#hc.vw

hc. a golden eyes lore briefer.  shoddy tagging habits have failed me, but here are some found + expanded notes about my golden eyes lore:

his tribe (clarkia) and wider clan (the lakhdari) has its own lore around golden eyes and people with eyes the color of precious metals.

gold is most important! but there are stories for silver too and even copper and verdigris that developed separately from canon lore.  they don’t have silver-eyed warriors at all.  silver is linked with other associations.

their lore springs from how rich vacuo and the oasis was in the past, not only in dust, but in other materials.  metals, bullion, coin currency.  trading in kind was and remains common practice in some parts of vacuo, so this primacy of metals in the lore has its origins in connection to real historic prosperity, before plastic lien began to be circulated around all the kingdoms and before vacuo went seriously downhill.  the clarkias have been pretty steadily notable so the valuation and stories stuck with them, well preserved and thought real.  thus:  lore, not fairy tale.  symbolic connection to wealth and prosperity naturally followed.

golden eyed warriors are of particular significance because people born with golden eyes are thought to be likely to have / attain certain positive traits.  they’re viewed golden eyes as a sign that someone might be a good fighter.  it’s not just about physical prowess though.  the themes at the heart of the story are loyalty and self-sacrifice, willing or unwilling, and so martyrdom belongs here too.  the first golden eyed warrior was not a traditional warrior.

golden eyes, as we have seen in several characters, are not exactly rare to find in remnant.  rarity is not what makes the color notable.  just like for real gold, his tribe acknowledges a spectrum of shades:  yellow-gold vs rose gold vs honeyed, amber, burnished, ochre.  

some of these are valued (or valuated) more highly than others.  categorization is a lot to get into but one key question to ask is:  does it gleam?  does the shade seem particularly lustrous, polished, metallic;  truer and truer to the real thing?  i will also say: tapetum lucidum.  for over a decade one of the most well-regarded golden eyed warriors in his clan is love’s longtime trainer, leila bur, who is an oryx faunus.  she can see in the dark and has that light-reflection gleam.  this is ... in fact ... a point of interest!  ah!

off the top of my head, characters with gold/yellow eyes:  blake, tyrian, cinder.

so that’s interesting isn’t it.  i mean.  i mean.  i’m laughing.  let’s not talk about who love has been attracted to and if this has ever had any influence on aesthetic appeal.  none of them have ever deeply dealt with loyalty, self-sacrifice, or matrydom have they?  nope.

ironic that the clarkias still want to stay a human tribe, but that reasoning is wholly due to semblance, not this lore.  love’s eyes are golden and still considered quite pretty for several reasons [link] but based upon color alone they’re actually not the “highest grade” so to speak, which is the sort of language that they would use.  a vocabulary of appraisal.  leila’s eyes [in the banner] are pretty top tier.  

golden eyes lore involves a lot of death, (re)incarnation, and refinement, which i made up way before all of the oz revelations.  i wasn’t thinking about the maidens either when developing this lore, since maiden-stories in his tribe are rather ordinary.  my standard opening line even begins with: once upon a time, there was a man who died.

i 100% thank pr/incess tu/tu for that line and for giving me heaps more inspiration.

hot mess incoming im still processing and NERVY AF ASJDKLDFHJ

ok.  my muse isn’t canon of course so i am focusing on the vacuo revelations.  

1) it is very nitty gritty and super survivalist, the wildlife was more dangerous than expected, shade being described as the only source of order makes much more sense now.  in v4 sun expressed surprise that menagerie didn’t expand inland and blake said that menagerie’s desert wasn’t like vacuo’s - it was inhospitable, and had wildlife more dangerous than average.  if that’s still true then holy shit.  the grimm, harsh nature, lack of resources, and wildlife we get exposed to in this book?? vacuo is a hard fucking place to live.  

2) vacuo organizes itself mostly around settlements which was surprising to me too, i didn’t expect nomadism to be that much of the norm even though it’s forced due to grimm attacks and sandstorms / other natural disasters.  it just brings a nice contrast to the utter luxury of love’s upbringing, being landed outside of vacuo city.  they have had the means, money, fortune, luck, security etc to give up nomadism.

3) added headcanon: love’s tribe definitely has their own small cct support tower.

