#arcamand

I’ve got to admit that Torm is actually an interesting character. There was always that resistance to his own violent behavior when he was a kid, before he fell in with Runda, and I don’t think don’t that would’ve entirely gone away.

And I think a good portion of that is from his mom– she was the moral pillar of the family, and she tried to enforce those values within the household and pass down her compassion. She was always apologizing after him and gently trying to change him and treating him differently than Yaven and Astano. Like, maybe he felt like she was ashamed of him, and maybe he felt like she feared him. And the rest of the family probably did too.

He knew what was right, and then his father tried to drill self-discipline into him for the first half of his life. So Torm knew how to be a just man, and aspired to it in his own way.

Then poor Gavir accidentally showed him the brutality of his own nature. Don’t get me wrong, Gav didn’t do anything, it was all on Torm. It was Torm’s decision to arm slaves, and being angry at Gav doesn’t give you an excuse to, you know, kill a small child. But it was all times that he was trying to ‘fight’ Gav (play fight, punish). So Gav becomes a convenient scapegoat for Torm to divert his rage from himself to the a weak slave who’s the opposite of him. DUDE, they both had opposite episodes, they both saw things that other’s couldn’t, about themselves, but whereas Gav’s precognition was illuminating (he could ‘walk through the world’), Torm’s rages warped reality for him and cut him off from most of the people around him.

He knows that what he does when he’s off on one of his rages is wrong, and you can see that, in the beginning, he’s trying so hard to be a good person. But then he kills Miv, and he must’ve realized that he’s done something unforgivable. He’s sent off to bootcamp, to train as a soldier, which is what he’s always wanted. But instead of working for glory, he’s toiling to overcome shame and failure. Everything he’s ever hoped for is twisted into hell for him.

Preparing for war in strict and brutal conditions is not a good way to work through emotional turmoil, so everything compounded inside him. And then actual war happened, and all of his violent tendencies were suddenly valued and rewarded. And all of the death and gore around him wouldn’t have helped either.

So he’s already had his destructive behavior validated, so after the war, he can finally be comfortable with himself. He falls in with that rat-bastard Runda, who indulges and encourages the crazy for amusement, and then tells Torm that he’s oh-so-wonderful for accomplishing all these wild, brave, astounding feats while he’s out of his fucking mind. Altan is encouraging this friendship, as well, meaning that Torm’s making his father proud, and advancing the Arca’s political standing through this friendship. At the same time, Altan is also trying to get rid of Yaven, who is everything that Torm isn’t, and who, for most of their lives, was the favored son. I feel like his relationship with his brother was like that with his mother, they walked on eggshells around each other, and especially after developing a closer bond with his other brother (born on the same day), Torm definitely began to resent Yaven. 

And this brings us to Torm’s twin, Hoby. Hoby shares Torm’s crazy, but as a slave he couldn’t go around expressing it, and when he did, he was basically kicked out of the house and into a hell. Kind of like Torm. They saw themselves in each other, and Hoby probably admired Torm for being in a position of power. Hoby was Altan’s son as well, and he wanted the position, and he got to it and lived it vicariously through Torm. But Hoby didn’t have Falimer there to try to temper the aggression with the example of compassion. He understands and encourages Torm’s more sinister side, and they feed off of one another’s anger, rejection, and madness.

Because of all of this, they became cruel enough to take Sallo and Ris that night. They had planned it, Sallo knew it was going to happen, Sotur tried to stop it, and everyone but Gav saw it coming.

I wish LG would’ve let us see more of Arcamand after Sallo’s death. I wanted to see Torm look Gav in the eye and realize the horror of what he had done. I wanted to see everything there fall apart because of him. Because of him and Hoby and Altan.

Now, maybe immediately afterwards, Torm can justify it to himself, she was just a slave girl after all. How could she be valued over him, the newly favored son? But then Gavir, who loved his sister more than he loved Hoby, and in such a different way, drowns himself, possibly runs away. And not just Gavir, everyone loved Sallo. She was known as the sweetest girl anyone had ever met. Most importantly, she was beloved to almost everyone that Torm loved.

