There’s a paragraph from the Broken Earth series that has been burned into my brain as a fantastic description of an unbalanced power dynamic and relationship evolution.

“Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.”