#filerelli

My brain trying to decide which OC to yap about:

So fuck it, I'm gonna talk about Alex and Caoimhe, my Hunter girls, and how they come to such different conclusions as hunters, with Caoimhe pursuing Redemption and Alex pursuing Zeal.

Caoimhe's first brush with the supernatural came way earlier, was deeply traumatising, and derailed her life entirely. Bad grades were hardly the end of the world - she had backup plans and would have happily moved to Ireland permanently - only for her mind to be shattered by the Delirium of witnessing Cormac’s Change and Simon's death, which led her into dropping out and ending up on the streets of London.

Alex's first brush came much later when her life was already effectively set and in order, and she had a framework of life set in place. She might have been an ROTC dropout, but that was the result of injury as opposed to flunking, she'd learned to play smart with investments which gave her resources, and she had her grandpa's shop. So when she was attacked by Perry, the event was traumatising but it didn't rip away the foundations of her life and her understanding of herself. Instead, it just made it clear to her that monsters are real and they are out to hurt her.

Yet Caoimhe inherently comes to be much more forgiving of Cormac because she has a prior relationship with him. She grew to love him in all the time they spent together, playing music and hiking in the Wicklow Hills, and she knew him well enough to know that whatever happened that day, it was beyond his control. He might get angry, but he would never actually have hurt Simon. In a way, his storming off was always about trying to keep himself from doing just that.

And having lived on the streets, been the undesirable 'other' and grown to mistrust the powerful, she instinctively distrusts the likes of Sister Judith who tells her that Cormac is beyond hope and needs to be destroyed by default. That sentiment then extends to other werewolves because she accepts that there's so much she doesn't know about them, and so Caoimhe decides to take a chance and be contrarian - she lets Eamon escape, making it clear that she means no harm. And the gamble pays off. She finds a friend and an ally in Eamon and gains new insight into the world of werewolves outside of savage beasts and rage. It gives her reason to believe that peace is possible.

Alex, however, had no prior relationship with Perry, the other Thinbloods, or Chastain. She only knows then as monsters, not people. When she encounters the Thinbloods during the search for the missing teenager, she only becomes more certain of the fact that vampires are inherently dangerous; Perry was the murderer, and the others keep protecting him despite the fact that he is clearly out of control and will kill again. They barely seem to care that he tried to attack her before or that he attempted to again. As far as Alex is concerned, they're more interested in usurping Chastain than they are with actually co-existing peacefully. A belief that is reinforced when Perry attacks her again and Kyra makes no effort to intervene.

And as for Chastain, Alec concludes that she's a corruption in the town, one that's manipulated her father, incited terror, and generally makes life worse for people. Even if she knows how to be subtle and avoids killing people, she's still a kind of rot, and one that needs to be removed so that she can't keep making peoples' lives worse.

And in the end, neither of them are really proven wrong. Caoimhe reunites with Cormac, they still love each other. He's changed, but so has she, and yet they still only have eyes for each other. He, Imane and Eamon proved that there's plenty of good to be found in monsters that choose to be better, and she's able to persuade Gray that Rory is not the saving grace of Glenkildove, but a poison that will destroy it. Dialogue is possible, being humane is possible, and while there will always be monsters in need of killing, some monsters just need the right help and the right allies.

She finds vampires who have never killed anyone, who don't want to hurt people and are constantly fighting to limit the damage they do so that she can help them find the best ways to do that. She goes with Cormac to Northampton and works with Broadbrook to protect communities, combat the monsters that need to be fought, and keep the mistakes of the past from playing out again. She wants to foster understanding and community because that's how she spent the last eight years of her life as an environmental activist - rallying and organising people is her whole deal.

However, Alex has seen just how poisonous the likes of vampires can be and how badly it hurts innocent people. Children were murdered, an innocent man was essentially drugged into implacable rage that killed other innocents and led to his death too, peoples' lives were ruined, and she was nearly killed on multiple occasions because of who her grandfather was. The path she walked only showed her monsters who had no interest in trying to limit the damage they did, who only desired control. By pursuing the Hunt and joining the Special Affairs Division as a consultant, she was taking back her control and combating the poisonous influence that ruined the lives of so many people.