who wants some extremely self-indulgent not-at-all-based-on-existing-facts headcanons? ALL OF YOU? GOOD
season 4 might blow all this out of the water, but until it does, this is what i’m going with!
haida’s mom is a traditionalist. think retsuko’s mom, but amped up to 11. she cares a LOT about species, for example, whereas retsuko’s mom doesn’t really care at all. haida’s mom wants her son to be with another hyena, period. she was arranged to be with her husband, and now that haida’s 25, she’s starting putting pressure on him to be arranged as well. she’s hoping he’ll have his underbite dealt with first, though, in a very invasive surgery that takes a while to heal from…
she’s not a bad person, though. she loves haida very much, and has always been there when he needed her to be. she’s just old-fashioned and set in her ways. she did eventually fall in love with her husband, too! so in her eyes, arrangement can be a great thing.
haida’s dad is a pudgy, happy guy who works a soulless desk job not unlike his son, but goes home to build and paint expensive models. it’s his biggest hobby, and it keeps him sane, honestly. he’s the more lax one in this marriage, and he’s good at keeping haida’s mom calm when she gets heated. he’s never put any stock into species-matching, either, and were he not matched with haida’s mom, he probably would have wound up with someone completely different eventually. he’s where haida gets his more lax attitude towards it, where he’s not afraid to pursue retsuko and (sort of) inui.
haida also doesn’t realize how serious his mom is about it yet, either. she hasn’t tried to match him in earnest yet, and she’s never been bigoted, so he doesn’t realize how much she thinks marriage should be between members of the same animal species. pregnancy rates are much lower between animals of different species, so it’s always been a thing certain parts of society cared about, even though it’s fallen out of favor in the past several decades. people will still side-eye a cat and dog marrying, but it’s not taboo, necessarily.
haida’s mom doesn’t approve of retsuko at first. she wants the best for her son, after all. haida ends up blowing up on her for implying retsuko isn’t the best and his dad needs to calm them both down. it works out in the end, though, and she does end up supportive, but it takes time to get there.
so yeah that’s my Extended Haida Lore. hope you enjoyed!
