You've Never Played Boulder, Paper, Shears?

One by one the stars are dying, and the sky is growing dark and dim. Saving them may be beyond your ability but their stories… those you can spare.

C4E30 spoilers

Just a little speculation regarding that very first time Essek agreed to teach Caleb dunamancy. Frumpkin is never far, after all… and I like to think that cat is always up in everyone’s business.

And while we’re here, some bonus Caleb:

Are you talking to the cat or yourself, Caleb? 

Brennan’s done a very good job of setting these different Houses up and showing how powerful they are compared to the PCs. We know Otto Einfasen will end them in a breath. We know Lady Cormoray is equal to a dragon. But the Einfasen have been malleable to Azune’s manipulation and Amariya was in a box, so was easy to see them as somewhat less dangerous compared with the Houses that have been stronger direct antagonist forces in the campaign so far.

We’ve especially focused on the danger of Primus and House Tacchonis, because we’ve seen them in combat and we know how powerful they are.

But that meeting very much drove home the fact that every House and every House leader is incredibly powerful and active. They will not be easy to overcome or outmaneuver.

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.