how that challenged her view of herself and her family -- though never quite getting it, so her misty-eyed view of Tilrey would be interesting to read. She is one of the few people he really lost his temper with and got real with, in way. That time in her apartment before they ultimately put a wall between them after Ceill.

Though I'd be sad to have Tilrey recede more into the background of her novel, it would be interesting to see her years of motherhood of Ceill, continued (I'm SURE!) conflicted daydreams of Tilrey, and what it was like to finally partner up with a love match from Thurskein who, let's say, looked just like she wanted.

That would be so interesting to write! Interesting yet frustrating, because her perspective would be pretty navel-gazey and oblivious to Tilrey’s reality, at least when she’s younger. Romanticized, for sure.

But I’d love to explore what happened between Vera and Mal and how she eventually warmed up to the revolution. It’s a major character development that I basically shoved off-page, lol. Even though Mal was her Tilrey 2.0, I think he was way more than a boy toy and called Vera out and played a big role in radicalizing her, along with Lisha. Vera and Mal had the opportunity for a closer-to-equal relationship than she and Tilrey ever did, and part of her evolution is understanding why Tilrey could never see her as a peer.

And yes, her extremely fucked-up family would be fun to write! Funny you should mention them, because I just finished a chapter featuring the brief return of Jena, her dad, plus Lindthardt, Vera’s would-be suitor who failed to court her thanks to Tilrey’s intervention. Lots of not-fun flashbacks for poor Tilrey. Hope to post that in the next couple days!

[welcome-to-oslov]

I've re-read the latest All the Kinds of Broken chapter like a dozen times! What a tour de force.

Blows my mind noticing one particular connection between this night and his later life. One of the few times Tilrey really breaks down with Gersha is when Ceill's born, triggered by the lack of consent in that, the overwhelming worry for the baby & reflection on himself it evokes, maybe also partially triggered by the confrontations happening with Tollsha around that time. He emerges from sleep, emotionally out of control like he usually isn't, lets Gersha hold him, voice hitched as he's crying, "Don't you understand? I'm nothing. I'm an object to be used. That's what I am."

Exactly what Linden says to him as he rapes him 😢😭One thing I've noticed about him later in life is a lot of his feelings about what happened to him are too overwhelming to feel - both while he's living it and throughout his life for years to come. Thoughts come through his mind and he lets them float by, not engaging deeply with the ones that would be too catastrophic to confront.

Others, to absorb them, he rewrites history, misremembers himself: He likes to be beaten, he even needs it sometimes, he feels control through it. 

Oh, does he? Tilrey right now, when it first happens to him, sure doesn't. He is disturbed by it, he doesn't understand it, he's scared of it. 😭

I need to reread that chapter with his breakdown! This is such a great way to describe what’s happening inside his head in AtKoB. Some things are just too hard to process and have to be buried or shut out. Others can be woven into a new narrative in which he has some “control” over what’s happening to him.

Being beaten is uncontrollable and horrifying, and his brain is desperate to assert control over it, to figure out the “rules” that he can follow to keep from getting truly hurt. Once he’s done that (or thinks he has, anyway), the beating becomes like a ritual that has to be performed, and he can “enjoy” the adrenaline rush that comes with it. But again, it’s all in his head. He’s trying to turn abuse from someone else into a form of self-harm that he controls.

Really, I think it’s amazing that Tilrey doesn’t practice worse self-harm later in life. Some of his behavior probably does qualify as such, like when he deliberately enters situations where a sex partner will mistreat or humiliate him, but he keeps fairly tight boundaries on it. Underneath all the self-destructive tendencies that have been sorta forced on him, he has a very strong sense of self-preservation.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Naive belief in his own strength - that's so interesting.

Catching up on posts and similar to what you said a few back, Tilrey's "always trying to believe he can maintain some sort of control and numb himself to what’s happening."

