Hoo boy this is actually something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while but never really had a chance. @ulirequus please feel free to chime in if you feel differently since it’s your muse’s mother I’m gonna be talking about!
Adean I feel was a very caring and gentle influence on Seliph, and it’s why my Seliph is basically an emotional bleeding heart. He cares so much (maybe sometimes even too much) and he’s not afraid to show it. He didn’t grow up in a castle surrounded by soldiers who would tell him to “suck it up” or “man up” if something upset him. I think Adean really taught Seliph how to control his emotions instead of shunning them and replacing them with that masculine anger. Basically I feel a lot of feelings and so does Seliph.
♆ A body headcanon
the mark of baldur is a tramp stamp
Seliph has a lot of muscle that people don’t really expect him to have. They think he has a small frame (which he does) but not much in terms of strength, which is so very wrong. He doesn’t help his case much with his baggy shirt, but he has more strength and muscle than people realize. It could be because of his Baldur blood, but he has also trained diligently for a years both for his liberation army and to take on the soldiers terrorizing Isaach. And as a matter of fact, Tyrfing is heavier than Mystletainn is! It’s heavier and grants him a +10 speed boost.
✄ A pet peeve headcanon
Seliph really doesn’t get “pet peeves.” He’s a kind soul who doesn’t mind what other people are doing so long as it’s not harming anyone else. That being said, he hates injustices, especially towards anyone who can’t fight back. The child hunts still weigh heavily on him because there was absolutely no reason that had to happen and they were just innocent kids, etc.
This is just the thing for her furry friend! Elise holds the lunch behind her back. “Are you ready for the best meal you will ever have in your entire life?”
With a “dun duh-nuh-nuh,” the princess whips it out in front of her to reveal a bento of sorts. It’s small, only three compartments: two small, one large. In the bigger one, there’s rice with meatballs liberally doled on top. The sauce is drizzled on,so much that the rice underneath is soaked. In one of the smaller compartments, there’s steamed broccoli. In the last, a few chocolates.
“A balanced, healthy lunch for a balanced, healthy day. See, I even put in dessert–” Wait…can Wolfskins have chocolate? Are they like dogs? Will he die if he eats it? How inconsiderate…Elise should have thought this through before making them… She releases a strangled, “Yum!”
Peri walked around the Nohrian castle, thankful that Xander wasn’t in need of her services. Of course, she’d prefer at any time to be killing people, instead of trying to find ways to kill her time. In her hand, she held a knife, carelessly playing with it, throwing it from one side of her hand to the other... This was her self defense weapon, inside the castle (As, apparently, carrying around your weapon around the castle was seen as bad. She never understood why), and it made her feel safe... ready.
On a slight, wrong movement, the knife went to stop stabbing the floor, inches away from a furry, long tail. “Yikes” was her initial response, but she giggled. “A couple of inches away could’ve been a couple of inches off your tail.” She seems excited to mention this. “Something I would’ve preferred much more” she mutters, to herself.
“I didn’t catch your name, did I?” She bends to the front, picking up her knife, as she went back to play with it, this time, without looking. “You’re one of those... furry guys. Kit-sun-ays.” Peri had barely heard of them, but knew that one of those was in the army at Nohr. “I’m a human, but you know that already. I’d kill to have your claws, though.”
i wrote earlier that i think she’s reasonably healthy, but i think she could be much healthier if she took better care of her body. she keeps herself safe against illness as best she can, but she still could use some improvement on physical fitness.
headcanon for: body
maria is a very small girl!! she’s shorter than her elder siblings by roughly an entire foot – and if that isn’t enough, her siblings have also been in active training for… probably her entire life. they’ve been building muscle for a very, very long time, whereas maria has always been determined to walk the path of a healer. she’s also spent a good portion of her life as a prisoner, and while she was by no means kept under terrible conditions, she was still not really given time to run around outside during that period of her life. she doesn’t like to eat much, either, so… maria’s honestly probably underweight, i think, weighing in around 87-92 pounds, somewhere in that range. she’s. well. she could stand to treat herself better sometimes. at least to the point where she doesn’t weigh as much as a moderately sized dog.
headcanon for: pet peeve
maria’s a girl who can take many things in stride, but a lot of her pet peeves are probably centered around herself. did she screw on the lid on the jelly jar incorrectly? maria, you should have noticed that!
