#tribelands

[faunusrights]

okay, so this is (bear with me) a modern!gws!tribelands!weiss!!!!!!! aka she’s an unholy mashup of all of my AUs, but her style is so Slappin that i’m actually tryna think of a new AU idea just so she can Be In It........ the good news is that i haven’t thought of one yet. but there’s a still a ‘yet’.

[faunusrights]

I've seen mention of a Menagerie language a few times now in the Frapp fics and other ones, you got any actual info on it? :3c I'm a language nerd and wanted to maybe make use of it >3> (Also I foUND THE FICS!! And a few shrike faunus!Neo ideas I had too! Buff buns and murder birbs shall be seen soon)

WELL OKAY im the total opposite in that languages are Wild and Bizarre to me and frankly the fact i can even handle english as my one and only language is a miracle (duolingo please let me have my dog back im learning welsh i swear) BUT... i do have like. an origin??? of the language-- well okay lets just go all in cause tbh i think abt it a lot

SO the language spoken on Menagerie is called Menagerie Common (sometimes shortened to Menag Common or just Common) and it’s a direct advancement from the tribal creole, Tribal Common. Tribal Common was born from the merging of all 11/12+ core tribal tongues, such as Bonyornic, Akadyan, Jarran, Vandric, Yurriq, Riqran, Xuyrian, Nyrni, Soccorocoan, and Zverna. This was primarily because of Suunmord, the annual gathering in Jarro, originally born from a peace agreement between the tribes of Forever Fall.

The language has a few specific pointers: there’s no gender, for a start! Neither of people nor objects, because gender is Very Much a human thing and thus, was never incorporated even into its modern forms. That does mean it’s a very context-based language -- similar to how, in Japanese, you’ll use specific terms to denote a person’s status in relation to you, Common does the same (word choice is important. pick the wrong word and people might think you married yr mother. bad times). The other is that the language is... well... it’s not really, uh, regulated? Standardised? Different people from different tribes have different ways of speaking!

An example of this irl would probably be Esperanto, a constructed language I’m currently taking a glance at for this executive purpose! Esperanto tries to bridge the gaps between countries and is more a huge amalgamation of most European languages. Similar to that, most words are understandable from tribe to tribe, and some may even be very familiar, but stuff like syntax can change depending on the speaker, and even the spelling often switches depending on a person’s tribal heritage. Often, Faunus will argue over whether there is or is not an ‘R’ in a word, and often the only reason they’re arguing is because one tribe does and the other doesn’t.

As such, Common is best learned with a foundation in one tribal tongue, so that if you don’t know a word, or a phrase, or a way of spelling something, you have your mother tongue to fill in the gaps! Out of all the languages, though, Jarran has the advantage of having the most contribution towards Common given Suunmord, so if you know Jarran you’re, like, maybe 70% of the way there, haha.

[faunusrights]

i’ve posted this before, but this video (up until the 1:18 mark because it’s two short songs put together) was literally the entire inspiration behind Thimithi.

[faunusrights]

me: kaniwa is a cheetah faunus

other ppl: oh so does she chirp? does she chirrup?

me: yeah

[faunusrights]

Are there any particular traditions specific to certain tribes you particularly enjoy or are intrigued by or want to go into more detail on?

bonyorn is the Big One, of course, because i fucking love religious/spiritual stuff in my stories to incorporate more unreal aspects to a tale. but i definitely want to look more into xuyri’s traditionalism and how that clashes w/ sienna and arslan, and also into yuura of the west, once the peaceful people of vacra’s oasis. sun is their chieftain bringing a splash of akadyan colour into a bright desert landscape, so seeing how he integrates two cultures together is something im super hype to write!

[faunusrights]

how many members should i expect in tribelands

this is also vague!!! i presume this means how many… canon characters made the cut??? and the answer to that is: like none of em sdhfjfsd

cont. under cut:

basically when i made tribelands i realised the whole story and au is EXTREMELY faunus-focused. and thats on purpose! if canon is the story of humans doing their thing then tribelands is building on faunus lore, and i dont wanna dilute that by focusing on humans. but then i made the even weirder choice to make weiss the only* human-to-faunus converted character? i mean, of course i did that because of gws!au dont get me wrong, but technically i coulda made ruby a wolf faunus and yang a bear faunus and yatsu a fuckin ox or smthng-

what im saying is why didnt i convert the whole dang cast, and the answer to that is: too many. too many 2 handle.

when i write stories, esp. pretty long ones, i tend to find two or three characters and they are my entire focus. there’s other supporting characters, yeah, but the story is abt these specific few and thats all i care abt. now thats not to say wolf!faunus ruby isnt hanging out on Paact and fuckin, idk, koi!ren isnt out there somewhere! but theyre certainly not the focus of the story im tryna tell.

