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Continued yapping about Resurrection (because I said so):

The mutual issue that Skulduggery and Valkyrie have in book 10 is that they both place the other on a pedestal of perfection while simultaneously degrading themselves.

For example, Skulduggery views Valkyrie as someone who is fundamentally good but sometimes screws up and himself as someone who is fundamentally evil and tries to be good but fails whenever Valkyrie isn’t around to remind him what good is, hence the past six years where he’s been helping build a goddamn dictatorship. He also killed a guy who was investigating said dictatorship. Not to mention how he acted when Valkyrie turned into Darquesse in LSoDM, meaning that he has a lot of reasons for why he thinks that way about himself.

Meanwhile, he’s known Valkyrie for literally twelve years at that point, and she has always tried to be a good person and help as many people as possible (and for the most part, she has succeeded). And since Skulduggery tries his best to be good, Valkyrie is a person he can actually look up to and depend on, and he puts so much emphasis on that in Resurrection, to the point where it actually starts to drive her back.

And the REASON it drives her back is because she puts him on a pedestal too. To her, he’s an incredibly powerful sorcerer who’s capable of doing what needs to get done and keeping on going, no matter what. This is in opposition to how she sees herself, where she has weird powers she doesn’t know how to use, she’s too scared and traumatized to keep pushing forward, and most of all, she’s semi-responsible for the deaths of over a thousand people and that fact crushes her. It’s what makes her feel like she deserves to die, that she deserves the glares she gets whenever she goes outside and the beatings that people give her in random alleyways.

And seeing Skulduggery put so much trust and faith in her even when she views herself as worthless is scary because she feels that she’ll mess everything up when he’s fully capable of fixing the problem all by himself. And so when a problem arises that makes him disappear and forces Valkyrie to take charge of the situation, she spends a significant amount of time telling herself that everything is fine and that Skulduggery doesn’t need her.

The problem is that both of them view the other as something close to perfect, or as close to perfect as a person can be. And that causes a lot of miscommunication between them because they refuse to sit down and actually talk about their problems with each other. It takes fucking Russian roulette for these two to look each other in the eye and even admit that there is a problem.

Another issue with Skulduggery that I think manifests a bit in book 10 is that to admit that Valkyrie has raging fucking depression and actually needs help, he also needs to properly come to terms with the fact that the way he treated her as a teenager was awful. I could go on for hours about literally how bad he was for her, but it can really be summarized as using her as a child soldier. And to come to terms with that, he also has to then reflect on the issues with their relationship and to fix them, if they even can be fixed.

And the idea that your entire relationship with a loved one is built on abuse is a really scary one, and I think he wanted to skirt around it as best he could. But it’s kind of Valkyrie’s main problem, and he does eventually realize that, even if the two of them still refuse to go to goddamn therapy (hence his conversation with Omen in Bedlam. Absolute wild thing to talk about with a fifteen-year-old).

HEY FELLAS I DIDN’T INTEND FOR THIS TO BE SO LONG AGAIN