i hate redeads

It takes Warriors several pages to come out of his shocked reaction here. He’s staring blankly, looking at his shaking hands and startling as the sparks trek past them and up the wall. He snaps out of it when Wild starts talking and pulls himself together quite quickly once they start talking and he seems to get a grip on his reaction.

If this is a trauma response, Warriors has a very solid grip on it to bring it under control again that fast. But we’ve seen evidence of that before, too. Where Time has gone snappish and cold, and seems to be losing time and failing to respond to people over the past couple days, Warriors is protective but stable and Wild is already back to laughing and teasing… all of which are different kinds of reaction to the same thing. Warriors has had a lot of experience going from a brush with death back to the next problem, and he’s usually estimated to be in his mid-twenties now when he was most likely a teenager in his war: that’s around five years plus the time he was in active war to teach himself how to cope.

Its interesting to look back at Sunset and more directly compare how Time handled Twilight’s injury versus how Warriors did it. Time was clearly emotional; you can see a lot more rage in his face, a lot of panic and reactivity; he fights with Twilight directly, whereas Warriors eventually shrugs it off and walks by Twilight’s side and switches to teasing him – but, in Sunset pt.3, a few panels later when Twilight goes down it’s clearly not a surprise: Warriors had deemed the argument pointless and let Twilight fall, vs Time trying to order him around.

It happens many times, actually: he’s teasing Hyrule in Magic Sword, teasing Wild here in the Dungeon, teases Twilight even after they learn the fairy failed. Warriors has practice with deflection as a tactic (He deflects the innkeeper, deflects Wind from Wild storming off) and the moment it’s not needed he snaps back: once Time & Twilight leave for the village, Warriors shifts to command with Sky.

His problem with Wild is clearly that Wild does not take commands. Warriors’ reasoning not to attack the Knuckle is sound: he’s just seen evidence of it’s weapon dealing unhealable wounds, when he’s clearly assigned himself the main role of group medic back in Threatening Shadows. Unfortunately for him, Wild is not used to taking commands. He analyzes the situation himself and reaches his own conclusion, which isn’t strictly a bad thing! He has information about his skillset Warriors does not, but he has no idea that he should convey that to him before he acts on that choice: Wild does not fight as a unit, and Warriors does. This is a mutual misunderstanding with no blame, for all Warriors tries to chew Wild out for it in the immediate moment (when, once again, he was likely scared out of his mind Wild would die.) Warriors has clearly realized that since having assigned Wild to himself in this dungeon.

It’s the mature and correct reaction, to realize you were ignored not because someone refused your authority, but because they did not realize it was there in the first place. Wild reacts to stress completely differently than Time, who reacts differently than Legend or Sky because all of them have different experience. Wild, so far as we’ve seen, is the only one who responds with rage…

And that’s going to take work all its own for Warriors to manage if he wants to put himself in charge of the others. All this, and nevermind Wild learning to handle it himself—but Wild, unlike Warriors, is less than a year from waking in the Shrine himself. Coping techniques like he clearly has take time.