#catkua

so like I am an aroace person who is generally VERY critical of romance in stories and sensitive to issues like it hijacking the plot

but in this case Catherine and Akua's relationship ended up the center of everything the book had been about all along in all the right ways

from the start, they were rivals. BUT Akua was presented as not really important? like she was a kid that the rival faction sponsored. she was dangerous as an illustration of why you dont give children nukes, not because there was something about her personally. like yeah she was extremely intelligent to achieve what she did the way she did, but quite frankly a stupider person could have done a remarkably similar amount of damage in a less clever way. Akua's antagonism was never really special and it only ended up emotionally important because the damage she did do fucking devastated Catherine, in the exact same way the same damage done by anyone else would have, but it was specifically Akua who did this - and so, the oath of revenge (which Akua had immediately reacted to like it was a proclamation of eternal love which should tell you a lot about how special her relationship with reality was at the time)

and so, at the end of the first... maybe third? of the series - structurally at the end of the first half I suppose - Akua transitions from antagonist to a very different kind of presence.

as an antagonist she was defeated quite easily. like yeah she did a lot of damage but it was never really a QUESTION who would win. how much damage she would be allowed to / manage to do along the way was the only real tension. the real opposition was systemic. would the damage Akua would manage to do along the way be enough to ruin what the protagonist and her faction are going for? would it prove her faction wrong? would it cause her to change to a different track of action and intent? (and it did, to some degree)

Akua as a person was incidental to the opposition she presented, and while the buildup towards her being another victim of the system that birthed her was already there in book 3, in book 4 we got an explicit dissection of that. Catherine finds herself horrified at the way she was treated, at how she became the person who did so much damage. As a representative of the system that made her, Akua is at this point explicitly a child of it. Someone who did not get to shape it, someone who is purely a result of it, someone who was victimized by it -

- and the form of that victimization was doing a lot, a lot of damage, which is also important to the themes of the story, because EVERYONE in it of any importance gets to do a lot, a lot of damage along the way. Akua stands out for just how explosive the damage was, but she is barely in the top 5 numbers wise tbh. Numbers aren't what's important here, my point is that if she hadn't done al ot of damage along the way the themes of how fucked up it is would have fallen flat. PGTE is a story with very high stakes and it's with those very high stakes that Akua needed to demonstrate how bad things are for her story to be, like, notable.

and it's not just about raising the stakes. one of the biggest themes in PGTE overall is the cycle of violence and how nobody presently living started it and how much it takes to break it and how we ended up where we are and why it is a cycle and how it is perpetuated, and Akua is a very bright, shining and closely dissected example of it.

and so, after getting glimpses of her story, Catherine deliberately reminds herself that she cannot fix Akua. this is something very natural for the flow of the story and yet also precisely targeted at the tumblr discourse of "i can fix him" - Catherine specifically states in her internal monologue that no, she doesn't believe in that. she doesn't think Akua can be "redeemed" (I think I've come to hate that word and the mindset it represents but it's what's used in the story, where it's something of a technical term, and I don't want to dissect those mechanics here so I'll be trying to use better synonyms where possible)

- except

except

except Akua does want to fix herself.

the climax of book 4 has two pretty much independent in cause but intertwined both in theme and in the actual execution moments happen

the first is Akua choosing to, rather than run away and save her life and her freedom, save Catherine's life and accept Catherine's terms for what will happen to her deliberately, and challenge Catherine to, in fact, help her get better,

the second is Catherine realizing that the cycle of violence is still bad and she can and should try to disrupt it right there and then, no matter what it takes, with all her effort.

(for once, Catherine is not home. for once, the stakes are not so high that she simply cannot give or she'd be failing in her duty towards so many people who chose to follow her and trusted her with their fates. for once she is in the middle of nowhere and has leeway, and so she can try - and so she should)

the two are VERY interrelated in their happening as I once went feral about on this very blog because Catherine's choice put her and everyone with her - at that moment functionally just Akua - not just at risk, but, like. she was giving the people actively trying to kill them a free shot.