That's one thing that's so intriguing about him beginning to engage more with Linden. For all the man's half hold on reality, the half of him that's still there certainly has a singular style, motivation, and strength: to degrade, to hurt, to crushingly control. This is different from anything Tilrey's heart & mind has needed to get him through before. I think he's going to find in these early days of this next stage of his life that there will be times he *can't* hold onto any sense of control over himself or his body, can't stay numb like he needs to. :'(

Poor Tilrey. It's like I see this horror coming and wish I could save him from it - but know he must experience this and must go through this since in his life as we know it it has already happened (ofc could've also said this at the beginning of AKoB!).

I wish I could save him from it too! 😢 But I guess without that Tilrey, we never get Revolution!Tilrey. For better or worse, he would be a different person.

I’ve been giving some thought to Linden and his backstory and why he is this way, which all feeds into this story even if it’s not directly relevant. Some people just have this unsubtle narcissistic need to dominate and degrade other people, and it’s not easy to confront that! I find it much easier to understand Malsha, awful as he is, because he’s a control freak and a perfectionist and he finds Tilrey fascinating—even if that leads him to want to hurt Tilrey. But Linden is just such a blunt instrument.

And I think that’s a problem for Tilrey too, because he’s a thinker and a control freak and he likes to figure people out and learn how to manipulate them. But some people you cannot manipulate because they just refuse to see you as a real person, a fellow human being, someone they could ever have empathy for. And maybe that’s scariest of all. 😰

At least we know he’ll pull through in the end, and he’ll eventually break down that defense mechanism of numbness and feel things again.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Tilrey during his AKoB journey has looked back at various intervals and berated himself for having been naive. (Too hard on himself, I say, but the self-hatred created in him as life throws things at him he doesn't expect and shouldn't need to be strong enough/mature enough to handle.)

At the current life moment he's in, what are some things do you think young Tilrey is still naive about?

Poor Tilrey! At the beginning of AtKoB and for a while after that, he was naive enough to believe that his elders wanted the best for him and the system worked in a just way. The naïveté he was raised with has been completely burned out of him now. He can’t even trust Bror to protect him, because he’s seen how little power someone like Bror has.

But yes, I think he’s still naive, and now he’s naive about his own “strength” and the defenses he’s built around himself. He believes that if he just turns off his feelings and leaves his body, the core of him will be safe. He thinks he’s ready to die now before allowing anyone to puncture his hard shell and make him feel. (The harder that shell gets, the more painful it is to be with Bror, who makes him feel things. 😢) He’s in a very dark place that has a bit of adolescent nihilism to it, and in his mind, this is the exact opposite of naïveté.

But I would say it is still naive, because he’s human and needs to feel things. He still has the human needs for love and communion and safety. He’s allowing Upstarts to turn him into a “block of wood” and telling himself it was his own idea. 💔 It will take a while for him to return from that dark place, as we’ve seen, and allow himself to be vulnerable.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Hellooo! I am slowly but surely making my way through the epic - just getting into Hulda & Einara coming onto the scene - and want to praise you for creating SUCH a compelling world! People talk about worldbuilding but damn, you've done it. And now more than ever it's great to immerse into a world where things get terrible, then get better, and then certain people - real people - manage to be heroes.

Thank you so much!! ❤️❤️ And I’m so glad the saga is working as a bit of an escape for you, because it certainly is that for me. Now more than ever, reading and writing feel like my refuge from the dystopian doom scrolling. It may seem frivolous, but I do think people have always reached for stories in hard times.

I have a mostly-drafted chapter of All the Kinds of Broken that I hope to post once I get done with the latest ridiculously tight deadline I’m on!

[welcome-to-oslov]

Ahh Harbour! Great memories of that story. It was so nice seeing Tilrey fall in love with the outdoorsiness and warmth. He always was such a nature boy. He even loved those plants in Malsha's old apartment.

