#persawyeh

I always love getting VM asks from you, even when it's been long enough since I've watched Fate that I'm a bit fuzzy on the details 💜💜💜. (That means that if canon contradicts any of these headcanons, I genuinely don't remember, so therefore no it doesn't 💙.)

I'm sure I've made it clear by now that Sawyeh Noor is my most favouritest gorl, so I'll stick with her for the character headcanons, but I'll jump around a bit for the ship headcanons. (Now that I've finished typing this out, this got way longer than expected so I'll be putting the ship headcanons in their own post.)

Character Sawyeh headcanons:

I like to think that with Sawyeh's background growing up in the monastery, she developed a unique perspective on community that the other Maidens don't necessarily have - every member of the monastery would need to contribute to the upkeep and care of not just the building(s) and grounds, but the other people within it as well. This does come through a fair bit throughout the campaign, most notably post-Bastard's Breach and her consistent commitment to helping rebuild and train and help anyone in the Sisters of Sorrow that she can, but she's also just like that in her day to day life, to the point of occasionally being almost naggy towards the other Maidens to clean up after themselves or to keep their gear repaired and stuff like that.

I also think she would have learned how to cook while in the monastery (part of taking care of the people and not just the place is making sure everyone is fed), and I think she'd both be quite good at and genuinely love cooking, and find the process almost meditative.

Alistar Fritz Patrick occasionally joins her during her early morning yoga sessions - instead of cat yoga, it's pseudodragon yoga!

As a Way of the Four Elements monk, she obviously ends up having a connection to the elements, but I find it interesting which elements she ends up gravitating towards. She starts the campaign using fire the most, and then uses it and water (bc of her connection to Olhydra/Persana) fairly evenly throughout the campaign. She also uses air a decent amount, and that connection gets stronger once she gets her dragonfly wings...

...but she doesn't use earth all that much, if at all. Which I think is incredibly fitting for her, as a big part of her motivation in leaving the monastery was her desire to travel and experience new things - and if A:TLA taught us anything, that freedom and curiosity is essentially the opposite of earth as an element. I think she genuinely struggles with that kind of rooted-ness.

Building off of both of the above, I like connecting her to Ranna and Chidi once she starts studying from/training with the Carillons, and as such, she has someone who has influenced her life that is directly connected to one of the elements: her mother Maheen is water, her father Aram is fire, Ranna is air (bc air genasi), and Chidi is earth (bc of The Tree).

We already know that she's a big tea-drinker and avoids alcohol (I am considering late-campaign Sawyeh drinking an exception to the rule due to. y'know. the potential unravelling of the fabric of reality), but since I am also a big tea drinker, I have Thoughts. and by that I mean I am projecting my own taste in tea on Sawyeh.

She tends to favour black teas, but also really enjoys rooibos and herbal (especially anything with ginger or chamomile), and doesn't particularly like green teas. Properly brewed masala chai is her absolute favourite, and when she was growing up it was a treat for special occasions.

I know that Naseem is Iranian-American, and I know that Sawyeh Noor and Maheen and Aram are all Arabic names (or at least from neighbouring regions/languages), but in the very first stream that the Venture Maidens made on their channel, Naseem describes Sawyeh as Filipino, and that idea has stuck with me since then. However, I am Incredibly White and know next to nothing about Filipino culture - but I can definitely look up traditional & popular Filipino food, tie that back into my earlier headcanon about Sawyeh and cooking, and say that her favourite food is tinolang manok.

Also she can fucking DESTROY some minatamis na saging and lumpiang saging.

In the time-honoured tradition of the one ace/aroace friend in the group, she's somehow the person all the rest of the Maidens come to for relationship advice. Maybe she just seems wise beyond her years. Maybe she's able to keep a clearer, more rational viewpoint that isn't distracted by attraction. Maybe she's just the least likely to deliberately give them bad advice as a joke. Who knows.

(It's all three.)

As I said in the tags on one of your art posts that I reblogged, I love the idea of Sawyeh and Persana ending up as queerplatonic partners. I'm always a sucker for ships where one half is human or essentially human-like, and the other is just so inherently alien that their relationship fundamentally can't be put into the typical framework that we usually put relationships in.