okay actually re: my own tags on this post about the hall of mercy and the concept of Azune's people possibly being converts to a shaper religion because it will not leave me alone
this is assuming that there is a connection between Azune and the hall of mercy, which is obviously by no means confirmed and is just me doing word association, but it plays around with something i was already grappling with re: Azune and how i've felt about the theory that his sorcery comes from the shapers/from Tansul specifically when it never gelled with me, especially after it was established the shapers were pretty brutal colonizers. it just didn't seem imo like a route luis would take uncritically (not impossible, obviously, just not what i would assume)
we know his lineage is almost assuredly non-shaper, is older than the shapers, and there's solid evidence to point to his being a draconic sorcerer (which was my hope from even back in the overture, dragon sorcerer Azune my beloved)
but with his tattoo saying what it does and the hall of mercy being for those devout of the shapers that weren't of their chosen people to petition for a shaper's afterlife, I'm wondering if there's a chance his people are of a lineage original to araman but were converts to a shaper-religion, to the belief that the shapers were the True Gods of Araman and were the rightful owners/heirs to it and not colonizers and usurpers, either by choice or by necessity, and far more likely by necessity to simply survive
(which feels very much to me like an analog to the kind of forced conversion to christianity and destruction and legal suppression of native religions as part of colonization in the americas and the hold that christianity/specifically catholicism still has on especially latino populations. and with this campaign already having a lot of commentary about the legacy of colonization and slavery, that doesn't feel like a stretch to say)
or, flip side, if they are of a shaper lineage and were a kind of guardian or even priest/missionary class, if there's a level of intercession they made on behalf of those not of the shapers' but devout to them. or converted and then acted in that kind of capacity. either way "have mercy on those i send you," in the context of the hall of mercy (again, assuming there's a connection we have no canon confirmation of), almost feels like it could be a prayer for the dead
all of this legitimately just to say how devastating it would it be for azune and mayali to still, 70 years after the death of the shapers, be carrying that legacy of assimilation and conversion and colonization and having it still color everything about them and how they interact with the world because they have literally no other choice. it's not like they have a people to fall back on or a culture to return to, because as far as they know it's gone, or at the very least it's lost to them as individuals
something something azune's maleable sense of self and becoming what others need him to be to survive being a parallel to what his ancestors had to do in microcosm (especially now with him being so entrenched with the einfasen, fostering a false sense of family there to win them over at the expense of his identity). something something the push to remember as a desire to rejuvenate to a lost/suppressed culture, and mayali's "i remember" to him being so much deeper than simply remembering him or them or their family, but having remembered their culture and their people like azune is being guided and pushed to do. a return to what was lost. proof to him that it's possible and proof to her she's not alone in that remembrance
