#hivert

As an only child it's been wild for me to write any sibling relationships and trying to emulate any kind of understanding of what they're like. Best thing I did in the past couple years was developing Hivert's relationship with his sister (adoptive) Anais and seeing how they take care of each other in the absence of any loving parental figure. Especially when considering how deadpan and alike their mum Anais is, she defies that heritage by being a loving sister to the degree that she can.

Which makes it even wilder when I think about the unhinged dynamic between Dunya and Hivert as half siblings who both carry some sort of insane gene of competition and spite, how they only see each other as siblings when it can be used as a way to enforce their involuntary connection to each other as a method of near torture and mockery, and how no matter how I write them they never seem able to create any form of positive relationship to each other. The best they can hope for is some semi-amicable truce when Hivert is married to Lafayette (VileBile's oc) because he and Dunya have a far friendlier dynamic. Hell, the only reason she gets to know her niece is probably through Laf, and even then she's a fun aunt. She's not the family that's gonna show up and look after her niece because the parents are stressed out, that's something Anais does. Dunya really has a messed up association with family and I think any notion of forming familial bonds makes her so deeply uncomfortable, which is why she would rather have friends, enemies and lovers. But never family. She idealises the thought of being a mom someday, but I think the chances of her becoming a distant deadbeat are at a good 65% or so