4) i hummed at some of the more callous/uncaring descriptions and stereotypes of vacuans...

surviving is what we do here, or we don’t. we look out for one another but if it’s down to your life or someone else’s, you choose your own. no hard feelings.

the only home you have in vacuo is the people you keep close.

settlements described as honestly meagre places. “there was no way is could ever compare to beacon, let alone any village in vale”

but i’ll take em since they came from the mouths of vacuans, from their experiences living among different settlements.  still, just the first page had trite stuff like  vacuo: the wrong place at the wrong time  and  a terrible place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.  SO I STARTED OFF SQUINTING REAL HARD. i was really scared of just .... not liking the vacuo we get, after all this time of waiting and worldbuilding on my own.  i was terrified that my hype would fall apart or be disappointed by some mad max wild west bullshit.  and terrified that i’d feel overly protective of my headcanons or salty if others suddenly started paying attention to vacuo thanks to cfvy, who aren’t even from there (bar you know you), so vacuo would just become a theater again.  

5) but fox and slate especially brought a lot of feeling and sense and heart to these sayings and environments, so i really wound up liking it! (“no matter how long you’ve been away, you’re always part of your tribe, and your tribe’s always part of you,” slate said. fox smiled.)

6) although i liked much less the judgments made by coco & velvet when they’d only been living there for a little while and obvi are there because their hands were forced after the fall.

7) i guess the clarkia tribe’s strong ethics and emphasis on hospitality can be a product of their wealth too. they can afford this generosity, whereas a lot of others need to focus on survivalism.

8) most vacuans wore simple, light-colored tunics and linen cloaks and head coverings for crossing the desert. ...  inb4 love really is extra Extra for his sense of fashion.

9) the bits on vacuan attitudes on leadership vs authority were very interesting and i have old headcanons that i need to dig up and think about. fox said most tribes and settlements don’t have elected officials which...personally feels incredibly yikes and unsustainable. incredibly. “it’s even more unusual for a tribe to have a leader that they trust” honestly, i don’t like this canon. i’ll trash it when it comes to love. on slate’s good leadership, from coco’s thoughts: “it was because she cared more about them than she did herself, and that was a rare quality in vacuo.” ... like, objectively i know this attitude is probably true but god do i hate generalizations!! i felt like this when rping ciel too, on generalization about atlas that was all rly about class.  ah!! oh well. i’ll think about it.

10) velvet dabbled in fortune-telling when she was younger can we TALK about this.

11) all the grimm were beautiful by the way, beautiful and terrifying and fucking everywhere, though that was mostly because Plot. gotta remember that that high level of threat is not typical, but due to Plot.

12) speaking of plot: someone seeking out people with strong semblances?  love has a Strong Semblance.  his semblance, in fact, has a whole mound of its own lore and celebration behind it. pls fuck him up, or warn him that this is happening.

14) descriptions of shade, too, i am on the fence about. “It felt like everyday at the school was a test to see how good you were, to prove that you deserved to be training to be a Huntsman. Survival was more important than teamwork, and it was more competitive than Beacon Academy- even within your own team- placing CFVY at a unique disadvantage” / “...focus on survival and results rather than teamwork and studies.” ... we get it, you have to survive. why the fuck wouldn’t teamwork and studies be important to survival and training career huntsmen? i just don’t get it and it doesn’t quite align with my views, though i know that attitude certainly exists in vacuo, ffs it’s not monolithic. in a huntsman institution?? i don’t buy it. idk!!

15) “Vacuans were typically more respectful and less wasteful than anyone else.” !!! A GOOD ONE!!

they acknowledged several times that vacuo’s problems has roots in other kingdoms taking advantage of them!!  “Their whole existence was centered on picking up and moving on. And it was the other kingdoms that had created this situation for them. No wonder they didn’t want to get involved in Remnant’s politics.”  I FUCKING STOPPED AND CHEERED AT THIS PART. AAAAAA GOD FUCKING BLESS. i have added legitimacy to how love doesn’t at all sign onto the grandeur of being a huntsman especially if it leads him out of vacuo, he does it for other and personal reasons.  the goodness is a happy bonus.

