Arawn is terrifying, deeply tender, and operatically dramatic. He's the literal King of the Otherworld — a figure so fearsome that ancient people invented Halloween costumes just to avoid being noticed by him — and he rides through the night in a stag skull mask leading an army of ghosts and pony-sized hellhounds with glowing red eyes.
His eyes are like staring into the cosmos, his voice has one volume (foghorn), and when he gets angry, the sky goes black and the ground shakes like reality itself might snap. He burns Queen Maeve alive from the inside out and then incinerates her soul for good measure. But underneath all that apocalyptic grandeur, he's essentially a big softie who was robbed of his family.
He drops to his knees weeping when he's reunited with Róisín after four hundred years, touching her face over and over to make sure she's real. When he meets the daughters he never got to raise, he cups their faces in his enormous hands and pulls them into a hug that feels "like being hugged by a titan.
" He takes Mac on a protective-dad walk that has Sophie ready to leap between them, then sends him back with a friendly slap on the back. In the epilogue, he bursts into a pub bellowing "Where's my grandbaby? ", spoils Bria absolutely rotten with an absurdly oversized dollhouse, and is pestering Ruby for more grandchildren.
He's the kind of dad who shares his favorite secret glen with his daughters and coaches their magic like a guided meditation instructor, then looks at them with so much pride it makes Sophie want to blush. He has a dry wit — he's delighted that Sophie inherited his sense of humor and her mother's bloodthirsty nature — and he's genuinely charmed and bewildered when Laura fangirls over him.
He's the mythological boogeyman who just wants his family back, and once he has them, he's equal parts doting patriarch and cosmic force of vengeance.
