I think about Marek from Lapvona a lot
People shit on this book a lot because none of the characters are likable and the protagonist is whiny. Both these things are true. The characters are for the most part all bad people in some capacity. It's a bleak, dark, disgusting read that is fairly hard to finish if you aren't looking for that, but I feel like people who come away with "Marek sucks/is a bad person" and nothing more kind of missing a huge chunk of his character, which is the fact that he's a horrible victim of miserable circumstances.
Marek starts the book living with the man he believes is his father (Jude) who is constantly beating the shit out of him and very clearly does not give a shit about what happens to him. His mother is absent, and as far as he knows, is dead. The real truth is that Marek is the result of an incestuous rape of his mother (who appears later in the book) by her brother, and his "dad" is aware that Marek isn't his kid. The kid is very clearly a little gremlin, and not a great person, but who the fuck were we expecting to teach him to be a decent person when he has absolutely no decent role models?
The only mother he has is the woman who breast-fed him who is also sexually abusing him throughout the book, and as far as he knows, there's nothing wrong with this. This is, in his mind, just kind of the way that a mother IS. So much so that once he finally meets his actual mother, the first thing he does is try to breast-feed off of her, which immediately freaks her out (obviously), and he genuinely has no fucking idea why she's upset. He has absolutely no relationships at any point in the book that offer him affection that is not transactional or obligatory, and it's pretty clear that he's desperate for it, even if he doesn't fully comprehend it.
When he kills the lord's son Jacob and is taken in by the Lord as a sort of "replacement son," it's not actually because the Lord wants to treat him as a son or cares about him in anyway it's because that's the "debt to be paid" and he thinks that Marek is an interesting thing to keep around and mess with. Villiam is constantly just fucking with this kid because he thinks the fact that Marek is just sort of stupid and gullible is really fucking funny.
Lispeth (Jacob's servant) also very clearly does not like or care about him. She is only taking care of him because her job was to take care of Jacob and now her job is to take care of Marek because Jacob is gone.
Jude hates him and is beating the shit out of him constantly, but there's this little inner monologue at the start of the book where he thinks something like "well at least getting the shit beat out of me means that I'm closer to God and Jesus." Like this kid probably thinks that the only beings capable of loving him are God and Jesus.
Yeah, he does kill Jacob, which is arguably a bad thing for him to have done, but how did we get there? How did we get to the point where he threw the rock and killed Jacob? Severe abuse and neglect, most likely. He's extremely jealous of Jacob and why wouldn't he be? Jacob has everything that he doesn't, down to the barest of bones.
But he's so starved for affection that after Villiam dies, and marek becomes the Lord of Lapvona, one of the first things he does is go to his mother in her room (she's dead by this point, but he doesn't know that yet) and basically commands that she be a mother to him as a lord's order. He is DESPERATE for love he doesn't have to earn, so much so that he's willing to command it out of someone.
And then, even at the end of the book where he throws the baby off the cliff (it's kind of left up to interpretation whether he actually throws the baby or not) and he's talking about how death isn't the end and the baby shouldn't be afraid, it doesn't really surprise me at all that he'd be so delusional by that point that he'd truly believe it would be better off. He's grown up his entire life hearing about God and Jesus and heaven, and all he's gotten out of his life is misery where nobody loves him. He still probably thinks that the only being is capable of loving him are God and Jesus, so in his mind, throwing the figurative Christ child off of the cliff is probably doing it a mercy.
Like yeah, a lot of his actions throw away any of the pity that you might develop for him as the book progresses, but he genuinely had not a single role model to teach him to be basically anything other than what he was and I think about this often. He was surrounded by miserable people who all either only cared for him out of obligation or based on what he provided for them.
i love finding posts of people who eloquently write about what im thinking of when i feel so horribly dumb trying to articulate them
