This Post Was Probably Stating The Obvious But I Wanted To Talk About Them Anyways - Tumblr Posts

More thoughts about Valkyrie and Nefarian, specifically related to SoW.

By the time book 13 rolls around, Nefarian has never actually cared about anyone (by his own admission). He doesn’t love anyone, he’s selfish, and he likes to press people’s buttons, that’s the persona he plays. But Valkyrie does not take his bullshit and handles him in such a way that it becomes a fun back-and-forth for them.

And so the idiot gets emotionally adopted by her and now they’re friends, and Nefarian has to deal with actually learning to care about someone and how to handle those emotions for the first time in his life.

And now getting to the point of this post, the book doesn’t really discuss how Nefarian handles this, so I’m going to talk about it (and probably state the really obvious in the process). Nefarian becomes really, really hungry for attention from Valkyrie, even more so than his general “I’ll be a bitch so people focus on me”. Like, when they’re standing at the wall, he’s literally going “Valkyrie Valkyrie Valkyrie are you paying attention to me” while Valkyrie has to tell him that she can hear everything he’s saying, she’s just ignoring him. He also tries to divert her attention and/or affection away from her friends (most notably Skulduggery) and towards him. Does this work at all? Hell no, and she tells him that. But it’s really interesting to watch him actually fight for the attention of a singular person.

And thinking about why he learns to care about her is really fun to think about as well. Because a lot of their interactions in the beforehand part of SoW was Valkyrie disrespecting him and projecting how much she hates herself and views herself as evil onto objective reality. And Nefarian can see this woman perfectly fine; he knows damn well she’s not evil. But for whatever reason he sees her being all “I’m an evil person and all those war crimes are my fault, I’m a worse person than Skulduggery” and immediately goes to “hm. friend material”. This has…so much potential for backstory stuff, as well as being really funny to watch.

And watching Valkyrie go from “hey am I allowed to murder this guy” to “guys stop bullying him” was hilarious. I really hope we see more of them in phase 3 because they are such a funny duo and I like turning them around in my head.