AshesofWidogast

Rewatching Episode 1, I think Liam told us Hal's entire arc in one sentence:

"Trying... to hold on to the spirit that has buoyed him through his life."

Creepy O'Brien

I wonder if it's a trauma response.

Hal grew up with a soldier for a father. Whatever happened within that family, we know violence and war shaped his childhood long before he ever stepped onto a battlefield himself. Then, while he was still little more than a child, he and Thjazi were thrown into Axe and Vine together. They saw horrors no child should ever witness, and Liam has already told us that Hal once pulled Thjazi from mud and blood on a battlefield.

War changed both of them.

So when people talk about Thjazi's violence, I wonder if Hal instinctively shuts down because acknowledging it would force him to confront something much bigger: that the war didn't just take his brother—it transformed him. And maybe it transformed their father long before that.

Accepting that would mean admitting that the people he loved were shaped, damaged, and in some ways consumed by the same cycle of violence.

Perhaps that's why Hal keeps trying to remember the brother he loved instead of the man everyone else is describing.

Not because he believes they're lying, but because hearing those stories tears open wounds that go all the way back to his childhood.

To his father.

To the battlefield.

To the little boy who couldn't save his family from becoming casualties of war long before any of them actually died.

Maybe that's why Hal shields himself from those conversations.

For years he's survived by becoming whoever others needed: the father, the host, the actor, the theater director, the protector. And now, the face of the resistance.

Every role is real, but each one hides another part of himself.

Maybe the war didn't just take his childhood.

Maybe it took Halandil Fang, too.