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dragonz-r-kewl · 1 month ago

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Hello there, fellow Farsight enjoyer. I have enjoyed your characterization and ideas about Farsight, and if it does not inconvenience you too much, could you tell me a little about what you think her and Mastermind's relationship was like? I personally agree with the fact that they were close, and I agree with how they both had respect for each other's knowledge and intelligence and academics in the other fanfictions. Yet, there's a lot that puzzles me with their relationship, like how Mastermind claimed correctly for years that Starflight was his, yet Farsight refused to say it in Prisoners, and then 2 years later they're seen standing next to each other in the prologue of Moon Rising. From some speculation (piecing together mentioned events from The Dark Secret, Prisoners, and Moon Rising), I have figured out that Mastermind and Farsight must have had some sort of interaction in 5004 A.S. to conceive Starflight, but she's noticeably absent from Prisoners when Fierceteeth is 7 in 5010 A.S., and then she's already dead for a few years by 5011 A.S. That means that they would have known each other for a few years in that timeframe. What do you think the course of their relationship was like? You mentioned that it was going downhill for a while, and I'd like to hear your take on it. Thank you for also receiving my speculation. It's very nice that you and I both are Farsight enjoyers on here.

Hi and sorry it took me so long to respond! I've been a bit creatively bankrupt lately and had to sum up the energy to digitally infodump. (and then it took me like a month or five because i took so long that i kept psyching myself out :p) But! I have Thoughts about this!! Even if it's been like a month or more since I've posted to this damn website!

I've never actually thought about it in terms of a timeline before, considering I do most of my thinking in pre-canon limbo and applying like. A human-ish timeframe to things. Still, the canon course of events wouldn't disrupt my idea of them too much- if anything, it brings a lot more structure to it.

I do think they would've been acquaintances since, I don't know, the dragon equivalent of high school aged?? Farsight would've been the bubbly, friendly type who likes to talk with everybody, while Mastermind appreciated companionship but had other priorities at the time. They would drift apart for a while in their young adulthood, persuing different things after their lives were shuffled around by the volcano having a flare-up.

Then again, this has taken several months for me to write, and I've warmed up to the idea of them not knowing eachother aside from maybe one or two meetings

A few years later, though, by the time Fierceteeth exists (so around 2003 A.S. with a few months' allowance either way), due to more nebulously defined happenstance, Farsight and Mastermind end up running into each other again and getting to know eachother much more closely.

More specifically, I have this notion that maybe Farsight's job was to be a scribe or a typist/stenographer (depending on how much technology dragons would have-- Tui seems to add technology to her world based on what *feels* old-timey, making it ambiguous if it's medieval or post-renaissance or another thing entirely. I find it funny to call it The Calculus Problem, based on how they seemingly have invented calculus but not gunpowder-- in a warring, fire-breathing species no less!) , and they would have met again when Mastermind began to work under Battlewinner directly and would be made to start attending the meetings. (you know what I mean by the meetings, right? idk i haven't read the dark secret in... a while...)

Anyways, the start of their relationship happens very quickly and out of nowhere and all at once. Depending on where in the year the brightest night is (it's never directly exposited iirc) it might be over the course of a bit over a year or less than it. Why it happened so quickly, I have a few ideas as to that also.

Mainly, they were both lonely and their home was slowly being destroyed. Farsight had whoever Fierceteeth's father was die on her, her friend(?) Secretkeeper is often busy with her life in high places, and it's unknown how much else she has going for her. Mastermind, meanwhile, is pretty much an outsider within their society (source: he hides in a room all day and people don't seem to like him) Companionship, at this point, seems very desirable, and so they quickly end up romantically entangled.

Aaaand then Starflight happens, and the weirdness/canon mystery regarding this relationship becomes impossible to ignore.

My thoughts on the situation go like this:

Farsight knows Mastermind is Starflight's father, and so does Mastermind. They both know that the other knows, and are perfectly open about it... to each other.

