lodestar countdown / day 4 / ship day / wylie and alvar
and once again a late countdown post from kallie! i would have posted this like forever ago but i was just too lazy to scan it. i also changed the lighting on this a little bit because the scan looked a little light, and i also think it looks kinda cool.
aaaaanyways … *cue dark lighting and aesthetic presentation slides* let’s talk about wyvar.
let’s start with some basic facts:
wyvar is, wyvar was, and wyvar always will be. wyvar is eternal.
‘twas i who stumbled upon this rare beautiful gem when all seemed hopeless and heterosexual.
meet my co-captain, star. she has, in fact, written a short fanfiction about the very events in this comic. good luck deciding which is the dragon and which is the egg, and better luck yet figuring out which came first.
now that you have acquainted yourself with this beautiful ship, please consider some reasons for adding it to your ever-growing list of otps:
wylie and alvar are the only two characters to whom we have been introduced of their age group. of course, when there are only two characters who are even remotely the same age, they always end up together, but please consider that the other options are:
having a couple girls enter the scene for no reason except being a love interest, a truly terrifying thought
them staying single for the rest of the series, which, refreshing as it may be, denies us the feels and pain of shipping
our childrens’ love lives remaining unknown to us (i think not)
one or both of them dying. need i say more?
i think i speak for at least one other person in this fandom when i say that keeper is currently far too straight. we need more lgbt+ representation. i’ve seen comments on shannon’s website talking about diversity in her books, though mostly racial diversity, to which she has replied saying that elves have cultures separate from humans, and elves don’t discriminate based on skin color, but acknowledging that she hasn’t been perfect (can we please just take a moment to appreciate that? there are probably fewer authors willing to say that they haven’t been perfect than authors who have done well in writing diverse characters). it wouldn’t be right to put in a gay ship just for the sake of having a gay ship, but this gay ship is cute. you can’t have true diversity without including diversity in all relevant categories. for example, sexual orientation would not be relevant in a book/movie with no romance whatsoever (see: big hero 6), but would be in a book like keeper which has somewhat of a romantic focus.
person a and person b on opposing sides of the war = many feels. a lot of people shipped sokeefe way before the end of neverseen, which made keefe’s betrayal much more heartbreaking and painful, but honestly it’s a really good plot concept: someone on the protagonist’s side has feelings for someone else they think is on the protagonist’s side, and they see it as black and white, good and bad, but then the person they’re in love with betrays them and is actually on the other side, and suddenly it’s not black and white anymore. when someone you love betrays you, you start making excuses for them, trying to find a way that they could possibly justify what they did and maybe redeem themselves. it’s like being in denial. it hasn’t been confirmed, but wylie is most likely on the black swan’s side of the war. alvar is with the neverseen.
they understand each other. in exile, alden, alvar’s father, breaks, and i don’t remember seeing it, but alvar is definitely mourning. long, long before, prentice, wylie’s father, also broke. they’re such similar situations. here i make an analogy to another book, a mango shaped space by wendy mass (a great book, by the way), so *SPOILER ALERT*. when mia’s cat, mango, her best friend and one of the most important things in her life, dies one day, she is devastated. at one point she tells her best (human) friend, who had lost her mother years previously, that she doesn’t know how it feels. her friend is confused and hurt. later, at school, she is talking to another friend/possible love interest and almost says the same thing, but remembers that he had a dog who passed away, and that he does truly understand what she’s feeling. *END SPOLIER ALERT* similarly, in exile, grady and edaline might have understand how it feels to lose someone dear, but wylie is the only one (besides alvar’s siblings) who understands how it feels to lose a father like that, still alive, but no longer sane, no way to reach him or help him. whoever wylie may blame for what happened to prentice, and whatever he believes about how sophie can fix things, he understands what alvar is feeling.
the beautifully complex dynamic between two people when they understood each other’s pain for what seemed like a fleeting moment but then some miracle happens to one of them, but not the other. here i make another analogy, this time to the show once upon a time, at the end of season 5, so, once again, *SPOILER ALERT*. all season emma has been doing everything in her power (and that’s a lot of power) to save killian, to keep him alive. she literally goes to the underworld to get him back. then, in the end, there’s no way to save him anymore, and emma has to return to storybrooke without him. as they try to beat hades, robin’s soul is obliterated. the next calm moment they have to grieve, they feel each other’s pain of having loved someone so deeply and having been willing to do anything for them, only to have that crushed, with nothing anyone can do about it - emma has already tried everything; regina’s boyfriend was literally deleted from existence. then zeus decides to do what gods do best: do something really nice for one or two people they like, not caring about how much it fucks with everyone else. he brings killian back to life. while emma has a moment of pure joy, regina has yet another bucket of emotion dumped on her head. *END SPOILER ALERT* assuming wylie and alvar know each other during exile, wylie must be feeling something like what regina feels. he’s angry, angry at people who don’t deserve it. he’s angry at alvar even though he had nothing to do with alden’s healing, angry at sophie for healing alden first even though it was the council’s orders, angry at the council for ordering alden to be healed instead of prentice even though it wouldn’t make sense to heal a prisoner in exile before an “innocent” noble (an “innocent” noble who broke from guilt), angry at alden for doing this to prentice even though he, like sophie, had no choice, angry at the black swan for not immediately snatching up sophie and dragging her down into exile to fix prentice, angry at fate, the world, whatever caused all this to happen to him.
unless the matchcmaking office takes sexuality into account, they’d probably be a bad match, and they’d probably stay together despite that, and they’d get married, if only as a “fuck you” to elvin society. then they’d join the nobility, get quality jobs, live happily for a while, find themselves bored of everyday life and find a way to somehow sue the council or whatever the equivalent of that is. who doesn’t want to see any of that happening? (i’d watch any of my notps go through all that very willingly and probably come out of it shipping them really hard tbh.)
and now for an explanation of this comic that i have drawn:
it takes place in exile, during which, as i have explained, alden is broken and prentice is broken and they get each other.
in the first panel, alvar, angry, tears coming out of his eyes, stands at alden’s tree, saying “damnit, dad! you said there was no reason to worry.”
in the second, wylie, standing by cyrah’s tree, notices alvar, and, being a kind cinnamon roll, calls out to him: “al?”
next, wylie’s hand on alvar’s shoulder is depicted, because wylie is a wonderful elf and wishes to comfort his evil boyfriend.
in the next two, they make eye contact. a million words pass between them. (it’s really hard to get emotion into just the eyes like seriously wow)
“i know,” says wylie. a tear escapes alvar’s eye.
with absolutely no context whatsoever and nothing to determine the status of their current relationship in any way, they kiss. well, two awkwardly drawn anime people who bear a strange resemblence to them kiss in the exact same spot.
i made the sky gray because blue was too happy and i had no other good sky colors, also p a t h e t i c f a l l a c y (i was drawing this and i just could not remember what the thing where the weather reflects the mood is called …)
and thus concludes my presentation on wyvar, on which i unintentionally spent two hours! luckily, it is only 10:48, so it is still technically day 4 for me. tl;dr: wyvar is otp.
(did anyone actually read that whole thing lmao)
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