my life is a work in progress

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

The Halovars aren't really the Halovars. The real House Halovar was destroyed during the Shapers' War along with the House Obridai and the other broken houses. Yanessa was a member of an unrelated merchant family who took advantage of the chaos following the war to claim the name and power of the house for themselves.

Listen, we all know that Yanessa Halovar is a big phony lying liar who lies: her accent's fake, her religion's fake, her resurrection is fake—why wouldn't she be lying about her own name?

I had this idea because I was thinking about Yanessa's whole accent thing. If she's from a noble house, why would her private/real accent be cockney, one of the most famously "lower class" accents that exists in English? (ofc, one could argue that it has different connotations in Araman, but it would be strange for Brennan to choose the RP/Cockney dichotomy for Yanessa if not to invoke the class distinction of the two accents that exists to the real-world audience/players)

And then there's the magic. As far as I can tell, all the other Sundered Houses still have sorcery in their bloodline from whatever the original source was, even after the death of the gods, the closing of the doors to faerie, etc. However, Wick's sorcery seems to come not from his family's ancestral connection to Tansul (like the Tachonis and their necromancy), but solely from his celestial "grandfather."

Yanessa herself has magic, of course, but we already know she's been making deals with Ksha'aravi, so what's one little warlock pact? The Creed has been strongly preaching against warlocks, which works very well with her whole "rules for thee but not for me" MO. (There is also the fact that she is shown to have healing magic, which warlocks generally don't have, but that could just be a filament thing. Honestly, all her magic could just be a filament thing but I think it's more fun if she's a warlock)

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.