#this is some great meta
It’s always surprising to me that the default Thelyss family interpretation in fandom is “everyone (especially Deirta) is cold and abusive” because… I don’t think that would fly at all.
Leylas is starting to act rash and more violent in temperament because she’s exhibiting signs of typhros, and that’s clearly worrying the court, and if it were anyone but the literal queen, I think that kind of behavior would have already been either corrected or eliminated, because, well, they’re all stuck with each other, and they have to get along, even if that is very superficial.
In that scenario, you end up with family units that stick very closely together and are probably actually overly pleasant (if there are closed family units, which seems unlikely to me, making it even harder to hide particularly abusive behavior). These are people who have spent lifetimes in the same groups, who live incredibly long lives, and who want people to join their groups. They both have to put on a nice face and then keep the peace once they’ve won people over, even if that peace is tenuous and shallow.
That’s also exactly how Essek asks—he’s described as having a “perpetual soft smile” and at surface-level, he’s very accommodating. He is such a pleasant person, at all times, even when he’s under enormous amounts of stress. He had, essentially, one “outburst” toward the Nein that he was narratively pretty justified in, and the next time he saw them he apologized without prompting and took on most of the blame for the issue, which would probably be how I’d characterize conflict within the Dens.
And that’s absolutely still a toxic environment. It’s the type of environment that makes it nearly impossible to release any frustrations, where everyone is emotionally repressed because they haven’t yelled in six hundred years and internalizes any sort of problems as their own personal guilt. But it ensures that the Dens survive, at the expense of any sort of lasting conflict resolution. To be clear, I’m sure there is some amount of conflict resolution, because at the point where you have people together or breaking up after multiple lifetimes, I imagine you need it, but in terms of, say, ideological differences? Especially since this is a religiously-based family bond? I’d guess that that’s the kind of thing where the answer is “grin and bear it and don’t bring it up at the dinner table.”
And with that, Deirta as the matriarch has to not only be pleasant enough to get along with everyone, she is also probably the one mediating any conflicts that do arise, which means she is a probably maddeningly pleasant person. This is primarily important because, as the leader of the household and his mother, and given how he speaks about his father, Essek likely took most of how he presents himself from her.
