Some Shadow Thjazi Meta
Considering a few main questions:
Is Thjazi present and listening/watching from Julien's shadow at all times, only during moments when the veil is thin, or in some other subset of circumstances?
What kind of decisions is Thjazi making in his new circumstances? What can we make of his character based on his decisions so far?
What can we learn about the logistics of the Tachonis scar from all this?
What do the answers to these questions mean for the party's strategy and operational security going forward?
So let's do it.
I initially wrote this post by beginning with a collection of the scenes and lines I'm referring to as evidence, but it got super long, so I've dropped that list to the bottom of the post and am instead doing analysis first. If I mention something that happened in-game/on Cooldown and you don't know what I mean, check the end of the post for clarity.
Questions:
Is Thjazi present and listening/watching from Julien's shadow at all times, only during moments when the veil is thin, or in some other subset of circumstances?
We have word-of-god confirmation from Cooldown that "you need to be in a liminal space" for him to be "active," but it remains a question to me what "active" actually means. For now, I'm choosing to read it as "able to interact physically with the world, as well as see and hear it," which leaves open the question of if he's present and listening at all other times, or at some other times, or never.
Based on the evidence below, I think he's at least semi-present in situations with a single light source (the candle in the Einfassen aviary, Thimble outside Hal's house in the last episode), because a single light source allows Julien's shadow to be relatively singular and coherent. In these situations, I think it's reasonable to guess that he can see and listen.
In other situations, such as total pitch black or in a room with bright lights, we just don't have evidence one way or another, which is relevant to my next question. He might be listening, and he might not. I think it's most interesting story-wise, and also easiest from a DM standpoint to keep track of, if Thjazi can hear anything Julien can - so while that's what I'd guess is happening, I'll continue to consider other possibilities.
What kind of decisions is Thjazi making? What can we make of his character based on his decisions so far?
I'll start with the more recent event - he tried to force Julien down the stairs to help Thimble, despite significant danger to 1) Julien, 2) himself, and potentially 3) the plans of the party at large, if anyone was captured. I'll come back around to 3 later, but I'm generally willing to read this as Thjazi's intense loyalty to Thimble and desire to help her, even in a situation that she has objectively chosen for herself by staying upstairs.
His decision-making in Tannesar is what I'm really concerned with, because I think it's so fucking bonkers.
Reasons regarding Aranessa (per Brennan in Cooldown): first of all, Thjazi Fang is the last man in the world with a leg to stand on regarding anyone abandoning Aranessa, and this is a situation, like Thimble's, where Aranessa is without Julien (and Thjazi) because she has chosen to be, indeed by mutual agreement. She does still also have a guard with her. This is where it becomes relevant if Thjazi can see and hear when in normal lighting circumstances - it's possible that he just missed that discussion entirely, and all he knows is that "there's danger, Julien was with Aranessa before and now he's not, that motherfucker." Maybe he assumed the worst of Julien, which is honestly real, and therefore he lashed out. But secondarily on the subject of Aranessa, if Thjazi has any idea what's going on whatsoever (for instance, if the veil was thin enough at the Palazzo massacre that he could see those events), it's insane of Thjazi to try to murder... the one person Aranessa has left and her primary remaining protector, regardless of the personal beef he and Julien have. I find it difficult to read Thjazi's attempt to kill Julien as anything other than deeply cruel, or at least thoughtless, towards Aranessa, who he for sure knows is in mourning for him (Thjazi) and probably knows is also suffering intensely for all the other reasons. Thjazi knows how much Aranessa cares about him; and while we still don't know what exactly happened at Maharlian Falls, I'm relatively confident in saying that Julien had to have had an opportunity to kill him there, and did not. Which gives us a good bit of information about how Thjazi, at least now that he's dead, feels about Julien, and about how he (fails to) prioritize the feelings of Aranessa.
Reasons regarding Thaisha and Occtis: the Seekers at the time of this attack were headed into Tannesar, an exquisitely dangerous place that Thjazi knew the Tachonis were interested in, they were already in the Barrowdell, and the party included two people Thjazi cares about to varying degrees, Thaisha and Occtis. They were furthermore, at least in part, on this mission in order to try to rescue Alogar, Thjazi's presumably beloved nephew. It's wild insane to try to kill someone for personal reasons under these circumstances, especially someone who is one of the more competent warriors present to protect your support casting and/or squishy loved ones. On the way out of the barrowdell, I could have handled it, but this seems like a big failure to consider the practical consequences of killing Julien for people he presumably likes. Maybe he just thinks Thaisha and Occtis are that competent and didn't need Julien, but given his behavior about Thimble, I doubt it.
The thing I haven't considered here are his non-personal-beef reasons for trying to kill Julien in the Eternal Night, namely, to try and get his soul free. It's indeed true that he could have been making a more measured decision, "I need to get free to do X and also fuck this guy in general and also for leaving my wife," but based on Brennan's phrasing of his thought process in the Cooldown, I doubt it. Still, this brings us to the next question:
What can we learn about the logistics of the Tachonis scar from all this?
We learned from in-game dialogue that the reason Mara didn't get the scar is because Primus himself is the only one who can give the scar to someone in wildshape. We can also infer from this, though, that apparently someone needs to be alive in order to receive the scar. This makes sense - if you kill someone, their soul moves on, and it's too late to do the scarring. I haven't successfully gone back to confirm when or how someone (Thaisha?) discovered that Thjazi had the scar, but I do remember that Brennan confirmed it verbally in the last episode of Convergence.
