Which, honestly, was almost as big a betrayal of that. one. book. as “decidedly male” ever was.

This used to be a Twitter thread; please excuse the staccato:

So, hey, #mtg, #vorthos:

Here’s my stream-of consciousness thread about how I would’ve written Liliana in WAR, since Weisman novels really shouldn’t be canon.

So, last we see of Lili before WAR is Bolas picking up her contract at the end of DOM. Lili achieves her objective: between killing the demons she brokered her contract with and whatever Bolas does to her to let her guide the Dreadhorde, she has the power, now.

But no agency.

Now, here’s a delicate spot:

Liliana Vess is not her trauma. In particular, the choices she made in life, she owns. She’s embraced the coping mechanisms she built around it and became an unstoppable, abusive piece of shit. So referring to that trauma in writing is tricky. But the story primed us to at least think of the circumstances of that trauma, and I think it is important to see the parallels here:

• In the hour of direst need;
• when she was powerless;
• a man appeared to help her;
• but it was only a trick; she lost what was worth most

And I think the best way to address it here isn’t directly — it’s by acknowledging that it is a thing going on in her psyche and then writing around and through it. Showing the consequences of that absolute bullshit in her actions, in how she tries to find a way out again.

(Which, I think, is a huge mistake of Wiseman’s that he didn't even try.)

And this time Liliana cannot just find a clever bargain; she can’t trick someone, she can’t pull her way out of it. The dragon owns her. It’s an unctuous presence in her mind, ready to bite the moment she strays one inch. It is denying her what’s at her core: agency at any cost.

So, rather than have Liliana brood at the citadel, I would introduce a plot excuse for her to have her own scenes, to show how the influence of Bolas is pushing all her buttons in the worst possible way and how she goes from empowered agency to, almost, learned helplessness. Maybe the Dreadhorde is so massive she has to roam to keep those closer to her to peak efficiency. These aren’t the minuscule townships of Innistrad; Ravnica is a labyrinth of alley canyons and bridges and spires, perfect spots to hide or escape capture.

Perhaps this gets her close enough to the former members of the Gatewatch. Perhaps she wants to talk to— no, not to that fool Jace, assuming that was him and not an illusion. There's too much there that she externalizes as just anger at him, even though we know most of it is self-loathing.

Perhaps she sees Gideon. Perhaps for the first time in a long while she is afraid to disappoint someone. And I bet, this makes her angry. I bet it’s not a random Dreadhorde zombie who desparks Domri: it’s her action, seeing him trying so desperately to ingratiate himself with her abuser. I bet she kills him in projection of the utter blinding anger that she cannot express any other way.

And I bet she thinks this is some act of rebellion, to an extent. That soon the reprisal will be swift, give her something to fight against. But the dragon just laughs. She’s done his work for him. Before Domri, incapacitated, dies entirely, a harvester steals his Spark.

And the combined pressure, this plus Gideon plus whatever else she sees roaming, breaks her spirit. She would revel in the power of the greatest, most dangerous horde of zombies she’s ever been able to command; but even that wanton destruction is that much more hollow.

And I think it’s important to underline here that she absolutely crosses the line several times. She maims and kills with abandon. She is simply not in the habit of letting those that don’t matter cross the threshold of her attention. She’s used to bodies hitting the ground.

Perhaps when the God-Eternals cross the portal, she is so far gone in this self-loathing that she cannot admit to herself — too weak to wrestle control of her life, robbed again of anything of value to her — that all it does is just stun her. They’re not even really under her control.

In the end, she’s not even that important.

And when she does see that girl and her brother crushed by a spire she didn’t even think of, when for the first time it occurs to her that she has been made an instrument and conveyance of the same horror that she experienced, all it does is break her further. Open her to the idea that there’s exactly one action she has control over.

She doesn’t do it because she’s a hero. She does it because it’s the only thing she can do she has power over.

It’s not a noble act. It’s all she has left.

(Even to the end unable to admit that there is any force in her that drives her other than her will and dedication to her own pleasure.)

The rest is as on the cards: after Gideon tries one last assault with the Blackblade and it breaks, she points the whole of the Dreadhorde at the Citadel; and Bolas burns her alive; and Gideon, at the very last second, gives her a gift she could never be worthy of.

And in an angry moment of exultation and dread she wrestles controls of three gods and desparks Bolas. And, broken and humiliated, runs away.

This is an arc that speaks to the character a million times more than what is on the page and I’m angry that it couldn’t be written.

So many arcs could have been better, and Lili’s is one. It is important to me that her arc written this way not be a triumphant redemption narrative. Liliana Vess has embraced murder, psychological and physical abuse; she has betrayed and stolen and tricked with cruelty, because that’s what she wanted. At any cost, she would have it, whatever it her mind most latched at the moment: pleasure, beauty, health, survival.

What we have here is a character wrestling with hundreds of years of knowledge that perhaps, just perhaps, all the things she’s done, all the ways she’s ruined and killed and pulled from death were ways to feel better about the contradiction she started with: she did it. She’d have done it at an even greater cost if she needed to. But the first time she did it, the first time she let herself break all rules and all common sense, she did so to save a life. And when she figured out she was tricked, she told herself that life didn’t matter; only the power to never be tricked again.

And now that absolute idiot has shown her that perhaps, even at the depth of this well of narcissism and self-loathing feeding into one another, she can still want that for better reasons than she thinks.

And she’ll have it at the ultimate cost if she needs to.

(Also, destroying yourself to get what you want — freedom, the humiliation and death of the living who are symbols and actors of of your abuse, anything — is the most black the Magic color wheel ever gets.)