The 
gutter minded will not stop me using cum
You may take that as out of context as you need to.
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Thank you, because I definitely did when I read the email.
You all bring me so much joy. 
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Okay, the next scene we get with Tidus and the Puppy absolutely needs to start with Tidus asking “You sold Midnight Thunder? Why?”
And then taking a bit for anybody who isn’t in the tread to find out that it is actually the name of the horse
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Please remember the size changing boots were a gift from Oliver, she didn’t think about that
Having quick change clothing is not something a lot of people think about, it’s a gimmick at best for normal people
Some former spies and bad guys admit to using them, but for everybody else it’s a trope
Heck even trying to find out how to make them is kind of a secret, it’s a magic trick
Trust me, I’m still on the devolving stage for my quick change from our girl to her male form,
~~ I am not even going to bother trying to have it done in time for con this year, less than two weeks is not enough for me
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I live to bring chaos.
Occasionally joy, but mostly chaos.
I really wonder what would happen if the Red Guard ever managed to actually grab hold of our girl and tried to read her memories.
Imagine the absolute hilarity. “There’s no Raven Queen, we’ve all been punked by a snot nosed brat who’s been running around and playing us for absolute fools.”
I feel like they would not accept it 
The Raven Queen had to continue for the egos of all the people who’ve been scared by her.
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People struggle with the idea that sometimes doing something bad can be the only good option by dint of being less bad than the worse option.
People are angry that he didn’t find a way around it. They’re angry that he broke her trust. They want to believe that he had options beyond what he had.
It also doesn’t help that Thaddeus isn’t a morally good character which means people are more willing to tear him to shreds over this and find stuff to point fingers at. And the conversations they had after she had her mind wiped and he was trying to act normal - possibly a bit too successfully. But that, again, is a protection because if he acts weirdly it can cause dissonance and lead to the same scenario again.
I completely understand Siobhan hating him. She’s his victim.
I think for the readers it’s more of an instinctive revulsion of his actions coupled with the fact that he seems in control of himself, even though he feels trapped. We don’t know the consequences of him not upholding his vows, or if it’s even possible.
Some people just genuinely think he should have killed himself before going after Siobhan (if even that’s an option once the vows are triggered!).
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Yes, to him changing memories is bad, but it’s also something normal. For her it’s a horrible violation, and in this case it also almost killed her… the experience was so traumatic that it ended up creating another split in her Will.
Out of the whole ordeal the thing that upset him the most by a long shot is remembering that he is a slave to his vows, not what it made him do.
And I don’t think he was unable to try to steer the conversation in another direction before in went too far.
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Could he have, short of refusing to talk about aberrants to anyone as a rule? He was seemingly compelled to investigate the moment Siobhan asked the question.
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This is the best description of the situation so far. Thank you! It’s difficult to put into words exactly why people hate him now.
I’ve had a feeling since book two that he would do something absolutely awful to her… but I figured that it would be out of avarice or convenience, not compulsion. In my view that makes it better. Motives matter. They don’t excuse anything, but… yeah.
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It’s something normal for him because the Red Guard has made him do this so often that he’s become inured to it. This is their modus operandi. It is all, supposedly, for the greater good.
There’s been this undercurrent throughout the series that knowledge is dangerous. Even in Myrddin’s journals where he talks about how before he would have used a large scale divination but now he’s afraid of what it would reveal - even unto the final chapter of the book where the creature inside Siobhan laughs at her and points out that the spell causes understanding and uses that to pull her into her memories.
But he was upset at what he had to do. He was angry about it. Not just because he was forced but because he didn’t want to do it to Siobhan.
That’s part of why she gets away with so many of her secrets intact - he refused to strip her or to attach his mind to hers to directly view her memories. He refused to go through her bag to find its secrets. He justified this to the vow as “unnecessary”, “dangerous” and “likely to raise suspicion” respectively. He was happy when he realised he forgot to ask her how she came to her conclusions so there was even more that he left behind for her.
