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Jul. 21st, 2025 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavokay, fire emblem tellius zihark characterization essay that's been cooking for years, aka this one:
god, he's such an interesting character and this is one of those character trait wrinkles beyond the two or three foils that most people pick up and chew on.
ANYWAY. caveat empor that, given this topic is not the kind of thing he'd utter out loud much less think consciously of, all of this is one giant mish mosh pit of a headcanon lol. we're cooking with Vibes.
* we can start with that he's a remarkably pretty boy for the cast. there's others of course; sephiran, soren, reyson, naesala, rajaion, and we can go down the rest;.... but usually they all have some connection to nobility and some vanity/time/resources to primp up (implied naesala & sephiran with love :p ), herons being seen as otherworldly beautiful spirits of the forest, soren's always seen as a youth (understandably much to his chagrin). not a rough and tumble mercenary, you know.
* on a lighter stupider silly note before we get into some heaviness, zihark's always felt quintessentially libran (sun) to me in personality, which is very much a sign about beauty and aesthetics and a kind of femme energy, among a great many other things. romantics. habitual eternal smilers and charmers who abhor actual strife and conflict but will indecisively see both sides to a situation all the way down until you want to shake them lol. (man's pretty predictable when you see him for what he is imo lol). moreevidence headcanons for that here.
* bluntly putting it out there, i do think there was some sort of sexual coercion/transaction going in his early mercenary years for survival. i briefly alluded to this history in this muarim/zihark smutfic since it was somewhat, regrettably relevant.neotula mentioned a while back he would have grown up in the worst of daein's plague years - and since there's zero reference of his parents/home mentioned in daein even with ample time spent there in radiant dawn for a passing mention, i'm inclined to agree that he had to claw his way out of some horrifying shit in terms of lack of resources / probably dead family / a whole nation in the middle of a breakdown. (there's also the POR supports line about him having a habit of fixing up his own armor and brom even noticing the strange amount of independence.) it's implied he's been in the mercenary world for a while, along with the dregs of humanity (toha vigilantes), and human/laguz slavery isn't near the bottom of the list that happens; just look at the subtext with the heron(s!) for more of the sexual slavery variety. i don't need to connect the dots here especially with the kind of army/mercenary dynamics history shows here.
* with that said, i do think that he sees said youth/beauty as a transactional sense - and since it got him out of abject poverty and is always there to rely on because there's always the worst of humanity around -- there's always that back-of-the-mind sense of it as a.... last ditch distasteful security investment of sorts. little bit of a survivalist paranoia sense style. he's not fond of the inherent conclusion, but it's an instinct that lingers like a ghost even long after it's strictly necessary.
* and there's ego keeping up with appearances too. it.... isn't all transactional. the man likes to be seen and even chased a little - i always crack up a little at the amount of attention from the ladies he gets in game when he's not in the mood for it -- didn't exactly dress himself in sackcloth and ashes for those years of wandering after his mentioned lover - and people can be contradictory about what they want and need emotionally. quiet old grief mixing with attention-seeking as a kind of loneliness hoping to fill a hole that has to be healed in other ways. or simply matured into healing with time doing what it does best. (calculating when what happened, again, generally places him as a late teenager when he'd run into his laguz lover - which imo does some necessary contextualizing. he was young when a lot of that went down).
* and this is wandering further out into headcanon territory - i can see him also being stubbornly quietly defiant about still keeping masculinity on his terms. i've always gotten the strong sense of bisexual energy from him and there is a heap of real-world literature about what bisexual men specifically have to go through in society, especially with any hint of visible markers straying from """"traditional"" rigid masculinity (the irl stories that men with long hair have to go through alone is. fucking depressing/enraging!, etc.) much less the above.
and so it goes. you survive, and you work your way towards living.
wills, wits, fists, swords carving flesh if it needs to be - which he does, and he does find stability and relief and genuine camaraderie in the games working with ike and co. which is the story you know.
