#*renascence

what can be said in defense of the rabbit who does not flee, who does not even freeze—but instead forces her way between the jaws of the wolf and prays he will eat gently of her brazenness? [ . . . ] in defense of the rabbit: the wolf, with its thick fur and generous tongue, eats always more tenderly than the viper.

oooo i think it's like roundabout established in renascence but the timeline is post-acosf wherein all of the events from acowar on were stretched out over a few decades instead of a few months(? years?), mostly so as to give time for iphigenia to 1) be born and grow into adulthood; and 2) hear muddled fifth-hand accounts and rumors about what happened under and after amarantha—which means tamtam has been down bad for significantly longer than in canon.

one of my favorite headcanons to come from this is that because he spent so much of that time in his beast form, his movements and tendencies are more animalistic than they used to be. he'll look askance when he doesn't want to be seen as a threat—subconsciously make himself smaller. (genia notices this when his anger peaks—to her he seems to suddenly deflate or shrink, shoulders drawing in, head ducking. there are also a lot of times she doesn't notice it, primarily when he isn't angry but she's still wary of him—he steps back from her a lot, shifts his weight away, physically crouches down, etc.) his voice is deeper and gruffer from both disuse and from being accustomed to making Animal Sounds. i also love tamlin who eats his meat raw, who has no qualms about tearing past a hide with his teeth, even in fae form.

a hallmark for established tamgenia is that they feel safe expressing their anger around and with each other. that's a really important part of their arc. tamlin whose anger often harms those around him either intentionally or unintentionally and so who carries A Lot of shame about feeling it at all, even when it's justified; iphigenia who shies away from acting on her anger because beron taught her that it ultimately amounted to nothing—nothing she did in service of herself could actually help her, better always to fawn than to fight or flee and risk a punishment. it's tamlin who feels comfortable to do so first; iphigenia eventually realizes that his anger never harms her (which is like 🫨🫨🫨 for her) and thus stops flinching from it, helping tamlin realize that anger is not inherently bad and he is not inherently bad for feeling it so long as he's mindful with it. this takes longer for iphigenia though. for a long time, there's that small fear in her mind that the other shoe might drop if she pushes him too hard—and she wouldn't be able to stomach it, if she found the capacity in him to treat her like beron did. but there is no capacity in tamlin for that. eventually she realizes this too.

tamlin also gets more playful with iphigenia and more banterous as their relationship progresses, just like we see in acotar with feyre. his words come easier because he isn't uncertain in his standing with her or subconsciously trying to push her away to spare her of him. more smiles. more earnest charm. the kind that disarms iphigenia at once because there's no artifice in it, no intent behind it. it isn't the double-spoken veneer of autumn; there isn't anything to parse out from it. tamlin is what he is and says what he means. so this exchange: "i used to write." "stories?" "poetry, mostly. lyrics if i was inspired." "and what moves the high lord of the spring court to song?" tamlin, looking directly at iphigenia: "beauty." well that literally makes her brain start going brrrrrrbrrrbrrrrrbrrrrrrrrrr. she also has that delightfully sharp, coquettish autumn rizz that tamlin enjoys of lucien hidden beneath the obsequence beron expected of her, so once tamlin opens those flirtatious doors, she's literally In Her Element.

her age is left ~ambiguous~ in renascence but she’s pretty young! that was intentional to make her and beron Even Worse. we know from canon that loa was 20 when she and beron married, and helion expresses that this is very young for a faerie to be wed. i set iphigenia in her early twenties when she was taken to the forest house in renascence—in the timeline where emile kills her she was 19—to make beron see in her his young wife as she first was when everything was Good™ between them. beron ideates pretty consistently in his pov about how youthful and unsullied and pure and naive iphigenia is. just by virtue of how high stress and high risk it is to be in the forest house, i rarely see her surviving there beyond a year. i’d say for maximum crunch she’s 21, for slightly less concerning crunch she’s 25.

beyond allat, her being young preserves the believability of her being a virgin when her father sells her off—otherwise she may have begun participating in autumn’s sex rites or just had sex with someone. twenty-ish years was also the maximum amount of time i wanted to stretch the acosf timeline out across before beron would have moved in on tamlin’s negligence. in the fic’s canon, beron’s like actively about to try to overtake spring. that’s why [redacted] arranges for tamlin to come the night he rescues iphigenia—an attempt to get him to show beron that he’s not out of the game. it’s established in tamlin’s second intermezzo that beron has essentially been raiding and pillaging spring villages to test the border, see how tamlin responds, and weaken spring even further. any longer and i think spring falls.

i hc that around 23-25 in fae years is when autumn females come of marriageable age—younger for nobility. genia’s an adult by both human and faerie standards, just a very fresh one. (she thinks in unrest to a time when boys tripped over their feet for her and males kicked them aside as a nod to this.) her experiences with beron didn’t age her per se, but they did strip her of any lingering vestiges of adolescence she had to her before the forest house.

12 ⧽. what's a song or two you associate with renascence?

what a perfect way to get me in the headspace to write it lmao thank u dana wana<3 probably: darkest shade of blue by young the giant i'm here with you when your hands are shaking i'm here with you and your heart is racing i'm here with you in the darkest shade of blue with my eyes closed by cults 'cause you're the exception i've tried every way to be sure of this if i could just see i'd open my eyes to the light and then we'll free fall straight into the trap you set for me free fall i'm not going back now that i see

lmfaooo honestly i went so back and forth on that interchange because it is like just such a blatant and glaring lie but no matter how i tried to work it, she wanted to shield her mother from the same fear that she felt to have first faced tamlin. ultimately i think it’s a very Telling Thing that miss mistruth, miss lie-by-half and lie-by-omission tells her mother such an unbelievable lie and has absolute faith that her mother will believe it without question. because she doesn’t have to convince tamlin. she doesn’t have to convince her father. she just has to convince her mother—her mother, who has already believed unbelievable lie after unbelievable lie after unbelievable lie from her father. what’s another?