For a time, they just don't tell anyone else about their relationship, let alone the egg's parentage because of... social reasons I guess? Lots of which relate to the prophecy and stuff.

There are a few reasons I've come up with, but personally, I've landed on the following for now:

Harsh but plausible; (almost) no one likes Mastermind, and he's still there just because they need a science guy and he's the one ensuring they still have a water supply. However, based on what we have seen of him, he is unemphatic, far from personable, and difficult to work with. He's unpopular, essentially, and somehow high up in the pecking order despite that, and Farsight knows she'll have enough dragons in her face to begin with just having an egg that lines up with the prophecy in the first place. She wants to keep their relationship- especially after the egg- under wraps, and Mastermind agrees for her sake. After she dies (or just after things cool down- more about this later) Mastermind is more willing to mention it occasionally, but anybody who pays attention doesn't really believe him.

Or maybe they were normal about it and Morrowseer is out of touch and dragons just don't believe anything Mastermind says sometimes because. The mastermindl

Regardless, they grow closer at a fairly steady rate, and they get along well! Things are stable and sane, except for the looming anxiety of Starflight's egg being taken because they should know that, really-

There are two (wow, only two for once?) possibilities with Starflight here; either his being a prophecy egg was deliberate, or coincidental. Based on Farsight's feelings about him, at least, I tend to fall in the latter camp.

Logically, if an egg's hatching can be accurately predicted to the day, apparently, they probably knew from very early on that Starflight would hatch around the brightest night at the very least. Mastermind knows this, and logically, Farsight should too- but based on her behaviour in Winglets, it seems like she hasn't fully processed or come to terms with it, even though she definitely *knows*. At the very least she wants to pretend like she'll get to spend all that time with it and raise it as long as she can.

And then the egg is taken.

And Farsight doesn't take it well.

In Winglets, Fierceteeth menitons her "moping" and it being "so annoying". Based on how scared Fierceteeth seems to be of emotions, I generally take this as meaning it was bad. Fierceteeth essentially lost her mother all the way back then-- Farsight was grief-stricken, depressed, and inconsolable. They were both unable to handle the situation and it ruined their relationship for good.

However, as much as I would love to go on and on about Fierceteeth and Farsight and the tragedy of it all and how it's nobody's fault and it's everybody's fault and it's Morrowseer's fault in a way but he's a jackass and it doesn't count because everything is his fault BUT that's another infodump for another day, I want to post this within this century, and the main point of this is Farsight and Mastermind.

So, Mastermind.

OH GOD MASTERMIND I NEVER KNOW WHERE TO START--

I do think Mastermind would care about Starflight, and earnestly, too! (He strikes me as a very earnest character, just a weird, morally dubious one.) He's just not very emotionally literate and has a hard time caring.

Where Farsight so instantly and completely loves, Mastermind is a lot more reserved. He's slower to care about things, slower to get attached, more easily put off-- he's not friendly.

So he doesn't care horiffically much about the egg at first, not any more than an extension of Farsight and his relationship with her. Sure, he hopes it goes well, if only so Farsight-whom he already has grown to love-is happy and well.

However, seeing it taken, seeing it somewhere where he is unable to see it, and seeing Farsight so utterly distraught, it gets him to start caring. He wants her to not be so consumed by grief. He begins to miss that egg too, and in this shared understanding, he wants nothing more than to comfort her.

One problem: he's bad at that!

Again, he's not emotionally literate, he's not the most empathetic, and he only has some vague idea of how to comfort someone. It only works some pittance of the time because Farsight, always caring, bleeding heart, actually got to know him Farsight, can tell he's trying to comfort her and appreciates it.

Their only relief from the situation is the fact that the other understands. It's a weird place to be, and it's hard to get empathy for: their dragonet has been taken from them before it hatched, presumably to a place where it will be happy and alive, but it was still TAKEN, and there wasn't much say for them to have in it. Considering the conditions on the island, they might die before their child can come back home, and even then they'll have missed its entire childhood. Any sense of grief or loss could very easily be tainted by guilt, because their dragonet was alive-- so many others weren't.

