Y’know, if I ever had to choose between having Eda Clawthorne or Raine Whispers as an enemy, I’d choose Eda.
Eda has a soft heart. She’s very forgiving, collects strays, is genuinely good with and likes children, teens and creatures. She’s really fucking patient with people (if not processes or herself anyway), has a lot of compassion even for people who treat her like shit. She’s self sacrificing and can be persuaded out of the worst of that particular strength because she has the wisdom and heart to let herself. Eda has…a lot of mercy in her. She doesn’t need to have it, and perhaps even shouldn’t because of how she’s been treated. But in the same way that someone like Hunter starves for life and bleeds rebellion and reckless love, Eda has mercy.
Raine is a lot of very good things too. Heartbreakingly brave, for one. Charismatic, funny, competent—but they’re also a stone cold, really efficient double agent who survived under Belos and even Terra Snapdragon’s nose for a while. They are the steel spine of the resistance. They are capable of making the ugly bloody, hard choices in service of a successful rebellion.
They were able to soldier past the horrific situation with Hunter—or risk severely compromising the mission. They started up the resistance with almost no support and gave themselves up to a grim death willingly with no expectation of quarter from Darius or Eber. They concocted a plan to invade the Emperors mind. They had the fortitude to look Eda, someone they LOVE, in the eye and ask her if she’d sacrifice a principle she held as dearly as her own identity.
Everyone has had to bear up under the differing burdens of rebellion against Belos. But I do think Raine’s could stand to be discussed a bit more because they’re fascinating, and so hardcore and in some ways quite brutal—not just with the stakes, consequences of mistakes (hollow mind for example) but with their own heart. Raine is a good person, a heroic person. And the choices they feel they have to make, the stuff they chose to carry because perhaps no one else could are crushing.
They did all of this while actively playing the fool for Belos. Pretending to be a puppet.
All this on a character whose design suggests gentleness, an easy warm smile on a slight, gently spoken figure who abjures the spotlight.
So there’s something bone deep and disturbing that the person who was willing to go down with their lover back to back in an act of rebellion that they requested her aid on turned into a literal puppet by the power of a god child—only for their enemy, the political antagonist, the monster they’ve been directly evading comes once again to take actual, full and unbending possession of them.
Belos owes a massive karmic debt to MANY. But Eda and Hunter have gentle hearts. Raine im not so sure if gentle is a word for them, and where an enemy might expect hesitation or mercy from the other, Raine seems the sort to be capable of making—and executing—on the hardest things.
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