I always headcanon as Gai having been jounined- at like 20! 15 would have made him a bonofide genius.What makes you say 15? ( genuine question, I really like the idea of him achieving Jounin so close after Kakashi. That would likely make him the second to achieve for his graduating class)
Disclaimer that there are a lot of inconsistencies in the canon timeline, so all of my thoughts are definitely pure speculation and uh honestly subject to change as well. I’m not one to insist that my muse is powerful and better than all the others, etc; I’m open to alternative interpretations and also will change my mind if there are insightful reasons to!
Here are my reasons:
1. War and vacuum.
Generally, their generation, growing up in war, were promoted a lot faster than shinobi really should, most likely being pushed up earlier to replace casualties. An equally likely reason is they were forced to grow in battle and skills out of necessity and hard experience.
2. Exponential progress.
Although Gai was a late bloomer, his progress seemed to be exponential and he gained the respect of his peers as well. Gai failed the academy entrance exam, but once he actually made it in, he graduated very quickly at the ripe old age of 7. Gai made chunin at 11. For comparison: Asuma and Kurenai graduated at 9, and made chunin at 12 and 13 respectfully. Hence, he was indeed ahead of his peers already before making chunin, and I extrapolated from this.
3. Acknowledgment by Itachi.
Itachi made chunin at 10, and massacred his clan and left Konoha at 13. We know that he warned Kisame not to underestimate Gai, and was well-aware that Gai was powerful and posed a threat. Being 8-9 years older than Itachi, Gai would have been around 21 or so when Itachi left. For Itachi, a top prodigy and ANBU captain, to acknowledge Gai, I doubt he’d have been a fresh jonin at the point when Itachi left.
4. Gai being sent to tail Kakashi.
This is probably the least convincing reason, but it is also the reason for the age being lower. In Shippuden when Gai is sent to tail Kakashi on Kakashi’s mission, I perceive this as a fairly high-risk/high-trust task that wouldn’t have been entrusted to a chunin. Since Minato was still alive, this would put Gai’s age at possibly 14-15.
i think about this scene a lot, and i always feel like Briggs is speaking from personal experience here. i can't help but wonder whether he's ever come into Graceland high, or been around the others high without them noticing — whether because they didn't know he was an addict at the time, or because he's so convincing/experienced at playing sober, or some combination of the two.
nothing ever excites me more than a spontaneous genshin, or more particularly, mondstadt discovery. i sat diluc upon the barbatos statue as a nice spot to go afk on without being interrupted by repetitive idle animations and voicelines (sorry diluc, this is nothing personal). my volume was turned up more than regularly by accident, and my in-game music was off despite how much i like the original game soundtrack. aNYHOW- i was about to go afk when i heard some strange noises that i didn't recall hearing in mondt before. it made me pause and turn my volume up even more. in the video above, it's kind of hard to discern the brief sounds over the noise of the wind up on the statue and in mondstadt in general, but when the wind dies down a little, you can distinctly hear voices of people, and what shocked me the most – neighs of horses. i have no clue whether it is just me discovering this only now, after 4 years of playing this godforsaken game and clearly not having paid enough attention to mondstadt's sfx before, but i still felt the need to share this terribly interesting tidbit in case there's other clueless mondstadt enthusiasts like me.
[Downfall Timeline, Death, Grief, Mild Description of a Dead Body, Mild Body Horror]
The Hero of Time is nowhere to be found. The princess of a doomed kingdom takes matters into her own hands.
As always, Impa follows right behind.
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You can read it on Archive of Our Own Here!
I haven't beta'ed it, it's kind of weird and very Unhallowed Vespers' related, but it's also some weird Impa and Ganondorf and it's also spooky and also Impa almost says fuck. :>
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It is unknown when or how, or even if, the Hero of Time had died.
Most people left in Hyrule still believe in heroes. They trust that a mythical figure will rise from the ashes of a golden age long since consumed, and put an end to their common misery. They are hylians after all —unused to the idea of coping with despair, its prolonged chafing. Impa can hardly blame them for it. But she knows.
She has known for a long time.
The princess had fidgeted with the idea herself, independently, but had refused to accept it for as long as she could. Denial curdled into obvious delusion until it suffocated her. Impa chose to keep her mouth shut and let her process this on her own terms. The absence of light may be Impa’s domain, but Zelda still clings to its presence, seeking it sometimes beyond reason. At seventeen, Zelda no longer identifies as a princess —princess of what? Her kingdom had been stolen, her lands scorched and torn into crude, uneven parts— and now she hid in dusty clothes Impa pulled from secret crevices near Kakariko. Bandages, daggers and bones. Zelda is now known as Sheik. Why the hell not. They had picked the name together; a title rather than a name, not that anyone still alive would know but Impa. And yet, despite that process of reshaping her identity for protection and safekeeping, the poor girl still knows to embrace her divine role within the fate of the world. So does Impa. This is what she tells the girl, in great detail: everything known about the course of time, godliness, destiny. The rules of the holy land they were born to preserve.