HOWEVER THAT SAID if someone came up to me once nilas is done and went ‘hey murphy i wanna write bear!faunus yang kicking human ass’ u kno what? go for it. grab this au w/ both hands and make something.

but for the sake of not making this story sprawl even more wildly out of control than it already is, ive focused almost exclusively on faunus characters, which is why i had a proper whinge a few weeks ago that there arent enough faunus characters for me to actually work with. which is why i made kaniwa and oryza and ecru and so forth because i literally ran out of named faunus to use. its Bad.

so, i guess my answer to this is theres… still a lot of characters and if u love faunus then theyre Literally All Here, but if yr looking for the human characters like CFY, RY, JNPR and so forth… this may not be the right place to look unless you wanna write that yourself, haha.

*i can sense someone’s about to go ‘murphy, arslan isnt a faunus in canon’. allow me to tell you right here and now you are wrong and here’s my essay on why she’s 100% a secret faunus. firstly, her name means ‘lion’ in TWO LANGUAGES-

[faunusrights]

Will we see or hear more abt Blake’s Family

Oh God Yeah right now nilas is set in jarro so we’re hearing considerably more abt velvet’s side of the story and her family, BUT there’s at least two fics set in or around Akadya/Blake! one of them is the story of how blake first met velvet when she was vying for their hand in marriage/the marriage itself, and a second is about blake and velvet’s rise to chieftainhood! so dw we are definitely going to see kali and ghira and the akadyan lifestyle later down the line >:3c

(believe it or not, the fic abt blake accepting velvet’s proposal was actually meant to be the first fic in the series, haha. but then i had the image of blake and velvet meeting this strange mythic from bonyorn in my head and i HAD to write nilas first. it means the timeline is a bit all over the place and the au hits the ground running VERY hard, but once that fic is written things should click into place a little better.)

[faunusrights]

so, abt ecru,

sdjkfsd this is so vague im screamin but okay

answer under the cut i go on for a bit

to start, i made ecru on such a whim because i wanted weiss to have a Dramatic Entrance. she didn’t even have a name in the first nilas draft? like, seriously, she was ‘the woman’ for months:

That was unusual, and another wave of question rose in the Hall before Blake held up a hand to quiet them once more. “Interesting. Are you one of these mythics?”

The woman shook her head, stepping aside easily. “No. But she is.”

and it was cause i was super unsure how many non-canon* characters i wanted to have in tribelands because it was already going to be a fic that was 80-90% original content and missing over half the cast as is? so using original characters for anything was like ‘,:/

but i ended up realising she’d be a great supporting character for weiss outside of the introductory scene and i’d already decided that she and weiss had some history (though exactly what that was i wouldnt figure out until way later), so when i named oryza and kaniwa for the first time i also grabbed a name for ecru**. and then i realised she was probably hot and goofy and here we are!

ecru’s very cool tho. once a character has a name my brain boosts character production rates to at least 75% so i spent a lot of time mulling her over. things i can say that arent rly... spoilers is that the akmuo clan are famous for nearly being wiped out by disease! when it was down to like... five or so people they made a deal w/ the Hallows, asking to survive in exchange for their ability to lie. it worked, and they lived, but ecru cannot tell a lie. not even a little white lie! she always speaks the truth. they’re often called ‘truthtellers’ by the bonyornic folk, and ppl tend to use em as witnesses to things to prove if something did or did not happen. very handy.

ecru’s also one of those people who you can’t read at ALL. she has a great poker face (as do most of bonyorn; blocks of ice, the lot of em) but she’s much more smiley than most, which is mentioned in the next*** chapter: 

Ecru had probably seen right through the change of topic, yet she took it with grace, canting her head with a smile far more easily won than Weiss’s, in Velvet’s opinion.

and these interactions mean shes a rly good bridging character between blake and velvet and weiss, since weiss is very aloof and solitary but ecru’s much more sociable (and, uh, honest, for the obvious reasons).

so that’s how a RANDOM FAUNUS i made to do nothing more than give weiss THE DRAMATIC ENTRY SHE DESERVES became my Hottest OC Of All Time because im a trash baby

*i dont really consider non-canon characters to be OCs? i feel like an OC is a character who you like... rly work on and make the protag of a thing? ecru and kaniwa and oryza r just supporting characters tho so i dont even consider em OCs. theyre just chillin.

**her full name is ecru akmuo but im thinking of changing her surname for be more viking sounding shgjdfshdf im so! indecisive!

***’next chapter’, i say, as if im not planning to add TWO MORE CHAPTERS which means this might not happen until chapter five instead. lol.