I think one of my favorite things about The Invisible Library and Irene and Kai’s relationship is the blatant reversal of traditional gender roles from the beginning.
Immediately, Kai is introduced as the pretty one (inhumanly beautiful) who is much more interested in clothing and general appearance than his female counterpart. His “feminine” interests expand into an appreciation of general romanticism in art of all forms - writing, poetry, architecture, paintings - and while Irene can appreciate these things just fine, we know that she is much more interested in mystery novels and pragmatism in all things. Kai also canonically loves to cook, which is another role stereotypically given to women in a partnership. While the appreciation for high-brow romantic art is definitely from his upbringing, we learn that Kai truly loves and understands these things instead of simply liking them because they are considered more high class than other forms, and that the imagination required to do so is looked down on by some of his royal associations for being a lower class trait he got from his mother.
Deeper though, we see Kai as being more emotionally intelligent than Irene (and really everyone else). He not only is very aware of his own needs, he easily vocalizes them; we see him asking Irene for reassurance frequently, whereas Irene struggles with this because she feels that she constantly has to be strong - both as a mentor, and as a person. Kai feels like he has to be strong, but processes it in a drastically different, and less stoic way than Irene does, which is typically considered significantly more “feminine.” As their relationship progresses, he is also acutely aware of Irene’s needs as well and takes it upon himself to take care of her without prompt (we all know that most “manly” heroes don’t traditionally bother themselves with taking care of other people, let alone women like he does). Neither of these things seem particularly draconic in nature when you take into account Kai’s shift in attitude when he’s in the presence of his family in any way and that a lot of that softness disappears.
But my personal favorite is that Kai’s internal struggle involves him having to overcome conditioning and internalized self worth issues that stems from a culture that shames all of these things (kind of like how women have to deal with internalized misogyny). Throughout the series Kai is not only coming to terms with the idea that the culture he grew up in and has been conditioned to believe is superior may not be as idealistic as he once believed, he is dealing with the affects that had on him as a prince of a low-born mother. Irene is constantly reminding him of his worth because he fully believed that he was unimportant and a disappointment to his family.
I mean, there are a lot of things to love about this series, but this is such an awesome thing to watch play out.
Just@kristinadavidovna being genius and giving me even MORE FEELS about this series. Nbd.
I feel like you should all know that the amazing @librarianinresidence made an Invisible Library-themed escape game for her Zoom gift exchange with me and @enigma731 last night, complete with letters between characters, book ciphers, and references to all the source material.
I would just like to say that the whole concept of dragons hoarding people they care about is *chef’s kiss*
What makes this even better, to me, is that a major distinction between Kai and the other dragons we’ve met is that he’s able to do this while still not reducing those around him to objects.That’s the reason the possessiveness is attractive in him.