He could have stripped her curiosity from her. He could have stripped her Will from her. But he refused to do either, despite knowing that she might well come across this knowledge again. He did just enough to remove the knowledge from her so that he wouldn’t be forced to kill her.
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I think part of it is also that - despite how amazing she is - we see Siobhan as weak and Thaddeus as strong.
We’re more accepting of the weak having to do what they must to survive but are less accepting of it in someone strong. In fact, reading some of the comments, it felt like people couldn’t accept that Thaddeus was weak and under someone else’s power.
There’s an element of hating the strong character for oppressing the weak one without acknowledging that he, too, is a victim.
And yes, part of it is because Siobhan is the main character. We were with her as she was chased, twisting and fighting and just barely getting away. We saw her make a deal with her inner demon to get away by casting impossible magic - and it still wasn’t enough.
The horror, the rage, the frustration when he finally caught her, the unfairness of it all, that’s also colouring people’s perception of Lacer.
It’s not rational, but it’s human.
Edit: for the record, despite my sympathy for him, if Siobhan had used his blood to curse him I would have supported her and cheered her on. My morality is very skewed.
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I think too, this group read the Patreon version of the book. In that version, Lacer seems to have more free will.
I was on the typo hunting team and the portrayal now emphasizes slightly more Lacer’s inability to fight the curse.
He’s not even certain why the oath hard-codes this behavior. In his mind, the Red Guard is a failing institution, and he wishes he could have Siobhan’s help instead of upholding the oath.
The new material also slightly emphasizes that during the fight he subconsciously was trying to have her escape (he entirely allowed himself to be tricked by Siobhan’s illusion), which helps emphasize the compulsion’s severity.
It’s maybe a 1- 2% difference, but Lacer’s attitude focuses slightly more on doing the absolute minimum the oath requires, and while that’s horrible for Siobhan, he’s coming across more sympathetic.
Frankly, it seems that if Lacer could split his will, he’d rip that oath out by the roots, much the way S. fights the memory modification.
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Mmm, I did read the original version and I felt that it was fairly obvious from the beginning that he hated what he was doing (I think I have long comments about this somewhere ) and loathed being under control.
But yes, Azalea emphasised it further in the final edit.
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… I believe at some point she has a bit of self reflection and she’s like [oh, wow, I am a cold hearted b*tch, how do I feel about that?/meh, lacer is a jerk and look at how cool he is! So maybe me being a bitch isn’t so bad… But maybe I should try to be nicer to those who I dream worthy of it yah?]
I want to point out that’s she’s so busy with the external crap in her life, or trying to be perfect, she doesn’t seem to believe she needs to grow
One of the things that Azalea is good at is having relatable problems.
Trust me, I know people in their 40s/50s who still haven’t had an ego blowing humbling moment,
Why should they change? They are perfectly happy with how their life is…
By the end of book 4 our girl had only started to stop running around with her head chopped off
However, something else happened by the end of book four that is prob also subtlety effecting our girl
There’s a quiet theme in the series, magic responds to the popular desires, the red guard and university seem to be trying to guide magic (to a favorable way to them)
I know somewhere I have made a joke
Let me say it in a different way
This seems less of a practical guide to sorcery and more of a “how to accidentally become a godling”
… How much is the general populations beliefs effecting our poor girl?
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I disagree about Siobhan being emotionally flat.
She’s still paranoid, yes, still suspicious, still more comfortable with trades than accepting kindness. But she is the product of her upbringing.
She’s been betrayed by almost every single person she’s ever loved or trusted.
Her mother abandoned her when she decided to cast through her flesh - and then keep casting.
It doesn’t matter why she did it - to a child it’s just a betrayal. Emotionally, it will always be a betrayal no matter how much she can rationalise it and understand it.
Her grandfather trapped a nightmare inside her head and took away her memories. Yes, to protect her, but you can see how much that has scarred her from the way she would prefer death to having it happen to her ever again.
