#sairsel

no one talks about this but the fact is that sairsel's love for sihtric is so immense that it houses almost the entirety of his self-denied capacity for extreme violence. he's a tree hugging peace loving hippie at heart and only incidentally went to war mostly for his (much more fluent in the language of violence and aggression) mother in his xiv iteration which is why i've always been at odds with latching zenos onto him as a foil (which in turn translates into his revulsion-attraction contradictions re zenos within the narrative) but as a hunter and wild man whose echo is essentially a version of the wit from ROTE he's also a bit animalistic in his instincts that translate into fierce territorial aggression and offspring protection, all heightened through the lens of human emotion WHICH IS TO SAY. he was in fact extremely vulnerable to zenos manipulating him into unleashing the worst of himself. his rage for ala mhigo (territorial aggression) gave zenos a good fight but it genuinely is nothing compared to how utterly nuclear sairsel could have gone if zenos had caused even just SOME harm to sihtric. so in from the cold could have been much much much worse and the main reason it wasn't in my canon (besides that i am letting game canon stop me) is zenos didn't understand sihtric was the key to getting everything he thought wanted until he actually met and talked to him in sharlayan and he'd had his little royal menagerie introspection character development by then

just made a connection. sairsel calls sihtric little fox bc he's clever and mischievous and ginger and in the final fantasy fourteen blood-thirsting carrion birds universe the resistance folk in little ala mhigo called sairsel sand fox ...