#segyar

One thing I thought was really cool was the handling of Segyar and Naisa’s illiteracy; most fanfic erroneously assumes they can read, even though the show has repeatedly (if subtly) shown that they can’t. It’s not at all that they’re stupid or incompetent, as the rest of the fic shows. It’s that for most of history, most people were never given the opportunity to learn to read, and that farm purples were one of the last groups to be affected by mass literacy. Emina can read, of course, but Emina is not exactly an average purple.

Hi, anon! I am always excited to talk about TDC, tbh, but I do disagree that showing this is a problem.

One, people die all the time on this show. Naisa’s children were killed, even. Incredibly brutal things happen, and if you don’t want to watch it then I totally get that, but at this point I feel like we kind of know to expect a certain amount of misfortune to befall our heroes.

Two, the reason it’s good for the baby to be with segyar is that 1) segyar will make sure nothing happens, as I am sure none of us want the baby in question to die, and 2) segyar will absolutely try to get the child back to their original parents as soon as it’s safe to do so, she would never ever keep someone’s child apart from them unless it were absolutely necessary. 

Three, we don’t even know whose baby they are, or whether the mother is actually separated from them? Literally all we know is that the baby has yellow hair and that Segyar is watching them (and that Segyar seems to have left the palace at some point), so if the mother is Tayaran or someone, then for all we know, they both left the palace, and Segyar is just helping watch the kid while they both hide out from whoever is probably chasing them. 

Four, if Segyar is the baby’s sole caregiver, I still don’t think that’s a bad thing to show, necessarily? Someone has to keep the baby safe in the midst of all the Dramatic Murders. Obviously Segyar is not an ideal person to do that, but I feel like the whole show is really about playing the hand you’ve been dealt as best you can, even when it’s a bad hand. So this is a really thematically appropriate arc, in that respect.

Five, I absolutely don’t think that it’s wrong to write about something you haven’t experienced yourself. That would make it wrong for green writers to write about any conflict that was specific to purples or greys (green writers are really unlikely to have lost a family member in combat, for instance!), and yet the world would be a much poorer place if none of those stories could ever be written or have big-budget adaptations, I think.