Her father went from being a (presumably) decent enough parent when her mother was alive to abandoning her to her grandfather, coming back later and then dragging her around here, there and everywhere, running cons, sleeping around and finally selling her off in marriage to a family she knew nothing about and giving away her last memento of her mother. Even after all that she struggled to give him up until she thought that he sold her mother’s gem and replaced the celerium with a fake. It was wrenching to watch her throw that all away and come to terms with the fact that the loving father she wanted was just a child’s wish and not someone who existed anymore.
In Oliver she saw the same patterns repeating and acted based on her fear of betrayal - she saw the slyness, the smug self satisfaction and it triggered alarms in her brain because she’d seen the same signs in Ennis before. She made a lot of assumptions based on that because of her inability to trust and fear of being taken in. Let’s not forget that she genuinely liked and trusted Oliver and was at least a little bit infatuated with him and this likely scared her all the way off because she was terrified he’d be another Ennis.
She trusted Thaddeus Lacer as well. He was her hero before she came to university, he was the reason she got into university and he helped her with seemingly no benefit to himself at several points. He spoke to her relatively freely, even letting her know things she shouldn’t, things that could incriminate him. He was a father figure in many ways - and then he punished her for asking questions by chasing her down, beating her and stripping away all her defences and taking her memories and tampering with her mind. (Yes, he has reasons for all of this, but the feel of it is terrible).
Despite all of this, she has still grown emotionally to the point that she goes to Oliver for help instead of trying to do everything by herself.
Her aloofness is a defence mechanism from her childhood. But she’s still made friends and acknowledged them as such. She’s even given away some of her hard earned coin to help others - and this is from a girl who starved so badly she ate rats and tried to eat a stray dog. She knows hunger and poverty intimately but is still willing to part with a portion of her security in order to help others.
She has many biases and she’s been trying to tackle them since the beginning of the series - blood magic, the conversation about nulls with Oliver, causes for Aberrants, the nature of magic, the quality of education in Silva Erde - she’s actively trying to remember that just because something is common knowledge doesn’t make it true. She’s also become much kinder to her friends despite them all being nobles and her having prejudice against them at the start. She did take Ana’s criticism on board and it genuinely bothered her and inspired change in her.
She’s worked on making her appreciation more apparent. She’s patient with other students even when she finds them incompetent. She shows kindness to animals and children and generally anyone who’s “weaker” than herself who she can’t trade with.
The trading and transactional nature are also a defence mechanism, btw. It comes from a life where if you accept something without knowing what the strings attached are then you’ll find out later and it will always be the worse for you. Better to trade and know what you’re giving up and what you’re getting in exchange up front. You never want to put yourself in someone else’s power. It’s why she’s so relieved when Oliver says he could use a favour from her later in exchange for his help with the current crisis. It puts her at ease because it balances the scales between them.
Siobhan is desperately in need of love and therapy. Instead what she has is two lives, a critical lack of rest - not even sleep! - and constant danger hanging over her head.
Look at the other characters whose growth you’ve pointed out - Alec was comic relief, sure. But he always had a soft side to him and that’s implied to be the reason his father was so cruel to him. He’s lightened up since his abusive father was removed from his life.
Damien also has an abusive father, but he was largely sheltered because his older brother looked after him and ran interference. He was a good kid so it doesn’t take much to put him on the right track and he’s had his worldview massively shifted by realising the forces of good can get up to some seriously nefarious shit. That’s played a massive role in his development.
Thaddeus has always wrestled with his vows. That’s part of why he ended up at the university (implied) and why he’s been punished so much by the Red Guard. His character development has been more regarding Sebastien and his unhappiness in seeing himself reflected in his apprentice and how it brings up his own memories of unhappy childhood and abuse (implied).
Unlike Siobhan all of these people are living one single life, getting plenty of sleep and rest (well, usually) and generally getting periods of downtime.
She hasn’t got a single person she can be honest with. She’s not even in her real body most of the time. She’s under so much stress it’s unreal. You want to talk about emotionally flat? Her whole confrontation with the Red Guard at the end of the book was emotionally flat - because she was numb. She’s so broken right now it’s unreal, and it screams at me from the pages. There have been times where you can feel her working herself into a mental breakdown. The whole beamshell arc was an example of her avoiding her problems by trying to mask the symptoms and you could just feel her winding tighter and tighter as she did everything to avoid her grief and terror.
