Found Family in Assistant to the Villain: Misfits, Belonging, and Broken Blood Ties
What Is the Found Family Theme in Assistant to the Villain?
In Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s 2023 fantasy romance, the concept of found family emerges as a central thematic claim: the dysfunctional employees of Massacre Manor form a genuine support system rooted in shared loyalty and acceptance, standing in stark contrast to the betrayal and alienation of broken blood ties. This theme asserts that family is not determined by birth but by who shows up—sometimes with stolen wine, sometimes with bone-knitting salve, and sometimes with a net during a guvre attack.
The novel positions Evie Sage’s journey as an arc from isolated caretaker of a fractured biological family to a woman embraced by a circle of oddballs who see her fully. The found family at the manor does not erase her past; it rewrites her understanding of what belonging can feel like.
Tracing the Found Family Across Three Plot Movements
Part One: Isolation and the Fractured Blood Family (Prologue–Early Employment)
Evie’s biological family is defined by absence, illness, and secrets. Her brother Gideon died, her mother Nura disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and her father suffers from the Mystic Illness that has plagued the kingdom for a decade. The burden of financial survival falls entirely on Evie, who cycles through failed job fairs and carries guilt too heavy for one person.
When Evie Sage accepts the position of personal assistant to The Villain, she conceals the truth from her family, telling them she works as a maid. This lie isolates her further: “It was for their own good, really. Her father already worried so much because of the burdens he was placing on his daughters.” Even at home, Evie performs emotional labor, maintaining a practiced smile inherited from her mother’s advice: “You could fix a broken world with just your smile.”
The brokenness of blood ties is literalized through her father’s illness, which demands constant care, and through Evie’s admission that tragedy “isolated them.” She notes she was “content to live with the ghosts,” having stopped trying to connect with peers after her family’s unraveling. The biological family, once a source of warmth, has become a well of obligation and hidden pain.
Part Two: The Wine Cellar and the Birth of Belonging (Chapters 32–34)
The clearest crystallization of found family arrives during an impromptu gathering in the office as a kingdom-wide storm rages. The scene gathers the manor’s misfits: Rebecka (Becky) Erring unexpectedly brings brew, Blade Gushiken proposes raiding the wine cellar, and Tatianna arrives with already-stolen wine and glasses, pressuring Becky to drink. The Villain himself, soaked from searching for the female guvre, joins and permits the gathering.
What follows is a playful game where everyone mocks each other’s quirks—Blade’s color blindness, the boss’s hair obsession, and more. The text directly names what Evie experiences: “Laughter gave Evie a profound sense of belonging.” This is not a polished family portrait; it is messy, alcohol-fueled, and abruptly ended by the female guvre’s screech. But the belonging is real precisely because it is unforced. No one is performing duty; everyone is present by choice.
Earlier, Tatianna’s healing practices already modeled this alternative economy of care. She heals Evie’s bruised tailbone not for coin but for secrets, then provides a pain-management vial for Evie’s ailing father—a gesture that moves Evie emotionally. The healer’s currency is intimacy, not transaction. Similarly, Blade’s gentleness with the captive male guvre—a snake-like creature with bat wings—reveals tenderness within a supposedly monstrous exterior, a microcosm of the found-family logic itself.
Part Three: The Father’s Betrayal and the Forged Resolve (Chapters 54–60)
The found family theme reaches its darkest test when Evie discovers her father’s betrayal. King Benedict is not merely a distant tyrant; Evie’s own father, Griffin Sage, is a Valiant Guard who faked his illness for three years as an alibi, used Evie as the key to The Villain’s downfall, and tried to marry her off to Otto Warsen.
The confrontation is devastating. Griffin calls The Villain a “monster,” and Evie replies: “We’re all monsters in the end. At least mine lives in the light.” This line marks the thematic pivot. Blood family—her father—chose deception, manipulation, and self-interest. The “monster” she chooses—The Villain, and by extension the manor’s found family—operates in the light of honesty about who he is.
When Trystan is captured, Evie’s response is ferocious. She bathes, applies her mother’s rouge, orders Otto’s head hung from the ceiling, and descends to the dungeon “vowing to save Trystan or become a villain in the process.” This is not a woman merely avenging a boss; this is a woman fighting for family. The biological father discarded her loyalty; the found family inspires it.
Characters and the Architecture of Found Family
Evie Sage: From Caretaker to Belonger
Evie enters the story as someone who has “never been very good at making friends.” Her humor, her oddness, and her defense mechanism of letting serious matters “roll through her like a tide” all mark her as an outsider in her village. At Massacre Manor, these same traits become assets. The Villain hires her precisely for her blunt practicality and inappropriate laughter.
Her emotional arc follows a migration of trust. Early on, she lies to her father to protect him. Later, she confesses to Tatianna her dreams about The Villain—a vulnerability she offers in exchange for care. By the end of the examined arc, she risks everything to rescue Trystan, a commitment she never extended to the father who betrayed her.
Rebecka (Becky) Erring: The Antagonist-Turned-Ally
Becky initially appears as a workplace nemesis—passive-aggressive, superior, “heinous” in personality despite physical beauty. Evie narrates their tension with comic sharpness: “If her personality reflected even an ounce of her physical beauty, Becky might be the best person Evie knew.”
Yet during the storm gathering, Becky brings brew. She participates in the mocking game. She is, crucially, present. Found family in this novel does not require sweetness; it requires showing up. Becky’s inclusion in the circle complicates any simple notion of friendship, suggesting that shared context and mutual endurance can forge bonds as strong as affection.
Blade Gushiken and Tatianna: The Quiet Pillars
Blade and Tatianna each contribute essential textures to the found family. Blade’s tenderness with the male guvre and his proposal to raid the wine cellar reveal warmth beneath a fearsome exterior. Tatianna’s healing-for-secrets economy values truth over coin, and her presence at the impromptu party—stolen wine in hand—signals full membership in the circle.
