also hang on i want 14 (quotes) for jkhaal and avrant.... ryusei too if you'd like
14. Do you have any quotes tied to the character, either from the story itself or from another source that fit them?
OH this is a fun one!!! i will do all three :) also multiple for each because i have collected too many of these to not share hskdf
avrant:
"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
"And it's like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. That is built upon the empty promise of a child's fairy tale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia. And it's justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. So like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop it's perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking"
j'khaal:
“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
"And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight… till it burns your hand, and you say this: No one else will ever have to live like this! No one else will have to feel this pain! Not on my watch!"
also i have. i Have to put this one too
"What happens when someone who's not real dies? Where will my heart go? That is, if it doesn't disappear completely…"
ryusei:
“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
"There's no reason for this, only / a starved dog's logic about bones."
"I wish I never met you, Doctor. I was much better off as a coward."
"I see your star / You left it burning for me / Mother, I'm here"
tell me more about cyrelle.... let's go 3, 18, and then 20
YAY WAHOO thank you for the excuse to talk about cyrelle. this got extraordinarily long so its under a read more ^^;
3. What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?
cyrelle's name and her role in the story are so connected I feel like it was both? i guess technically the name first. i knew i wanted avrant to have grown up in the brume but i had... decided this before i learned about myste being a common surname for orphans from the brume lmao. so when i found out i decided i wanted him to get his last name from someone important to him rather than a family member or anything, so he gets glaceaunt from his mentor: cyrelle glaceaunt. which is a good segue into the next question ksjfd
18. Does the character have other characters connected to them? Do you have a family tree and "offscreen" connections made up for them or do they exist in a vacuum purely for the purpose of the story?
i imagined her as a noble from a minor house, just enough influence that no one would bat an eye at her formally taking a ward but not so much that she'd have much of a public eye on her. so like, i imagine there are other members of that house but i haven't given them a ton of thought... her more important relationships are as follows
avrant: avrant grew up in a small orphanage in the brume run by a priest who tldr sucked real bad. cyrelle was a knight who had been on the priest's trail for some time but lacked definitive proof of any wrongdoing. knowing that it would have been unlikely he'd be put on trial anyway she resolved to kill him. on the night she plans to, she finds avrant, overed in blood and kind of Freaking Out, standing over the priest's dead body. she helps him cover it up and takes him in as her ward, explaining it away as he'd need a new home in light of the priest's "tragic" death. she teaches him how to wield a sword and helps avrant flee ishgard when they're both accused of heresy. avrant inherits a lot more than her name, his kind of relentless pursuit of the truth was a trait that came about because of cyrelle's influence and it could be argued that he's a good dark knight because she would have been one. she was intensely dedicated to finding justice for the people who weren't getting it, and that stayed with him even through the years they were apart. after reconnecting during hvw, the two occasionally meet for tea and keep up a letter correspondence.
ysayle: whereas avrant fled to gridania, cyrelle fled to dravania where she wandered about for some time as a sellsword. she accepts a job that would have required her to kill a wyvern and runs into a band of heretics, led by ysayle, who learned that there was a mark placed on that wyvern and sought to protect it. cyrelle who had long been disillusioned with ishgard was easily convinced to stay her sword and, just like avrant would a year later, ended up deciding to join ysayle so she could find the truth of the dragonsong war for herself. her time with the heretics gave her a sense of purpose that she didn't have while travelling as a sellsword and while she was not personally close to ysayle herself, she felt that ysayle had saved her in a sense. she's quite crushed to learn of ysayle's passing and helps avrant write a biography of her since she had spent slightly more time with her than he had
vidofnir: i havent entirely figured out Why this happens but i think cyrelle ingested dragon blood at Some point during her time with the heretics but the transformation didn't exactly take? so she's kind of half dragon half elezen now (like an au ra but more draconic? i have GOT to figure out how to mock up her design in game at some point). she ended up spending a lot of her time at anyx trine to lay low but also to understand her condition a bit better. she ends up forming a kind of rapport with vidofnir (also made easier by their mutual connection to ysayle) and helps her recover during 3.x. they end up rather taken with each other, both only capable of being true to their words and their heart... they become Involved by the end of 3.x :)
20. Bonus question: share any additional thoughts, art, favourite scenes, anything you've been waiting for a chance to ramble about
i feel like i've rambled about everything i could already shkdfj but i Will share the initial design i have for her... for my sanity i just think of this design as her when she's younger/around the age she would have taken avrant in because i can't. figure out how to get her to look her age (she'd be around 40 during hvw). i didn't really intend her and avrant to look so similar but there's also something kind of cute to me about the fact that they do.. two peas in a pod....