No, no, I do not agree that Siobhan is emotionally flat. Avoidant, overwrought and unforgiving? Yes. Flat? Not at all.
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But we do.
Damien has gone from irritant to useful idiot to friend to “if Damien turned out to be an aberrant would I be able to make myself kill him?” and musings over if this is what it’s like to have a brother.
She had a whole tearful moment where she realised she was lying to him like Oliver was lying to her and she was trying to apologise and acknowledge that even as she realised she could not come clean.
When he spills her secret to Thaddeus she’s not angry with him, she takes his words on faith that he was trying his best and she subtly asks him if he spilled a larger secret. When she comes back she confides in him what she can.
When she’s literally dying she thinks about him and his safety and casts magic to change her form so she can alert him to danger. She’s literally dying with her mind tearing itself apart and she thinks of his safety.
She lets him take her home and look after her.
In a moment of paranoia she wonders if Damien will betray her only to realise that she’s betraying him and she likens herself to Ennis, one of the people - if not the person - who’s hurt her the most in life.
She’s deeply avoidant. She suppresses her feelings and tries not to think about them. Even so, it’s very clear how her feelings for Damien have changed massively since the beginning of the story.
Edit: she also lets him touch her, which is huge. She only lets a very few people touch her - Oliver, Ana, Damien and Sharon. Liza to an extent. She’s very touch avoidant.
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Without him asking for help in the warehouse attack she would not have been in the position she is now. That single night has caused Siobhan so much hurt since then, she had to fight so hard just to survive he better be feeling responsible.
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I read your edits:
Siobhan spends so much time hiding herself and her history that she avoids asking personal questions of others before she doesn’t want to lie about them herself.
She also has a lot less mental energy to worry about other people because she’s drowning herself.
She told Damien multiple times that he could put off the research, that he needed rest - she pulled him aside and said she’d do whatever she could to help him. There was the whole conversation about bribing the teachers if he was in danger of failing.
She also mentioned that she started having to remind him to eat more. There was a scene before their exams where she told him the faster he eats the faster he can take a nap and then she puts her jacket over him and watches over his rest and makes sure he gets to his exam on time.
She paid for his meal at an expensive restaurant because she knew he had no money. We know how much she winced at the prices before. But she did it for him without him having to ask because we know she feels guilty for him taking on this project.
But Damien might be having financial difficulties now, but to solve it all he has to do is wait until his next influx of pocket money. For him poverty is wearing last season’s suits and selling his horse for extra cash.
He has a roof over his head. His family is paying for his education. He’s not going to go hungry.
His father sucks, but he’s never told Siobhan the details and she knows that he loves his older brother and that Titus looks after him.
Who do you think is going to feel more emotional in a relationship? The person with a lousy father but wonderful brother who’s never known hunger or wanted for anything, or the person who’s lost everything, known hunger so intimately that they’ve eaten rats and who’s still operating on survival mode expecting to lose everything at some point.
Obviously Damien will feel more, be more horrified, have the emotional bandwidth to think about Sebastien more.
Then there’s her relationship with Oliver. Again, she’s not demonstrative with her feelings - even in her head she tries not to think about things. We know she had feelings for Oliver because she did - once - acknowledge how good looking he was and she lingers over his appearance and focuses on his actions in a way she doesn’t for anyone else. She blushed when his hands brushed against her while putting feathers in her hair and then she ran off to suppress that and tell herself not to be a brainless ninny. She let him hold her hand when she was shaken and needing comfort. She lets him touch her more than pretty much any other character.
She enjoys his company, but she was always afraid of the smooth talking charm he displayed because, again, Ennis. She reminded herself over and over that she wasn’t special, that he treated everyone with the same attention. She persuaded herself that gifts were just a negotiation tactic to make her feel more generous towards him.
