He Gives Me So Many Thoughts I Think He's My Favorite Patho Character - Tumblr Posts

i used to talk about this a lot on twitter a few years ago but recently i’ve been thinking again about how little agency victor kain has both within the narrative and as an individual. specifically i think a lot about how his life after nina’s death is one in which he as a person plays very little role, and the fact that his duty as her husband (and as a kain) means that after she’s gone the nature of his family’s beliefs about the preservation of the soul keep him trapped by design in a grief that is necessarily all-consuming. if he wants to keep nina’s soul alive he can never progress beyond even the first stage of grief: every moment has to be dedicated to her and her memory; he has to be constantly reminded of her and the fact that she is dead. for him to move on would be for him to essentially kill her, so he can never even attempt to recover from her loss. his life has to revolve around the space where she was. in that way i see him as kind of a living shrine, a memorial whilst he’s alive and a vessel when he’s dead. his path is called the mistress! his entire life is explicitly devoted to someone who will take his body and return to life when he sacrifices himself for her! he’s working towards a utopia like the rest of his family, but who is it for? he lost his son in the pursuit of this thing which he will never get to see, and which seemingly never had a place for him at all. the kains’ utopia doesn’t even extend to their own.

all of this pains me particularly acutely because of how clear it is that victor does have interests and desires of his own, despite his implications that he is nothing more than a mouthpiece for his family. if you believe andrey, he doesn’t even want to be here: he wants to go back to the capital to finish his degree. i often see people talk about the kains as if they are one undifferentiated entity, but a lot of the quests ‘the kains’ give you are from victor, and i would argue that in most of those he is acting as an individual rather than necessarily a kain. he wants daniil to free the wrongfully imprisoned people; he acts against his family’s interests in rewarding clara for telling him about rubin. his letter to daniil on day 9 causes me agony for many reasons but in this context specifically because it doesn’t seem like he wants to die. georgiy appears pretty unfazed about being possessed by simon (although it’s georgiy so who knows) but victor, who has two children and has been one of the town’s rulers for presumably several decades, is telling a man he met just over a week ago that he is the only one to whom he can pass on anything meaningful. you could argue that he is just manipulating daniil here to persuade him to take up the kains’ cause, but i am of the opinion that he is being genuine in this case. he doesn’t want to die. he wants his family back again, but the only way they can be reunited is with his death. he wants to finish his degree. i am putting my head through walls