i’m going to write a fic So Stupid

17 - Bram does indeed have an "enemy" and it's a petty one-sided beef spawned entirely from his own inability to watch someone else act like he does literally all the time. If you guessed said enemy is the red catboy himself, G'raha Tia, you are correct.

We as players know G'raha ripped everyone out of the Source to go help the First for a good reason, but all Bram never really gets past being abducted in the middle of a war to go fight someone else's. This is further exacerbated by my own canon leaving Doma bereft of its King so soon after the liberation and Mina being taken in the same breath. So Bram is truly gunning to get all that shit over with as fast as humanly possible and get everyone home where they belong.

Once all of G'raha's self-sacrificial plan comes to light, though, is the moment Bram really seals the deal on this petty grudge because that's a Bram move. That's his thing that he does. And it feels like shit to be on the other side of it, so instead of learning and growing and behaving normally, he just decides he can't stand the guy and carries that grudge well through late Dawntrail. :)

15 - There are a few places that hold important memories for Mina, whether good or bad. Saisho is of course forever sealed in her heart, because it was her home just as much as it was Bram's. It was where she learned to be a chirurgeon and she had a strong bond with most if not all of the people who lived there. When it's destroyed, she is just as heartbroken as Bram, but she doesn't show it as easily. She's relieved every single time she encounters someone she knew from Saisho later on during the liberation.

Another place that holds strong negative memories is the Immortal Flames' infirmary in Ul'dah. Early on she tried to present herself to them as someone with skills that would benefit them, but because she had no magical healing abilities she was basically laughed out of the room. They told her there was no room on the field of battle for a healer who couldn't manipulate aether and she was so furious and ashamed that she stopped even trying for awhile.

Spagyrics in the Crystarium was the first place she ever felt like she was really valued and held to the same level of skill and talent as the magical healers around her. Sineaters are vicious, and people came in with injuries that couldn't be treated as easily with aether as they could with surgery and long-term healing. And Mina was the gold standard for helping people in that way. It was extremely difficult for her to leave when it was time to return to the Source.

4 - Not really “failed” because she was a literal child and had no say, but Mina’s got a boatload of unresolved regrets about her relationship with her parents. Bram remembers their mother so, so fondly and Mina simply doesn’t have that. I think, at the core, it makes her feel like something is wrong with her. Hanako didn’t die until she was 8, but she kind of stopped living when Hector left. So if Mina had any fond memories of her mother at all (there are a few, but not many) they’re tucked away in the first couple of years she started making proper memories to begin with. They feel so far away and distant that it’s hard to trust herself regarding whether they even existed, and she’ll never really get closure about that, because she’s gone. She wears her earring almost as a personal joke to herself. She’s honoring the memory of someone she barely remembers. But at the same time she’d feel terrible if she ever lost it.

It’s very much the same with Hector, too. He was so perpetually distant even before he left that it doesn’t really feel like she ever had a father. But because he’s alive and their time in Garlemald gives her the chance to finally speak with him, she takes the opportunity and is finally able to give more context to why Bram hates him so completely. She doesn’t feel that nearly as strongly—even if she did get her feelings temporarily hurt—but it gives her closure she’ll never have with her mom.

8 - Bram. 🤦‍♀️ My dipshit son embarrasses himself often. The story Mina most likes to bring up is the time he climbed up on the roof when he was little and refused to come down, so their mom had to knock him down with a broom. While that IS embarrassing to him still, I think the truly most nightmarishly mortifying moment of his life was seeking out the advanced birds and the bees talk from his mentor after figuring out he was gay. Please imagine learning about lube from a samurai with an eyepatch and 40 years of combat experience. He got the info he needed but they both still look back on that moment with bafflement and distress, and it will remain unspoken forevermore, amen.

10 - YES PERFECT KAIEN QUESTION ‼️ ( @hoppips also asked this same thing, hi Grey.)

So the important thing to know is that the Kaien who existed pre-occupation died the night he lost his nation to the imperials. The burden of that failure never left him for even a second, and transformed him into a shadow of his former self.

Kaien was a very sentimental man. I think he was very soft and cried easily as a child and his father (half due to cultural expectations and half by necessity) really spent a lot of time trying to harden him up. He naturally gravitated to things like reading fiction/mythology and writing, especially poetry, and his love of those things was quite heavily criticized by his peers and mentors as frivolous. As he got older he kept those hobbies as a secret for himself, and in his mid teens really locked in and focused outwardly on matters that would make him A Good King, like combat and military strategy and politicking. Unfortunately it was too little too late and only a few years into this real focus, his father unexpectedly died in his sleep and left the kingdom in his hands, which he then fully lost to the imperials within five years.

There’s a point in my fics where Gosetsu tells Hien about how Kaien wooed Mina (his wife, not Bram’s sister) with love letters and Hien is just absolutely aghast at the idea of that level of softness existing in his father. But by that same token, even he admits that if his father had occasion to see the little Monkey King doll he digs up during the Endwalker role quests, he would definitely smile.

Kaien was all too aware of his own sentimentality and it paralyzed him. His need to preserve and maintain what was left of Doma was so powerful he couldn’t drive himself to make the choices needed to save it. The only spots it was ever allowed to come out was in regards to what was dearest to him: his beloved wife and son. Following in his own father’s footsteps, I think he made a point of taming those sympathies in Hien, which was a lot easier because Hien is a lot like his grandfather was by default. Bold and a bit of a meathead lol.

That said though, somewhere in the royal bedchamber of Doma castle there is a little, unassuming box full of all the letters Kaien and Mina ever exchanged, and a handful of precious tokens from Hien’s childhood. He never managed to subdue those feelings in full. 😔👍