5 for j'khaal, 3 and 4 for avrant, 16 for any oc ^^
5. How did you choose their name and why? Was it simply based on vibes or is there any specific meaning behind the name? Are the reasons behind their name different in- and out of universe?
<- guy who likes coyotes
i picked j'khaal's name largely because i like coyotes and they're known as american jackals LMAO so you know. jackal. j'khaal. but also! i'm quite fond of the name khalil and i think the meaning of that name is just really fitting for j'khaal? also i write him as an arab (g'raha too actually, now that i've been developing their dynamic during 7.x + raha Is an arabic name) so i wanted to be sure he had an arabic name
3. What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?
it was his name! i didn't really have set thoughts when i started the game outside of the fact that i wanted a wol from ishgard. if you want to know how i landed on his name i wanted to do something that related to ice and also played off bodyguards so. avant garde -> avrant glaceaunt
4. And reverse, which one of the four things did you struggle with the most?
god, despite the fact that his appearance is technically what changed the most it was actually his personality. i initially wrote him as just the kind of character i liked at the time (which on account of me starting xiv when i was in high school was mostly just kakashi, a bit to the left) but as i started thinking about him more seriously as a character i really struggled with how i wanted to characterise him... he's rather reserved and can be kind of distant, but i was playing it a little too straight initially. i think it made more sense for his character to be the type of person who is personable/gregarious but shares very little about himself rather than just being entirely closed off.
16. Is there any memes or running jokes associated with the character, both in- and out of universe?
flop era avrant is frequently the butt of many jokes. he may be facing the horrors but he still chose to wear those glasses. probably the one that i remember most though is my roommate joking that the pince nez stays ON during sex (it does. literally made that canon bc of that joke skhjdf). i also like to make the joke that cyrelle (who is a knight from ishgard that served as avrant's mentor and helped him flee to gridania) is a better bearer of ysayle's legacy than avrant because much like saint shiva, she Also famously fucked a dragon-- (she becomes Involved with vidofnir during 3.x. in ishgard au there is an entire ishgard dragon polycule thing going on that one day. i will talk about. but today is not quite yet that day)
the first law of tragedies: the end is already written and inevitable. the second law of tragedies: your actions are all your own and you can choose to get off this ride whenever you want. the third law of tragedies: we both know that you are never going to do that.
He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.Â
not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]
[ID: A page from a What If? book that reads, "In fact, the Moon — our faithful companion — would act to undo the damage Andrew's scenario caused. Right now, the Earth spins faster than the Moon, and our tides slow down the Earth's rotation while pushing the Moon away from us. (There's a footnote here, that says, "See 'Leap Seconds,' http://what-if.xkcd.com/26, for an explanation of why this happens.") If we stopped rotating, the Moon would stop drifting away from us. Instead of slowing us down, its tides would accelerate our spin. Quietly, gently, the Moon's gravity would tug on our planet..."
Here, the page has a comic of the Earth and Moon. There are four "panels" — there are no lines separating them, but there are four depictions of the Earth and Moon — and in each, Africa and Eurasia are shown on the Earth as the Moon spins around it. The Moon says, "Hey, Earth. Earth? Why'd you stop? / Oh no. Are you okay? Earth, are you okay? / Don't be scared, Earth! I can help! / I'm here, Earth. Your moon is here."
The text finishes, "... and Earth would start turning again." There is a final panel of the comic, where the Earth has turned, showing Australia, a bit of Asia, and the Pacific Ocean. The Moon tells the Earth, "I will never leave you." /end ID]
I am aware that this request is fundamentally selfish. I can offer no justification for it, no argument in its favor. It is simply the outcome I desire to see the most. So I am asking you