If he felt like an outsider before, it’s nothing to what he is now. Who could love him after he tortured and murdered Sallo? He might as well have killed his older brother. Even if Yaven does survive the siege of Casicar, what will he do without Sallo? I like to think that Torm still manages to cling to a shred of his humanity. And, in a moment of lucidity, he finally comprehends the fact that he’s become a monster.

Maybe Runda can stave this off for a little while. He spends more time with that piece of shit than he does at home, anyway. But to Runda, Torm’s a clown. In the chaotic aftermath of what he did, Torm must be troubled, and he would probably be more subdued, aka less crazy, aka less fun and the bag of infected douches would get bored with him. Or, if Torm goes the other way, and gets even crazier, and Runda eventually goads Torm into doing something over the line. He already got him to streak at the fucking senate and fight bears and shit, they want to see how far he’ll go. The resulting scandal leads the vile, trust-fund baby to dump Torm, without much regret, and all he’s left with is his reputation as a fool. Then, questions start popping up about his lack of service. Yeah, he was helping during the siege, but why did Yaven go to Casicar and not the budding sword-master? Is he secretly afraid to defend his city abroad? Is Altan coddling him?

Next, Father ain’t doing too well at Arcamand either. Falimer and Astano probably despise him at this point (and Sotur definitely does), and all of the slaves, including his steadfast bodyguard, Hetter, don’t trust him and don’t follow him with the same respect and admiration that they once did. And if Runda jr kicks Torm out of his little club, especially if it for some sort of scandal, then his position in the Senate suffers as well. He’s got one mad son, and his other’s either incapacitated by grief (over a gift girl, no less) or dead. And maybe, if my other daydream is true, Sotur’s kicking up a scandal of her own.

Finally, Hoby. I’ve thought up a lot of horrible things for Hoby. After he murders Sallo, Hoby isn’t popular, and he hasn’t been since what he did to Gavir. Everyone knows that this was all some kind of sick revenge. 

He’s shut out by the other slaves. He’s reviled. He’s a traitor and a master’s pet. There is a lot of mocking and abuse whenever he’s within view of the men’s barracks, and the women hide from him.

In the house it’s not much better. Altan’s grown to be fond-ish of him, but that squat old bastard also wants his oldest son dead, so being his bastard son by an anonymous slave doesn’t lend Hoby much consequence in that corner.

So that leaves Torm, the other bodyguard, and Tib as his only allies. And despite Tib’s fawning, I don’t think it would hold up well in the face of the household’s sheer hatred and the horror over what he did to Sallo. Other than that I’ve also got the morbid headcanon that the other bodyguard lives like a month before the others exact revenge. Oh, by Ennu, would you look at that! What a tragic accident. The lout cracked his own skull and then fell head first into the well. Wow, Hoby, it seems like everyone around you’s drowning, wanna go swimming later?

On top of that, Torm’s spiraling into depression. He’s questioning himself, and therefore Hoby and the slave’s influence on him. Hoby’s on the verge of losing everything.

Then Falimer finally has enough, and wants the slave that killed and tortured Sallo gone. Or Yaven returns. And one day, when Yaven’s back to a functional level, he asks for Hoby, who doesn’t exactly belong to Torm. Not in the way that Yaven exclusively owned Sallo (a horrible sentence to write, but I’ll get to that in another post). It’s a capital offense for anyone but the master to kill a slave. So Yaven’s got legal grounds (lofuckingl) to go after both Hoby and Torm for killing Sallo. And Yaven would want revenge on both of them, he may not be able to get his legitimate brother, but he can hurt him through Hoby, kill two birds with one stone. Now, if Falimer or Yaven get their way, Hoby’ll most likely be sold somewhere where he’ll live a short, brutal life. 

There are some parts of Powers, especially towards the end, that are flat-out bad. They feel forced and lazy and I just dropped out of the story whenever I came to them.

One of the worst of those scenes took place in an inn on the way to Urdile. Gav’s talking to some strangers and they start talking about the Barnavites and then that leads to talk about loyal/runaway slaves.

