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All That Remains + things that cannot be unsaid

This is exactly how I see Leandra too. There’s an element in there, of course she doesn’t HATE her children, but there’s such an incredible amount of resentment between her and her eldest child that to write it off as simply grieving is a misnomer, I think. 

I think it’s fairly clear that she resents Hawke for a number of reasons: knowing Malcolm better than she does (implied at the end of Legacy), failing to save him/acting as the head of the family despite the fact that she’s clearly not stepping into the role or even trying, the dead twin, etc. Moreover, I think it’s fairly obvious that Leandra and Malcolm were very much what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet hadn’t had a typically tragic ending: they were young, impulsive, and in “love,” but once you’ve given up everything, what does that really leave you with? A partner you barely know, who you’ve put all your trust into despite that, and despite however much Leandra says she puts love above all-else, we see even in her conversations with Gamlen that this very much isn’t necessarily the case, and she carries a lot of her bitterness with her. She wasn’t ready for what running away really meant, she was young enough to have very likely acted impulsively on a romantic ideal that didn’t pan out in any way she’d actually hoped.

It’s a really dysfunctional, bittersweet relationship, and I can’t at all blame Hawke for thinking this. Hawke’s already got a guilt complex a mile wide, no matter how you really play it; there’s a reason they take on all this responsibility that isn’t even necessarily theirs. With Malcolm, it’s all responsibility, and honor, and doing the right thing no matter how hard it is, and with Leandra, it’s all guilt, residual affects of growing jaded with where unchecked romance really leads.

She can be a caring figure, certainly, when she feels like it, but finding her to be a truly supportive one it a little harder for me, when she relies on her eldest child the way her younger children do. There’s such a lack of responsibility on Leandra’s part: something must always be someone’s fault, because surely SURELY there must still be some good left to come out of a foolish decision she made as a teenager. Their status in Kirkwall is Gamlen’s fault (which is true enough, but he DOES have a point in that she’s been away from home for 25 years; anything he does to drag the “family name” into poverty and squalor is his own doing, and while it’s hard to support his methods, he’s at least grown up enough to recognize the reality of his situation. Is Leandra’s anger at her brother entirely unjustified? No, but at the same time, she continually fails to recognize that she gave up her status, her family name, and her inheritances, and this attitude doesn’t come out of nowhere, suddenly rekindled after two decades of “hiatus.” It’s a failure to take responsibility. 

TL;DR, I seriously appreciate just how incredibly fucked up and dysfunctional Hawke family dynamics really are. It’s a family full of love that Hawke would and continually does put their life on the line for, but it’s not a healthy one. It’s not a supportive one. And I find it really telling that despite Malcolm’s questionable allegiances as an apostate, it’s THIS name that Hawke chooses to symbolize and hang onto, despite the fact that Leandra is clearly very ready to step back into the role of a noble that she’d “left behind.” Is it any surprise that Hawke seems so used to the responsibility, so easily stepping into the role as head of household when their parents are so embittered, disillusioned, and in Malcolm’s case, paranoid and uncommunicative?

Hawke’s so used to being the parent, being the one to take up responsibility that of course it’s going to kill them when they fail; they’ve been conditioned to impossible responsibility and the constant looming threat of guilt.

This depth makes my heart hurt.

Wow, this is such an excellent take. This is not how I’ve usually seen or headcanoned Leandra, but all this insight is really making me want to take a long second look at their relationship. 

I love this. Because it’s not that Leandra doesn’t love her children — of course she does, she adores them — it’s that she’s not a perfect woman: She makes mistakes, jumps to hurtful assumptions, and thrusts too much responsibility on her children, particularly her eldest. Not to mention that she’s still struggling with profound grief, not just over losing her child and her home, but the life she sacrificed everything for. 

She’s not a bad mother (just look at how her children turned out) nor is she a bad person. She’s just a complicated human being, with warts and flaws. Sometimes it’s hard to see them because we self-insert as her child, and it’s always tough to see your parents as people, not ideas,  even when said parents are digital. But I think a read on her character that acknowledges said faults and mistakes is far more illuminating than the alternative.

Personally, I think you can see a lot of Leandra in Carver and vice versa; certainly they manifest their grief in similar (hurtful) ways. I’ve always headcanoned that the two of them were particularly close (and I think there’s some good evidence in-game to support the theory).

hawke remembers babysitting the twins when they were just toddlers. bethany’s magic manifested for the first time when carver pulled on her pigtails. a lump of dirt flew up and hit his shoulder, and carver fell backwards with a yelp, more surprised than hurt.

hawke remembers her mother running outside to see the twins wide-eyed in fear. she remembers leandra turning to her with accusations in her eyes.

she remembers feeling helpless.

hawke remembers her father always looking over his shoulder after that, his easy smile not so easy anymore, his jaw more tense and his eyes harder.

she remembers the way his self-defense lessons became about protecting others instead of herself, and how at age 10 her babysitting equipment started to include daggers.

she remembers her father leading the way as they moved from village to village, and she remembers bringing up the rear, watching her family ahead of her and noticing, with every step, that none of them looked back to her.

except for leandra.

whenever one of the twins tripped, or got stung by a hornet or complained of hunger or fatigue, leandra shot a look back at hawke, full of expectation and disappointment. do something, it said.

hawke remembers never knowing what she was supposed to do. but she never forgets that look from her mother.

do something.

do something.

she wishes she had been able to.

