#THANK U THO REN ueueue i saw this and was like ur a real one for sending this question

[nelithic]

forget - me - not :   has your muse ever forgotten something that is or was important to them ?   are they afraid of forgetting things like that ? 

▀▀ 　BOTANICAL HEADCANONS　₊　

as nel would want, let's get a clear answer out of the way first: nel has a near film reel level memory for most things, and in particular would never forget something important to her.

now, wilful suppression of memory, on the other hand . . .

　　　　　　　　( major fell xenologue spoilers under the cut )

" i saw through your ruse from the beginning. i simply chose not to confront you about it. you took his place for his sake and for mine. that was an act of kindness. we may not have been born as twins, but i have always thought of you as my other half. "

so. the uselessness of ascribing horoscope signs to a 1000+ yo non-human aside LOL, i still enjoy using personality indicators as a way to help myself scaffold a character and understand the skeleton of who they are. to that end, i spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about nel being canonically a pisces despite the way she is, and especially the way i play her, which — full disclosure — i'm not especially a fan of how bland nice female protag love interest she becomes after xenologue chapter 4, and i'm going to be overall leaning more on her personality prior to the love interest reveal as being more than just a defense mechanism against alear in particular — but that's neither here nor there in this post.

where i've roughly landed for now is that i think a lot of the pisces comes down to a certain sentimentality in the way she handles traumas and very difficult personal decisions. we learn at the end of the xenologue that nel knew for however many centuries or however long this was going on — that nil was long dead and rafal was not her brother. i posit that the way she went about all these years was in large part a wilful self-suppression of the truth for her own emotional protection.

continuing on as though nothing had changed, playing into the game of pretend that rafal ( and likely sombron, who i think had the right idea for his master plan but ultimately underestimated nel's ability to sense her own twin — it's worth keeping in mind that twins in fell!gradlon aren't both around for very long, and so sombron probably didn't have much precedent to go off of in terms of whether he could expect her to figure it out eventually ) sets up by stepping seamlessly into nil's place. these are the facets of nel choosing to close her eyes and "forget" nil's death.

i think the hint of it being willful suppression and not just her going into it fully embracing the truth of rafal being a fake comes in her next line in the same scene, where she talks about finally mourning nil only recently by leaving his flower on the grave at the beginning of the fell xenologue:

" i carried that flower for a long time. i suppose some part of me was unable to move on. "

not allowing herself to face his death, grieve for it, and continue past it. the fact that she admits to carrying this bottled up, unprocessed grief for god knows how long seems to suggest that she was all too willing to accept the pretend story that rafal offers by stepping right in to her twin's shoes and pushing the truth way down. of course, 1) it's not like ignoring the truth makes you truly forget it ever happened even if only somewhere in your subconscious, and 2) nel has a fantastic memory even when she doesn't want to, so it's not like she literally self-inflicted amnesia — hence, unresolved grief and holding onto the original nil's flower for a millennia or something.

it's also worth noting that she specifically interpreted rafal's decision to become nil as being "an act of kindness", which, however many layers of logical fallacy that may have been filtered through, is i think indicative of how much she was willing to latch onto an emotional anchor / source of comfort at the time. this interpretation of rafal's decision as originating from kind intentions is particularly illuminating for nel's psyche in a larger context: we get the sense of fell!gradlon society being anything but kind ( particularly in the sense of being willing to subordinate the self for another individual, given that fell!gradlon is all about lifting up one's individual ego to rise above the pack ). it also ties in heavily with the psychological impact of rafal being apparently a spitting image of the original nil, considering we know the original nil was ( likely highly uncommonly ) kind by nature.

as for why willful suppression as the response — not only is she desperate for her brother in the aftermath of his loss, but for nel, who had devoted the purpose of her young life up to that point to protecting him from everything that wanted to harm him ( which was everything in gradlon KJDKG ), she was likely also unwilling and unable to face the fact that she had failed. facing that truth meant she would have to face loss of purpose, and, moreoever, loss of the source of her strength: which, though a separate meta for another time, i believe is what nil always has been for her.

losing her north star meant she would likely sink beneath the waves of what gradlon society expected of her, so she naturally latched on to a fake brother if it meant she could continue pulling her same strength and purpose she's relied on this long from something.

in terms of whether rafal was just " nil " to her, or whether she did acknowledge either then or at some point later that he was just a replacement deep down, the answer is essentially yes to both. right after the above quoted line, she continues:

" despite that, you became very dear to me. your companionship saved me from loneliness and despair. i was happy to be a sister to you. "

trying to parse out when exactly she reconciled inside herself that rafal was not nil, for how long she continued fully investing in the playact, and when she recognized that she cared for him either or both as an individual separate from her brother and as her brother nil — is ultimately i think an effort with no answer, because the answer to all of them is kind of equally ' always ' and ' never ', and slides back and forth along a scale between the two binaries at any given point in time between the original nil's death and the end of the fell xenologue.

so tl;dr, the truth is: yes, she forgot nil's death and let rafal supplant him yes, she never forgot nil's death and knew rafal would never replace him yes, she loved him as nil yes, she loved him as someone-pretending-to-be-nil yes, she loved him as himself