In Defense of Sciona Freynan (and Women Who Refuse to Apologize for Ambition)
- Amy S. Yen
- Oct 6, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 23
In Defense of Sciona Freynan (and Women Who Refuse to Apologize for Ambition)
One of the most isolating feelings I’ve experienced in my short life has been moments when I’ve looked around a room full of women and convinced myself I was the only person who was fed up with the status quo. I was the only person who wanted more.
I felt this often growing up in a conservative religious setting. I’m older and wiser enough now to know that perception isn’t everything – I’m sure there were others in the room who felt what I felt, but were unwilling to vocalize their feelings. But sometimes the knowledge isn’t enough; sometimes, you need others to stand with you.
I have never felt so seen as I did when I first read M. L. Wang’s Blood Over Bright Haven. If you’ve read this novel, then you are familiar with the protagonist, Sciona Freynan, the first female High Mage in Tiran’s 300-plus-year history, who knows she is more intelligent and more capable than any person around her, and she is not shy about it.
And what I’ve come to learn since reading Blood Over Bright Haven is that readers are not at all shy about their disdain for Sciona.
But what, exactly, makes women like Sciona so unlikeable? Is she truly a terrible person, or is she just a woman who makes mistakes?
And we cannot tolerate a woman who makes mistakes.
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Sciona Freynan is exactly what her society doesn’t want in a woman: drive, intelligence, and willingness to challenge any man she comes across because she inherently knows she is smarter than they are. And in the rare instance she believes she is not as smart as someone else, then she is willing to work harder to find solutions to problems they cannot begin to fathom.
None of these attributes seem inherently bad. Annoying, perhaps, if you’re on the receiving end of her intelligence and ego, but not morally wrong.
Why is it, then, that I find myself unsurprised that readers find this intelligent woman annoying and selfish?
In a heteronormative society, a woman’s success can be viewed as synonymous with selfishness because it’s assumed that success is at the cost of her husband, her children, or others in her life whom she should prioritize. Her ability to provide for herself makes her undesirable because it threatens others’ ability to provide for her. And a woman who isn’t being provided for cannot be controlled.
And that’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Intelligent women who do not conform to expectations cannot be controlled.
And Sciona Freynan? There’s no controlling her.
Sciona’s selfishness is taught, nurtured, and resented all at once
In Blood Over Bright Haven, Sciona is the pride and joy of her aunt and cousin, Winny and Alba. These two working women have sacrificed much over the years to provide Sciona the most optimal home and conditions so that she could successfully study, research, and ultimately become the first woman high mage. They have fed, clothed, and done all the chores around the house so that Sciona was never once distracted from her studies. And they benefit from the notoriety that comes with being associated with the only female high mage, and they like it.
Up until they don’t. Then oh how the turned tables.
But before Sciona’s fall, she was indulged, coddled, and never held accountable. And everyone is fine with it until they are not. And then she is called selfish and held accountable for everything wrong she had ever done, even though she had never been told it was wrong.
One of Sciona’s greatest failings – or that of her family’s – is that she never learned or was taught empathy. And to be a woman is to embody empathy. Women are traditionally praised by society for sacrificing their time and aspirations to rear children and support their spouse. To not do those things, to lack the expected selflessness of the Aunt Winnys and Cousin Albas of the world, makes you a selfish woman, even if your ambition was once encouraged.
The great Irony to me is that, on the flip side, were Sciona a man, her devotion to her work and her heretofore uncharted achievements would be considered extraordinary. Never mind that her clothes are wrinkled because she sleeps in her office sometimes. And if her hair is mussed, that’s alright, it’s a sign of genius. Because she’s a man. And any sacrifice for success is good.
But Sciona is not a man. In fact, she doesn’t want a husband, or children, or traditional things.
And so, she is selfish. A terrible, selfish woman.
Women aren’t rewarded for ambition, they are punished
If you have ambition you are willing to act upon, then you may find yourself agreeing with this belief of mine:
Drive is a disease of the mind.
No matter how tired you are, how much you wish to rest, your mind cannot allow your body to relax when you know there is more you can do to meet the demands of your ambition. If you’ve ever spent a night working on a project because of a compulsion within you to keep researching, to finalize the finishing touches on a document, not because it’s necessary, but because you want to, then I dare say you are displaying symptoms of this disease.
Is that a bad thing? To try? To feel confident in your abilities to find a solution to succeed?
To own your ambition instead of apologizing for it?
I think it’s easy to say that no, these things are not bad. We encourage hard work in everyone, regardless of gender. That is one of the most valued attributes in our society.
Now, you might argue that the problem with Sciona isn’t her hard work, but her repeated mistakes. Mistakes she makes because she is relentless in her quest for success, mistakes she makes because she is single-minded in all that she does and does not have the capacity to think about others.
To that I ask, do you dislike Renthorn as much as you dislike Sciona? Renthorn, Sciona’s male counterpart and another favored pupil of her mentor: who forces himself on women; who messes with equipment to ensure others’ projects fail so that they join his team on a project; and who views himself not just as superior, but as having a God-given right to destroy living things (including people) and enjoys it?
If Renthorn is just another man who is like other men, the kind we expect to be terrible and accept his terribleness, then I dare say you may have a case of internalized misogyny.
To not balk at Renthorn’s fanaticism with death but despise Sciona for her attempts to make up for her society’s wrongs can be argued as expecting more from the intelligent woman than the nepo-baby man. But I read that as not accepting a woman who fails and as accepting a man’s amoral behavior. Sciona is treated like a monster for doing what she thinks is morally right while Renthorn is forgotten for taking what he feels entitled to but does not ultimately belong to him.
In my mind, Sciona is a case study in what it means to be a woman in a man’s world and to both succeed and fail. Ultimately, she fails either way: her success is credited to a man or to her convincing men through sex; she is patronized for being a woman at every turn and is expected to fail when it comes down to brass tacks; and if / when she does fail, she is considered a monster who must be punished.
Her peer, Jerrin Mordra, on the other hand, is rewarded for consistent failure, and it is because of that consistent failure that he is the only high mage left alive by the end of the novel, ultimately making him Tiran’s only living authority figure.
Sciona Freynan must die and is a good person simultaneously
There is no doubt in my mind that Sciona must die by the end of the novel to be redeemed for the irreparable trauma and destruction she has caused, no matter how good-intentioned. However, that does not mean I also think she is a terrible person. In fact, she may be one of the few, if only, “good” people found in Wang’s novel.
What makes Sciona good is her self-awareness. She is able, before facing judgment, to identify the ugliest parts of herself and acknowledge not only what that is, but the part it played in her actions (and therefore mistakes). She confronts her ignorance about the Quin and the Blight and attempts to do better, to rewire the views ingrained into her by her upbringing. She does not shy away from her failures but owns them and takes accountability. Is that not, at the end of the day, all we want from the people around us? To own up to their mistakes and try to correct them?
In the context of extremes, and Blood Over Bright Haven is nothing if not extreme, Sciona is just a human being doing her best to get by and leave the world better than she found it. Does she want accolades for being a genius, the first of her kind? Absolutely.
But don’t we all?
At least she knows when to bow out and dismantle a cycle that is only causing pain. I cannot say that about many people in positions of power these days.
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A writer and podcaster with an M.Ed. in Higher Education & a B.A. in Creative Writing, Amy S. Yen deep dives into 90s-00s nostalgia to make-up for lost time growing up in China, devours smutty audiobooks on her work commute, and reimagines literary classics into contemporary LGBTQ romance novels.
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