This is part 2 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 the bond between a nunh and his tribe.There will be spoilers from the lorebook below the cut, so be warned.
Part 2 M’rahz Nunh
From Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II:
“There was a time when I was the weakest of the males in the M Tribe. It wasn’t easy, but through rigorous training, I eventually grew to become the man you see before you.”
M’rahz was only three and twenty when he bested his predecessor in a duel and replaced him as nunh, a breeding male. While that was an impressive feat in its own right, the Seeker of the Sun would be the first to acknowledge that the harder part was still to come. In the early days, it seemed as though he could please none of the womenfolk, but pain proved an effective teacher and he quickly honed his sensitivity to the needs of others.
Over the next twenty-seven years, he has protected his people as both a husband and a father. A challenging task at the best of times, it was only made more difficult when the Empire invaded two decades ago. With their hunting grounds shrinking and food growing scarcer by the season, many hard decisions had to be made. And the hardest one of all was that which saw his dear friend and fellow nunh, M’aht, leave the village behind. Owing to their history, he harbors a fondness for M’zhet, M’aht’s spirited son.
Let’s talk about his quote first. It seems that Rahz refers refers to his own people as ‘the M Tribe’ and not the Marmot Tribe. The use of the word ‘tribe’ also suggests that they are the only group of Marmots out there. In RP, we often speak of septs, sects, pacts, or whatever else, to indicate that there isn’t just one group of that tribe and everyone can play their Seeker Miqo’te as they like, even if they share the same tribal letter. As this is not done here, one might wonder if all M Tribe Miqo’te can only be from this particular group.
I personally do not think that is the case, and that they used these terms to not confuse people. Not everyone might know that the M stands for the Marmot totem, and not everyone will realize that tribes might have split off into different groups at some point in their history. I would like to see more acknowledgement of these different groups of the same tribe at some point, but I suppose we should be happy about getting any kind of lore about Seekers at this point :P
Note that he also uses the terms ‘males’ and ‘man’, indicating that, yes, some Seekers will refer to men as males. It’s an easy term to pick up if you want to give your character that extra bit of ‘tribal flavour’.
Next: becoming nunh
They then focus on him beating his predecessor in a duel at the tender age of 23 and that that was a pretty impressive feat. So the weakest male managed to climb to the top of the combat ranks at the tender age of 23… That training must have been really rigorous indeed.
It makes me wonder how the runt became the master in such a relatively short amount of time, and if the other tia didn’t train just as hard. It doesn’t seem to be normal to be able to defeat a nunh so early on, as they make a point out of calling it an impressive feat. I suppose they want to show how hard he had to work for it, but personally I wouldn’t have minded it if they had made him a little older.
It’s followed up by this quote:
In the early days, it seemed as though he could please none of the womenfolk, but pain proved an effective teacher and he quickly honed his sensitivity to the needs of others.
Uh, pain? As in.. physical? Did they beat him up? Or did he hurt a lot of the women by just being an insensitive dick? Or did they hurt him? While I like that they emphasize the need for a nunh to be sensitive to the needs of others with this quote, it has some weird implications when you think about it more. Mostly, that apparently the tia of the Marmot tribe don’t receive any sort of training on what is expected of you once you do become nunh. They only focus on training to defeat the current nunh, and supposedly learn the duties that come with it after that. So what happens when a nunh doesn’t learn? It just seems odder and odder to me, the longer I think about it. Like having an archery competition to determine the best huntress of your tribe, and once someone wins, they’ll go on their first actual hunt. The M Tribe could have used a ‘Nunh for dummies’ book back in Rahz’s day.
Luckily for the M Tribe, Rahz learned well:
Over the next twenty-seven years, he has protected his people as both a husband and a father.
Personally, I hate the use of the word husband in this sentence. It’s very confusing as to what it means. I think they might mean in a general sense, as ‘husband to his people’ and not one woman like the term suggests to the average western reader, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part, as that is the better out of two unpleasant options for me. Let me explain.
Husband to one (or multiple) women
If he is literally married to one woman of his tribe, or even several, it would mean he values this person above the others. Even if the marriage is political or symbolic, it means this woman is favoured by this nunh for whatever reason. This level of favouritism might be very difficult in a culture where he literally has to father all the children of the tribe and raises a lot of questions:
Does he live with his wife, or wives?
If not, what is the point of the bonding?
Does that mean he favours his children by this woman?
Do other huntresses or his other children never get jealous?
Of course they would, so how do they deal with that?
Why specifically the term husband, and not something a bit less city-folk-like such as mate for example?
Can tia get married as well?
Can women to other women?
You have to keep in mind that female Miqo’te vastly outnumber the males, so what then happens to the women who are, for lack of a better term, leftover and not inclined towards other women?
