#I normally only lurk but I can’t stop rotating the fact that zorian is of mixed ethnicity in my head

[spacefairynayu]

I can’t stop thinking about how Zorian is of mixed ethnicity and how that adds so many unexplored layers to his befriending of the indigenous minorities within Eldemar(ie. a morlock, shapeshifters, the aranea) AND layers to his mother’s rejection of her heritage.

Especially to his mother’s rejection of her heritage.

Witches are explicitly indigenous to Altazia, and yes part of the negative perception of them comes from the fact that many witches have done terrible things, but the villager’s treatment of Cikan and her mother also easily parallels plain racism. Cikan’s reaction to this being to completely abandon her heritage screams of a choice to assimilate into the majority culture to avoid discrimination. Her insistence on raising Kirielle as ‘the perfect lady’ by Eldemar’s standards is an almost obsessive attempt to erase any trace of her ethnic background and present both Kirielle and herself as ‘proper’ Eldemarian/Ikosian women. She says she’s doing it for Kirielle’s sake, and partially it is(albeit while heavily projecting), but it’s mostly to reinforce the family’s image, her image, as 100% Eldemarian/Ikosian.

Not to imply that abandoning one culture to embrace another is inherently a bad thing, Cikan is very clearly happier living as an Ikosian woman than an Altazian one. This probably was the correct decision for her. The problem is that she is taking the choice to embrace or reject their heritage away from her children(as well as doing the exact same thing that she hated her mother for, attempting to force a certain way of living onto them that made them miserable).

And then there’s Zorian. The Kazinski child who resembles a witch the most. He’s anti-social and withdrawn, he fiercely holds on to grudges and memories of every slight(and holds to memories of kindness just as tightly), he parleys with non-humans and ‘undesirables’, and to top it all off he inherited the bloodline ability that his witch ancestors cultivated and passed down to a degree that likely hasn’t been seen in generations.

Zorian embodies everything that Cikan has tried to erase from their family history. He’s a walking symbol of their Altazian ancestry.

All this to say that I feel it was a massive waste for Nobody to not explore Zorian’s heritage, his relation to it, and his family’s relation to it, as well as how that in turn affects his relation to/perception of Eldemar and it’s politics.