And Gavril! Maybe the most minimally uncomplicated good guy in all of Oslov? For once - once!! - someone finally said immediately with zero hesitation, he's not going to lay even a finger on you while I'm around. And Gavril had no ulterior motive; he wasn't even attracted to or falling in love with Tilrey like he had been with young Krisha. He just saw a bad situation and someone to protect from it and his moral compass said to do it.

I guess Gavril didn't have to wrestle with his Upstart vs Laborer conditioning like Gersha resisted wrestling with for so long - which let Gersha kinda protect Tilrey but kinda not, guiltily letting himself benefit from perpetuating the system while telling himself he wasn't, that he had no power (he did), because it eased his conscience to think both he & Tilrey were powerless (only Tilrey was).

But Gavril had seen powerlessness first hand when he rescued Krisha, only a couple years younger than Tilrey had been at the start. Gavril still went against what others in his role would do: after all, it was soldiers like Gavril who were keeping Krisha. How did Gavril grow up in Oslov to have such a strong orientation to be a hero? So few people even see anything wrong with their society, and those that do just hem & haw & do nothing... or let themselves benefit from it while saying they have no choice.

That last part is way too true! And thank you for reminding me about Gavril—I forgot how strongly he stood up for Tilrey.

Now clearly I need a refresher on The Trip to Harbour—and on Krisha’s backstory in AtKoB—but my head-canon says that the heroism is the result of an evolution for Gavril rather than how he started out. He did “rescue” Krisha, to the best of his ability as a Laborer without that many resources. He taught him a useful skill (flying) and brought him to Redda and helped him get citizenship, IIRC. But he also slept with him. And the easiest path to citizenship for an Outer is the Brothel, so that’s where Krisha landed until Malsha picked him up.

Again, I’m not 100% sure this is canon, but I think the older Gavril feels guilty that he couldn’t do more for Krisha. It seemed like enough at the time, but now that Gavril has been outside Oslov, he wonders if he could have helped Krisha escape to a life where he wouldn’t have to be a sex worker or lackey. So Gavril’s attitude toward Tilrey is colored by the remorse he feels about Krisha and by his determination to do better.

I think in my head there’s a parallel between Gersha/Tilrey and Gavril/Krisha, but Gersha’s extra Upstart ideology bullshit gets in the way of him doing the right thing for quite a while! Gavril is more intuitive and finds his way sooner.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Trip to Harbour

Tilrey always on my mind:

While obviously not blond, throwing out this cute man here as feeling kinda like the essence of Tilrey on his Harbour trip, perhaps almost upon arriving at the True Hearth, looking at a map to reach it.

Didn't Gersha want to shave off that newly-grown beard, after all?

Thanks as always to the wonderful @welcome-to-oslov for creating the Oslov world! Fics here

[welcome-to-oslov]

Speaking of therapy for Tilrey, I suppose that Oslov therapist would feel pleased with herself:

"He couldn’t help cowering as the driver mounted him. He focused on deep, healing breaths, ushering Jorning into himself rather than resisting it."

Still, she should know she's either complicit in the system that keeps youth like Tilrey and Stefan in positions like this and/or vastly overestimates how much these "tools" would truly help, or be capable of being harnessed or held onto in the moment 😢

TMI time: I confess that when I wrote that character I was thinking about a therapist I once had. Who was very lovely and not complicit in an oppressive power structure at all, I swear, but she was obsessed with breathing and wanted to bring everything back to that. (Maybe she was just frustrated with how my brain works, and I can’t blame her, lol.)

The breathing stuff actually did help me with some serious stress. I use it all the time and it’s great! But I still think it’s treating a symptom and not the root cause (in Tilrey’s case, oppression and systemic inequality). So when I was trying to imagine an Oslov therapist, that came to mind. 😏

[welcome-to-oslov]

You've probably seen the Guy Pearce statement vs. Kevin Spacey video confrontation from yesterday. Really interesting to see a long-accused harasser/assaulter confidently & aggressively hit back directly at someone who shared his story 😳

Made me wonder about who in Oslov might aggressively & confidently deny Tilrey's victimhood, to his face, if he ever asked for acknowledgement of what they put him through.

