M’aegir of the M-Tribe. I’m so good with names. Growing up on the outskirts of Vira Nilya, he became close companions with the Ananta of the same age. They prepared every day for adventure. Though instead of adventurers, they joined the Resistance when they got older. M’aegir was trained as a sapper, though he’s most requested to act as a liaison to the M-Tribe and the Ananta. He’s stationed in Castellum Velodyna. He’d like to go on a big, sweeping adventure some day.
This is part 5 and the final part of my lore series, where I try and analyze some of the tidbits of info we got from Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II. This series only focuses on the Seeker of the Sun M-tribe lore, particularly four of its characters that were highlighted in the book and shared in the BRPN Discord. For this part, I’m going to look at M’hahtoa. There will be spoilers from the lorebook below the cut.
M’hahtoa Lhan
“Come, come, eat your fill of our food, and drink deep of our spirits. There is more than enough for all.”
From the Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II:
According to her daughter M’naago, M’hahtoa is the true leader of the M Tribe. A willing listener and an accomplished cook, the forty-two-year-old welcomes those with troubles to unburden their minds and fill their bellies at her hearth, and thus sees their worries vanish alongside their hunger. That the members of the tribe, strong-minded folk by nature, are able to rally under one nunh is in no small part due to her comforting presence.
Aside from her skills at the cookfire, the Seeker of the Sun is also a peerless huntress, and hers was the hand that trained M’naago in the bow. In her spare moments, she can be seen crafting arrowheads, but one is advised not to disturb her as she works.
Alright, we finally have a woman to look at for the M Tribe and… Well… I’m not saying she isn’t a strong woman, but I am saying she’s strong in a ‘behind every strong man’ kind of way. This is not really how I envisioned a tribal huntress.
If she is the true leader of the M Tribe as her daughter suggests, then why isn’t she the true leader? Why isn’t she recognized as such by the tribe? This isn’t some patriarchal society where women can’t lead or anything. In fact, according to the naming conventions it’s highly unlikely for a nunh to be the tribal leader, suggesting that women more often than not fulfill that role. They even make a point that without her, they most likely wouldn’t have been able to rally under one nunh at all. This makes the decision of going to one nunh even weirder than I already thought it was.
In the way she is described, she’s like one of those grandmothers that lead the family through calm wisdom and (literally) food, but this isn’t the real world where centuries of patriarchal oppression has taken place, dammit. This is an entire species of people with mostly women in them, they don’t need to follow such traditional roles of female strength as she ‘cooks and listens’. I wouldn’t even have minded this leadership style if she was the actual leader, but now she just comes across as that mom-figure that quietly let’s the menfolk play at leading while she and everyone else knows better, but they have to keep up some facade because this is 18th century England or something. Also, how in the hell did she do this when they were all starving because their hunting grounds were too small?
Maybe her daughter was just praising her, but even then it’s kinda a shame how they devote so much time on her being a cook, and so little on her hunting skills.
I also want to know why it’s so bad to disturb her while she is working.
This is part 3 of my lore series, where I try and analyze some of the tidbits of info we got from Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II. This series only focuses on the Seeker of the Sun M-tribe lore, particularly four of its characters that were highlighted in the book and shared in the BRPN Discord. For this part, I’m going to look at M’aht. There will be spoilers from the lorebook below the cut.
Part 3 M’aht Nunh
“My path may take me to the ends of the world, but my heart shall ever be here.”
From Encyclopaedia Eorzea
Together with his fellow nunh, M’rahz, this Seeker of the Sun once led the people of the M Tribe. When necessity forced them to revert to single-nunh rule, rather than face his friend in a duel as tradition dictates, he relinquished his title and left the village. He took with him his beloved son, M ‘zhet, and the two lived in isolation in the mountains of the Fringes. Yet M’aht never forgot his people, and he continued watching over them from afar. In the course of his vigil, he caught wind of a dastardly Qalyana plot to unleash frenzied beasts upon his village. Facing the creatures alone, he succeeded in herding them inside a cave, but he could not avoid the baneful touch of their petrifying poison. With the last of his strength, he entombed the beasts in stone in stone before turning into stone himself. He was but twenty-five.
He was a tia, dammit!