(of course, the more we talk about the older he gets, the more we wander into 'blatantly headcanon territory' and perilously close to 'krad's gigantic headcanon nexus territory', so like fair warning here lul)
* and so when he gets older, post-game - i can see him physically filling out, strikingly masculine in ways he wasn't in his twenties in-game as natural aging marches on. more well fed and less lean from hunger in the childhood years. more confident. further removed from previous experiences and with more resources (i can't see him being bad with money, and i don't see ike's mercenaries leaving anyone stranded financially after the playable cast very literally being heroes of the continent after the last game).
and yet -- old habits die hard, so the line goes.
and so it's this messy as fuck set of feelings he'd have with his masculinity as he'd get older; in some ways a very old distant ugly piece of security isn't there, when youth fades as it does, and there'd be subconscious fear about that absence. there's simple ego-vanity in the fleetingness of that strain of image he'd miss too. (it's a terribly human vanity, even if i don't quite understand it. terribly, tenderly endearing all the same.)
do i think he'd come to some sort of peace with it? honestly.... it really depends on where his life goes after the games, doesn't it?
anyway!
this doesn't capture all the notes here on the topic but it does capture a lot of it i've been rotating around recently.
#one of these days i may or may not write that giant meta essay in my brain about how [zihark would] have a very complex/messy relationship with-- masculinity in general (this is purely Vibes. all vibes) given what i headcanon part of his past to be and anyway. #i can see things getting easier in some ways and not in others when he gets older. why am i saying this lol. enjoy?
god, he's such an interesting character and this is one of those character trait wrinkles beyond the two or three foils that most people pick up and chew on.
ANYWAY. caveat empor that, given this topic is not the kind of thing he'd utter out loud much less think consciously of, all of this is one giant mish mosh pit of a headcanon lol. we're cooking with Vibes.
* we can start with that he's a remarkably pretty boy for the cast. there's others of course; sephiran, soren, reyson, naesala, rajaion, and we can go down the rest;.... but usually they all have some connection to nobility and some vanity/time/resources to primp up (implied naesala & sephiran with love :p ), herons being seen as otherworldly beautiful spirits of the forest, soren's always seen as a youth (understandably much to his chagrin). not a rough and tumble mercenary, you know.
* on a lighter stupider silly note before we get into some heaviness, zihark's always felt quintessentially libran (sun) to me in personality, which is very much a sign about beauty and aesthetics and a kind of femme energy, among a great many other things. romantics. habitual eternal smilers and charmers who abhor actual strife and conflict but will indecisively see both sides to a situation all the way down until you want to shake them lol. (man's pretty predictable when you see him for what he is imo lol). more
* bluntly putting it out there, i do think there was some sort of sexual coercion/transaction going in his early mercenary years for survival. i briefly alluded to this history in this muarim/zihark smutfic since it was somewhat, regrettably relevant.
neotula mentioned a while back he would have grown up in the worst of daein's plague years - and since there's zero reference of his parents/home mentioned in daein even with ample time spent there in radiant dawn for a passing mention, i'm inclined to agree that he had to claw his way out of some horrifying shit in terms of lack of resources / probably dead family / a whole nation in the middle of a breakdown. (there's also the POR supports line about him having a habit of fixing up his own armor and brom even noticing the strange amount of independence.) it's implied he's been in the mercenary world for a while, along with the dregs of humanity (toha vigilantes), and human/laguz slavery isn't near the bottom of the list that happens; just look at the subtext with the heron(s!) for more of the sexual slavery variety. i don't need to connect the dots here especially with the kind of army/mercenary dynamics history shows here.* with that said, i do think that he sees said youth/beauty as a transactional sense - and since it got him out of abject poverty and is always there to rely on because there's always the worst of humanity around -- there's always that back-of-the-mind sense of it as a.... last ditch distasteful security investment of sorts. little bit of a survivalist paranoia sense style. he's not fond of the inherent conclusion, but it's an instinct that lingers like a ghost even long after it's strictly necessary.
* and there's ego keeping up with appearances too. it.... isn't all transactional. the man likes to be seen and even chased a little - i always crack up a little at the amount of attention from the ladies he gets in game when he's not in the mood for it -- didn't exactly dress himself in sackcloth and ashes for those years of wandering after his mentioned lover - and people can be contradictory about what they want and need emotionally. quiet old grief mixing with attention-seeking as a kind of loneliness hoping to fill a hole that has to be healed in other ways. or simply matured into healing with time doing what it does best. (calculating when what happened, again, generally places him as a late teenager when he'd run into his laguz lover - which imo does some necessary contextualizing. he was young when a lot of that went down).