Who is his wife, or wives?
What is the ceremony like?
So many questions, and we probably won’t get any answers from SE, so we have to decide for our own tribes. I just hope people do ask themselves these questions, when they next write love-stories for their nunh characters.
What I truly despise about this option though, is that his wife, or wives, aren’t named. It reminds me of DBZ or old Disney, where the spouses were often so ‘background’ that they weren’t even given a name. The huntresses deserve their spotlight as well, dammit :P
Husband to the tribe
I like this option better, but once I started writing down why, I realized it has its fair share of flaws as well. If he is a husband to the tribe, how does that work when he’s defeated by a tia? Is defeating and becoming nunh quite literally tearing a family apart and inserting yourself into it? If that’s the case, then I understand why he had trouble pleasing the women of his tribe at first, as that sounds rather traumatic.
For me, personally, it’s still the better option though. I hope they meant he does husband-like duties, just like he does fatherly duties as mentioned in the same sentence, without him literally being someone's husband. It also makes me wonder what counts as husband-like in Japan, and I even tried to look up if ‘husband’ could mean different things in Japanese, depending on context. The only thing I could find, is that the most common character for husband in Japanese is the same as ‘owner’, or ‘master’. Yikes.
Anyway, enough about this one word, as this wall of text is getting quite long as it is. It’s just interesting to speculate about. The rest of the description talks about difficulties stemming from the invasion of the Empire 20 years ago, with hunting grounds shrinking because of it. I’ll talk about Aht and Zhet in their own posts, so that’s it for me, for now.
If you made it all the way down here, then thank you for reading! If you have your own ideas and speculations about this bit of lore, let me know in the comments below. I’m always eager to discuss people’s interpretations.
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.
I hope it is alright that I’m going to do things a little differently today, and instead of writing fiction, I’m going to try and write an analysis on the new lore that was revealed in the second lorebook. We’ve reached a new plateau in our understanding of this world we all love to play in, after all. This will only touch on Seeker of the Sun M-tribe lore, particularly four of its characters that were highlighted in the book and shared on BRPN. If you do not want anything spoiled from the lorebook, then please do not read below the cut. Special thanks to people from @balmungrp and @the-wardens-reliquary for sharing these blurbs of info!
Part 1 M-tribe history
From the Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II:
“During the Age of Endless Frost, a great migratory wave saw tribes of Miqo’te cross the frozen sea of Eorzea. Following the Velodyna River northward, they finally arrived in a region now known as Gyr Abania. As the ice melted, giving way to the Fifth Astral Era, the majority of these tribes spread across the realm, but the J and M peoples alone elected to remain, the former settling for the Peaks while the latter claimed the Fringes for its hunting grounds.
Since that time, the M tribe has lived quietly in its domain east of the Velodyna, untouched by the changed that unfolded around them. They watched from afar as the city-state of Skalla rose and fell in the neighboring Lochs, and survived the floods of the Sixth Umbral Calamity and all that followed. Though they occasionally entered into alliances with other races, ever did they preserve their identity and their crag-top home.
However, the tribe’s resilience would be sorely tested under imperial rule. Rendered unwelcome in their own territory, it was all they could do to eke out a living. To limit the mouths that wanted for feeding, they took the drastic action of shedding their second nunh, but this was no permanent solution to their hardships. Thus did they join hands with the Ala Mhigan Resistance, that they might reclaim the freedom to simply live their lives.”
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be that much new information here, except for a few more details on the migration of the Miqo’te. What is interesting though, is that according to this only J and M Seekers stayed in Gyr Abania. From the way it is worded, it would seem that the Jackals (J) claimed the Peaks while the Marmot (M) claimed the Fringes.That makes it unlikely that other tribes could settle in those areas, as they are claimed by these two.
Does that mean that your Seeker character from another tribe, but native to Gyr Abania is now lore-breaking? Well, technically, kinda, yeah. But this late in the development of the game and RP scene I highly doubt anyone will give you any trouble for it. Your tribe could have returned to Gyr Abania at a later stage. It is, however, somewhat unlikely that the tribe was huge, or else it would infringe on the Marmot or Jackal hunting grounds. After the occupation, it would become even harder to justify, as even the big Marmot tribe has trouble feeding its people. City slickers are a different story altogether, of course. I personally focus on tribal Seekers, so I haven’t looked into how Miqo’te were viewed by the other races before the Empire.
Another interesting part is about the shedding of their second nunh. What does this tell us? The Naming Conventions say that on average, there are 10-50 females per nunh in a tribe. That means that with two nunh, the Marmot tribe had to have between 20-100 female Miqo’te, if they abide by these averages. Quite a large group, I would say.