Saldegren, for example, obviously has a refusal to comprehend what's actually gone on between them, as we saw in Oslov Unraveled. And he did have that confrontation with 30s (20s?) Tilrey when Tilrey tried to stand up for himself and tell Saldegren to stop having "reminiscing" convos about him with others. Tilrey asking this, with the emotional way he asked, was in a way the kind of indirect demand for acknowledgement of what they did to him that he might barely been comfortable making. Yet, in the face of that, Saldegren showed some teeth in his steely resolve that made Tilrey back down.

Curious if post-Oslov Unraveled Tilrey would ever want to put an end to that passive aggressive things unsaid sickly equilibrium that gaslit and oppressed him for so long. I know he wants to end it for society and for others. But himself?

I just watched the video. Granted, I don’t know what happened between them, but wow, the way Spacey just dismissed the possibility that he made Pearce uncomfortable. “Grow up” is classic gaslighting. 😡

That scene where Tilrey calls out Saldegren has always been one of my faves, so I just reread it—Tilrey is 43! 😳 I had forgotten. (So has Saldegren, apparently, because he’s shocked to hear it and calls Tilrey “boy” even after he’s reminded.)

But anyway, to your question. When Tilrey called out Saldegren, Saldegren pulled rank and was basically like, “When I degrade you, it actually makes you seem unthreatening and not like the potential traitor/rebel you are, so I’m doing you a big favor.” Post-revolution, he can’t claim to be protecting Tilrey anymore. Given Tilrey’s age and new position, there’s a good chance that more Councillors will start treating him with respect—or at least pretending to.

This is also another case where Tilrey might be quicker to stand up for someone else than for himself. If Stefan is now on the Council, he’s definitely gonna get the harassment that Tilrey used to get, even if it’s less overt. I can imagine a situation where Tilrey calls out the harassers and insists on a formal apology to Stefan. And if he catches someone doing that to Ceill or Janta, all hell might break loose. He would absolutely use his authority to make an example of that person.

I kinda want to write this now—Tilrey’s righteous rage! Harassment is such an insidious offense and so hard to call out, but if anyone could do it, he could.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Not as high-brow as your other reader lol, but if we're back to doing reccs (!!!), I stumbled across a random fic the other day that is really good for power imbalance, dubious consent, and psychological abuse issues.

No idea what the fandom is, but it's some sort of sci-fi space world where apparently humans had colonized various planets, so now there are humans from all over. The humans from Mars have apparently been enslaved by the humans from Earth. The group we're with are some sort of rogue spaceship team comprised of humans from various planets. But then one day the team lands somewhere where the society discovers their human-from-Mars teammate isn't enslaved like he should be... so one colleague takes it upon himself to become his enslaver. To help him, of course. And the colleague insists that it's important he get himself into the headspace of how he would actually feel if this were all true. Just to help avoid actual capture, of course. (And wait... how would the human-from-Earth colleague know, anyway...)

archiveofourown.org/works/12018603/chapters/27201696

I like the sound of this! Checking it out immediately.

And thank you! I’m so into these recs, high-brow and low-brow and everything in between. 🥰 AO3 is one of the few things not scaring or depressing me right now. That and nice long immersive fantasy books where rapists, tyrants, and the like get their just deserts.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Hello! I was just reminded today of a fantastic author whose play I saw in New York a few years ago and I think you'd really love.

Edouard Louis is a young French public intellectual, known for his autibiographical novels about traversing the path from growing up poor & lower class in a northern French industrial town to discovering his love for literature & philosophy as a teen and young man - which, along with his burgeoning recognition of his attraction to men, estranged him from the society he grew up while opening the door to his new life in France's upper class.