and a big part of the way she did it was to tell Akua to

PGTE is very big on themes of trust. not just in interpersonal relationships, but in systemic, political relationships - with the interpersonal mirroring, echoing, reflecting and causing them. Catherine was extending systemic trust to the Sisters who were trying to kill her, and she was simultaneously extending interpersonal trust to Akua, whom she had just been thinking of as irredeemable, but whom she had come to understand on a somewhat uncomfortably deep level and who had already made a gesture Catherine had already taken the moment to interrogate her about - and oh that interrogation. Catherine looks at the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" statement and goes "yeah no I'm checking every single tooth of this one" and then upon obtaining all the information she can she makes this unspoken, unackonwledged in the text leap of trust, where she just commands Akua to stop and expects that it will happen as surely as if she'd pressed a keyboard key in commanding a video game character. She is in charge, Akua is with her, and Akua will follow her strategy and make the leap of faith with her

and Akua does.

so far the themes Akua has exemplified, if you're keeping track, are:

- a systemic threat that has an individual as its face but the individual does not constitute the threat, they are just the current arrow in flight;

- the victimization inherent in the cycle of violence, where it is perpetuated by those it'd hurt, hurt specifically in the way that pushes them to perpetuate it;

- interpersonal and systemic trust;

...and the one that I have all the words for, which is:

- the ability to get better.

So to get back a little, when Akua saves Catherine instead of leaving and Catherine challenges her on it, Akua challenges Catherine - demands of Catherine - asserts that Catherine will - in fact, try to fix her. or rather, help her along the road. let her have a redemption arc. it would be against Catherine's own morals to do otherwise, she says quite confidently, because just as Catherine's knowledge of her cuts uncomfortably deep, the same is true in reverse, and even as an enemy Akua had come to know Catherine's principles, her reasons, what moves her to act, quite intimately. and from that, from her familiarity with the ethical and philosophical system that shaped Catherine, she asserts that no matter Catherine's personal beliefs on the possibility of redemption for her, no matter Catherine's unbreakable (at the time) oath to make her suffer in a way that will serve as an example to others for centuries, no matter Catherine's extremely personal and emotional refusal to even consider the possibility of forgiveness for her -

so long as Akua is putting in the effort, so long as she's playing by the rules, Catherine HAS to give her a chance to prove herself.

even as she's upfront that she's insincere about this, that she just wants the (metaphysical, supernatural, very real in the setting) rewards for going through the motions, she's convinced that it's the act that matters, not the intent, and so it should work - or rather, it might work, and that is a good enough reason to try - and Catherine will let her.

this is another major as FUCK theme of PGTE: fixing things. making things better. looking at a cycle of violence and saying that you are going to break it so hard they won't be able to find big enough pieces to do a forensic analysis on. the moral obligation to do so, and the corollary questions of how far does that obligation actually compel you to go? in trying to fix things, what about that which you end up breaking along the way?

there is another character who exemplifies this theme more than anyone else, Amadeus of the Green Stretch. he is the fixer.

Akua is the fixed.

and Akua is the fixed as the result of HIS actions, even though he is - not, like, a perfect embodiment of a person doing everything right in regard of that theme? in specific among other things, up until a local climax late in the books he does not think Akua is fixable, nor should be fixed. he trusts Catherine and does not stop her, but his personal opinion is - well, he hates everything about the system that made Akua, and he hates all participants of it with a quite personal passion, and with the amount of damage Akua had already done, she is very much a participant. he despises her. from the start, even before the damage, he sees her as nothing but a tool of that which made her, and he has 0 intention for anything he does to be helpful for her.

it is anyway, because it's a cascade reaction. this is something PGTE does not quite call out explicitly, unlike most other themes I've mentioned, but it's pretty clearly laid out in the text anyway. action begets action, effect begets effect. Amadeus trusts Catherine and sets her up to fix what he cannot, what he doesn't have the perspective to, and Catherine doesn't need to try to fix Akua for Akua to look at her and see salvation.

oh, Akua's later internal monologue implies that she was only going for it because of a romantic crush on Catherine - a "fascination" to quote the text - but Akua's internal monologue at that point is the definition of unreliable narration. she is not just thinking she is actively narrating to herself what had happened, convincing herself that everything that happened fit a paradigm, and that paradigm absolutely does not include what she ends up doing just a few chapters later - it's quite clear that what Akua thinks there is to be taken with a whole tonne of salt (and a fair bit of pointing and laughing)

