Okay, I withdraw the argument— she is an Evil Matriarch according to the trope. But since she's also stupid, gutless, and ultimately powerless, I don't really see her as a matriarch in any traditional sense. Next to Kolkhis, Vey, or Porphyria, she looks downright pathetic.
On Kay's woobie-ness: Honestly, I think Kay is less of a woobie than almost anyone else in this story. His parents mostly ignored him, but he wasn't (as far as we know) outright beaten, molested, or starved; he had to go to war against the Usarans at fourteen, but he proved successful and popular in the war; there's no evidence that his sister Isobel disliked him until he forced her into marrying Murtagh; he actually doesn't have to hide his sexual attraction to men in general, only his love for his straight friend, "King" Gerrard; and he orders his men to fight a hopeless war against the Corambins, mostly, it seems, to please Gerrard, who is really Too Dumb To Live. Yes, he's going through hell at the beginning of Corambis— but even then, he's full of annoying wangst, and it seems that his previous forty years weren't all that unlucky.
Gloria Aestia is not an evil matriarch. Evil stepmother, yes. But she was born into a cadet branch of the Aestii and, in all her scheming, she's really Vey Coruscant's patsy. Mildmay describes her as "stupid" and suggests that she lacked "guts"— not marks of an evil matriarch. A matriarch of any kind doesn't have to just be fertile; she has to be in charge of something. Gloria Aestia didn't have the luck or the smarts to pull this off.
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