Perhaps this is what had convinced the princess to take the matter into her own blessed hand.
Impa arrives alone at the empty castle. Ganondorf the usurper had destroyed the old one. White stone turned to black, vulgar work. Charred oxygen and the rancidness of unearthed magma; and yet the halls are so cold.
Places Impa used to know were mangled. She had haunted these halls long before they’d been dead; and she expected some measure of longing, some heartache for the perfect gardens of green, for the flowers in bloom and the careless laughter of a content crowd. But the old thing had been obliterated. There is nothing to recognize. As always, its new master cares for dominance and symbols in a way that never once proved anything.
Impa walks through the new meaningless construction at a steady pace. Ignored by monsters, of course. Not only is she quiet, but hardly ever recognized as something worth killing. Fairies ignore her wounds just the same. She walks one step removed from reality. Shadows draping her, always.
As she rises towards the central tower through endless stairways, Impa notices the press of something against the inside of her throat.
She enters a cavernous room, cathedral-like, bathed in sickening sunset-light, and sees her.
Impa walks to the bundle of cloth, slowly. Kneels. She traces the exposed throat. Cold.
Dead.
Zelda had been dead for hours.
Impa takes it in. The off-colored, wax-like sheen of a perfect skin. Blue eyes, pale and glossy. Blonde hair, tangled in a way she thinks needs brushing. Half-open mouth. She had seen so many bodies before, just like this, or worse. Somehow, Impa had never really prepared herself to welcome this one into her memories; even though she had spent so much, so much, so much of her existence shielding the girl’s fragile life from harm. Cupping candlelight between burning fingers. But it is over now. A sheikah knife lays next to the princess, and arrows, and a bow, and Impa doubts the fight, if there had ever been any, had lasted more than a minute.
She breathes in, and out, and closes the girl’s eyes with her thumbs, rolling loose fabric under her chin to keep her lips mended together, soft and asleep. Impa tries to look inward, with idle curiosity. She finds space between her ribs, a newfound clarity to the oxygen she breathes. She presses small hands together across her chest, across the single eye of her people, and thinks: after everything, the sheikahs and Hyrule died together as one.
Everything she ever upheld as meaningful, now tepid on the lush crimson carpet. Belief, mistakes, restraint, self-abandon. Love. Gone. It is over. It is over, and yet Impa cannot process it as defeat. Not her defeat —even though she had categorically failed at everything of import ever devised for her by fate.
The girl’s right hand no longer glows.
A guttural sound echoes from the depths of the large room, where pillars overcast the surreal gleam in strange moving shadows. Something large and grotesque. A thrill, on the edge between a demonic hiss, a human voice, and something far worse than both.
Impa lets go of the girl and stands. She breathes unburdened. No tension left in her besides the simple mechanics of motion. Taking the blade out of its sheath has nothing to do with self preservation. At most, it feels like a social cue, expected from her by a crowd she can’t see and didn’t really care for.
She walks towards the moving shadows. A quiet pace. No need to rush. Anything about to happen now is but an epilogue.
The darkness itself seems to pulse. Large shapes overlapping, the smell like untouched depths of a cave beyond cracks in the floor, fizzling char, nearly suffocating her. Something gags with labored breathing. A man. A thing . Impa focuses, invoking her perception of truth among the pit of organic tar.
A shape. Human.
Ganondorf, or rather the imprint of him, has one knee to the floor, much like the first time they spoke to each other seven years ago. His face is hidden behind bloodied hands, long hair. Light shudders underneath his fingers: a map of his veins and bones backlit with divine fire. The limits of his flesh aren’t clear anymore. His body blurs, swept away and redefined amid the moving darkness.
“So you won,” Impa says.
A hiccup, hidden behind shaky hands.
“You should have known,” replies a voice, booming and strained and breathless, surrounding her yet pinned to a singular, fragile point. “Y-y-you should have guessed I had. Reclaimed. Courage already.”
The silhouette heaves, each word like a stab wound to himself. The fingers slip; Impa sees the eyes then, the nostrils and mouth, the fine lines embedded in his dark skin.
All of them burning from within.
“W-w-what does it. Feel like.” He groans, trying to look at Impa directly; but there is so much push-and-pull of darkness, pure light, and skin that focusing on the person behind is near impossible. “To know. To know you bowed to your masters. For this.” He tries to laugh, but the voice is too broken, his effort too blinding. “Hyrule. Is. Nothing now. I am…” He gasps. His defiance almost sounds like despair. “I am all that is left.”
A shadow on the walls behind him takes a strange form; hulking, something with claws and tusks and a gaping maw. But the shadow refuses to stay put, refuses to commit yet. The old Hyrule might be dead, but it has yet to be replaced by anything new.
“You still haven’t made your wish,” Impa notes.
Blackened nails ram their points into the flood of light threatening to bubble out of his flesh. “The Triforce is mine ,” he spits out, and Impa watches on as the sad spectacle of Ganondorf’s victory leads her to the only possible conclusion she can draw.
“You’re holding the pieces together by force.” Her breath constricts, half-stuck inside her throat. “The Triforce still wants away from you.”
