#(most of the cleanrot knights know miquella has terminal baby disease but pretend they don't for sake of his feelings)

[on-stained-glass-wings]

Headcanons: Miquella and the Strain of Pretending to be an Adult

(TW/CW: Discussions of child abuse/neglect)

Miquella may be very good at pretending to be an adult, but that doesn’t mean he is an adult, and that’s a very important distinction most people that interact with him forget about.

Don’t get me wrong; Miquella is both a genius and extremely mature for his age, both due to...well...being over 1,000+ years old and also being forced to grow up early by living in a fraught political environment and even more fraught family. Given what we learn about Marika’s parenting in game, it’s clear that she was a very cold, distant mother, and Miquella probably went from being the golden child to being a burden due to his stagnant physical age. Radagon tried his best, and it’s clear--based on the statue of him and the twins in Loretta’s boss arena in the Haligtree and the incantations they made for each other--that Miquella at least had a positive relationship with Radagon. In the canon of this blog, actually, it was Radagon that helped Miquella and Malenia flee from Leyndell to the consecrated snowfield once Marika grew displeased with their ‘disobedience’, and he was the one to engineer the Great Lift of Rold with its secret mechanism so she couldn’t find them. However, Radagon could only do so much, and it’s very likely that the political situation in Leyndell and the situation with the Greater Will was deteriorating even before Godwyn’s death.

Add to this that Miquella had simultaneously deal with being patronized and babied for his stagnant physical age and being assumed to just be a mini-adult, sprinkle in likely assassination attempts and political predation, and you have a very small, stressed, eternally baby genius who’s trying to save his sister to start with, and then--once he becomes Saint Trina and learns of the plight of the oppressed races and minorities of the Haligtree--half of the Lands Between as well.

Honestly, Miquella pretends to be an adult so well that most sentient beings can be deceived into thinking he is a mini-adult. He is articulate, well-spoken,  and has a vocabulary befitting his true age and then some. He’s brilliant and extremely well-read and educated. He’s forced himself to learn as much as he can about politics and negotiation to hold his own against Leyndell’s elite, foreign delegations, and delegations to the Haligtree. He even seems to have an adult’s emotional maturity, although his facial expressions are noticeably more transparent than those of a fully grown humanoid.

Here’s the thing, though. Miquella’s not an adult, no matter how badly he wants to be. A child who’s content with his knowledge, body, brain, and power wouldn’t encase himself in a cocoon for god knows how much time in order to become an adult.

Miquella’s brain isn’t fully developed. No matter how smart he is or how quickly he’s been forced to mature by the world, he still has the brain structure of an 8-10 year old. He can logic his way into pseudo deductive reasoning but still makes impulsive, short-sighted decisions, because he literally cannot see things any other way. He likes to play with his sister and occasionally longs for the chance to play with other children ‘his age’. He gets overwhelmed really easily--both mentally and physically--and will often have sensory and emotional meltdowns after really long stents of time of keeping up the act of adulting. He just doesn’t have the capacity to grasp things as well as an adult, and it’s that inability to piece together a final picture that drives him into the cocoon, because he hit a mental wall when it came to the unalloyed gold and knew he needed to not have a child’s brain any longer to figure it out.

Yet he’s also a god, and the leader of a kingdom, and is brilliant and clever. He does have an astonishing amount of emotional intelligence and maturity for someone his age, even if it’s nowhere near an adult level. So many sentient beings are relying on him to save them, and if they saw him as childish, they would lose faith. So very few people know that he likes to climb the branches of the Haligtree and play Tree Sentinel vs Ulcerated Tree Spirit in the roots with his sister. They can’t know Malenia helps to wash his hair at night and still reads him bedtime stories (albeit on topics ‘beneficial’ to both).

The few people in the know are several higher-ranking members of the Cleanrot Knights, Finlay, Loretta, and, of course, Malenia, who has long since mastered the art of treating her elder brother like an equal and a child all at once. One of the conditions of her entering a romantic relationship with Finlay was that she understand as well, but when Finlay caught Malenia calming down Miquella after a tearful breakdown and immediately stepped in to assist, the goddess knew she could love no one else.