#sa is not romantic
The day that people stop romanticizing and sexualizing Gw*n’s sexual assault is the day I will know peace. Just because he was there, and killed the soldiers, does not make this a romantic gesture or proof of a romantic relationship. And it completely diminishes the trauma she experienced by trying to center it on a man and framing the aftermath as a romantic gesture or foreshadowing of some kind.
Mor was also there. In fact he gave her a cloak and then immediately handed her over to Mor who would have then been the one to primarily take care of Gw*n in the immediate aftermath of her trauma and yet…I don’t see anyone shipping them together because of this. You know why? Because it’s not indicative of anything and it would be weird. It’s one human being showing care and concern for another during a time of intense pain and trauma. Nobody thinks Mor taking care or Gw*n is a prelude to romance. Is it because she’s a woman? How does anyone even know Gw*n is interested in men? The whole thing is gross but I guess it is what it is.
It was not a tender moment. A beautiful moment. A romantic moment. I doubt it was something that Gw*n would want a reminder of by keeping the cloak that Azriel used to cover her naked and bleeding body. It was traumatic and violent, to the point where she had trouble leaving the library.
Seriously ship who you want to ship, but please don’t romanticize a brutal assault. It wasn’t romantic, it was the most traumatic and painful day of her life, and Azriel and Mor, who were total strangers to her, witnessed it.
Azriel showed the decent, most bare minimum level of compassion, and i really believe almost any other character in the book would have done exactly what he did.
It makes me sad that such a basic level of compassion, or even just human decency, is being singled out as romantically extraordinary. If that moment was romantic, then the bar for cis het men is even lower than I thought (which I actually didn’t believe was possible).
