WHY AUBRECHT IS NOT A HERO, AND SABRAN WAS NEVER "IN LOVE" WITH HIM. [UNPOPULAR OPINION]
In "The Priory of the Orange Tree", the general consensus seems to view Sabran and Aubrecht’s marriage as a tragic romance or a "bittersweet" love story—a narrative where something initially forced turned into something genuine. I’ve noticed that the general audience tends to sugarcoat structural violence simply because the man involved was "good and gentle" about it.
THE REALITY OF "STATE RAPE"
I’d like to challenge the popular idea that Sabran eventually "fell in love" with Aubrecht. I am firmly convinced that love was simply not possible under her circumstances. Sabran spent twenty-eight years saying "No." She was terrified of childbirth and resisted marriage, owning everything in her Queendom except her own body. When she finally marries Aubrecht, it isn’t a choice; it is the surrender of a cornered animal. She capitulates because the "Berethnet Mandate" is a cage she cannot escape.
Entering into a marriage where you cannot safely say "No" means that your "Yes" is void. The intimacy that follows is not romance; it is state-sanctioned rape. For those who have seen Blue Eye Samurai, consider the contrast with Mikio: he is a deeply flawed man, yet even he recognizes the hollowness of a forced union with Mizu, choosing to sleep separately rather than claim a wife who does not want him. Aubrecht, the "gentle" suitor, fails to clear even this low bar; he hurries to cash in his "marital right" on their very first night. The fact that he didn't hold a knife to her throat, but instead spoke of his hometown, doesn't change the fact that her body was conscripted for the state, and he was the one assigned to use it. He wasn't a "rapist" in the criminal sense, but he had no problem benefiting from Sabran's lack of choice.
AUBRECHT: THE BENEFICIARY, NOT THE SAVIOR
The fandom loves Aubrecht because he was "good" and clearly loved Sabran. But we must distinguish between personality and power.
By explicitly mentioning that he "ignored" the rumors about her, Aubrecht subtly reminds Sabran (and the reader) of his own "nobility." This is a form of emotional grooming; he frames himself as her only escape from isolation or political scandal. If he truly wanted to be a gentle friend, he could have supported her from afar or offered a platonic alliance. Instead, he demanded the one thing she was most desperate to protect: her body. He could have chosen a woman that knew and loved him. Instead he decided to make an expansion into a distant land and ask for the hand of a stranger. He saw a woman isolated by duty—a "prize" temporarily undervalued by the market—and he stepped into the vacuum.
He wasn't her partner; he was the company in her cell. To be precise, Sabran was born and raised in that cell; one day Aubrecht opened the gate, entered, and locked himself in with her, never once considering if his company was what Sabran actually wanted.
REFRAMING THE "DECLARATION OF LOVE"
When Sabran cries out during the siege—“Damn you, you are my companion. You have shared my bed. My flesh. My—my heart”—readers see a declaration of love. I see a desperate investor terrified of losing her only asset. Sabran bet her entire life, her body, and her autonomy on this one "horse" that is now risking a fatal shot before reaching the finish line. She paid a devastating physical and psychological price to produce an heir. If Aubrecht dies, that sacrifice risks becoming meaningless. She isn't mourning a soulmate; she is terrified of the void that opens up if her "investment" is erased.
SURVIVAL IS NOT A ROMANCE
Sabran’s "affection" for Aubrecht is a textbook survival strategy. When your body is public property, finding "fondness" for your husband is a way to stay sane. It is a coping mechanism, not a romance.
"You asked me, before I took Aubrecht to consort, if I wanted to wed. I confess now, to you alone, that I did not. And… still do not" … "Aubrecht was kind to me. Tender and good, but when he was inside me, even when I found pleasure in it, it felt — It felt is if my body where not wholly my own. It.. still feels that way now".
This confession to Ead is the most devastating moment in the book for me. It confirms that Sabran’s "pleasure" was not a bridge to love, but a symptom of her alienation. No amount of "gentleness" could manufacture a "Yes" that wasn't there to begin with. It reveals that Aubrecht was essentially making love to a ghost; he was occupying a body that Sabran had to vacate just to survive the encounter. By continuing these encounters while Sabran felt like a stranger in her own skin, he prioritized his desire for "tender connection" over the glaring absence of her agency. Consent is not just the absence of a struggle; it is the presence of the self. By Sabran's own admission, her self was never in that room.
No man's "goodness" can repair a woman's lack of bodily autonomy. By being "kind," he actually made it harder for Sabran—and the readers—to name her trauma. If he were a brute, she could righteously hate him. Because he was "gentle," she had to internalize the violation. Aubrecht never checked if she was "there." He was satisfied with a body that performed its duty. To call their relationship a "love story" is to erase the 28 years Sabran spent fighting for her own skin. It sanitizes the horror of her situation and rewards Aubrecht for simply being a "Nice Guy" while participating in the systematic stripping of a woman's sovereignty.
The "niceness" can be a tool of control just as much as "brutality" can. Let’s stop applauding the "gentle" jailer. Sabran deserved autonomy, not just a polite occupation.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CREATION AND COLONIZATION
"The kiss was hot and new and world-forming, the flare of starbirth on their lips".
When Samantha Shannon uses the phrase "world-forming," she is describing an act of cosmic agency. This is the moment Sabran stops being a historical artifact and starts being a participant in her own life.
Her contact with Aubrecht was the ultimate performance of compulsory heterosexuality—a script she read while her heart was elsewhere. Her contact with Ead is the moment she drops the script. To genuinely love someone, one must first be Whole; what Sabran was with Aubrecht was Hollow.
When a woman is assigned a husband and told her body is a vessel for a royal line, she is treated as a national utility. We need to call this by its real name: reproductive slavery. There is no middle ground where a healthy romance can grow in that soil. You cannot strip a person of their sovereignty and then expect them to "develop feelings" for the person benefiting from that theft. Romance requires the freedom to walk away; without that exit, any "affection" is merely a survival mechanism. To claim Sabran loved her consort is to suggest that a person can truly love their own chains just because the chains were wrapped in velvet. It’s an insult to the complexity of the human psyche and the reality of the trauma Sabran had to survive.
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There is a profound tension between Samantha Shannon’s intent—the image of a noble, tragic consort—and the structural reality of the character she actually pinned to the page. Shannon seemingly invites the reader to mourn Aubrecht as a "decent person" because he performed the role of the "Good Man" with tenderness rather than brutality. However, a character’s morality is not defined by their tone, but by their participation in power. By placing Aubrecht in a world where Sabran’s body is a state-mandated resource and Aubrecht is the one who gets a piece of that cake, Shannon created a character whose very existence is an act of encroachment. No matter how many times the author whispers that he was kind, the character’s actions speak with a much louder, more predatory resonance: he is the man who accepted the hand of a cornered stranger, who moved into the "jail" of her autonomy, and who mistook her dissociative survival for a shared life. The author may have tried to paint a tragedy of lost love, but the "pigment" of the world-building reveals a much darker portrait: the "decent man" who is perfectly comfortable benefiting from a woman's lack of choice.
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P.S.
To be clear, this critique is not an indictment of Samantha Shannon’s skill or her intent. I have immense respect for her as a writer, and I don't believe she set out to deceive or disrespect her audience. Her writing is anything but shallow. However, this is my personal take on the architecture of her world, shaped entirely by who I am as a person. We all bring our own vision to a story, and while the author may have intended a tragedy of love, my own lived experience reveals a tragedy of lost sovereignty. This is the beauty of complex literature: it allows room for the reader to find truths that even the creator may not have fully realized they were painting.