Regardless, they are stuck together, even with feelings and lives and pursuits that are all falling apart and collapsing and becoming so dysfunctional, because the other is the only one that really understands. It's probably not the greatest thing, but there's not really anywhere else to go. The only way out of it, really, is for someone to die.

And then Farsight goes ahead and does die! Effectively, it's the end of the relationship, and it has some very interesting implications on Mastermind's behaviour's afterwards.

I've seen the idea shared before (i think i was spectating the fandom wiki forums, of all places) that Farsight was Mastermind's moral compass or something like that, able to stop him before he went to before. I don't quite hold that so literally, but it's totally understandable that, with that one stable pillar in his life gone, Mastermind would be a good deal less well adjusted.

I'd imagine Farsight's death would give him a bit of a mortality crisis of sorts, realizing that she died on the dying island, too weak from stress and starvation to hold up a fight, before ever getting to meet the child she cared so much about. And suddenly, despite the growing despair and workload and apathy, Mastermind cares very much about his work, maybe too much, because he doesn't want to die there like she did.

I've always imagined Morrowseer as Mastermind's supervisor--well, he's in charge of a lot of people, but not quite so directly--and using that kind of rhetoric, of not wanting him or his tribe to die on the island, to try and push Mastermind into duties he was reluctant to do. After that, it really begins to work.

And, when they need an experiment that may very well secure their future, but is messy and unsafe and underfunded and needs more than one researcher and just in a way he hasn't been raised and taught to be able to place gross, he's willing to agree. He just wants to live long enough to see a way out of there, and if he can help make one, that increases the odds for him, and reduces the number of dragons that have to die like her.

And, hey, he gets his wish.

In my opinion, Farsight's shadow looms heavy over the RainWing experiments. She weighs so heavily, suffocatingly heavy, over nearly every damn interaction Starflight has with his surviving family.

The scene where he first meets Starflight hurts. He's just so happy, and proud, and just has this sudden turn in mood... to me, from my brainrotted headcannon haze, it feels like the first reason he's had to light up so much and so genuinely in AGES. (I've seen the opinon where he's just happy to have someone to sit around and make him feel better about himself, but I've never really read him as sinister in that way, just emotionally stilted in one way or another.) It's the closest he's gotten to seeing Farsight in ages. The only moment of apathy we get from him around Starflight is when he gets to the desperate, dead-end, most uncomfortable part of his WORK--

The exact thing that turns Starflight away from him. He doesn't even really notice.

Because integrity and good moral standing died like everything else in this place. Where all the dragonets were slowly killed in one sense with the "nightwing superiority" rhetoric they were taught for generations, and far more literally as the environment crumbled around them. Where Mastermind and Farsight's relationship died slowly, too. It was a place where everything not already rotten was going, going, gone.

Or something like that. The best part about their relationship is the room for interpretation, I guess.

So yeah! Mastermind x Farsight! And to think this all happened so quickly, too... They never really had a chance, but they really did end up loving eachother.

I am SO SO SO SORRY this took so long, I've just been stuck in an exhausted dysfunctional funk for months. I can't tell when this ask was even sent anymore--October I think?-- and i am very sorry. I'm getting back into the groove, though, and more than happy to exhange ideas about Farsight and related subject matter in the future.Obsessing over fictional characters that appear twice is something I'm always willing to indulge in. I promise it won't take as long lolll

Anyways, my fellow Farsight enjoyer, it has been very fulfilling to get this all out in text, and I'm very curious to see what you think! I am not proofreading this so if something makes absolutely no sense, sorry about that too.

So yeah! Thanks for the ask, I appreciate it loads :]

#hopefully finishing this will get me over the mental block that has stopped me from working stuff #and getting this out of the way makes it feel fair to post again so i might be able to actually make something with all this soon #mastermind wof #farsight wof #wings of fire #wof #text post #i love infodumping about random niche characters RAHHH!!!#ask #nightwings wof #nightwings

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