Tavore, Past, Future and Tragedy
One thing that strikes me about Tavore is her youth and how, when we get glimpses of her thought through dialogue, it reveals she is constantly preoccupied with the past, its immense weight, and how she exists in the shadow of it. If I understand the timeline right she is only 21 years old or so upon becoming the Adjunct, this in a series where a lot of the main characters are grizzled veterans at the youngest and hundreds of thousands of years old at the oldest. Unlike the other military leaders in the series, we get introduced to her when she is untested and first starting out, and the soldiers spend all of House of Chains (and to some extent lot of the later books too) comparing her to the shadow of Kellanved and Dancer, and to the shadow of Coltaine, often finding her wanting. And she, too, wishes to reach into the past and chase it; I remember a line in HoC where it describes how she is asking for information about the Emperor and his allies to reach for, if only in knowledge and a story, a loyalty she does not have.
And what’s interesting about her character is that if you take away the general background and tone of the series, her narrative role is rather like a typical children’s show/game protagonist; think like Undertale or (I only watched the beginning of it but I know it by hearsay) Steven Universe; an impossibly young outsider who wanders into a world of beings who are in comparison immortal gods, to defy their goals and end their ancient grievances through compassion and idealism. But she is instead in a series where the weight of the past is far too many-layered and large to simply hold onto like this, where the countless perspectives and lack of a clear protagonist emphasizes how small one person is before this past, and the dark tone shows just how difficult it will be to change anything. To even learn this past, let alone change its injustices, is something that takes years of study rather than a simple “backstory episode”. Still, she attempts to learn this weighty past (as the preeminent scholar of war) in a single-minded goal to end a suffering that has lasted a hundred thousand years, and in recognizing how she defies the very pitiless nature of this world to do so she does it behind a mask of “cold iron”. Her position is precarious; the only way she is able to come to the power she needs is to become the servant, the living tool, of an empress whose previous Adjunct was completely hollowed out by her role and died pitifully, hiding deeply that “naïve” nature that the Empress calls her out on when she at last splits with her at the end of the sixth book. She continues to, a mortal, chase the shadow of gods, to know them, to defy them.
Tavore’s family background symbolizes this past, this power behind mortal, that she chases the trail of so that she could somehow matter in its wake. She has an older brother, who she always spars with as a child and tries to keep up with; described by Felisin as being in his shadow until she becomes his shadow. Ganoes becomes a symbol of the older, the ancient, the above human, when he himself comes into a godlike power, in fact a power that is above and transcends gods as the master of the game they play. And this, her brother becoming fully a part of the exalted past that she chases, is a great motivation for her, as shown when she says what started her on this path was the moment the Paran family lost their eldest son. He is lost to the cold godhood she despises, both in being used by gods and then becoming something like one, and as always, she gives chase. Even as she knows he is above her, lost to her, perhaps will not forgive her or aid her (I love the moment at the beginning of Dust of Dreams when they are discussing Ganoes and she does a strange gesture of looking at her hands, probably seeing her flimsy mortal body compared to what her brother has become). And to Ganoes, Tavore is the sister that haunts him; younger, far weaker in terms of physical power, someone he doesn’t even like as a person and wishes to escape out of the haunting world of childhood, who nonetheless has such grave, implacable will that he finds himself following her and devoting himself to her. All of which makes it a powerful moment when, after so much time alone and chasing what he represents, believing him far lost and hating her and ascended to a world she cannot reach, how he is the one who saves her.
But, of course, Tavore is a middle child, so what does the younger sibling represent? Felisin instead represents the future, represents what Tavore loses, sacrifices, betrays in forever chasing the past. Represents what happens to children as they are broken and twisted by the world of uncaring adults. The ending of House of Chains is a tragedy, and Tavore having many of the markings of a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense. Her position of power, the noble goal that underlines her actions, her hubris in wanting to challenge the gods, and her own flaws, choices, everything she is leading her to a path of unknowingly killing a member of her own family being a classic tragic trope. And, of course a tragic flaw, which is her tendency to so vigorously chase the past that she forgets and betrays the future, those even younger than her. She wishes to have the greatness of the past figures she chases, yet House of Chains ends with it being all for nothing; she does not fail or succeed on her own merits, only the literal ghosts of Coltaine’s past campaign carry the day.
Which leaves the rest of her story to ask what is left for the tragic hero, and what is left is to embrace the tragedy. She knows she has fallen the day Felisin died, and in this falling to being a figure of pity has seen the truth that pity brings, and lives willingly in a perpetual moment of anagnorisis. Death is nothing to the tragic hero who has already enacted her tragedy, as she says to Lostara there is a strange comfort to her in how Lorn fell to an ignominious fate despite her pretensions of power and importance, and so shall she. In this sacred state of completed tragedy, she is transformed by the children of the Snake, and embraces them to give them comfort in what seems their final days, a symbol of the future she had long since made the mistake to cut down and now sees with the clarity of the fallen hero how valuable it is. Although the series appears a military epic, which the tragedy is often seen as the antithesis of, an epic mindset cannot understand compassion, and it is only through tragedy, through the tragic hero who continues on transformed nonetheless, that it can be known and carried out.