Ganondorf writhes, his body lined in boiling gold. The cracks of a vase about to shatter. And yet, and yet…
With a groan, the gerudo’s face shifts back together, looking somewhat human through all the searing glow. Enough for Impa to recognize a bloodshot eye. Pupil blown wide.
“I can do it,” he rasps, fractured. “I will make the gods. Obey me.”
Impa can’t help the cruel smile carved across her skin.
“The Goddesses are long gone,” she says. “No one can make them do anything.” Impa watches him struggle some more, grasping for focus to remain enough of a body to reply, or react. A shape lost in a storm of his own making. She cocks her head to the side, curious. “You’re not drawing out the full strength of the Power you secured. Why is that?”
He hurls forward with a spasm —already bestial, already a monster. “I won’t. Debase myself. For their entertainment.” He tries to stand. Fails. “Or for yours.”
She catches the glint of a mean grin among the sizzling chaos. Impa imagines reaching for the usurper, no matter the pain; coiling both hands through the man’s fiery scalp, and pulling the skull apart. The weakened flesh would cede to any kind of pressure. She could do this, and he wouldn’t be capable of stopping her.
But she doesn’t need to do this. All she has to do is watch this man torture himself, and pretend this feels like vindication.
“This is my victory,” Ganondorf grunts, squirming inside his rupturing skin. “It’s mine . I-I-I need to rule, as myself. I won’t let them…”
“You don’t want godhood to change you,” Impa concludes. A horrible cough-like laughter shoots out of her throat. She has not laughed like this in over a decade. “Do you even hear yourself? The gods hate you. Everything sacred hates you. Hyrule will never stop resisting your claim. The Triforce will fight you like one fights a disease. Whatever you think you are… They’ve already scraped it clean off. You’re clinging to a corpse.”
He makes a sound, that he must have hoped dismissive instead of agonizing. “I c-can’t. I can’t let them overwrite me.”
“Then stop trying to assemble the Triforce inside your body.”
“No. ”
He had barked this at her, like a child. A pang knocks behind Impa’s armor. She can’t name its cause; if it is simply anger, or a different kind of urge to scream.
“I c-c-can’t let the pieces back out,” He chokes, holding each side of his blinding face. Brute force against cosmic chaos. Somehow , he is still winning. “If I do… If I do...”
“You will be shattered,” Impa says, flatly. “Maybe you should die, then, if you can’t handle it. You should let it kill you.”
He looks at her, his smarting expression almost taken aback. The blade between her teeth had slashed thoughtlessly; the vicious evidence in her words pouring out of her like a fetid sigh, held back for far too long. There are no consequences for her cruelty anymore. She no longer has to pretend she was ever more than a body groomed to inflict pain. Light had been blotted out. And shadows always were her domain.
She allows the blade to drop; slipping from her open fingers and clanging against the muffled floor. One step. Two steps. His gaze fixates on her as she makes her way to the abomination; the warlord who had killed the only girl she had ever loved; the man who had set the ruins of her life on fire, cleansing all that remained until nothing was left . She stands tall, and he crawls.
Impa had never felt more free.
She drives her fingers through his hair —static jolts of fire and thunder and raw pain, and Impa welcomes each sensation with abandon. She yanks him closer to her; he doesn’t yelp, reaches for her wrist when she kneels besides him. His grip, for all its godlike power, is weak, unfocused, completely lost. He fights her as much as he clings to the concreteness of her body. His patheticness, not her grief, is what makes Impa want to cry.
“You wanted this, didn’t you?” she murmurs through her teeth, so close to his deformed pointy ear she could bite off the excess if she wanted to. “Then do it. Go on. Become a god. Rewrite the world. Who cares what you make of it. Who cares what you once wished this would mean to you. Go on. Rip yourself apart, my lord.” He makes a choking sound, an echo of the grief she doesn't feel. He burns so bright against her. Impa stares ahead, right at the wall, at the sunset far behind, as each of her fingers sizzles and chars and fuses with him. “Do it,” she says, as her lungs threaten to collapse. “Do it, you coward, do it. ” Ganondorf’s essence shakes and sputters besides her. She can’t feel her arm anymore as he curls, as tension rises, as something wild and manic wrenches out from her accursed throat. “DO IT.”
Golden light erupts beside her in a shriek. Tears of relief boil right through her waterline.
She doesn’t close her eyes as Ganondorf implodes, blinding her.
Blinding everything.
At last, the Shape arises.
The golden light is weakened now, after the flash. Not mended together, but contained under endless blackened fur. A maw unhinges. More darkness than flesh. Timeless eyes open for the first time, pale and emptied and quieter. The walls of the castle are blown open to a darkened sky. Inky. Alive.
Ashes coat everything.
The Shape looks down at itself. Bones cling to its arm, tangled there, bleached clean off.
With terrible claws, the Shape plucks the skull off its dark fibrils. It is so small inside the palm of its hand. Boar-like eyes, fueled by divine violence and impossible dreams, stare mindlessly at the empty sockets.
