maguiretriping - Tumblr blog

[maguiretriping]

Controversial Opinion: Rayla doesn’t really respect Callum

I know I’m gonna get destroyed for saying this, so here me out: I do love Rayla. I think she’s an amazing, well written character. On top of that, I do believe that she truly loves Callum. He very quickly became one of the most important people in her life, who she can open up to and be vulnerable around...

...it’s just that she kinda looks down on him too.

And I actually think this is completely intentional on the part of the showrunners, because her attitude towards Callum reflects her attitude towards humans generally. From the very beginning, we see that she does empathize and sees value in humans, enough that she becomes the first assassin in centuries to disobey a direct order and let not one, but two human targets live.

Yet while Rayla displays compassion towards humans, she also displays a condescending attitude too. As Human Rayla, she mocks humans on a number of stereotypes (including violence, hypocrisy, and complaining), but then also mocks them for things completely outside of their control, such as their “sub-century life expectancy.”  While this is done for comedic effect, in Rayla’s interactions with Callum we see that she does genuinely look down on humans, even him.

Before she realizes she loves him, Rayla often gave put-downs to Callum. In 2x04, she doesn’t seem terribly bothered that Callum is potentially risking his “stupid human life” to venture into the storm, and only objects when he takes Zym with him. When talking about entering Xadia, Rayla diminishes Callum by saying “It’ll be safe and easy, even for you,” instead of, you know, pointing out that Callum is more capable than he gives himself credit for, in a moment when he was feeling especially insecure and unsure of himself.

Heck, any time that Callum talks about his insecurities and self-loathing (”I’ve always been bad at everything”/ “I can’t do anything”), Rayla never seems to directly challenge this (the way Ellis does), or even suggest that he’s being too hard on himself and point out that it realistically takes time and effort to get good at something.

On the contrary, she affirms Callum’s self-doubt (”It’s okay, Callum”) and then feeds into it by insisting she go deal with conflicts on her own. Compare that to how both Ezran and Callum handle Rayla’s insecurities--they flat out reject that Rayla has any reason to doubt herself, and insist she’s awesome and heroic. Rayla isn’t bad at providing comfort, so it’s not that big of a stretch to conclude that the reason she doesn’t reject what Callum says here is because she does agree with him.

By s3, Rayla only marginally improves in her attitude toward Callum, entrusting him with more physically demanding tasks (incidentally, after he connects to an Arcanum and therefore has more value in Rayla’s eyes). But even so, compared to Callum’s fawning over Rayla for being a hero and “the most amazing person I’ve ever met,” her praise of him appears shockingly minor and muted.

She applauds him for meeting the astonishingly low bar of not having her killed, leaving his home and family, and sacrificing a stone he’s only been attached to for a week in exchange for saving a life. Essentially the bare minimum required of being on the journey to return Zym home. If this isn’t the soft bigotry of low expectations, I don’t know what is.

By Through the Moon, it becomes quite obvious that even though Rayla may value Callum, she doesn’t really value him enough to respect his decisions, and subtly insists that she gets to be the one to decide all the important stuff for the two of them.

I’m, of course, referring to the decision to go after Viren. On the one hand, Rayla decides, completely on her own, that she needs to up and leave him for an indefinite period of time to go deal with a large threat. Yet, when Callum insists on doing the exact same thing, she completely rejects this. Apparently, while she can make such choices, he doesn’t get to choose the way she can.

On top of this, Rayla decided that reasoning with Callum was just a waste of time, and so decided to just trick him and leave without him, all while expecting to return to him after the mission is over (according to Aaron) as though nothing terrible had happened. Rather than making her case and then respecting whatever Callum decides, Rayla decides that her personal wish for him to be safe overrides whatever Callum wants to do. While Callum is by no means perfect toward Rayla, he’s never tried to undermine her in this way.

Throughout their time together, Callum has become much more capable, yet Rayla frequently treats him like he's not as capable at all. Ironically enough, the reason why Callum struggled with so many things before is because no one--including Rayla--was interested enough to properly train him in anything, hence why everything he excels at, he taught himself how to do. We can understand why someone like Lujanne might dismiss training a human like Callum even after he connects to a Primal Source, but Rayla ought to know better.

Again, I think much of this is intentional by the writers. I’m pretty sure that Rayla has a long way to go before she learns how to respect Callum--and humans in general--properly. Fittingly, Callum remains in Katolis where he can resume learning swordplay, and is connected to an Arcanum whose mages are known for being acrobatic and capable of magically enhanced speed. It’s possible, if not likely, that Callum winds up becoming a better fighter than Rayla while she’s away, and their reunion will end up driving home how mistaken she was in underestimating Callum.

But that would be a story for another time.