Neither character is centrally developed in the available excerpts, but their consistent presence at moments of collective belonging establishes the manor as a network, not merely a backdrop for the central romance.
Griffin Sage: The Broken Blood Tie
Evie’s father embodies the thematic counterweight. His betrayal is not a single wound but a layered deception: faked illness, secret service to the king, and the disclosure that he tried to marry Evie off to “have one less child to worry about.” The father who told stories of heroes named East Marigold, who checked under her bed for monsters, becomes the monster himself.
The novel does not offer him redemption. Evie sedates him and delivers a final verdict: “There is no room in my world for someone who hurt me the way you did. You do not belong walking on the ground I walk or breathing the air I breathe.” Found family is exclusive in its loyalty. Those who betray do not get to return.
Symbols That Deepen the Theme
The Mated Guvres
The mated guvres function as a symbolic mirror for the novel’s vision of bond-as-choice. The female guvre, imprisoned by King Benedict for ten years, becomes “unstoppably vengeful” when her mate is threatened. The Villain’s plan exploits this bond—using the captive male as bait to lure her. Yet in executing that plan, he experiences a revelation: “love means choosing captivity with the beloved over freedom alone.” The guvres, monstrous in appearance, model a fidelity that the human blood family—Evie’s father—fails to uphold.
Evie’s Mother’s Butterfly Clips
The butterfly clips represent the ghost of a biological family that once nurtured. Evie’s mother’s song, her rouge, and her memory thread through the narrative as a counterpoint to the father’s betrayal—a reminder that not all blood ties were broken, but that the ones that remain are insufficient for survival.
The Employment Mark
The gold employment mark on Evie’s pinkie finger binds her to The Villain by magic and contract, but it also symbolizes entry into the found family. It marks her as belonging to the manor’s strange ecosystem, visible to no one in her village but recognized by everyone within the castle walls.
Complexity and Contradiction
The found family theme is not sentimental. The manor’s inhabitants are fractious, competition is real, and Becky’s passive-aggression does not evaporate after the wine party. Evie still lies to her biological family—a moral compromise the text does not fully resolve. The Villain’s violence is not sanitized; Evie watches him annihilate knights and finds she “had even enjoyed it a little.”
Moreover, the found family does not entirely replace blood ties. Evie continues caring for her father until his betrayal is exposed. Lyssa, her younger sister, remains an anchor to innocence and hope. The novel does not argue that blood family is worthless—only that found family can become primary when blood family fails.
The most uncomfortable complexity is Evie’s complicity. She works for a man who displays severed heads in the foyer. She learns to “work around” corpses on her desk. Her found family is built on shared complicity in violence, and the text asks whether belonging forged in such conditions is sustainable or corrupting. The available excerpts do not fully answer, but they refuse to let the question disappear.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the wine-cellar gathering illustrate the novel’s definition of found family more effectively than a sentimental scene would?
The gathering is spontaneous, mildly chaotic, and fueled by stolen wine—not a planned celebration or emotional confession. Everyone mocks one another’s quirks, and the belonging Evie feels arises from unforced presence rather than orchestrated bonding. This messy authenticity reinforces the theme that found family is built through shared context and the choice to stay, not through idealized declarations of affection. The scene’s abrupt end—a guvre’s screech—further grounds it in the dangerous reality of manor life, preventing any slide into sentimentality.
2. Analyze the structural parallel between Evie’s father and The Villain as paternal or authority figures in her life.
Evie’s father, Griffin Sage, presents a facade of gentle vulnerability—illness, storytelling, checked-under-the-bed protection—that conceals manipulation, espionage, and a willingness to trade Evie’s autonomy for his own convenience. The Villain, by contrast, is transparent about his nature: he displays heads, tests Evie with a corpse on her desk, and does not pretend to moral purity. The father who seemed good is revealed as monstrous; the boss who seems monstrous becomes a figure of loyalty. This inversion underpins Evie’s final line: “We’re all monsters in the end. At least mine lives in the light.”
3. What role does Tatianna’s healing-for-secrets economy play in the found-family ecosystem?
Tatianna’s practice replaces monetary transaction with intimacy. She heals Evie’s injury in exchange for two secrets—one about a dream, one about its romantic nature—and provides medicine for Evie’s father as a gift. This economy mirrors the found-family logic: membership is purchased not with coin but with vulnerability. When The Villain silently appears and overhears the second secret, the scene also foreshadows that within this found family, secrets do not remain hidden for long—truth circulates as currency.
4. How does the female guvre’s behavior mirror the found family’s ethic of protective loyalty?
The female guvre, imprisoned for ten years, becomes “unstoppably vengeful” when her mate is threatened. She does not calculate risk or negotiate; she attacks. The Villain explicitly connects this to his own feelings: “love means choosing captivity with the beloved over freedom alone.” Evie later embodies the same ethic when she vows to save Trystan or “become a villain in the process.” The guvres, creatures dismissed as beasts, demonstrate a fidelity that human blood relatives—specifically Evie’s father—fail to honor.
5. Does Evie’s decision to sedate and abandon her father represent a rejection of blood family or its tragic necessity?
Evie’s action is not triumphant but wounded. She says she “wanted to be wrong,” hoped her deduction was incorrect, and weeps as she confronts him. The sedative is a slow-acting mercy, not a violent execution, and her final words emphasize exclusion rather than destruction: “Your story is finished. Whatever happens to you now is of no concern to me.” The scene argues that found family sometimes requires the amputation of toxic blood ties—not as celebration, but as survival. Evie does not destroy her father; she chooses to stop carrying him.