* and this is wandering further out into headcanon territory - i can see him also being stubbornly quietly defiant about still keeping masculinity on his terms. i've always gotten the strong sense of bisexual energy from him and there is a heap of real-world literature about what bisexual men specifically have to go through in society, especially with any hint of visible markers straying from """"traditional"" rigid masculinity (the irl stories that men with long hair have to go through alone is. fucking depressing/enraging!, etc.) much less the above.
and so it goes. you survive, and you work your way towards living.
wills, wits, fists, swords carving flesh if it needs to be - which he does, and he does find stability and relief and genuine camaraderie in the games working with ike and co. which is the story you know.
(of course, the more we talk about the older he gets, the more we wander into 'blatantly headcanon territory' and perilously close to 'krad's gigantic headcanon nexus territory', so like fair warning here lul)
* and so when he gets older, post-game - i can see him physically filling out, strikingly masculine in ways he wasn't in his twenties in-game as natural aging marches on. more well fed and less lean from hunger in the childhood years. more confident. further removed from previous experiences and with more resources (i can't see him being bad with money, and i don't see ike's mercenaries leaving anyone stranded financially after the playable cast very literally being heroes of the continent after the last game).
and yet -- old habits die hard, so the line goes.
and so it's this messy as fuck set of feelings he'd have with his masculinity as he'd get older; in some ways a very old distant ugly piece of security isn't there, when youth fades as it does, and there'd be subconscious fear about that absence. there's simple ego-vanity in the fleetingness of that strain of image he'd miss too. (it's a terribly human vanity, even if i don't quite understand it. terribly, tenderly endearing all the same.)
do i think he'd come to some sort of peace with it? honestly.... it really depends on where his life goes after the games, doesn't it?
anyway!
this doesn't capture all the notes here on the topic but it does capture a lot of it i've been rotating around recently.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 04:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 03:38 pm (UTC)(hahaha ikr with rent! then again they're a treat and a reward in other ways so i suppose it evens out :P )
(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 04:48 am (UTC)I love the extrapolation into his potential backstory here, love tugging at those threads to see where they might lead, and my god, yeah, he really would have had to be pretty young at the point of losing that lover. That's a lot T_T
His finding security in something that was used to exploit him... It's so human and so substantial, really, I love it.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 04:43 pm (UTC)iirc zihark was 22 when PoR started and then 25 in RD specifically; so if we allow for, say, 3 years since his laguz lover -- that'd be right around 19 or so, maybe 20. my heart goes out to him for having so much stuff to Deal with with effectively no support structure until Ike and co. in a way, he's a slice of Daein affected by Ashnard that one doesn't really see elsewhere, even different than Jill who had Haar and her father. (Interestingly, I get a strange sense of Nolan having a past similar to Zihark but that's a different topic lol).
(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-23 03:11 am (UTC)but, to try to reconstruct my thoughts- I feel like escapist fantasies are hit and miss, and especially like, what I want to see in either escapist or realism is some degree of in-universe consistency, OR, to address that lack of consistency as a Thing, and I like that FE straight up is like oh yeah, there are lady knights, but, they are definitely ladies, and it's remarkable to Isadora that Marcus treats her as a knight first, so, that says something, you know? and I will also never begrudge anyone just ignoring some realism, god knows I do it enough with comphet/homophobia. but then I turn around and make it in explicit point that in my own lore, Mark's disability can't be cured by magic... it's just, like you said, something to play with, rotate to one's own ends, and god, yes, the body horror. The nods to what kinds of suffering a person can survive and what the cost is for that survival, not just to oneself, but to those around them, looking at bright eyes (:
but man, yeah. that's a lot of go through at such an age and with nobody really in his corner until after he's, you know, made some attempt at living with it. and ohh, I hadn't really done a lot with Nolan beyond those initial chapters... I am very curious your thoughts on him (and also my own experience in this new playthrough when I get to RD)... lots to be had honestly, and I love watching you pull at these threads that the written plot dangles at us to see where they could lead
(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-22 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-23 12:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-07-23 01:36 am (UTC)(tbh your fic in RETURN has always dovetailed so seamlessly well with this i was probably subconciously pulling on it too :D )