(in reference to your post about rayla losing three family members + ethari and the silvergrove ghosting her) that’s why it bothers me when i saw people saying rayla “ignored” soren’s trauma, especially since at the beginning she says “i’m sorry” when he says he was there at the night harrow was murdered
yeah, rayla is a sixteen year old girl dealing with a very quick turn over of multiple levels of grief on top of being uncertain about how all of them died (in addition to feeling responsible, at the very least, for runaan’s). and to be clear, trauma is not a competition. soren has been through shit too
but his situation is very different in some crucial ways. for example, the way i read his hesitance - “do we have to talk about this?” - was from guilt, not trauma. (he defs has trauma in relation to feeling like he failed harrow, that night, but that’s not the core of either side of their conversation at all.) similar to how he looks away in when janai says “to fight the monster who destroyed our home.”
soren, in his own words, knows he has done or been convinced to do terrible things. and although rayla doesn’t label herself as one of the assassins anymore, soren still knows that they were her troupe and she cared about them, and that soren, his crownguard, and his family were responsible for all of their deaths. there are also more immediate differences, such as:
1) soren chose to cut ties with his dad of his own accord well before the battle (3x05) and then more permanently (3x07) knowing that it was the right thing to do for himself and the war, and 2) while soren has trauma related to viren’s death, he also admits himself that there’s both relief and anxiety in knowing he didn’t really kill his father - but there is a somewhat positive emotion, there, understandably.
soren is also 1) able to return to his childhood home and have familiarity there and in his position as a crownguard, and 2) hold onto two of his oldest friends (callum and ezran).
rayla doesn’t have any of that. she can’t go home. she can’t communicate with ethari. she never even cut ties with runaan. up until the moment he left her, rayla was trying to stall and convince him otherwise. she spent months thinking her parents abandoned her for a duty that they clearly didn’t care about only to find out they had died, painfully, at viren’s hands, and that rayla would have joined them without bait and callum’s intervention. so that’s two douses of survivor’s guilt on top of three levels of grief. her entire long term support system has shattered out from under her feet and all she currently has are ezran and callum, and that’s it.
soren, at most, is actively mourning and missing his sister, but again: claudia never comes up in the conversation. and soren brings up the events of 3x09 fully of his own accord. in this sense, he and rayla are grappling with the same sort of “failure” in killing viren, except, again - rayla already has trauma wrapped up in a past, previous experience with not killing marcos and having everyone in her troupe, as well as her father (figure) die because of it.
i will also say from experience and in real life that often times mentally ill people, when they’re in their worst patches (which rayla definitely is) most often steamroll over other mentally ill people. rayla is in a place where she snaps easily at callum, who is her partner and someone she has a lot more experience being emotional with. she’s known soren a significantly smaller amount of time and this is likely the first time they’ve ever talked about anything remotely emotional one-on-one. so yeah, rayla isn’t going to notice his cues, especially when she already has a stubborn personality.
so she pushes him once about the loss of her family at his father’s hands. of which soren had very little to actually do with because unlike claudia, he wasn’t working in the dungeons. so yeah. soren’s hesitance is 99% due to guilt, not trauma, and not trauma induced guilt, either. rayla had every right to push.
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