Goldybays

Orca's art

I think Orca was a passionate artist who took her craft very seriously. She was dedicated and sensitive in a way her mother wasn't, and this might have been a source of pride (and occasionally arrogance) in her own life.

When I view Coral's creative pursuits I see her as someone who does art mainly for appearance's sake. There is a bit of a shallow, performative quality to her; she lavishes in the praise and attention it gets her, which is why she seats her council of advisors primarily with sycophants who fawn over her. The actual quality of her work is somewhat middling (not terrible, but plainly average), she just uses her power and influence to make people regard it highly.

I think Orca saw this quality of her mother and, while she idolized Coral's art at a more impressionable age, their understanding of what it meant to be an artist diverged as she grew older. To her, art was more about the work itself and the honing of your skills, rather than the price tag you can put on your creations. A large body of her work probably was never shown to anyone. There might even be a secret cave somewhere that's full of never-before revealed statues and figurines she made; hidden away from the public so the ignorant masses wouldn't lump her in with her mother as just another royal show-off.

Orca's ambition

Why exactly Orca chose to challenge her mother at a comparatively young age is difficult to say. Perhaps her perceived artistic superiority eventually turned into resentment and hostility. Perhaps she saw her mother as strong and enduring and felt so trapped in her shadow that she HAD to confront her. Maybe she was just cocky and wanted to be rude. We can't say.

I think what we can rule out almost definitively is that Orca's reasons were for any sense of "justice" or "goodness vanquishing evil". Orca was not an altruist and she didn't have anyone's best interest at heart. If her grab for power had been for benevolent reasons, she would not have concocted a plan to murder her unborn siblings and children in cold blood. You don't do something like that if you're a caring, nurturing person. I think whatever reason she had was likely self-motivated in some way.

It's also important to be aware that we have no idea what Queen Coral was like back when Orca was alive. The murderous version of her we see in the second book--the one who threatens her own daughter with death and who rips apart her servants from the mouth down--is a woman who has slowly and methodically been driven mad by grief and the continued loss of her children. It can be easy to lose track of, but if the odds of a newborn Seawing being male or female are roughly equal, there is a chance Coral has lived through the death of a child like thirty times by the time we meet her. It is very possible that before that horrific trauma, Coral was a well-adjusted and kind person who was maybe a bit self-absorbed but ultimately well-meaning. Intense grief and misfortune can wear us down and exacerbate our worst qualities.

So no, I don't really believe Orca was trying to take a stand against a tyrant, or to make the world a better place. I think she just wanted to challenge her mother, whether to prove to herself that she was capable of it, or some other, less-reputable reason.

Orca's Legacy

With everything I've extrapolated from what little canonical information there is... If Orca won her challenge and had become Queen, I think she would have not been very successful. With how the succession process works in most Pyrrhian cultures, it is important for the Queen to project an image of strength, confidence, and permanence. She is always under threat of being challenged by her heirs, but also expected to endure that pressure and remain strong in the face of it.

Coral, for all her numerous other faults, embodies this quality extremely well. Orca did not. She was scared to death of that situation (as would I be to be fair) and engineered a backdoor to avoid it altogether. This suggests to me that, had she assumed the role of ruler, she would have eventually buckled under the stress and fallen apart.

There is a tendency for us to under-appreciate what we have and instead covet what we don't. It's possible Orca would have flourished by focusing on her art instead of throwing it away in a bid for power she didn't even really want. But of course it is always easier to say that with hindsight.