#1 sumeru and harbinger enjoyer

hello!! i’m soap, ar60/lv70 na (if u want to add me feel free to message me for my uid!)

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i know most people are well aware that she’s named after the lauma (latvian) or laumė (lithuanian) because of. well. the elephant in the room. but i actually couldn’t find anything credible about them being naked in the myths (i am not trusting sources that use ai generated images or follow the ai generated article structure).

here’s a description translated [by google] from lithuanian: “In Lithuanian fairy tales, the laumė is one of the most frequently mentioned creatures. It is said that laumės usually appear near water bodies, springs, and forests. People meet them in cultivated fields and in bathhouses. Laumės look either as young beautiful girls with very large breasts and braided hair, or as old women, sometimes with the body of a hen or a mare, or as giantess.” (source)

and wikipedia:

with lauma, we have the centaur form, the one eye covered by her hair, the large breasts, and the rainbow in her splash art (and maybe also her height?) all tying her to lithuanian depictions of the laumė.

but i think her inspiration goes beyond that, specifically with the greek goddess artemis. there are a lot of overlapping themes: the moon (especially represented by a crescent), the forest, wild animals, and maidenhood (lauma is also called “the maiden of the grove”). also, artemis’s sacred animal is the deer, notably the animal lauma is most associated with, despite laumės not being specifically associated with them.

maybe this is a reach, but i wonder if her splash art was at all inspired by this statue of artemis.

imo it would make sense, with her being a descendant of hyperborea, to have some greco-roman influence on her design.

also, lauma’s birthday is 1 march, the same day of the ancient roman celebration of matronalia

i know lauma isn’t much associated with childbirth (though the circumstances and veneration of her own birth are something she often thinks about, according to her character story 1). but what i think is interesting about the connection to juno lucina is this prayer to diana that the people of tsurumi island referenced in these murals in their prayer to the moon goddesses:

and lastly, to me the flowers on lauma’s arms look like light blue morning glories. there are two species in particular that stand out, i. tricolor and i. alba, “heavenly blue” and “moonflower” respectively, one being used by priests, the other being a night-blooming flower.

& that’s all i got!

childe believes that the harbingers are ranked by strength, but seeing as a lot of his voice lines about the harbingers have been wrong, we know he’s not the most reliable narrator. even so, he doesn’t feel like it’s right to challenge her to a fight—most likely not because he thinks he’ll lose, because we’ve seen him throw himself into all sorts of fights. he just can’t reconcile her apparent innocence and docility with her rank as 3rd, so he’s confused and tells the traveler to be careful.

scaramouche isn’t saying he’s stronger than the traveler so he could go toe to toe with her, he’s saying that her innocent appearance and detached nature wouldn’t deter him from starting a fight, but he knows that the traveler has stricter morals and wouldn’t do the same.

this i feel like needs no explanation. yes, she does give weird and unpredictable answers to questions, and disappears randomly without elaborating.

columbina’s whole story is about being misunderstood and having expectations forced on her. she couldn’t be the all-providing kuutar that the frostmoon scions thought she was. she’d thought the fatui saw her as her own person, but the tsaritsa wanted her for her agenda as well. the other fatui didn’t understand her and didn’t really try to either, hence all the vague voice lines. people point out that the song she sings in elogia cinerosa is supposed to sound eerie. i don’t disagree, but it also sounds sad—she is singing an elegy after all. it seems like we as the audience also misunderstood her based on the literal scraps we had to work with for 4 years.

most of the time when we saw her in nod-krai, she was in a weakened state, extremely tired, hiding away from other people, so her personality was pretty muted. but in the fontinalia quest, i feel like we’re seeing much more of what she was like with the fatui. she punches wriothesley and neuvillette because she’s observed people doing that and somehow concluded that that’s how you make friends. she completely stops acting whenever she senses sandrone nearby and doesn’t bother to explain her behavior to the others. and she did this before:

so yeah she does act weird, and most people probably would think she’s crazy or creepy because of it.

idk, to me it just seems like a lot of us made assumptions based on the opinions of people who didn’t know her well, not that she was “rewritten” or turned into “waifu bait” (jesus christ can we stop saying this about every female character who gets a lot of screentime)

as an aside i think we need to reflect on the definitions of some words and phrases. “retcon” would imply that her personality was portrayed one way and then they completely changed it. this isn’t the case because we did not see her personality before nod-krai. “waifu bait” is just plain wrong because she has a complex backstory, relationships with other characters, and a unique personality.