shieldofrohan: Art by Ellaine on dA (Smile)
Éowyn ([personal profile] shieldofrohan) wrote in [community profile] thecircus 2015-12-08 06:28 pm (UTC)

Tom is, as you know, Éowyn's goddamn nemesis. I think part of that is that he's been a safe target for her anger - he's close enough to Capitolite that she can aim some of her frustration at him, but still an offworlder, so hating him openly hasn't been something that would brand her a traitor. She isn't aware that's why she hates him, though, because that would require more self-examination than Éowyn usually goes in for.

Her excuse for hating him (besides that he's a stuck-up sociopathic asshole) is mostly to do with Aragorn. She already hated him for turning Aragorn in, and that was made 10000% worse when Aragorn died permanently in the very next Arena. She's come to the conclusion that the Capitol killed him off because of his rebel activity, and therefore indirectly because of Tom.

The thing with Éowyn is that she deals with grief by seeking vengeance. And in the case of her castmates, she couldn't have vengeance against the people who actually killed them (the Capitol), because she was already doing everything she could to undermine them anyway. So all that anger and grief and hate got transferred onto Tom, even more so because he killed her and failed to save Arya. (She's still very angry at that, because if he'd just left well enough alone or, conversely, if they'd killed one another faster, Arya might have won and got out of the Games. She also isn't entirely sure he didn't do that on purpose, because he certainly got a lot out of Arya dying)

In a lot of ways, Tom is someone she really needs right now, because he's such an unapologetic asshole that she could go on hating him, and I think if she didn't have that immediate hate to keep her going, she would either have gone mad or done something really stupid by now.

Some of it is tied up with Arya, but the truth is, she wouldn't mind him and Molotov being Arya's pseudo-parents if she didn't hate them both so much. She only sees him as competition because they're so ideologically opposed; if he wasn't her enemy, she'd be perfectly happy to let him be Arya's adoptive dad and just be a sister (which is how she thinks of her relationship with Arya anyway). But she does hate him. So very much. So screw him.

Her hatred for Jason is much cooler and less personal. Like, she still hates him, don't get me wrong. But she hates him less for who he is and more for what he is: an avatar of the Capitol, and someone who exemplifies everything she hates about this place. And tied up in that is a kind of weird pity, because he's genuinely pathetic to her: he's self-centred and childish and he's never been free. She thinks of him kind of like a badly-behaved dog: it's not his fault he's an idiot, it's the way he was raised and the influences of his society, but that doesn't mean it's okay or that she has any patience for it. And eventually, he's going to have to be put down.

She finds it very ironic that he looks down on offworlders, given how pathetic he is. She can't take him seriously. She gets annoyed by him, and she hates him, but she can't actually herself to see him as enough of a threat (or important enough) to count him as an actual enemy. She'd kill him if she could, and she wouldn't regret it, but she wouldn't risk her own life to end his, which she definitely would for Tom. Part of her also thinks that he's such a pathetic human being that letting him live might be a more fitting punishment.

Bayard, like most of the children here, is someone she feels a sense of responsibility towards. She doesn't feel particularly close to him (they've only talked a few times, after all), but she is grateful to him: he helped to ground her when they met after she arrived, and that meant a lot. Mostly, she just wants to protect him from the war and bloodshed around them, because no child should have to live through that.

Post a comment in response:

If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting