shining gleam of my misspent youth

most of the veretian characters are described as having darker colored hair (or, at least, darker than blond). and of the roughly three blond veretians damen encounters, two of them are described by him as having sandy colored hair darker than laurent's, and the last one is a singular blonde prostitute (how blonde? damen never clarifies). it's also worth mentioning that when the sandy-haired house boy is mistaken for laurent, the guards specify that laurent is blond, "Not like this boy." and the house boy also tries to downplay/insult laurent's appearance by calling him mousy-haired. the real smoking gun comes after damen couples with all the vaskian clanswomen, and laurent says, "I couldn't if I wanted to. A batch of blond Vaskians really would get me disinherited."

bonus: in book one, when torveld rebounds to erasmus, damen says, "Erasumus's fair skin and burnished hair were the closest thing in the room to Laurent's gold and ivory colouring." so, while we know that any pleasure slave they can get blond enough is basically reserved for damen, it seems like even most of the veretian pets aren't blond either. ancel's red hair is rare too, with some rumors even spreading that he's a foreign pet.

does make me think extremely chewy thoughts about how fucking complicated this has to be for ilya. like obviously things with his father are SO fucking complex and layered and there's so much pain there, but also what emotional potential of being the only person he consistently remembers. even ilya's older brother gets forgotten, but when he's distressed, ilya is the one he calls? he ALWAYS seems to know ilya?????

it adds to the guilt also that he's the only one who can calm his father down or at least handle him when he's like this and yet he's the one on a whole different continent, but also what a twisted wreck of feelings it has to be to be the only one their father consistently remembers. like there HAS to be love in there, doesn't there? if i'm the one he remembers when he forgets everything else? i'm at least THAT important to him? i have to be, don't i? even if everything else is gone, i'm still in there. that HAS to mean something, doesn't it?

Or another time Shane's really trying to remember the word for chicken but he just can't. And it's Russian day, the day of the week where Shane commits to speaking Russian the whole day, so he really doesn't want to cheat and go back to English. Eventually he folds his arms towards himself and starts wagging them like wings. And Ilya's like "Ah! Kuritsa!"