From Now until the darkness claims us

I'm I'm rereading HoF and I got to that part where Rowan gets mad at Celaena and tells her she would have been more useful if she had died ten years ago. And... yikes???? He never apologizes for it and it kind of bothers me. What's your take? I also find it kind of weird how in the first few chapters thete are lines like "you're a child to me" (Rowan to Celaena) or "oh yeah you know we're related". In the context of later books it's just so odd

no true, true, Rowan and Aelin are horrible to each other in the beginning of HoF. They are both in such bad places. They both think they’ve lost everything,  Rowan is just living life as Maeve’s muscle, Aelin can’t imagine a world in which anyone would look at her as a leader and love her the way they do those two people she sees while she’s hanging out on the roof drunk (their names escape me, her relatives though). She says some really horrible things to him as well. But they are deliberately pitted against one another. Maeve has something Aelin wants, and she has to go through Rowan to get it. This old dude who could kick her ass five ways to Sunday and doesn’t give a shit about her. Of course they are going to be antagonistic. And Rowan’s first impression of Aelin won’t be good because he doesn’t know her, but he does know Maeve. The devil you know, and all that. Maeve is not setting herself up to be chummy with Aelin, and Rowan works for Maeve. Lines are drawn.

I think Rowan does apologize, when he changes his actions. Letting her into his bed (in a not sexy way) and caring for her, realizing that what he is doing is helping to destroy someone who is already so broken… Honestly, if he had had a big sit-down with Aelin and said “hey, sorry about that, friends?” Aelin might have laughed in his face. She wouldn’t have trusted it, because he still works for Maeve, he keeps shutting her out, he’s kicking her ass in training. And he still does some of those things, just… from a place of “I’m going to help you out” instead of “UGH why am I stuck with this BRAT”.

And his attitude change is huge! It changes their entire dynamic. Aelin was already open to it changing. She wanted to know about his life, his kitty cat friend, to just have a freaking friend. She’s like the embodiment of someone who stays home alone and then gets upset that no one is calling. She isolates herself, but she doesn’t really want to be alone. Rowan was fine not having anyone. But then he realizes that maybe… that’s not the way he wants to live either. Rowan saying that she’s like a child to him makes sense at first because it’s a really good way to distance himself from her. He doesn’t want to be emotionally involved, so he latches onto the first thing that makes it seem impossible for him to care, or even empathize with her. He’s saying they are so different, that he doesn’t understand her and she doesn’t understand him, so let’s just not even bother.

The whole relation thing is not really that weird because technically, everyone is a descendant of the three fae ladies, right? @rayonfrozenwings will remember more of this than I do purely because of her love of theory, but it’s like… these women are so old, no one even knows how old they are. So the generations have filtered and blah blah, and Rowan and Aelin are related in a “hey your great aunt five times removed is cousins with my great-great-great-grandfather’s uncle’s nephew”. I was having thoughts about what it means that Maeve is not actually one of the sisters and so what does it actually mean to be her descendant? Or is anyone? I honestly have no idea. That’s probably another question.