Lo and behold, Gavir’s become infamous. The story that the guy told was way to specific to be taken seriously (even if he heard the story straight from Hoby’s mouth it the details– no matter how wrong– would have been fuzzier).

Now, as I first read that paragraph, I couldn’t get much beyond how awkward it felt. I still feel that it’s awkward. BUT, when reread it, one of the little “facts” of the story struck me. According to the gossip, Gav ‘defiled one of the family’s daughters.’

This is laughable because A. He’s like math club loser straight from a 90′s movie surrounded by jocks. B. This is Gavir. The kid who wasn’t even aware that he could disobey that Family. The kid who was horrified by his own sexual awakening. Anyone who knew him would probably cackle until they choked if someone told them that that scrawny little nerd was secretly seducing the family ladies into his library of iniquity (he’d have Trudec’s Moralities out and open to a passage on restraint and chastity at the table). And others would know that Gavir wouldn’t have been so suicidally stupid as to start an affair with an Arca girl.

It could just be a mistake on the part of the stranger. The story and Sallo’s death in particular would morph as it was told and retold, or Hoby was lying through his teeth. Then I remembered how he felt about Sotur.

I can’t imagine Sotur would have been quiet about her friend’s murder. Nope, my girl would hiss and snap and sneer every time Torm so much looked her way. Start telling anybody and everybody what a treacherous, rabid animal Torm is. She’d be laying out all the family’s dirty laundry, generally raising hell, and validating and encouraging the slaves’ discontent. Torm’s lucky that women are relegated to the home in Etran society because if she had her hand on a sword it doesn’t matter how many fancy classes that asshole took his intestines would be at his ankles.

Obviously, this behavior wouldn’t really ingratiate her to her uncle and cousin, who support her, and I can think of this playing out in two ways:

In the first one, her loud fury and pain, along with her close friendship with Sallo and Gav, arouse suspicions that she was more intimate with them, Gavir specifically, than was previously believed. Choosing to continue her studies and all that time that she spent in the library with Gav come under new scrutiny. And maybe some of his bad poetry to about her is found. And maybe his crush on her was more obvious than he had realized.

Rumors like this wouldn’t exactly be good for the family in the eyes of Etran society, but they could be an opportunity for redemption for Torm and Hoby. If Gavir was actually a snake in the grass who betrayed his house, then his sister Sallo, who knew everything about him, was his accomplice. Then maybe they could frame her murder as a just punishment for their crimes against the Arcas and discredit Sotur. 

The second theory is that Sotur is the one who claims to have had an affair with Gavir.

Altan and even her brothers would be pretty eager to dump her, and it probably wouldn’t take long to scrounge up some social climber to taker our little rabble-rouser off their hands.

BUT Sotur is a clever girl, and I’ll bet you that she knew about Gav’s crush. It’s a decisive out, but it’ll cost her. She loses her reputation and her family (for all they’re worth). The scandal will hit them hard, socially. She’ll be losing her fortune and her support system, but it’s better than some louse slobbering after Altan’s favor.

Another downside is that she’ll be dragging Gavir’s name through the mud, and muddying the tragedy of Sallo’s and possibly Gavir’s deaths. Also, I don’t think Sotur would realize this at first, this could lead to bad consequences for the other slaves at Arca. Everra’s class would be the first to go. It encourages intimacy among the family’s children and the slaves, and gives them both the notion that they deserve to be treated as anything more than property. There will be suspicion cast on all the slaves, but the men in particular. The very idea of educating slaves might come under scrutiny. And the house and the household would definitely be segregated as much as possible, and it would strain the relations between the two even further.

To end on a positive note, though, can’t you imagine her defiantly walking into the dining room or whatever where the all the family is gathered like, ‘Oh hello there, it seems that I have ruined everything, and I’d like to thank the sack of shit who made this all possible: Torm’?

Soturovaso was such a great character, and I know I’m probably overly-romanticizing her, but she took on the title as the defender of everything right and stepped up even when her entire family was against her. She always saw her family’s and her class’s BS, and subverted it whenever she could. She was more fleshed out than Sallo (which was deeply unfair to Sallo).