Akua's "redemption arc" is a weird game of chicken between Catherine and her, where Catherine says "fine. if you want to try I am going to give you the BEST CHANCE I POSSIBLY CAN, which is to say I am going to explicitly and aggressively teach you to do the right thing and see people as people, and also actively and with my best effort manipulate you into staying the course, mostly by challenging your pride to. i actually sincerely want this to succeed because you understanding the magnitude of damage you've done is actually the best revenge i could have possibly come up with. fuck you" -

and Akua goes with it. knowing that it is designed to hurt her, to break her, that Catherine sees it as revenge and that she sees every next step she takes down this road as a personal victory over her, she keeps going. Catherine's manipulation - it's not really a manipulation, see, Akua grew up among snakes Catherine could not hold a candle to. Catherine is just very good at understanding people's reason to do what they do (I have clocked her as a Seer of Mind which ought to be a clear reference to many of the people I expect to read this, and yes Akua is a Vriska fix-it fic) and she knows that if she nudges things around Akua just so, her reasons will take her down this road.

now, Catherine has two working models for what is going on. one is the one she's seeing with her own two eyes and also her understanding of people and also her optimism and belief that things can get better, which is that no matter the tangle of reasons Akua had for stepping onto this path, it's working. that Catherine's right in her theory that you cannot do those things without also becoming the kind of person who does those things, that trying will inevitably shape you, is right, and it's working, and Akua WILL become a better person no matter her initial conviction that she can fake it.

the second is that Akua is successfully faking it. Catherine does not really have a detailed model for this, I don't think, it's just an "if I'm wrong". because trust is not blind, and Catherine knows she's taking a risk, and as she's affording Akua increasing chances, increasing freedom, every time she's staking more and more on whether she's right and Akua will, in fact, fix herself in this way.

and that is an important part of the arc and the theme and the whole story of Akua fixing herself, which is that she's fixing HERSELF. Catherine's contribution is - leaving lit beacons along the road she's inviting Akua to walk. every time it's her choice. every next step is a choice Catherine is inviting her to make, usually not explicitly but simply by taking her at her word from way back when and assuming that she will do the right thing. and time after time, Akua does.

there is so MUCH to this, so much that was done right, but I've already spent half the post on this -

back to themes.

the cycle of violence. the systems that generate it. trust and the ability to get better. those aren't separate.

Those are all the same story, and the way Akua personifies them is exactly how the story goes. The place she's from is a key part of the cycle of violence that Catherine and her faction are trying to break, the damage she's done is a big ass example of why no-one has managed to break it before, and the way Catherine and hers are trying to make things better is by building trust.

And Akua as a representative representative of this system goes from being a prisoner of war to being something of an ambassador in that. At the climax of her arc the cycle closes and she is back home, she is back with the system that'd birthed her, and she is given power that she had strived for once, more of it than she could have really had without the intervening events including her defeat. Having been elsewhere, having seen how things are and can be, having walked down the road she'd once asked, challenged and demanded to be allowed to walk, she is back and she gets to choose what to do now.

And she does the right thing.

And this is not the end of the story, because there's more to the cycle of violence than just Praes and there's more to Akua than just the kid from it. She's a person and she wants more and she's given up that power she'd so craved in the process of putting things in place to be fixed - for other people to fix, who are better placed than her to do it right -

and she wants more and the story is not done yet.

The story is not done until the new system snaps in place fully.

(There is an amount of... cheating? that PGTE does here - the setting's mechanic of narrativium makes status quo god with a lot of force required to change things, but once you do change them, the new status quo you've formed becomes god. Things are less fluid than reality, and change one person, one group of people can effect is far more profound and categorical, so long as they manage to effect change at all.)

...the story is not done until the new system snaps in place fully, and that is where Akua steps forward to lock the last piece in. She is the representative of villains even as she's the one of them who's managed to overcome, to fix herself, to put together the broken pieces, to see what was wrong with what had made her and how things could be better.

And she becomes the patron of those like her and like those who made her, in this new age. And the degree to which this is appropriate - well. I hope the disjointed rant above describes just how perfectly fitting it is.

Also, she and Catherine are gay as fuck, which is also appropriate on like five different levels but I'm too aroace for that analysis and I don't give that much of a shit. The way Catherine serves as a beacon and a mentor to Akua and the way Akua in turn steps forward to support her at the time when Catherine is both at her most broken and at her most impactful and needs the help more than anything, is far more important to me that the fact they also have sex after the ending.

Like, that's an important part of making the whole thing have a happy ending and making it be just and showing that the new status quo is really better, but I don't think it was even well handled as I've talked about in the post I linked at the start, so yeah.