From my interviews with High Shepherd Yan, formerly of the noble Volody family of Pushta:
“Fostering is an ancient custom in Heimar. Its earliest precursor would likely be the clan structure of the Isles, where the clan chief—viewed as a second father to every member of the clan—would raise distant nephews alongside his own sons, feeding them at his own table and taking them as squires of sorts in his war-band. But scholars are unanimous that the fostering system as we know it has its roots in Centrevale. Fostering is an official, legally-recognized institution one step short of adoption. A foster-son (foster-daughters are rare, though by no means unheard of) is treated as a full equal to any legitimate children of the foster family, entitled to all the benefits of their foster-family’s rank and station and entitled to call upon their family as one would a blood relative in time of need. They were expected, of course, to reciprocate and aid the family in times of need as well. The only thing a foster-son lacked were two things: firstly, they did not bear the family’s name or coat of arms, and their inheritance rights passed through their own true bloodline. The benefits of foster-sonship did not extend to any other relatives of the foster-son, nor did they pass on to the foster-son’s children, but they did last the entire lifetime of the foster-son.
Tristan Martel and Michael Agrippa were two such foster-sons. Tristan was born to a non-noble man-at-arms, while Michael was the eldest son of a lower-ranking but wealthy Costian nobleman who made his fortunes as a merchant. Both exiles from their households, the two boys took to the highways, traveling on foot and scraping a living as prizefighters. The two became expert swordsman by the time they saved a traveling Islander from a gang of bandits. The Islander just so happened to be Peter the Marshal himself. He decided to foster the two boys alongside his own sons: Reikert and Heinrich. The four boys became inseparable, and in the Last Seige all four worked together to bring down the last Thrallic stronghold in Heimar.
However, Tristan’s status as a non-nobleman irked the proud and haughty Centrevalian noblemen, and when Reikert became Marshal of Heimar he began to marginalize his foster-brother, as part of his diplomatic strategy of conciliation. This culminated in the infamous Corealan Letters, where he actively allowed the Centrevalians to send Tristan and his men, alone, to storm the gates of Coreal, a state-of-the-art castle from which sympathizers of the Thrallic empire had been communicating with the Thrallic Empire. Reikert had faith that Tristan would survive, but suspecting a trap sent Michael to reinforce the assault. The Centrevalians gave the order deliberately trying to get Tristan killed. But Tristan and Michael battered down the gates with cannon fire and rushed into the breach at the head of their men, slaughtering any armed man in their path. Though they ended up isolated and fighting desperately for their lives, Tristan and Michael managed to eliminate the castle garrison. But when he was denied a knighthood alongside Michael, Tristan felt he had been snubbed—his family, he reasoned, had broken the vows of fostering. When he saw that Reikert had personally signed the order to charge, the rift was irreparable.”
Behind the Scenes
I recently saw a post that called the slightly messy, forward-hanging fringe of hair/fur/feather/etc. on various cartoon characters the “Protagonist Fringe” (think Young Simba’s forward-pointing fuzz on his head in The Lion King for an animal example or Timmy Turner’s haircut in Fairly OddParents for a human example). I definitely used that in Chris’s redesign before I had a name for it, but I haven’t really tried it on my human characters. So I thought I would use it for one of my future writing protagonists, Tristan Martel. However, instead of being a heroic figure, Tristan is a villain: The Black Knight.
I decided to draw Tristan’s hair at two stages in his life—as a child and as a young man at the start of his Reign of Terror. Tristan, like Anakin Skywalker (on whom he’s based), starts off as a good, heroic figure, and thus his kid design has a messy, fluffy, more conventional Hero Fringe. However, as he gets older, he becomes less innocent, hardened by war, more compromised. He still has the Protagonist Fringe, but it’s more in the style of Zuko’s fringe from season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender (which I still need to see don’t judge me). It hangs low on his face, starting to obscure it, which is part of his character arc—as his atrocities increase, he hides his face more and more.