But still, she did care. Because we saw how much it hurt her when she thought he’d betrayed her. When she went back to him to tell him about Osham and he tried to ask if she was doing well she ended up hurting and asking (internally) what right he had to act like he cared.
Siobhan is not like other characters in the books. She’s not honest with herself, despite her telling herself that she tries to be. She’s very guarded. You have to look at what she does, not what she thinks.
In her mind she’s very rational, calculating and selfish. In reality she tries to save everyone around her if she thinks it’s possible. She hears a call for a healer and runs. She tries to avoid sacrificing stray dogs and castrates them instead. Rather than putting the Undreaming Order on the right track and then vanishing she’s actually spending time with them and helping them and getting people educated.
She took the death of the man she couldn’t save so deeply to heart that she remembers his name - Jameson - and always makes sure she has some Humphrey’s adapting solution to hand, despite its relatively short shelf life.
In fact, since he died, she’s thought about him nearly every single book.
The last thing I want to mention is that although she knows running away will be safer and is almost inevitable at this point, Siobhan really doesn’t want to leave the people she’d come to care about. There was a painful, desperate line:
Something in her chest squeezed painfully, as if she really might just disappear, without the support and structure of the life she had built here. She would be entirely alone.
Beyond losing access to university she doesn’t want to lose her friends. That’s what’s hurting her the most, and we know how desperate she was to learn and get into university.
It’s huge emotional growth from someone who was determined to go, learn, keep her head down and not make any friends at the very start of the series.
I have some arguments about the fight with Thaddeus but I’ll keep that to another comment 
Alright, the fight with Thaddeus:
Let’s go through it bit by bit:
He tries to hit her with a paralysis spell that will put her body to sleep. This would have had the fight over in one shot with no issues if it had succeeded.
It didn’t work because the thing in her head screamed at her with waking nightmares causing her to flinch away so the spell didn’t hit her full on and it gave her raven magic a chance to fight it off.
He knocked her down while waiting for the spell to take effect and softened the ground underneath her so she would sink in and not be able to fight him so well.
She turned her shadow into a needle of cold and jammed it into his ear, giving him vertigo which, as he mentioned, is extremely effective against thaumaturges. It didn’t trigger any automatic defence because how do you ward against a shadow?
She managed to throw him off her and run down the corridor. He can’t divine her because of her magic. She sent a decoy for him to chase to buy herself time.
She levelled up her anti divination ability by getting her shadow to absorb that magic. He managed on the fly to figure out a way to find her anyway. He then tunnelled directly through rock to get to her position - bearing in mind she’d gone quite far already!
She chucked some spells, potions and rocks at him. He conjured up a suit of armour from the ether to protect him and let his passive defences handle the rest.
He threw a spell at her that was so powerful it broke her warding amulet. The next spell wasn’t one she could deflect because he was guiding it. She used her new magic absorption in her shadow to accidentally cut him off from his spell (she was trying to cut his line of sight but she ended up severing him from his own spell, which makes perfect sense considering the concepts she’s putting into her shadow but is also really freaking powerful and very much spooked Lacer).
She hid and distracted Lacer with her shadows and illusions and then…stayed put instead of running off down another tunnel. I think this is because she was so scared of him hearing her or detecting her in some way but it wasn’t the most strategic move.
He tunnels through rock and ends up practically on top of her - minus the armour which he had to drop while tunnelling. She stabs him in a way she really shouldn’t have been able to (the void that is her shadow is really good at doing things that shouldn’t be possible) and this surprised him because she shouldn’t have been able to stab him in the knee. She also shouldn’t have been able to take the knife out afterwards. But again, how do you stop a shadow?
She runs off while he heals himself. She hits him with the Dazzler she’s been powering up which throws him off balance a bit because he wasn’t expecting that. She then throws her detached shadow at him so the creature can attack him. It manages to make him bleed by attacking his face and trying to crawl inside him.
She makes a pact with her inner demon and leaves their plane of existence while he turns the air to treacle to stop her running away.
Thaddeus absolutely put on a good show. Against a normal person they would have been down in the first hit, no problem. Done, dusted.
