minutia-r asked: Kencyrath! So, best Caineron: Graykin, Lyra, Cattila, or Gorbel?
screeches in glee
Okay, tough question. I’d say that if you mean ‘best Caineron’ as in ‘best example of the House’s values, etc’ it’d be a hard tie between Cattila and Gorbel, because they’re both good at the underhanded-efficiency thing. Probably Cattila purely for that attitude of unshakeable serenity and ‘yes, this is fine’ that she has at all times, even when she’s being possessed by Merekit elemental spirits.
As for personal favorites…oh, that’s so hard, that’s so hard. I like Lyra a lot because…she’s just kind of a sweetie? Like, she’s very uncomplicated–she knows what she can do and what her limits are because of society and she’s willing to work within those limits to help the people she likes, like Jame.
I like Graykin for…kind of the exact opposite reasons. He latches onto Jame so hard and she’s so desperately unready for having someone bound to her and he’s just as desperate to be bound to someone even though he hates that need–he’s hard and complicated and difficult and does everything in his power to get around the limitations placed on him just to prove to himself that he can, even when getting around those limitations hurts him or someone else. But even through all that I think he genuinely loves Jame even as he kind of hates what her carelessness does to him–because Jame, the terrible destructive queen of my existence, is so careless with him, she has no training for what to do with him and no idea how to care for him–and he’s just such a messy character bound up in a mixed-blood bastard that I’ve kind of got to love him.
My general adoration for Cattila really can be summed up in how determined she is at all times to be calm as hell. Like when Jame and Brier’s ten-command break into Restormir in Seeker’s Mask and come bursting into Cattila’s sanctum sanctorum and she just kind of goes “There’s a secret passage at the back, everyone’s drunk, go on ahead” as if this happens every day. She knows exactly how much of a monster Lord Caineron is and, while she can’t be seen moving against him, she’s willing to let someone else do it and she’ll just sit back and watch, all right? She’s the sort of person I imagine to wait for the end of the final battle, step outside, and criticize the Tyr-Ridan for making such a terrible mess.
And Gorbel. Ah, my boy. I have a lot of very incohesive thoughts about Gorbel, who wants revenge for his dead brothers and who wants to be a good lordan and who wants his father’s approval and who wants to be friends with Jame and who wants all of those desires to mesh for just one minute. His life is a tangled mess and his loyalties are even worse and for reasons that he can’t really pin down, he recognizes Jame–who is terrible and dangerous and blood-drenched and chaotic–as the one solid thing. He orients himself by her, not the way Graykin does, as his leader, or the way her enemies do, as their opponent, but as a landmark, something he can use to tell his position in the shifting landscape of the Kencyrath and their politics and their underhanded tactics. And there’s something about that willingness to orient by her that I think makes him a gorgeously complex character with a remarkably large capacity for empathy and kindness given the way he grew up. (On a less solemn note, I think Twizzle is damn adorable.)
But I’m going to say that my favorite Caineron is Sheth Sharp-Tongue. His determination to let Jame rip apart the rotten scraps of the Kencyrath and Tentir to find the pure heart and the intact bits to piece back together is everything to me. He is the one who figures out how to slide around the bonds of Honor’s Paradox, letting Jame succeed without technically disobeying his lord’s orders. He’s sneaky and sly and clever and daring and I just kind of adore him.
Wow, this got wildly out of hand.
Oh, I completely forgot Sheth! There’s my Highborn privilege showing I guess.
The only place I’m going to really disagree with you is that I don’t think Lyra is a complete sweetie? I mean she is definitely warm-hearted and impulsive but she’s also thoughtlessly cruel to Graykin when he’s her servant, and later when she’s kinder to him it’s a) as a favor to Jame and b) she is kind of horrified by just what a sadistic bastard her father is, not because she’s had an actual change of heart. And while she doesn’t flout convention as completely as Jame does, she also ignores it when she can get away with it–she runs around her house with nothing on under her overskirt, for instance.
Anyway, point is, Twizzle is v adorable. There can be no two opinions on that point.