His book A History of Violence was adapted into the play I saw, and the entire thing revolves around a sexual assault he went through - all taking place in that apartment before & after, but bringing the audience through so many themes about life, the self, class, society, etc that makes anyone reflect on who they are and want to be.

His debut novel The End of Eddy waa written when was 21 and is great too! He also just had a new one come out a few months ago that I can't wait to get to.

Anyway, just saw an awesome interview with him that reminded me & realized this might be up your alley too! Gotta hand it to the French, their cultural discouse is a million miles above ours 😅😭

Ahhh, thank you! I hadn’t even heard of him, I’m embarrassed to say, though I’ve read a lot of older French lit. It’s a long time since I was up to date. I’m fascinated by stories of brilliant young people trying to move up the social ladder, as I’m sure you can tell, and France has such a history of great novels like that. Anyway, I read the Guardian piece about him, and I’m very interested in checking out Change and A History of Violence now!

That interview reminded me of the Genet book I struggled through with a dictionary because it wasn’t easy to find mm/gay literature in pre-internet times! 😅

[welcome-to-oslov]

Ooh! I just thought of a "what if" scenario I don't think we've considered before.

What if: Tilrey *had* just been sent home to Thurskein, after Malsha or after Verán or after Linden? How would he have coped & reacted?

I don't think an AU of that would be particularly interesting haha, but curious just as a thought exercise.

Maybe going home right after Malsha would've been his best chance to heal somewhat back into a normal Skeinsha kid (though he could never be the same person he was/would've been), but idk; he was already pretty damaged in his thinking by that last chapter with Malsha.

I feel like going home after Verán (rather than being moved into Linden's) he might just be so cynical & depressed it'd be hard to re-adapt -- but going home after those first couple months with the Island Party would've been an enormous relief & probably his best chance for second lease on life (thinking around the time he was sobbing on the icy balcony about not wanting to become a block of wood, after making it clear to the therapist that he wished he could be let out of this 😭)

Being shipped back to Thurskein after Linden... well, we haven't yet gone through with him his time with Linden 😬, but I think the Tilrey who showed up back home would've felt as unrecognizable to his Mom as he does at Gersha's door at the beginning of ASB to those of us who first met him in AKoB 😢.

You know, I never thought about how it must feel to meet him in ASB after you’ve only known him in AtKoB! That really would be sad. And excruciatingly sad for his mom, too, if he’d gone home then. He wouldn’t have known how to interact with anyone. His head would still be in “serve/please Upstarts” mode. I can even maybe imagine him making friends with Supervisor Fernei just to get near someone who has contact with the Upstart world. I think his mom is already with the rebels by then, so maybe she and Dal could deprogram him. That’s what it would take!

I agree with your speculations about what would happen if Tilrey returned after Malsha or toward the start of the Island period. He would still miss Malsha, I fear, but the adjustment would be easier. He might be the one who radicalized his mom instead of vice versa. He might even return to Dal and hope to rekindle their relationship. They might make a try of it, even marry, but I suspect that wouldn’t go well in the long run. He would still have nightmares, and she would try to help and not know how. He might become dependent on her strength instead of finding his own.

And what about Bror? Would Tilrey miss him intensely? If Tilrey returned to Thurskein later, after Linden, I can just maybe imagine Bror requesting a transfer to Thurskein to be with him—which you can do, especially if you have strings to pull. (It’s much harder to move from a Laborer city to Redda than vice versa.) So then we have an interesting scenario: Bror in Thurskein trying to adjust while he helps Tilrey heal, but also missing the family he left behind. Poor Bror—but I guess that’s a possible path to an HEA for those two.

[welcome-to-oslov]

"He’s created a fiction of his own strength, toughness, and resilience that has served him for decades. Of course it’s not purely a fiction. Those qualities are also him. But underneath somewhere still is that frightened boy, and he affects Tilrey’s behavior in ways Tilrey might not even recognize till after the fact."