the karkadann. “this grimm is really just one, but it has been a never-ending pain for ages, it is almost legendary at this point! a lord of the desert. one horn like a unicorn’s, the other like a rhino’s.  it looks like a stag or an buffalo with three hooves on each foot and the tail of a lion.  war-like, violent, and ferocious beyond comparison, it tolerates no other creature’s presence, not even other grimm! well, they say it’s fine with the company of doves. maybe we should release a flock of birds and be done with it! ” ghoul grimm. “the stuff of fairytales, you might say — undead monsters, yes?  no, ours are rare but very much real and physical things.  hairy, savage creatures that live in the wilder parts of nature unless they creep closer to lurk graveyards and battlefields for human or faunus remains, and the grief surrounding them.  but that’s not all!  they say that the very old ghouls can shape shift.  the ones who have managed to survive for decades.  they often travel in the form of a hyena, but they’re mostly solitary and horribly clever with age.  they will take the form of beautiful maidens with moon faces and sit by campfires near lonely roads at night, waiting to lure in their victims.”

the azhdaha.  “a serpent like the king taijitu, just as giant but very long.  flaming eyes, a wide mouth full of teeth, stories of how they eat the hearts of the brave and courageous.  only stories! hmm, maybe the oldest ones do?  we know how most grimm aren’t so picky over their killing.  but there are, oh, three variants of them?  ones who live on the earth, in the sea, or in the air, with fins or wings as they need them. sea azhdaha are the biggest terror, i think many sea monsters are because they can grow so large.  you will find them off the northern and western sanusian coasts with more bone plating than the other kinds, to make them dynamic in the cold water depths.”

tba:

simurgh. a fabulous bird. the one with the face.

djinn based.

variants or differentiation from common valean grimm.

wonderful description of fox’s childhood home!  “Hardy palm trees arching over a clear blue oasis, bright green leaves reflected in the still water. There’s grass on the shore, lush green grass, dotted with pink and white flowers. Bees lazily drift over them, collecting pollen. Do you hear them buzzing? This is the center of town, where everyone gathers to talk, eat, conduct business at the market. Around us are burlap tents and lean-tos built by traveling merchants, beyond are the huts, squat shelters made of mud brick and straw where are people dwell. [...] it’s beautiful. Though our homes are simple and inelegant, they stand as a testament to our sheer will to survive. The fact that anything can live in the desert is a miracle. And when the desert winds knock all this down, we’ll just rebuild. When monsters run us out, we will move and start anew elsewhere. Always remember that. Every life is precious, even the mole crabs and the carrion hawks and the slowworms...all the more so out here where there is so little of it.”

“This city seems like it’s all alleys. None of the streets make sense,” Yatsuhashi said. 

“That’s because it is all alleys.” It wasn’t like the city was planned out, like Vale, or engineered, like Atlas. When he first came here, Sun had learned that the city just kind of happened. People settled wherever they stopped moving, and the city sprouted up gradually around Shade Academy wherever houses and buildings fit, typically clustered around the small oases and patches of greenery that were too stubborn to give in to the desert. 

The city of Vacuo had some order to it, with different districts for residences and businesses, and a wide street down the center for the market. But the outer edges of it were periodically wiped out, because of sandstorms or sinkholes or earthquakes. Occasionally a big enough Grimm burrowed under the wall, churned up the sand, and knocked everything down. Or Ravagers would attack from above. A rare, heavy rainstorm might last for days—a mixed blessing that both brought water and washed shelters away. None of this was bad luck, it was just life—and death—in Vacuo. 

Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to get oriented right now. “To find Shade, you literally just have to look up, and there it is,” Sun said. Buildings in the city were usually no more than a few stories tall, which gave you a clear view of the terraced fortress in the middle, the site of Shade Academy and the Cross Continental Transmit (CCT) tower. It loomed high over the desert, tall enough to be viewed for miles around. During the day, wide awnings were extended from its walls on all sides, providing broad coverage and relief from the harsh sun.

vale/vacuo border is defined down the middle of sanus.  & though vacuo city is in the middle of a big desert, the terrain on the retro remnant map (which is official) shows green coasts and what looks like mountainous areas west, north, and southeast of the kingdom; islands to the south.  so.  vacuo has diverse regions and climates  even if populations outside of the capital are all settlements and less notable towns.  during that schnee fundraiser moment, that one bitchy lady said that vale had a lot of natural borders  &  i think this holds true for parts of vacuo (not vacuo city) too.