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Oh god Lavan is a much more spoiled less sympathetic Vanyek with much less reason to be so put upon (well until the school stuff). I am clearly not here for teenage angst. Also is this the whole life bonded weirdness that you all warned me about?

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From:

wychwood

Haha yes! I find him so frustrating at the beginning of the book - I mean, I sympathise with his not wanting to go into exactly the family business, but he doesn't really want to do anything else, either, he wants to ride around with his highborn friends and go hunting every day, that is not a reasonable life-plan, Lavan!! And even when his family are trying to find him something he'd like better - the caravan suggestion is pretty good, actually! - he's still so sulky about it.

From:

afuna

Yeah seriously. I get he doesn’t fit in and doesn’t want to be a cloth merchant. But then his family’s response is to say “okay but we don’t want you just lazing about doing nothing so how about you go to school and you can find something suitable to your interests and abilities”

And then it goes off the rails and totally understand he’s not happy. But before that oh *child* (he’s sixteen) chill it and grow up.

From:

wychwood

There's this weird alternation between his family being super-unhelpful and rather unkind, and them being completely normal and him being wildly unreasonable. It's sort of nice in that no one is really evil, but it does get a bit whiplash-y!

From: (Anonymous)

Ugh yeah you’ve totally hit it on the nose there

From:

afuna

That was me

From:

branchandroot

That's absolutely one of the points where Lackey flat-out frames lifebonding as mystical co-dependance, yeah. I felt a bit as though she made it specifically a lifebond in order to cut off any kneejerk 'omg bestiality', too, which is really unnecessary. This is certainly the point at which I just stopped putting any particular weight on lifebonds.

From:

afuna

Haha yeah. I wonder actually if that was Lackey’s intent? She’s going hard on the “no life bonds are not what you want them to be” thing

From:

wychwood

TBH I like that about lifebonds - it comes up quite a lot in the books, that people think they're this giant Romantic thing, but actually mostly it's about people who can't cope on their own! And of course they're obviously hugely meaningful for the people who experience them, still, but they're not all that desirable for outsiders, or shouldn't be.