Man, I feel like if Tilrey were made to read AKoB he'd curl up catatonic in a ball 😭

Makes me think of how stupid Saldegren has seen Tilrey for who he was all along, despite never *seeing* him or the situation. In Oslov Unraveled, his remembering Tilrey's first years in Redda: "frightened and intimdated by Malsha, hardly more than a schoolboy."

Saldegren remembers him as who he was, but from what you wrote Tilrey can't bear to see himself back like that. 😢

I doubt he would be able to explain logically what he blames or hates his young self for. For not suceeding in protecting himself from all that, since it did happen? For changing in ways he didn't want to? Maybe it's down to his old habit of grasping desperately for some sort of control: if he truly stopped hating or blaming his young self (or himself now), that means he would have to accept he'd had no control. 😢Understandably that would be too terrifying to accept while he was still in the middle of it; I guess resisting letting that hope go is one of the parts of young Tilrey he's still carrying inside him - even later in life when he's safe(ish) now.

Maybe he's scared he'd discover that those qualities of his you listed that feel so critical to him for his survival - strength, resilience, toughness - actually ARE fiction, if he ever let himself look too closely at the face of young Tilrey. 😢💔

“resisting letting that hope go is one of the parts of young Tilrey he's still carrying inside him - even later in life when he's safe(ish) now.”

Great point—I never thought of it that way! His obsession with control is like the last gasp of the younger self he refuses to be. And maybe Tilrey even knows that, but reaching for control is such a reflex with him that it’s very hard to unlearn.

He doesn’t want to feel like a victim, like someone who is passive, and he will twist reality any way he needs to to get there. But I do think he makes a lot of progress over the years as he interacts with other victims/survivors and learns about the systemic reasons for what happened to him (inequality, corruption). He can judge someone else (Stefan, say) more kindly than he judges himself.

Okay, so I keep ranting about Robin Hobb and I don’t want to spoil her plot twists. But can I just praise the fantasy metaphor she created for someone who copes with trauma by entirely rejecting his past self and shutting himself off from his humanity? It’s taken me like 2,000 pages of this trilogy to get there, but it’s so good. Anyway, that’s informing my thoughts about Tilrey right now, though Tilrey managed to hang on to enough of his past self not to become a full-on murderous sociopath.

[welcome-to-oslov]

So, we all know actually-helpful therapy doesn't really exist in Oslov (that was such a great chapter when he was sent to one!). We've also seen the things he's healed a bit & struggled to come to terms with things over the years, both early in his post-kettleboy era and later in life.

If Tilrey *could* have accessed real therapy at some point in time (now? While he's living with Gersha? When he's set free? Older? Now that Oslov is free?), I'm wondering:

What feelings/trauma do you think he would struggle most with allowing himself to think about/work on?

What things do you think he could've healed much better or faster if he'd had skilled help? What kind of therapy/therapist do you think he could've felt safest with to let himself be free to heal?

This is a great question! I wish I were better qualified to know what kind of therapy really would help Tilrey.

I think he would struggle most with accessing and coming to terms with his past self—the naive teenager who was thrust into this situation and had no idea what to do. Who truly believed that things like this couldn’t happen to someone like him. Who struggled, protested, cried. Over the years, Tilrey has shut himself off from younger Tilrey. He’s created a fiction of his own strength, toughness, and resilience that has served him for decades. Of course it’s not purely a fiction. Those qualities are also him. But underneath somewhere still is that frightened boy, and he affects Tilrey’s behavior in ways Tilrey might not even recognize till after the fact. He makes it much harder to trust or love or have hope for the future.

I think Tilrey needs to learn to love his past self and forgive the younger him for how he reacted in the moment to a situation he couldn’t handle. And it’s not just a question of loving the past self enough so it stops bothering him. He needs to be there for it always, to accept that he carries that inner weakness and grief with him and it’s okay, he can still also be strong.