What this means is that, presumably, Thjazi had the scar applied to him sometime in the two weeks in which he was imprisoned between his arrest and his execution, and this was done by a Tachonis. He didn't know what the scar was or how it functioned, but I don't know how to read the information we have now except as that: at some point in prison, some Tachonis came in and magically fucked with his chest shortly before his death, and that Thjazi was likely... aware that this happened? Because how would they keep him unaware of it? I guess they could have knocked him out, or hired someone to modify his memory or something. I know I'm reaching, but I do think it's important to beg the question of how or why Thjazi ignored "mysterious Tachonis ritual scar on my chest," given that this should have been important to making decisions while dead if he knew about it.
Finally,
What do the answers to these questions mean for the party's strategy and operational security going forward?
The good news is: if you have to be alive to get the scar, then leaving an ally's body around for the Tachonis to find is bad, but not as bad as it could be if doing so would also let them possess the mind and soul of the dead person, and thus all their knowledge of the growing rebellion.
The bad news is: if Julien dies or the curse gets lifted without care, it's likely that Thjazi will go to the Tachonis, and now he's potentially been in some or all of the rebels' meetings (any of the ones Julien was in, and probably listening better than his host, lol). This also goes for anyone who gets captured alive - we need to worry about them sharing information because they've been forced to by the scar.
So for op sec reasons, they need to be careful even amongst themselves and especially around Julien/his shadow, because anyone captured alive could be scarred and compelled to speak.
For strategy reasons, given now that Thjazi knows that it's his own soul on the line if Julien dies, hopefully he'll be more careful with his unwilling host. That said, he did still pull Julien down the stairs knowing this, so Julien and whoever he travels with need to be making plans around this potential problem. If Thjazi is willing to ignore plans and endanger not only himself, Julien, and the operational security of the rebellion at large in order to i.e. protect Thimble on a solo mission, then either the rest of the team needs to keep eyes on Julien anywhere the veil is thin, or he needs to not go to those places at all. Which seems unlikely, given who he's hunting.
My sort of overall sense, following Thjazi's behavior as the shadow so far, is that I don't think he's making good and reasonable decisions for the benefit of anyone he cares about (Aranessa, Thimble, Thaisha, or Occtis), or for the nascent rebellion that's following in his wake (given that putting Julien in danger is a potential major security breach for everybody via Thjazi getting spirit-enslaved).
As we the audience continue to discuss Thjazi's means and ends in order to try and parse out his whole fucking deal, I wonder if the important question is less about whether or not he was a good guy, and more about if he was an effective spy, rebel, and adventurer. Apparently he was quite good at some things, but also, the rebellion failed, the first attempt at a ritual seems to have been botched so badly that the doors to Faerie closed, and he got caught, arrested, scarred, and killed before he could try again. The more we learn, the more skeptical I get about Thjazi's judgment, not from an ethical standpoint but from a practical one. That, at least, doesn't seem to be a conversation that our characters have been having in earnest on screen yet, and I haven't seen it laid out in the meta yet either.
(If you're only here for analysis, you can stop here. If you want to see what I'm referring to factually...)
Evidence I'm using in the analysis above/facts we know so far:
Places where Thjazi was present and physically active:
in the Eternal Night, on the way to Tannesar, where he tried to strangle Julien and dragged him into the dark
in Obrimus Manor, where he interacted with (picked up and read) papers on a desk, pulled Julien out of the way of hostile skeletons, apparently delivered a vision of Teor and Cyd, and tried to pull Julien down the stairs towards Thimble (per Cooldown)
Places where Thjazi was seemingly or potentially present but didn't physically interact with anything:
in the aviary of Castle Klippenblick, when Julien went to send a message and the aviary keeper thought he saw a (presumably) dead loved one (after Julien got a nat 20 on a wisdom save, after looking at the shadow cast by a single candle)
at Hal's house, the shadow reacted briefly to the shadow-shears, and when Hal asked Thjazi to move his hand independently of Julien, Brennan rolled
outside of Hal's house, Thjazi reacted to Julien catching the abjurative nail but couldn't let it go or do anything about it
Places where the veil was likely thin, but we didn't see Thjazi act:
in the Palazzo Davinos during the massacre
And here's what Brennan said in the Cooldown for episode 31, when shadow-Thjazi was confirmed (not including all crosstalk, just what's needed for clarity):
Brennan: "So wait, yeah, so, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag. You need to be in a liminal space for him to be like, active... (Alex: "You need to be in the Backrooms.") "But, if we think about the times where your shadow acted, the first big one was the..." (Laura: "But didn't he attack him a bunch of times too?") "He attacked him a bunch of times! When you were in the fucking, going to Tannesar, you had abandoned Aranessa! And he was like, 'fuck this guy, I fucking hate this guy, I'm going to kill his ass and be free." But he didn't help you until he read the letters in Koral's office that said, the reason the scar's not working is there's some kind of curse, and that was your shadow going, 'oh fuck, Julien saved me.'" ... "And then, the thing Occtis said, of Thimble, Thimble's in trouble. Dragged him back down the stairs."
I've rewatched some of these scenes, not all of them, so get at me with a correction if I've gotten something wrong or ignored something relevant.
