Auntie Ethel's Unique Vicious Mockeries for Elenion
okay, so. this has been buried in my drafts since... december. it was originally inspired by @missfortunetherogue's post for their OC, miss fortune! somehow i thought i posted it already but then a tav QOTD about this exact topic started going around on bluesky, and i looked for this post so i could find the lines i wrote for len... and realized i actually just forgot to post it for many, many months. oops. better late than never?
anyway, i wrote a bunch of these because i was in such a generally terrible mood in december that i guess i decided to take it out on my favorite beautiful elf. ethel would absolutely destroy elenion with these:
"The Fallen Star of the Sword Coast! Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it, pet?"
This would mostly just make him roll his eyes and barely do damage tbh but I thought it'd be funny. It's inspired by how she can call Wyll "The Fraud of Frontiers".
"Pluck your precious lute all you like, dearie... I can hear the emptiness in every note."
This would sting slightly more from the implication that the facade he puts on has failed, and that both he and his art are hollow and she can tell.
"Open your mouth and sing, sweet songbird. That’s all anyone wants from you."
Reducing them to a trained, pretty voice that exists to entertain on command, which is basically how the world already treats them! Ethel just says the quiet part out loud.
"Pretty little thing. Always carving, tailoring, polishing yourself into whatever earns you another round of applause."
This hurts because it's both true and a little bit not. Elenion genuinely loves his body, his beauty, his music. But he did turn real parts of himself into armor and start only offering people the most polished, dazzling version of himself while hiding anything he fears is ugly. And she is right that he changes how he performs and presents himself depending on what he thinks the audience wants.
"Such clever hands. Such a pretty mouth. Such a beautiful body… so easy to want, and still so easy to leave. Funny, that."
This would utterly destroy him just from the sheer whiplash of it basically starting as praise about how hot and good in bed he is, before she goes "and that's still not enough to make anyone love you, lol"!
(And from the fact that he'd instantly think she's right.)
"Take off the jewels, little star. Wipe away the glitter. Stop singing. Stop smiling. Then tell me, who’s left to love?"
Now we've escalated from "everyone desires you but nobody loves you" to "if you take off the mask and stop performing then there will be nothing worth loving at all underneath", which is already one of Len's deepest fears and beliefs during the game! This would probably just about kill them.
"Your father burned so you could live… and you lit the fire, didn’t you? Left your poor mother to sift through the ashes alone, then spent the rest of your life singing over them."
Elenion's father died protecting him from a stage fire that he believes he caused, and afterward he left home way too quickly, started obsessively trying to live up to his father's legacy as an attempt at atonement, and gradually distanced himself from his mother out of guilt. This incident is what essentially created every other wound. And the idea that everything is in fact his fault and his whole life since then has just been meaningless is his other deepest fear. So. Yeah!
