#fivuril

Read some metas talking about how meaningful it is that Fiver in the book named his son Threar after his late chief Threarah so I reused my 2023 WSD character design art to do design my version of Threar!

So as I've mentioned, I started reading Tales From Watership Down (but skipping to Part 3 first because I wanna see how things pick up after the first book, I'll go back to the El-Ahrairah stories later). And after reading the chapter "The Secret River", I think I now know why it was a widely accepted misconception in the fandom that Hazel x Hyzenthlay and Bigwig x Thethuthinnang are canon ships, even though they aren't.

So in this chapter, three does from Efrafa (Hyzenthlay, Thethuthinnang, and Vilthuril) all got a ton of focus together. Well, more specifically Vilthuril really just talked about how she, Hyzenthlay, and Theth knew about the river of knowledge together. And with the fact that Vilthuril is canonically Fiver's mate, I think the fandom expected this trio of does to correspond with the three main bucks from the first book (and I suppose even the 1978 movie and 1999 series) who got the most focus- Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig.

I haven't gotten this far into Tales yet, but I've heard that some fans also think that Hazenthlay is canon because of some brief descriptions that Hazel & Hyzenthlay slept close together and touched noses, but that doesn't automatically scream romantic. Hell Bigwig and Thethuthinnang don't have any romantically-coded scenes together, not from what I remember of the original book nor from what I've heard about Tales. I feel the fandom started shipping them as more of a "pair the spare" trope just to go with the canon Fiver x Vilthuril and the popular Hazel x Hyzenthlay.

I'm not complaining about this btw! I actually really like the idea of Hazel x Hyzenthlay and Bigwig x Thethuthinnang as non-canon ships, but I just find it weird how they were long accepted as canon even though they aren't. Hell even I went almost a whole decade having just fallen for this information without reading Tales.

They are super cute! I wish we got to see more of their interactions. Vilthuril is such a sweetie and I wish we learned more about her. Even her chapter in Tales was really about Flyairth, not Vilthuril herself.