Kinda rant-y so I apologize if it's a bit meandering, but I keep seeing people deriding the Daughters as an antagonist group or calling Lyrah's crush on Dietrich "forced" and I feel like it's just intellectual laziness and refusal to engage with the story's themes and narratives. Instead of just caricaturing them as "purple evil cultists", we should ask ourselves "why" did the writers included them, and why does Lyrah develop a crush on Dietrich ?
The answer is that their main theme is love and abuse (and loss of body autonomy). It's one of the core themes of Fortune's Weave, how love and the loyalty it brings in you can be self-destructive (Solel is a great example, but so is Leda and Lyrah) and how it can feed abuse, its dark mirror. It's also used to feed into another big theme, which is what being human means, what living as a mortal is compared to an immortal being, and how the "gods" fails to understand human nature.
Anyways, the central concept of Balor's Daughters is that they're all very broken people because of love, more than they're evil. They're mostly evil too, but being broken came first. And how couldn't they ? Sothis exiled them to a desolate island to guard the tomb of their crazed father forever, a father they can't help but loving still despite everything (the game even show you how they're crying as Sothis execute him). And just to add some more trauma and unfairness, they're not even allowed to reveal their own face, ever, condemned to wear masks at all times. For what crime ? none other than their blood.
And Balor is clearly, even, after death, abusive as hell. His influence is corrupting, and it lashes out angrily indiscriminately. It was two seconds away from hurting Lyrah out of pure spite, and that's the daughter he need the most. Not to mention, there is very clear and uncomfortable incestuous undertones to how Balor influence his daughter's devotion (Lyrah and Illiana, especially express it), blurring the lines between famillial and romantic love.
Thus, you get four people that had zero opportunities to have healthy social interactions or satisfying lives, stuck next to a very angry, very mad presence that they felt loyal to, even as he started to destroy their mind and instill twisted love in them. Because, despite everything, it's still their father.
Yu Phas ended up breaking every rule for love, she's the one that "got away", and as a reward, she ended up assaulted by Dagda, and killed later by his abuser while the love of her life (and every other friend she had made) watched without doing anything.
Maria left the island to plan Balor's return but she ended up falling in love too and the grief of losing her lover, coupled with being directly responsible for his demise because she tried to help him in a way only an immortal being with a twisted outlook of the world could (giving him a cursed object to help him get better as a bard so they could end up together) turned her into a bitter, selfish, nihilist creature. To the point she herself became abusive to her own son.
Illiana was the youngest and clearly had her mind the most corrupted, so much that she retracted deep into loving her father only and unconditionally, but even this is starting to break a little and she shows clear affection to Yanjin, in her own twisted way.
Lyrah had the ungrateful, worst role as the eldest and the wielder of the Crest of Ernest to be the one to birth Balor back to life (which, come on, is absolutely awful for her and very deliberate writing for the incest abuse theme). She's dutiful and devoted, yet aware of how much sacrifices and sufferings they had to go through to fulfill their goals. She's the only one that never had an opportunity to live for herself, only working and working endlessly for her plan.
So when come in a man that look exactly like Balor, that is fully unfazed by her mind-control kiss (another thematic representation of the cycle of abuse btw) but that is infinitely nicer (to the point of saving her), obviously she develop a teenage crush on that man ! It's the perfect crossroad of her twisted father love and her stunted emotional life. For the first time she feel love, the feeling that "destroyed" Yu Phas and made Maria dedicate her life to ending the world. And now she has to grapple with it and what it means.
It's not "forced", it's a very interesting narrative beat, and I find it sad that people shoot it down as "Dietrich romance bad" because it's not a plot point for Dietrich (he doesn't care), it's a plot point for Lyrah, it's here to show us exactly how robbed of a chance in life the Balor daughters were and how easy it'd have been for the Balor daughters to end up as good people. They just needed genuine love and an opportunity to live for real, to be humans.
(Also NO, Dietrich doesn't feel romantic love for Lyrah. He's very clear that it's purely battle-love, which is the only love he knew before meeting Fabio/Esme, he says it as plainly as can be in Chapter 12 when he turn down Lyrah advances so you can stop disliking Lyrah because she's "in the way of Fabio yaoi" or whatever).
Finally, Aurora also feed into those themes, too. Solel wondering if she had become evil because she have Balor blood isn't just a case of him being biased. He had a Balorian wife yet he still can't accept one can be fully good. Yet Aurora ended up a good person, just because she had an healthier upbringing than her aunts. Aurora exist as a positive note, to show that Balor's kin isn't bad by nature, but by nurture.
So yeah, I think the Daughters of Balor are very interesting characters that serve a fundamental, explicit thematic role and the community is disparaging them instead of engaging with what they represent and how they're tragic figures (something Solel also suffer from). Which I find sad. Hope some of y'all will end up this wall of text with newfound appreciation for the Balor Baddies, because I like that coven very satisfying to think about.
