strangler fig system

(please feel free to use this ask as an excuse to infodump!)

realizing now that weve gained so many followers since becoming a primarily hk blog that a not insignificant number of you havent seen us talk about our beautiful wife Muse Bugfable... we'd show you a picture but there are literally no canon images of her and we dont like reposting our old art. Just imagine a pink moth built like a brick wall and probably carrying a smaller orange moth (that would be us) like a sack of potatoes

idk where to really Start because you see. one of the flaws of bug fables is that it sometimes fails to develop characters that are ostensibly really important (like its main villain but this ain't about him...). and one unfortunate side effect of this is that. The only thing we know about Muse is that she's leif's wife and exploring partner. and a tiny bit of her personality and how she fought. they don't really give us much else to go off of, we don't know how they met, why they became explorers, not even a shadow of what her life was like after leif died... so on

so weve dedicated a lot of mental space to just. thinking about her. and filling in the blanks on how she actually impacted the world. we lean to the idea that she was a bit of a social outcast and becoming explorers was her idea, and not something leif would have ever done without her. going to snakemouth den was a personal aspiration of hers! she wanted the recognition of being the bug to find the artifact there! and all that led to her spouse's death... and the rest of the story would not have happened if they didn't die there... she is so so tormented by guilt after the fact but if it weren't for her we would have no game. no fables. but shell never get to know to take consolation in that...

ummm fun facts time. we have extensive headcanons where she has Weird biology because she has an ancestor directly from the dead lands. she eats meat despite being a moth. her favorite food is snails. she has a very strong interest in giant-made structures and wants to own a toy truck. she and leif owned two pillbugs and she wanted a hunting weevil but those were too expensive to raise for them. she became a frequent visitor of the underground tavern after it was established because she Did Not Like the choices elizant ii made one bit. she got married again years after leif died and has a ton of grandkids. she has no concept of what explorer stories are "too scary" to tell said grandkids. sometimes she sits at the entrance of snakemouth den and talks to leif. she died peacefully and surrounded by loved ones but with the unresolved desire to apologize to them still weighing on her.