Is It Thursday Yet?

Lotus Flower

Oh well.

I've just started watching The Mighty Nine. Already experiencing Mighty Crisis.

In his mind, his father and Aranessa both chose Thjazi over him, to their ruin, and rather than blame them for their own choices, he attributes all of their suffering and lost reputation to Thjazi himself. I think it's especially telling in the most recent episode that he describes himself as the product of Thjazi's choices. Since childhood, he's been taking all the blame and resentment he might feel for the people he loves and heaping them onto Thjazi rather than meet them on their own terms, and in that moment in battle, he ran off to face down the towering enemy he built in his head rather than accept the choices of his father and friend.

It seems clear that in his mind, in that moment, he was certain that if the knight defeated the monster he'd built Thjazi into, everything would right itself. His father's esteem for Thjazi and Aranessa's affection for him would transfer themselves cleanly onto Julien, won by right of conquest on the battlefield. He cast himself as the bold young hero standing against the betrayer of his house, and he succeeded.

And even though the city cheered him for it, neither of the people he loved did.

He never seems to have recovered from that disillusionment, given that he's filling all his spare time with debauchery and seems to have absolutely no positive relationships outside of Aranessa. He brought "the monster" to heel, and he never got the girl, and he never got his father's respect, and now he seems to just be drifting through his life as a passenger and lashing out at almost everyone as he goes, without ever actually making a grab for the steering wheel, so to speak.

While Thjazi never stopped striving and adventuring and getting into trouble, Julien seems to have frozen in the moment he realized that his victory was hollow. While Thjazi lies, even in death, surrounded by tokens of affection and esteem and marks of a life well-lived, Julien has nothing to show for his entire adult life, even if, in his mind, he's earned the acclaim and love that Thjazi is surrounded by.

Julien has left himself, maybe even more than Aranessa or his father, the product of Thjazi's choices, in that he allowed his enmity with Thjazi, and its lack of reward, to define his entire life from the moment he bested him.