#elf dads

Just thinking of little Runaan and Ethari.

The thing about toxic cultures is, if you’re in the majority, you don’t see the toxicity nearly as much, and you and the others in it are often reassuring each other that you’re all doing the right thing. Often at some overseer’s urging, some leader or group that’s deliberately encouraging this behavior for some reason. *gestures to all of human history*

And it’s not always for a bad reason at first. But when a society takes on toxic traits, it’s often out of fear. Fear of losing identity, fear of change, fear of dissolution. Things get divided into “us vs them” and “good vs bad”, anything with only two sides, because a black-and-white situation is very easy to rally people to and motivate them with. And black-and-white is very Moonshadow. 

When you only have two categories to fill, and you put all the things you like and want to keep doing in the positive side, then literally everything else gets dumped into the negative side: humans, cowards, changing your mind, showing fear, speaking out of turn, showing your feelings, not dancing with the group, having perfectly ordinary concerns about dying.

Moonshadow culture definitely has issues. It was created to have issues. Just because Runaan and Ethari are The Hot Gay Elf Husbands doesn’t excuse their negative cultural behaviors. They genuinely love Rayla, they do. They’ve both broken their cultural rules for her, and that’s a big step for each of them to take, considering their culture. So that’s encouraging. But they both contributed to her hangups, too, by being the authority figures who told her how things went, who helped explain village life to her as events took place around them all year by year.

Thing is, they literally don’t have a second option that’s readily available. Moonshadows are homebodies. Ethari probably rarely or never leaves the Moonshadow Forest, or maybe even the Silvergrove. And when Runaan leaves, it’s with the mindset that he’s wading into a bunch of lawless humans who need some fatal correcting. There’s no room for learning good traits from them while he’s on missions.

They’re good people in a stagnant society that’s gone rigid with age and the strictures of tradition. If they see a better, more loving way to live, they should gravitate to it out of the goodness of their hearts. But someone has to bring that to them, or they’ll have to stumble upon it on their own. It’s extremely difficult to invent something out of nothing for the very first time.

You all sure think about this a lot, hmm? Well, so have we. This is Xadia, and adoption isn’t our only option here. But there’s a war on, and with Runaan stealthing his way along the front lines for the last several years, there hasn’t really been a good time to start taking this idea more seriously.

Runaan was so beautiful with little Rayla, though. Seeing them together made my heart sing every time.

Season 1 Runaan: grumpy grump.😠

Playing with some color palettes for Ruthari.