…i was going to make a longer list, but i’m drawing a blank. she doesn’t like it when people of high social status talk down to people of lower social status, and she especially dislikes seeing that same idea of inequality reflected in people’s actions, but that’s more something to be fixed than something to pout about.
headcanon for: happiness
if you really, really want to make maria happy, then let her know in some way that you were thinking of her. remembering something she talked about with starry eyes, pointing out something she said she liked once, or even just showing her a thing that it seems like she’d like. it’s not that she likes to be pampered, but she’s lonely, and being remembered like that just feels so very special to her.
headcanon for: anger
maria doesn’t really anger that easily, if at all. even when faced with unpleasant situations, she tries to understand why people act that way rather than get angry at them (not that she’ll overlook bad actions, but she’d rather work towards a solution than spend her time being upset).
the closest thing she has to something that absolutely angers her when someone talks badly of her siblings. if it’s someone who isn’t actually her family, then how are they supposed to know? they didn’t see or hear all the burdens and worries her siblings carried– they only see the end results. she can’t really blame them much, either, though, since they’ve had to live with the aftermath of their decisions (and in many cases, their mistakes). so… it’s okay to judge her siblings as rulers, but don’t judge them as people.
and if her siblings talk badly of themselves, well, that’s just as unwelcome (though she meets these situations more with sadness than anything else). she loves her family– absolutely adores them. they’ve made mistakes, they’re not perfect, and some of their actions can never be reversed… but they’re not bad people. they deserve to be happy, too, and she’ll stay by them as long as it takes for them to smile again.
headcanon for: food
maria leans towards the lesser side of average when it comes to cooking. she’s not particularly bad, but her cooking average at best. she’s either never really had the opportunity or just. had better things to do. she’s very good at arranging food, though, or cutting it into cute shapes. if someone cooked something and then left the shape-making and prettying up to her, it’d be absolutely delicious and cute.
i’ve mentioned this to you before, but she’s especially good at cutting apples into rabbit shapes. since her fruit carving is totally canon now, though, once keaton tells her how un-bunny like her apples are, they’d go from looking something like this to something like this. (even though that second image is a potato. just put up with me for a sec here. fruit carving master)
headcanon for: childhood
maria had a pretty happy childhood, at least in regards to the years she spent at Castle Macedon with her siblings! she never knew her mother, but she never longed for one, either. she was incredibly close to her siblings, and pretty close to their father as well (she loved him and he loved her, and i hc that she probably takes more after their father than michalis and minerva do-- she had his love for peace and desire to abstain from fighting, but she has that same fiery determination as her siblings-- but he was less readily available than her siblings were).
she knew from an early age that she didn’t want to be involved in battle the way her siblings were. it made her heart ache every time she saw one of them come back with wounds of some kind, and very quickly, she settled on becoming someone who could actually help them. her siblings were always protecting everyone else... so she would be the one to protect them.
headcanon for: mental state
maria’s mental state is decent! she’s very prone to fits of loneliness and, less often, sadness as well. i usually hold by the idea that she’s the least sad of my muses, but i think that’s a lot to do with the strength of her character, as well as how deeply and strongly she believes in others. part of what keeps her going, though, is that she hasn’t truly said goodbye to michalis (and she knows minerva is still there for her). if she had to say goodbye to her brother as well, she’d take a major hit. i also think that in a timeline where she doesn’t make friends with anyone in the long run, she does have the potential to become depressed.
but ferp maria? ferp maria has found her brother again (and even if she lets him go, she will not let him go) and she has a wonderful puppy friend and samesies pals and big (eventually) adopted siblings who will open jam jars for her... so i think she’s going to be just fine.
briefly touched on in my ‘antebellum’ thread with ares: one of the longest-standing and most memorable of the little episodic stories he would make up with nanna when they were kids were the tales of mortimer the knight. like all the finest knights of the manster district, he was a lance knight who fought valiant battles to defend his friends and family against the injustices of an evil tyrant and became renowned across the land. courtesy of nanna’s scribblings, he had a polka-dotted horse name “dot” – because they’re very creative when they’re seven and eight years old, okay.
they sometimes acted themselves into these stories; their favorite mortimer tales were when he would come riding into whatever town or city they were currently being hidden, drive out the empire, and rescue them. then all of them would fight together and he would help leif reclaim the throne.
leif never really realized it until a few years later, but he had always imagined mortimer to look like how others had always described quan.