It’s very much a case of “she might be weak, but she’s seriously unconventional”.
Things she had going for her that he had no idea about:
- A raven stopping her from sleeping
- A very over powered ward created by what I suspect was an archmage (her grandfather)
- Her shadow spell which she’s conceptually altered to work on magical energy as well as heat and light
- Her shadow spell which can be used to give him vertigo with how intensely cold it can become
- Her shadow spell which can slip past wards (and now can take things with it because of the void transmogrification concept she’s added to it)
- Her internal passenger who can see spells on the spirit realm before they’re cast which gives her a slight edge (because the thing doesn’t want to get caught, either)
- Her internal passenger who can take over her shadow and cause physical attacks
- Her internal passenger that can take her to the spirit realm and walk her through to a new place in the world
If you consider all of this, is it really so surprising that he struggled? He was expending huge amounts of energy just trying to find and catch up with her every time she got away. She was coming at him with things that shouldn’t be possible.
To me, narratively, none of it was unreasonable. She’s been working on her shadow for so long that this just felt like a natural progression. It’s the spell she’s always casting, the spell that jumps most immediately to her hand. The spell that has the most potential for growth.
If Siobhan had been facing almost anyone else, she would have escaped, unless they’d aimed to kill her immediately.
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I understand you wanting to present both sides, after all, I’ve been defending Oliver and Thaddeus for a long time in the comments.
My point was that I felt you missed a great deal of the nuance of Siobhan’s character when you say victories are too easy for her, that she hasn’t changed and that she hasn’t grown, that she doesn’t feel things for others.
She is constantly paranoid, preparing for every eventuality, and even then her preparations fall short. She obsesses over her failures and dissects them to improve in future. She practices obsessively - she has given up her sleep and gets in 8-10 hours of purposeful casting per day, in addition to constantly casting her shadow familiar spell.
It’s not that she’s the only smart person in the world and everyone else is a fool. It’s the fact that she thinks differently to other people, finding alternative solutions or jumping to ideas other people would never think of. That’s why she’s seen as a genius when she’s Sebastien. She’s closed the gap in academics going from barely passing to top ten percent to whatever her score will be in these exams.
She killed the rogue red guard agent out of her paranoid preparations - she knew that she put her life in danger to retrieve her belongings and that they could be used against her, so she made sure she could remotely get rid of her bag if she were to be separated from it. She didn’t realise the interaction it would have with the space bending magic and accidentally killed him and the people around him.
Preparation, hard work, reviewing her failures - this is why Siobhan wins. She works hard for her victories. As a reader, I have never felt that they were cheaply won. She’s pushed herself to the edge of breaking time and again.
With regard to your points on suffering, I will point out that I’ve mentioned the difference in her circumstances and Damien’s before. I suspect that if we had points of view from the various prostitutes and paupers in this story then they would likely be much more akin to Siobhan than Damien in their attitudes - do what you can to survive and focus on building security. Always wondering how people want to take advantage of them next. Always suspicious of kindness. That was basically my point.
She’s still in survival mode. She doesn’t feel safe. She does not have the luxury to indulge in her emotions - she’s trapped on a hamster wheel, running to keep up, using all her energy to gain power and knowledge before her time is up.
It is not about who suffers more or less, it is about the impact on their lives. Damien has space to breathe, Siobhan is drowning.
It’s important to understand the characters when you read them. This is why I sympathise with Oliver entirely - there was never a good time to reveal he stole the book. This is why I sympathise with Thaddeus - he chose the best of two bad options and he hates being trapped and forced into doing things he hates. And this is also why I sympathise with Siobhan, because I see the emotions she refuses to acknowledge or think about in the things she does.
I understand you wanting to make sure that people are fair to other characters, but you should be fair to Siobhan as well.
I’m sorry if you felt these replies were challenging, my intention was only to clarify things that I felt you had forgotten in your criticism of Siobhan. I’ve reread these books many times precisely because I love her growth - emotionally, academically and powerfully. I think it’s very worth the time to look at her in depth and really examine her. She might surprise you.
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