First of, he should be called M’aht Tia, as he was no longer nunh when he died. Nunh specifically means ‘breeding male’ and when a nunh is defeated, he goes back to being a tia. I feel like this is either a very silly mistake to make, or somehow the M Tribe still saw him as a breeding male even after he left. It could be because he shirked tradition and refused to fight, leaving him a weird form of limbo, but either way, he should be called a tia, or it should be a bigger deal that he’s still referred to as a nunh.
Criminally insane?
My friend @tirocupidus described Aht as criminally insane, I call him criminally stupid and/or criminally badly written. It’s just… too much to even write out without it getting wordy, so I’ve made a list for better readability.
M’aht was extremely young when he became nunh?
That’s right. If you do the math his son was nearly six when he stole him from his tribe (more on that later) and he was 25 when he died. Assuming this happened very shortly after they left, that means M’aht must have been 18-19 when he became nunh. Given that they make a big deal out of his co-nunh friend Rahz being 23 when he became nunh, it’s weird that they don’t make a big deal out of this.
Or maybe that’s because if Aht and his son had even a year or two on their own outside the tribe, that means that he was a minor when he became nunh and fathered the boy, yikes.
Shirking tradition is bad for the tribe
I hate how they make it sound like it was some sort of noble sacrifice for him to refuse to fight Rahz and leave, when in reality it is the single most selfish thing he could have done. It instantly shows me that he was a piss-poor leader with no foresight whatsoever and I hope he was just a nunh and not an actual leader like his friend.
If the two nunh had controlled their and/or their huntresses’ urges better, they could have easily kept both on as nunh for quite awhile. Remember that they make the choice to go to one nunh not because they didn’t have enough huntresses to justify having two, but because they still had too many mouths to feed and this was a way to limit tribal growth. It’s stupid, but I’ve discussed this the other parts already, so let me move on to the fight itself.
So in order to determine which of the two nunh was physically the strongest, they had to fight. Not to the death, mind you. It’s simply to see who could beat the other. The other one could have remained in the tribe as a tia, and help them out with their skill and knowledge, but instead of that, Aht decided to leave the tribe and take his son with him.
So in one swoop, he robbed the tribe of knowing for sure they have the strongest male as nunh, and robbed them of two tia that could help them in their time of need as well.
One might argue that fighting is a silly way to determine who is going to be nunh, but you have to keep in mind that the position isn’t one of leadership usually, but merely one of breeding. Seekers are nomadic hunters, living far away from the comforts of the city, and weaker individuals might be burdens that won’t survive. They increase the odds of their children surviving by having them with the strongest, most capable males. It’s not a preference, it’s necessity that mimics what you see in most species in nature. I’ll say it again, it’s not some noble sacrifice on his part, he robbed the tribe of two tia’s and the chance to be sure who the strongest male is.
Kidnapping children
You know what you call it when someone takes a child away from their friends and family, to go live in isolation somewhere where they’ll never see them again? That’s right, kidnapping.
That’s what Aht did to his poor son. One might argue that his mother was dead, as they later say he became an orphan when his crazy father died, but he very likely had grandmothers, aunts, siblings, and other people in the tribe that cared for him. This isn’t a town where no one knows their neighbors, these tribes are very tight-knit communities with lots of family bonds thanks to the nunh-system. Males are also rare among Miqo’te, so stealing one away is quite a blow.
I’m also wondering about the other children he must have sired, as he had been nunh for half a decade at least. Did he not care for those? What was his long-term plan for himself and his son? Why didn’t the tribe stop him from taking the boy? It’s a very weird thing to just gloss over, in my opinion.
He was stupid, and he died a stupid death
So the dude decided to live close enough to the village to be able to keep such keen track of it that he alone found evil plots against it (so he didn't’ leave for the resources, that’s for sure), then somehow got stuck fighting the evil-doers alone (some of those able huntresses over yonder might have helped) and got his kid stuck all by himself. Apparently in-game, the boy doesn’t even know what happened to his father, and the M Tribe has to tell him, which leaves me with even more questions, like why didn’t they damn well help, and why didn’t they get the kid if they knew his dad was dead?
Ugh, I’m done with this character. I feel like no one bothered to draw out a timeline for him. They just tried to make him sound like some tragic hero, but he really was just stupid and/or nuts. What is your take on him?
