#musing .

also. no g'raha is not and cannot be a shard of hythlodaeus because he was never sundered in the first place but hythlo reminds me so much of g'raha, to the point i was getting their voices confused when hythlodaeus first showed up + i think they've got similar themes going on. anyway. for this reason i think my azem was a little a lot in love with hythlodaeus but it was something they never talked much about / their relationship was always ... it escaped definition, both from outsiders looking in and from each other. azem struggled with ... staying - a wanderer at heart, their journeys often took them to the farthest reaches of etheirys for months at a time. she was also ... she was undoubtedly a warm and affectionate person, but actually kept herself at a distance from most people, hythlodaeus included. so if there was anything there that wasn't entirely platonic, it wasn't something they ever discussed.

and yroh'a is not azem, obviously, but ... i think if she could see her successor, the bearer of her soul, she'd be very happy to see that yroh'a loves so loudly and directly. i think azem was a little afraid of doing so - platonically or otherwise. afraid of the potential pain that could accompany a decision to be open about her feelings, to declare just how deeply she cared about her people. emet-selch being The Way He Is and wanting to live up to his example certainly not helping, as well as being part of the convocation.

in fact, i think azem joining the convocation was similar to yroh'a joining the scions. the culture shock left both feeling like their true selves - playful, loud, affectionate, rough around the edges selves - would not be accepted. they had to make themselves smaller. they had to sacrifice some of the things they cared about - or sacrifice their own needs.

azem didn't get to live long with her choice to abdicate her seat before the world was sundered. but yroh'a would eventually, generations about generations later, inherit the consequences of the choices made before the world's collective memory.

and though yroh'a went through those same struggles, those real and perceived demands to quiet himself down, to not love so loud, he came out of the other side loving so loudly and fiercely. her supposed last words before her Heroic Sacrifice™ were i love you. to her friends, who she had loved and lost and brought back, who put their lives in their hands to forge her a path ahead. she would not leave room for doubt that she loved them. and when she lived past the point she thought she would, when she survived the moment where she thought her death was assured, she made sure that they knew she meant it.

and i think he gets up to a lot of things after 6.0 before 6.1 - i don't care how long the game says it is, in my mind it's at least a year, because jesus they need that long. there's so much hurt and pain they never addressed, old wounds that scarred over, reopened, scarred over the old, scars upon scars. and that ... that choosing of herself, is about love. love for themself. love for the people that got her here. the people she lost. the people she loved and loves.

and it - has to start with herself, i think. her friends go off on their separate paths, and it isn't goodbye forever, they're only a letter away, and she knows where they are if she wants to drop in on them. and she does. but i think they also spend so much of that year on their own, like how they were in the beginning. re-falling in love with the world, with the perspective of how utterly unique and fragile it is, and knowing the choices that led to this world and its reflections.

and then, when she feels like she's finally, finally back inside her body again. when she can feel the earth beneath her feet and smell the dust and soil in the air, and when she opens her eyes to the view from her campsite or inn room window, and all the colors of the world overwhelm her eyes and it brings her so much joy, it's ... she crawls back into her friends' lives, like she never left at all.

and this is where i get back to the original point of the post and talk about g'raha because no i didn't forget what i was talking about. hythlodaeus and azem were characterized by distance. hythlodaeus saw himself second to azem and emet-selch - they were beautiful, worth admiring, and he was content to be the one to "help them realize their dreams" (he even called it his "greatest contribution to our world" and i'll frow up about it)

and did the exarch not see things the same way? he would save the warrior of light, even should they hate him for it, for his deception, but he would die happy, knowing he saved them and the world and all worlds. but he lives, and more than that, he has to decide what he wants to do with his life he didn't expect to have.

yroh'a and g'raha get to do with azem and hythlodaeus never did - they get to see the world together, hand in hand.

i cannot remember if i posted about it on here, but the short of it is that yroh'a's version of dark knight is unique to him - he found the soul crystal of a "dark knight" of eulmore abandoned in the wilds of kholusia. the dark knights arose in the wake of the flood of light and were basically highly specialized hunters of sin-eaters. my original idea is that the bearer of the soul crystal was fray's shard in the first - who i nicknamed shay (for shard + fray) and then it ended up sticking.

but some fanart reminded me that haurchefant exists (/lh) and that some people make haurchefant lives aus and i've never been into them because i think he ultimately serves the plot better, especially for yroh'a, by dying. which sounds morbid but it's true.

anyway. wouldn't it be fucked up if the soul crystal actually belonged to haurchefant's shard. someone yroh'a knew, in a different life, a different world. and this shade doesn't know him, and yet this shade is part of him, because the DRK soul crystal is weird /lh, and i think shay would've taken on some qualities they didn't actually have in life.

part of it is i think there's the removal of something like the mind control stuff that squicks me out so much but zenos still gives me massive obsessed stalker vibes. but again it's ... what he says about the wol at the end of stb does ring incredibly true for yroh'a and between that and zenos having been the first person (since lahabrea) to really fuck yroh'a up ... he loathes that guy. he loathes zenos because zenos scares him, and he hates that zenos wants anything to do with him.

anyway something that's randomly on my brain this morning since i was thinking about hypothetical hyroh boss encounters is the different elements the two versions are associated with. swtor!hyroh is heavily associated with fire. he has an affinity for swimming and grew up in a coastal area same as his xiv counterpart but overwhelmingly he is associated with fire.

xiv!hyroh on the other hand, has that same background association with water but is more heavily associated with wind. dragoon combat is based on agility and making great leaps and practically flying through the air; ships at sea depend on the wind to get anywhere; dragons ride upon them through the air.