#alkdjslfkdj thank you for sending this!!

[n7viper]

HEY i was creeping in maeves tag can you tell me about her too if you want??? Like fave songs for her or fave weapons or just whats on your mind about her rn!

Ooh, thank you for asking! :3 This got away from me and is rambly, so strap in. But first, I’ve got a playlist for her here:

A lot of it is angsty because that’s just the kind of music I listen to lol. It’s a bit of a mix - the first part is sad angsty music, then it goes into a handful of Mae/Crow songs, and then finally into some sort of “happy” songs. I update this every so often, so there will be more OTP and happy songs in the future. I’ve just been a little depressed in the first half of the year, and her playlist has suffered for it 😅

A bonus fact before we get into my rambling is that her tag (Maezi) is a nickname that I imagine Saint giving her. I don’t think I ever said that here, now that I think about it? It really just came about because I was thinking of her normal nickname combined with her last initial, Mae Z. It sounded like Maisy when I said it aloud, and it also sounds like a funny name someone would give her, Saint being an obvious first choice. I spell it like that because her last name is Zin.

Mae is my main guardian, one half of my Young Wolf pair. I only recently started playing D1, so I don’t have a ton of info about that time. For D2, I’ve mentioned in a few random places (so forgive me if you’ve seen this) that I started playing a few months before Forsaken came out and then left sometime around Season of the Drifter, I believe. I didn’t come back until last year, about halfway through Season of Plunder. So there are a lot of gaps in Mae’s story and things that I haven’t really thought about because of having to rely on going back to watch videos on Youtube to absorb the story. So as a general disclaimer, things change in her development A LOT. I know this is normal for OC creation, but I always feel really insecure about it. There are already some things from just a few months ago that I've retconned. So yeah lol

Mae is a jack-of-all-trades hunter who is primarily an arcstrider, sometimes nightstalker (spectral blades). She is capable of using solar light but chooses not to, and doesn’t often rely on either of the Darkness subclasses. For long-range combat, she prefers bows; Wish-Ender and Le Monarque most often (no, I’m not projecting that at all). Melee and close-quarters combat is more of her jam, though. She most often uses hand cannons and SMGs, swords and glaives for actual melee. For armour exotics, it’s a little complicated. In an ideal world, she would wear Liar’s Handshake and have some leg armour that looks like ST0MP-EE5 but don’t necessarily function as they do in game. She wears (fake) stompies because of their bracing; she has a persistent stasis-induced injury to her right ankle that is not easily healed. (Things might have changed on this since BL was quite some time ago, but Ghost repeatedly says in that campaign that there isn’t much he can do to fight stasis. Seems like if you got a shard of that embedded in your skin or in a joint, it would be difficult for a Ghost to heal, even if the shard was removed. That’s my thought process on this little aside.)

This is her canon armour, as long as you pretend that those hardened basilisk vambraces are Liar's Handshake :P

High level overview of what I currently have in mind for her general story — the other half of my little YW pair (Phaeston) dies between Curse of Osiris and Warmind. She handles this pretty poorly. Phaeston had been with Mae since she was revived, and they’re sort of a platonic bonded pair. She feels a little lost without him, feels like it was her fault (WIP), and becomes a bit reclusive. She has a pretty significant shift in personality as a trauma response, going from being a playful hunter to a quiet and solitary lone wolf. Cayde tries to help in his own way, feeling like she may be feeling like he did after Andal died (not that he would ever admit that to her). It only sort of helps and mostly just makes things worse after he dies too. She feels a little skeptical of the Vanguard after she kills Uldren and takes an extended assignment to the Dreaming City to help Petra try to contain the curse cycle. Anything between the end of the Forsaken campaign and Season of the Lost is mostly just a WIP.

Mae is also a Crow-mance because I am weak lol. Loosely, Crow is the one who takes the lead in their relationship and initiates it in the first place. Mae originally takes him under her wing as a sort of protégé, remembering what it was like for her when she was trying to find her footing as a guardian. She also feels mildly guilty for his early life, whether she necessarily should or not. He’s a good catalyst for getting her back to her old self and getting her to reconnect with her friends, but I do want to stress that it’s the early mentor/mentee relationship that does this, not the romantic one.

These days, she’s doing about as well as most guardians can be, I suppose. I haven’t even started thinking about her mental state this season with [potential spoiler] bringing up past regrets for several of the main seasonal cast. I’m still stuck in past seasons 😂 I could ramble on for an eternity about Forsaken and Season of the Haunted if you let me.

God uhhhhh idk if this really answered much of anything, but it’s been 2 hours since I started typing some of this out, so I should just call it here. I’m trying to get better about engaging with ask games again, so hopefully I can answer some specific things in the future.