␛ : ANGER
this is only tangentially related to anger, but i’ve sort of run out of things to say about leif and anger haha. leif actually really enjoys combat; he enjoys fighting, being on the battlefield, taking the lives of those who stand in his way. it gives him a powerful rush of adrenaline and – most importantly – makes him feel strong and validated in a way he lacks in a lot of other aspects of his life. he enjoys the fight or flight high that his body goes into when he knows he’s fighting for his life, and he fights with a distinctively vicious lack of restraint because he has never been afraid of pain or death – welcomes it, even. the battlefield is where he feels the most full of energy, vitality, and life.
i’ve talked about it before, but his penchant for violence frightens him when he thinks about it. it troubles him when he sees other soldiers turn pale at their first kill, get ill after spilling blood, and talk about having nightmares of death and the people they’ve killed, and realize that he’s never experienced any of these things. it makes him wonder at his own humanity, but ultimately it’s not something he dwells on much because he’s expected to be strong – and this makes him strong, right?
Partly a pet peeve, partly his own morality, but Camus finds it irritating when others take things that don’t belong to them. This formed in his early years in the military when his fellow soldiers would take his weapons to practice without care of who they belonged to. It was common, of course, since everyone at that rank used weapons that were more or less the same, but the one time Camus received a finer steel sword than those provided to him, it promptly went missing for several days. When at last it returned, he had to spend quite a bit of time sharpening and polishing it again. He made a point from then on to keep all of his belongings on his person or locked away in a personal chest. No one ever values borrowed items in the same way that they value their own, after all.
By extension, this also applies to thieves, toward which Camus already harbors some prejudice. He understands that nobles may be an exception, but most other people work hard for their possessions and money and should not fear that they’ll be taken from them. He’ll only sympathize with thieves when he’s forced to, but otherwise he considers them to be morally lacking.
Bottom line, don’t take something from Camus without explicitly asking permission first.
Tail? A tail, is that a tail. Tail??? An actual dog’s tail. That is so weird? That might just be the weirdest thing she’s ever seen, and she’s seen a three-headed monstrous hell hound try to rip the throat out of a wyvern.
….
7/10
It’s kind of cute though, look at it wag.
….
8.5/10
Look at those ears……..so cute and pettable…..she sort of wants to reach out and scratch at them, to see if he might like that. It’s…sort of humiliating, to think that about another person, no matter the resemblance to an old family pet.
Elise doesn’t get angry if someone hurts her. If they were to injure her physically, she wouldn’t care. Yeah, she’d hiss in pain, but she wouldn’t get angry at all. If someone cursed a sheet of paper to give Leo a papercut? All hell would break loose as the princess would try to heal her brother and find the culprit at the same time.
It also stems from the fact that she has somewhat of a low self esteem born from the competitive and cutthroat environment of living in the castle. Not as intense as the one her siblings grew up with, since she’s the baby after all.
♆ Body
She’s a lil chubby, this princess of Nohr. She’s quite the foodie, so she loves to eat whenever the opportunity presents itself. Snacking is her favorite past time next to tea time, so there’s some chub on her tummy and her thighs might rub together.
Her mother would always berate her. Words sharp, gaze heavy, “Stop eating so much! If you’re not beautiful, you won’t be considered a threat, let alone worthy of a princess title.” Pinch, poke, prod.
It bothers her sometimes, but her siblings love her just the way she is.
That’s all that matters.
† Religion
Is there a Nohrian official religion?
If anything, Elise believes there’s some sort of higher power out there. A sort of magic that powers her staff, the kind of divine wind that helps the flowers grow, something up there that brought her siblings home after a dangerous mission.
Something is keeping them safe. Maybe it’s a deity, maybe it’s just fate.