I don’t remember the therapy term for this—“parts theory” maybe, something like that? But I’m not sure how much Tilrey would benefit from talk therapy. In any one-on-one situation with an authority or expert, he will revert to his kettle boy training and tell them what he thinks they want to hear. A therapist who could call him out on his deference might be good. His role-playing with Einara kind of worked similarly, even if she wasn’t doing it for his benefit. She kept triggering his deference/submission responses while also challenging him on why he was responding that way. But she couldn’t teach him to love his past self, because she hasn’t learned that lesson herself.

Given that Einara helped him to some extent, I think Tilrey might like some kind of peer support group where he could talk to people who had gone through similar things. Even better, he could lead the group, which would make him feel like he was still being strong and helping others. I can see such groups forming in the Brothel, or whatever they end up calling it post-revolution, for sex workers who were exploited and now can choose whether to continue to do that work on their own terms. Tilrey would hear so many stories, some like his and others different, and in the process he might develop a new respect for his younger self who coped with an impossible situation in the only ways he knew how. 😢

I honestly never thought technocratic “meritocracy” (never truly based on merit) would be a possibility in my lifetime. But now that it is (maybe?) happening, I’m all the more aware of what that mentality does to everyone who is labeled lesser because of a test score or an accident of birth. When you’re trained to think your misfortune or oppression is always due to a lack of personal merit, you turn all the righteous anger on yourself, and Tilrey is exhibit A. (I think Bror is better off because his family didn’t absorb this Upstart mentality.) So anyway, sorry to get briefly political, but yeah, perfectionism is a destructive creed.

[welcome-to-oslov]

Tilrey is always top of mind for me after a new Oslov universe chapter drops! Two in one week, how lucky are we 🤗

So, I'm thinking about his age again during this terrible time in his life, which molded him for the rest of his life.

The age he is, college age, 18-22 (barely turned 18 when this all began and was literally still in high school when Makari took him for Malsha's ownership) is such an important age of personal growth.

Curious what areas of personal growth you think Tilrey missed out on during these 5 years with Malsha, Veran, Linden?

Very interesting question! All that was stolen from Tilrey.

Oslov doesn’t offer as many opportunities for young adults to have personal growth as our culture does, especially if they’re Laborers, but we still see some of that happening with other characters. Vera flirts with being a Hargist (cultural rebel) at University. In Thurskein, Dal seemed all set to marry Tilrey before he left, but then she falls in love with a woman and becomes a rebel. Adelbert gets obsessed with streams and wants to be an actor.

So, what kind of personal growth/exploration could Tilrey have had? Laborers don’t do University, so he would have started a job immediately, maybe working under his mom. I can see him getting disillusioned with the system his mom was upholding and no longer trusting her as an authority. He soon would’ve realized that her boss, Supervisor Fernei, was corrupt and generally evil. Would he have accepted that with regret, the way his mom did? Or quit to do something else? Or secretly joined the growing resistance?

At some point Tilrey’s relationship with Dal would have fallen apart—hopefully before they married and had kids, not after! Strange as it may seem, I think he would have wanted to be monogamous and she might have cheated first. But once that happened, Tilrey could explore his attraction to men at his own pace, without anyone forcing or rushing him. Maybe he would have a phase of sleeping around, but I think he would settle down with one partner fairly quickly, imitating his mom’s devotion to his dad.

And then there’s the AU idea where Tilrey manages to be the token Laborer who gets Raised. (I can see him applying!) If he got Raised and went to University in Redda, we’d see some wild and perhaps even chaotic personal growth for sure. Upstarts would still be trying to exploit and manipulate him as a vulnerable young person, but he would have more power and status to resist them. Who knows what he’d get into! Or maybe he’d just study obsessively and still not get a great job after college because of silly ideas about art and personal fulfillment—no, wait, I’m thinking of me now. 😅