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I've been thinking a lot about Asenath 'Sennie' Waite this week.

I find her so tragic, honestly. I know a lot of people read 'The Thing on the Doorstep' as a gender experience metaphor, and that's okay, I suppose, but I've always found that Ephraim quite literally using his daughter's body without her say in the matter speaks of a different sort of horror. We never hear or see Asenath proper, do we? By the end, she's left to rot in the most literal sense, with no hope of regaining her body, clubbed over the head, and her only reported actions (via Ephraim's dying body) is to have a trauma-induced breakdown.

Something breaks in me about her. I don't know why. In Arkham, I let her have a future, to have her body to herself, for a while, until Ephraim wrenches himself out of his corpse and into the body of her husband. None of them make it out wholly alive.

Sennie recovers from her injuries, after nearly a century, at the hands of her mothers' people and their advanced healing. But she doesn't remember much of anything. She's lost all her pain, sure, but also her chosen kindred, her happy years with Derby, her life she'd started to build, just remembered as another hometown tragedy, of the prodigy who died too young or the scar-headed woman who doesn't know the half of herself. Will she ever win, really?

Will she ever be a whole? Did she even have a chance to be so, before she got her innocence ripped away?

I've been listening to 'The Ballad of Jane Doe' recently. I find it describes her well, and the singer sounds chillingly like her. Give it a listen!

Description
I've been thinking a lot about Asenath 'Sennie' Waite this week.

I find her so tragic, honestly. I know a lot of people read 'The Thing on the Doorstep' as a gender experience metaphor, and that's okay, I suppose, but I've always found that Ephraim quite literally using his daughter's body without her say in the matter speaks of a different sort of horror. We never hear or see Asenath proper, do we? By the end, she's left to rot in the most literal sense, with no hope of regaining her body, clubbed over the head, and her only reported actions (via Ephraim's dying body) is to have a trauma-induced breakdown.

Something breaks in me about her. I don't know why. In Arkham, I let her have a future, to have her body to herself, for a while, until Ephraim wrenches himself out of his corpse and into the body of her husband. None of them make it out wholly alive.

Sennie recovers from her injuries, after nearly a century, at the hands of her mothers' people and their advanced healing. But she doesn't remember much of anything. She's lost all her pain, sure, but also her chosen kindred, her happy years with Derby, her life she'd started to build, just remembered as another hometown tragedy, of the prodigy who died too young or the scar-headed woman who doesn't know the half of herself. Will she ever win, really?

Will she ever be a whole? Did she even have a chance to be so, before she got her innocence ripped away?

I've been listening to 'The Ballad of Jane Doe' recently. I find it describes her well, and the singer sounds chillingly like her. Give it a listen!