Just finished watching the bastard son & the devil himself. Gonna try and write out my thoughts about it, sorry if it's a lot of nonsensical rambling.
What really got my attention about the show is the cycles of violence and abuse and the dynamics of war and oppression that were shown in the show. They don't talk about how the war between the Fairbornes and the Blood witches started. They don't talk about what the original reasons are for everything the two sides do. What the show does focus on is the actions they continue to take in the present and the real results of those actions as opposed to the imagined goals.
Nathan grows up being told he has something evil in him, grows up being treated with suspicion and fear and hatred all because of what his father had done. He grows to fear his own power and even his own emotions for the evil he believes they stem from. But his father was never a devil. His father killed countless Fairbornes, the most well known being at the Peace Massacre. He had tried to arrange peace talks but the terms the Fairbornes proposed were a barely-disguised means for what was basically cultural genocide of the Blood Witches. Marcus was getting revenge on endless amounts of horror inflicted on his people by the Fairborne council. And by doing so the Fairbornes gained a new reason to demonize the Blood witches. This was not Marcus's fault, the atrocities committed by the Fairbornes are entirely on their own heads. Marcus is not a "perfect victim", he attacks the people who attacked him, he's angry and violent and he left Nathan and his mother, but the show seems to make it pretty clear that he's not responsible for what the Fairbornes did in retaliation. I'm glad they did that and I'm glad they didn't make him out to be the bad guy just for fighting back, and at the same time I also like the way they handled showing the collateral of that violence through Ceelia. Ceelia was a survivor of Marcus's attack at Wolfhagen, she was a child and she was scared and she grew up and spent her life fighting the Blood witches. And she was one of the people treating Nathan with fear and suspicion. When she trained him she was violent and angry and harsh. She was abusive, to put it bluntly, and it was because of what Nathan represented. He reminded her of Marcus. She believed that she and the Fairbornes were in the right and were good and just and righteous and that they were justified in what they were doing to the Bloods. Except she saw that she was wrong, the basis for her beliefs was removed and she realized Soul was exactly what the Fairbornes claimed to be fighting against and she changes directions. As the show progresses, we see that instead of drawing from the hatred of the Hunters and the Fairborne, she switches to drawing from her own personal strength, her empathy and the people she loved and the confidence and convictions she'd built herself. She recognized Soul for what he was and she changed. This is really great when contrasted with Soul's story. Because he started out a survivor hiding scared in a closet like Ceelia. But he never had an ability to recognize when his perspective was wrong. Ceelia saw that the war was motivated by hate and fear and bigotry, and that going along with it only fed into that. Soul only saw that he needed to be more like Marcus to win the war, without ever seeing Marcus's reasons. So he went to greater and more horrific lengths to do what Marcus did, and became worse than Marcus had ever been. He became exactly the monster the Fairbornes thought of Marcus as. He was actively seeking to kill and destroy Blood witches and the collateral his mission caused was pretty clearly caused knowingly and intentionally.
There is also something to be said about Jessica and how she was so angry about a supposed devil killing her mother and father but ended up helping the real wolf and the real culprit for her mother's death. She is a uniquely horrifying character because it's so easy to understand why she became that way. Her mother's death was so horrible for her as a small child and she did everything possible in her power to fight back against that, but the only target and the only action within her reach was to abuse her brother, and she just never grew out of that pattern. I feel sorry for her just as much as I dislike her.
Marcus and Nathan's stories are also really interesting in comparison to each other. Nathan was bullied for being the son of Marcus and for potentially being a blood witch but because of also being treated like his anger made him evil he tried to suppress it. Of course because repression doesn't work long term and because bullying naturally makes people angry, Nathan lost control and attacked the people who had been hurting him, which the Fairbornes then used as proof that Nathan was dangerous. Marcus's story mirrors that in several ways. Marcus spends the rest of his life fighting and killing Fairbornes, mainly in revenge. Nathan becomes violent on only a handful of occasions, mostly in reaction to an injustice. He says after trying to kill Ceelia after Odette dies that there have to be consequences even though Ceelia wasn't the cause of Odette dying. Marcus seems to have the same view but slightly more extreme, but in contrast to his father, Nathan has people he loves that pull him back. Annalise repeatedly stops Nathan from getting consumed by his anger. When Nathan does end up killing someone, it's because he believed Kieran is going to attack Gabriel when he was actually trying to help, and Nathan is horrified by Kieran dying. What's also interesting is that Marcus left Nathan and his mother because he believed it would make them safer, and Nathan also tried to prevent Gabriel from coming with him to Wolfhagen, but Marcus never had contact with his family again while Gabriel came back. And throughout the show, Annalise repeatedly reminds Nathan that he is not his father, and Nathan's grandmother also tells him it doesn't matter if a person is Blood or Fairborne. Marcus sent Nathan alone to kill Soul and told him it was a chance to know who he was, but in the end it was Gabriel and Annalise that helped defeat him, with Annalise that killed him. There are repeated instances of people breaking the cycle of violence and oppression with Annalise killing her father and learning about the Blood's side of the story, with Ceelia breaking away from Soul, with Haley falling in love with Marcus and having a child together and not caring about Blood vs Fairborne, and with Nathan not choosing the path of his father.
Soul is great as a bad guy, he literally did so much trying to help the "his own blood will kill the wolf" prophecy get fulfilled that he became the wolf the prophecy was talking about.
What was shown of Gabriel's backstory is fascinating to me, Mercury's abuse and his response to it is shown in a way that feels really accurate. He struggles to get away from her and escape her control, but it seems like he might not have genuinely defied her until Nathan was in danger. There were others like him too, both before and after him. The one before him didn't do anything to help him, and he doesn't seem to have had much contact with the ones after him, but when he finally escapes for Nathan, he also promises to help the other boy get out, which is another way of breaking a cycle although it's not really connected to the main storylines of the show. It seems like the show could have done a lot with Gabriel's story if it had had more time to expand it.
The romance was great also, I hate love triangles so much and am always saying they should just be poly relationships and this show did that! Literally everything I've ever wanted.
TLDR: came for the poly queer relationship, stayed for the themes of cycles of violence and abuse. Also characters who break the cycles <3
