ur welcome!! u pulled thru and did it all :)
i was wondering, could you elaborate on your thoughts of the na bros' mixed heritage? im simply curious, is all.
ahhh thank you for asking this
Trying to unpack my thoughts is like trying to find a missing earring in a crowded pool (I've done that this week. It was hell. I won.)
mixed heritage: native american + british settler + everything else
Alfred is the product of violence, rebellion, and relentless expansion. He was "raised" (if you can call it that) by England but he was born of a land already lived in, already named, already known by its original nations. I like to think of him as someone who carries a complicated physical memory: Algonquin and Iroquois bones in his early body, rhythms from the Mississippi in his bloodstream, but shaped, often forcibly, by English law, Protestant rigidity, and Western expansionism.
He's got a British accent buried somewhere deep in his psyche that he suppresses. You can quote me on that! He wears cowboy boots over land that was never really his. The tragedy of Alfred is that he was born of the old world and the new, and denied both for the sake of power (I have many thoughts and none of them are coherent)
There's a reason why he’s so loud, so desperate to define himself. Because he knows what he’s taken. And he knows that parts of him he’ll never get back.
mixed heritage: first nations + french settler + british inheritance
Matthew is a quieter, more painful portrait of colonization. If Alfred is rebellion, Matthew is assimilation. He's still braided with First Nations threads... Depending on where you imagine he manifested. He was born into a land of deep winter and deeper memory, where knowledge is passed in snow and silence (dramatic i know) But France raised him with absence and Catholicism, called him "mon petit garcon," and gave him language but not sovereignty. Then England came and claimed him in the name of order. Matthew has always been seen as belonging to someone else. Rarely as his own.
He's the perfect nation to be forgotten because he was taught to erase himself to make others comfortable. But the land remembers. And so does he.
His mixed heritage manifests not just in looks or accent, but in contradiction: he apologizes in English but dreams in French.
His silence is new world. His bones ache with treaties no one honored.
They are patchwork identities, made of stolen land, broken treaties, revolution, survival...... They're nations that were born too fast and made to grow up too soon, and they carry that weight differently. Alfred carries it with denial and distraction. Matthew carries it with grief and grace.
But they both carry it. And in my view? That's what makes them so rich, and so tragic, as characters.
But then again I'm a sucker for the tragic kind. The ones who don't know if they're inheritance or invasion, only that they feel the ghosts of both.
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