“To limit the mouths that wanted for feeding, they took the drastic action of shedding their second nunh, but this was no permanent solution to their hardships.”
Boy… That’s pretty significant, isn’t it? It means that they apparently had no other system in place to limit birth rates. It doesn’t say that the tribe’s numbers went down enough to make the second nunh obsolete, but instead they seem to be having the opposite problem. They have too many people, and their solution is to limit the growth of the tribe by having one less breeding male.
I can’t help but wonder if they fully thought that through. It kinda makes it sound like Miqo’te have no control over their, for lack of a better term, breeding practices. This suggest they couldn’t or wouldn’t choose other options to limit the size of the tribe, like, I dunno, not have sex? Birth control of any kind (herbal or magic)? Keep in mind, birth control can be things like ‘don’t have sex during fertile periods’ or simply ‘pulling out’. It doesn’t have to be some magical herb or anything like that.
Instead, with this, they kinda make it sound that there was no way the breeding males could slow the hell down a bit with their breeding. I mean, I know it is in the name, but come on SE.
To me, it would make more sense if numbers had dwindled to a point where a second nunh wasn’t needed, but that’s not what that quote says, unfortunately. Even worse, it worked, albeit temporarily. So I suppose Seekers can’t keep it in their pants, at least not in this tribe. Do with that information as you please. Those of you that wanna ERP only will do o regardless of lore, I’d wager :P
Keep in mind, this is just one tribe. This doesn’t mean all Seeker tribes would choose the same solutions, or that even fringe septs of the Marmot that split off from the main group ages ago would.
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?
This is part 4 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’zhet Tia, the lost son.There will be spoilers from the lorebook below the cut.
M’zhet Tia
“Is that the sound of damsels in distress? Fear not! Your cries of despair will not go unanswered! For the future nunh of the M tribe, M’zhet Tia, has arrived!”
From the Encyclopaedia Eorzea, volume II:
M’zhet is the son of M’aht, the former nunh of the M tribe. Before he had seen but six summers, he left the Peering Stones with his father, who had volunteered to cast aside his title. The decision was prompted by their dwindling hunting grounds -- the consequence of imperial rule -- but these facts were not known to the young cub. His father would later be slain protecting their village, leaving him an orphan. And though he survived on his own, bereft of a guiding presence, he grew up naive in the ways of the world, particularly with regards to the women of his tribe -- an unfortunate failing for one who longs for family and aspires to become a nunh.
Now five and twenty, the Seeker of the Sun is in the prime of his years, with a resilience to survive even a grenado blast (albeit with some powder removed), but only time will tell if he will realize his dream of establishing his own harem.
That quote is so many shades of cringe, I can’t even…
I know they purposefully want to make him sound naive and bad at the ‘women-thing’ but really, damsels? Ugh.
Alright, let’s start at the beginning. Zhet’s story is actually rather sad, as he has basically been kidnapped by his father before he even turned 6 years old. I’ve gone into more detail about it in part 3, but all you need to know for now is that it didn’t last long, as daddy-dear was killed shortly after that.
That’s also where it gets weird. You see, due to an issue with his father’s age otherwise, the boy couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 when his dad died, but they make a point out of him surviving on his own without guidance. Children don’t do well at that age in the wilderness, as far as I’m aware, so this background story makes me personally sigh. I think they went that way to give him a reason to be ‘bad with women’, but a child that was left alone at that age wouldn’t just be bad at that, but basically at everything. He probably wouldn’t even remember being part of a tribe at all, let alone wanting to be nunh of one.
He also obviously doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing, if he thinks any Miqo’te huntress could be considered a damsel. Where did he even pick up that term, if he was by himself? I can’t imagine these capable tribal women having many stories to share with him with that as a theme, so it feels more like a silly real-life bleed that they are trying to play for laughs but really just becomes cringy. I suppose his crazy dad could have told him about them damsels, though he would have been awfully young to remember and that would make me hate his dad even more than I already do.
I don’t have much else to say about this dude. He’s 25 but still has this naive sense of women that seems to follow real-world tropes that probably wouldn’t be present in a Miqo’te tribe, he also wants to be nunh of the tribe he was born in, and some of those huntresses are probably his half-sisters or cousins, so yikes… I do not like the use of the word harem in this book either, as it suggest a negative, slave-like state of the women (as that is what most western readers will think when they see the word) when in reality it’s rather opposite of that. I do like that they call him a cub, as that confirms we can use the word to refer to Miqo’te children too.
All in all, it seems like they want us to be endeared to this naive kid that isn’t really a kid (he’s older than both the current nunh and his father were when they became nunh) but he’s just a disaster waiting to happen, and the M Tribe has been through enough already with their current and previous nunh.
