Dave wrote:zachariah wrote:Dave wrote:I think it's time for some healing and reconciliation (or "overdue recognition and acknowledgment") for Grandma Lily!
Better late than never!
Healing yes. Reconciliation no. What do they have to reconcile about they have never had a falling out or been angry at each other?
I didn't say "reconciliation between Lily and Katherine" - you're right, they've never fought that we know of.
I said "reconciliation... for Lily". I was referring to an
internal reconciliation... reconciling her feelings about who she is and what her life has been and meant, with the external reality and the current situation.
If you go back and read Friday's strip, you'll see Lily clinging almost desperately to her old pain and self image... "My daughter... all my children... were taken from me! I died alone! You can't make it better! Don't try! Don't hug me!" Her pain and loss and fatal alone-ness have become a huge part of how she defines herself...
... and that, I think, is why recent events have put her so much into a tailspin. Learning that one of her children did survive, and that she's actually a grandmother (a role she's thought for 5000 years had been ripped out of possibility by murder) has shaken her enforced self-image to the core. Suzie was right... Lily's distress wasn't primarily from fear of the apex paranormals... it's because Lily no longer knows "who she is".
What she has to do now, is reconcile her old persona (ancient vampire, scorned by most paranormals, lost everything that meant anything, roots ripped out, utterly without family) with the new truth (ancient vampire, defended by a demigod, treated with respect by a sphinx, with a living and most worthy human daughter, two lovely adoptive granddaughters, and a welcoming role as grandmother... and perhaps mother?... offered to her). These two realities... old internal self-image, and new external situation... are what Lily must now reconcile. She has to decide "Who is Lily" all over again. She has to decide whether "moving on" would somehow be disloyal to her memory of her three other children who did
not survive.
Donaldson's character Thomas Covenant once said "There's only one way to hurt a man who has lost everything. Give him something back, broken." That's not quite what Lily is facing here... but she's been "given something back, changed." Katherine survived, and she's turned out to be a loving and kick-ass-wonderful woman, but is certainly
not what Lily's daughter would have been if not for the Nu Gui's plotting. So, it's a tough situation for Lily... she has to reconcile her feelings for the Katherine-who-is, vs. the daughter-who-might-have-been.
There's a new future here for Lily, waiting to be born... but as G'kar wrote, new futures are always born in pain.
)
