"What About Me?" Glory Asked.

"What about me?" Glory asked.

Kestrel shifted her wings in a shrug. "I have no idea. Webs scrounged you up somewhere after we lost the SkyWing egg. I never cared where, because I knew you weren't important."

"Oh, go away!" Tsunami burst out. "Everything you say is hurtful and mean."

"Everything I say is true," Kestrel said.

"I don't think you'd be good for me," Peril said, staring up at her. "I never imagined you like this."

Kestrel hunched her shoulders. "I am the way life has made me. Take it or leave it."

I genuinely don't understand anyone who says that Kestrel could've had a "redemption arc." Her response to her own long lost daughter saying that she never thought she'd be this cruel is just going, "This is how I am, and nothing will ever change that."

Kestrel herself admits in the second to last scene we ever see her in that this is just how she is and there's no room for improvement for her. If she truly believes this (which I think she does because if not she would've changed something about herself before now) then there's nothing anybody can do to help her.

This is why I'm satisfied with Kestrel dying the way she did. There was nowhere for her to go, her character ends here because she's denied herself change over and over again. She decided to constantly take her anger out on children for 6 years, she decided to treat them as horribly as she possibly could, even now when finally reunited with Peril she acts the same as she always had.

She never makes any strides to change herself because she genuinely believes that the only way to survive in a cruel world is to be cruel back. And look at how far it got her.