Finished half-body commission for pickledmalzy of Leandra and Durga Hawke!

This was a lot of fun for poor Hawke’s expression alone, and I loved the description of Leandra I was given! :D Although my scalp was overcome with sympathy pain quite a lot while I was working on this.

Enjoy~

CONFESSION:

Leandra blaming Hawke for the siblings death always bugged me. Hawke was standing on the other side, what was she supposed to do? Float over to Carver/Bethany and stop them? I’m glad that the game allows us to address that. Even if it is by a snarky comment.

It was a heat of the moment accusation that never cemented itself into hawke’s and leandras relationship stop blaming her for something anyone else WOULD have done

1st: This poster didn’t sound like they were blaming her, just pointing out something that bothered them and how they were glad they were able to address this thing that bothered them in-game. 

2nd: The issue with saying things in the heat of the moment is that it doesn’t matter that it was the heat of the moment. Things were said. They can’t be unsaid. Just because someone claims later that they don’t actually think you’re stupid, or a burden, or a failure, or any number of things, doesn’t change the fact that it’s now out there, that the idea’s been released, that for a moment they did. Enough to say it, at least. That’s always going to be there, both for the person who said it and the one it was directed toward. Even if you’re forgiven, no one can blame anyone for having a hard time forgetting. And if you don’t think being told you’re responsible for your little brother or sister’s violent death by your own mother wouldn’t stick? Haha, wow, have I got news for you. Sure, you can play your Hawke as brushing it off, but if you’re like me that comment took them in the gut and never really went away, and both are absolutely valid play styles.

3rd: I like Leandra as a character. Don’t get me wrong here, and I know that sounds weird since I get pretty vitriolic toward her in this post, but that’s what happens when I talk about her flaws, which do very much piss me off. This SCENE pisses me off. Still, I like her enough that her death genuinely bothered me and I appreciate her as a character. I wouldn’t change her. The problem when you have parents as people in fiction, however? Is that those parents are people. They have flaws. They have personalities. They do good things and bad things. And people are allowed to not like those personalities, those actions. That’s fine. People do not have to like or forgive her. That’s part of creating a good, well-rounded character. Sometimes people take issue with them. For good reason, even!

FINALLY (I’m long-winded, I know, sorry): Because this annoys me, so warning for strong(er) language. “Anyone else WOULD have done”? Not even a “could”? BULL. SHIT. No, no anyone else would not have done, because that is an incredibly petty and vicious thing to say, and not everyone becomes petty and vicious when dealing with stress. Some do, okay, and I don’t have to blame her for it, sure, and I can acknowledge it’s grief and stress talking and that she is a much better person when she doesn’t have to deal with hardship (because she is), but I can think less of her for it, if only because Leandra apparently never apologizes unless Hawke calls her out on it first. Even then her response is more dismissive than actually addressing it. That is where my ultimate distaste for this scene stems from, personally. If Leandra had bothered to bring it up on her own once she’d had time to calm down, to own up to her mistakes and make sure her child knew she didn’t actually blame them, I probably wouldn’t have minded as much. It would have been a balm for the hurt she dealt. But she never did.

I have no patience for people who would rather ignore their mistakes than apologize, especially when those mistakes are targeted at loved ones. At least the scenario above goes under the assumption a person first tries to apologize. Leandra doesn’t even do that unless she’s confronted. People are allowed to judge her for that, because, frankly? That’s something that deserves a judgement call. Just because some people don’t judge as favorably as you might (and you might not, I’m just assuming) doesn’t make their feelings somehow flawed.

“My little girl has become so strong. I love you. You’ve always made me proud.”

she was such a sweet little girl

So a Leandra headcanon is making the rounds today. And I thought about reblogging some comments that defends her, but on the other hand, I’m not certain it is worth defending. Mostly because I’m not sure if it NEEDS defending.

There’s this prevalent, toxic idea in most cultures that once you become a mother, that is the core of your being. It is the most important thing you’ve ever done. When I had my child, my mother actually called and said, “this is everything I’ve ever wanted for you.”

But mom. I was a stage singer for 10 years. I’m bilingual. I taught teenagers how to sing and dance on stage. I was a student activist. I’ve done a lot of things in my life before having a child. Having a child is hardly the most earth-shattering thing I’ve ever done.

And yet when a woman is in any way a “bad” mother - as in not perfectlly nurturing and giving and maybe even dare to say her children are not the be-all-and-end-all of life, all her children’s insecurities and problems will eventually be blamed on her.

The words we use to insult men blame their mothers.

So if your headcanon says Leandra Hawke wanted to run off with an apostate and be a romantic couple on the run, and that she didn’t really ever wanted children, I say there’s nothing wrong with that. If in her wanting to be childless and free she felt resentment towards her children, because heck, we all do it, who hasn’t thought about why did I choose to do this while changing a diaper, there’s nothing wrong with that.