pillars of eternity ask, 13, 20, and 22 <3
13. how does your watcher relate to their culture?
answered!
20. what is your watcher's family life like?
Axa had an unusually small family compared to the rest of her community. this is largely due to her parents' own family situations growing up: her mother was born a slave in Readceras and escaped to Ixamitl totally alone as an adolescent, while her father was the son of a respected warrior in his remote village who had rejected his father's attempts at strongarming him into following in his footsteps by running away from home, traveling across the continent alone, and becoming a cartographer in a city built around a bustling lore college. unfortunately, their family only ever shrunk again after Axa's younger brother Tico was born. an Avian godlike, his birth rendered their mother infertile, putting a very abrupt end to her dream of having a large family with lots of children. she became bitter, and her demeanor drove her husband to working more and more, spending longer and longer amounts of time away from home. finally he promised to do one last big job and then he'd accept a job in the lore college his daughter would be starting at next year, allowing him to stay closer to home and family. instead, he vanished without a trace while out on that last job, leaving Axa's mother the sole caretaker and earner for their little household. an artisan by trade, Axa's mother had little choice but to resort to plucking her godlike son's feathers to use in her totems and amulets, making her stock stand out against her competitors' but sowing resentment in her children. Axa loves and misses her father, having been closer to him than to her mother, but she can't help but wonder if instead of meeting some terrible fate he just... got tired of it all and left them to start a new life. he'd done it before, after all. she loves her mother, but is infuriated by her quickness to judge and her flimsy excuses for her own bad behavior. she loves her little brother Tico (his full traditional Ixamitec name translates to Brave Little Bird Hops Out of His Cage) but wishes he'd stand up for himself more against their mother. Tico is a conscientious young man who insists on staying with their mother as he's the only family she has left and he feels she needs him. while she only visited her mother once between Pillars 1 and Deadfire, Axa loves to have Tico come and visit her every now and then– he adores his adopted niece Vela, and he was halfway through a trip back to Caed Nua from Dyrford with her when Eothas rose. as a mother herself, Axa is... not exactly neglectful toward Vela, but definitely not as engaged and present as she really ought to be. mostly it's due to her fear of fucking up as a parent the way her own parents did, but she also acknowledges that she leads a rather intense and violent life and she doesn't want Vela accidentally getting hurt. their relationship is pretty poor after she returns home from training in the Vailian Republics, gets a little better after a long visit from Uncle Birdy (Tico), then it really improves during Deadfire with Vela on board her ship. by the time Axa gives birth to Teo, she and Vela are very close. as a wife, Axa is fiercely loyal, intensely proud and supportive of her husband, and seldom goes where her Aloth cannot follow. (their Thing with Vatnir is enthusiastically agreed upon by all three parties)
Vaargys didn't have a family growing up. he barely even had a clan: his biological father was the clan's elderly priest who had sworn himself to celibacy so that he would remain pure from the seductive lies of Berath's Wheel by interacting with the cycle of life and death as little as possible, which included refusing to induce a soul's reincarnation by way of fathering any children that might receive that soul. Vaargys' biological mother was the priest's young acolyte, a woman barely out of girlhood who sought to become a priest so she could take the vow of celibacy too, to avoid her fate of having to become a clan mother someday as the thought of pregnancy and childbirth terrified and disgusted her. in the end, the old priest broke his vow and cruelly manipulated his acolyte into a single forbidden tryst with him. of course she got pregnant from it and died in childbirth, and as it was honestly pretty obvious what had happened, their child was forsaken by the whole clan as a portent of doom. Vaargys was a symbol of their priest's lack of discipline and true piety, proof that he was unfit to lead and that the clan was destined to perish. he was fed and clothed and educated like the other children, but he was not cherished as a child of the clan. he was not allowed to sing their epics nor to attend religious rituals and rites, no one shared anything with him unbidden and even when they had no choice but to include him they did so with reluctance and stinginess. it didn't take him long to put two and two together as a child when he realized that out of the entire clan, only he and the old priest had the exact same golden-yellow eyes, but he never saw the point in confronting the old man, and the old priest avoided his misbegotten son like a bad memory, having said maybe ten words to the boy before his eventual death in Vaargys' young adulthood. it's worth noting that his mother, who he'd never met, did appear to him in the first vision he ever had, urging him to seek the path of the Eyeless Face. he obeyed, because as he says, "one ought always take advice from one's mother's ghost, ja? that's just common sense." Vaargys took Vela under his benevolent wing partially out of an emotional camaraderie he felt with the poor orphaned babe, and as her papa he absolutely spoils her rotten, lavishing her with gifts and cooing lovingly at her in Ordhjóma (which he never actually taught her.) she's annoyed by his overly effusive affection sometimes, and she certainly knows how to use him to get what she wants, but overall Vela is a good-hearted child who doesn't abuse the considerable power she has over her adoptive father. usually.
22. what has your watcher been doing between poe1 and poe2?
answered!