#also to be clear shipping widobrave is not necessary here at all it's just a very good showcase of their marital issues manifesting

[revvethasmythh]

(@mindovermuses)

I really love this reply. Like, half of Veth's frustration with Yeza seem to be that he IS a good man and there's no reason she can figure why she shouldn't be just as in love with him as she was before she died. If Yeza HAD been angry, or stood in her way somehow, then she could have a real reason to feel dissatisfied, something firm to push her toward a choice. It would have been so easy if that were the case, but it wasn't because Yeza isn't like that.

"She needs to decide if she's content living in the shadow of her former self or if she and Yeza need to talk and maybe take a break and see if they can find their ways back to each other as they are now" is exactly how I feel about the situation. I've noodled with a lot of different story ideas for fic regarding their relationship, and I do tend towards the divorce story (for my "BREAK UP WITH HIM" tendencies), but a long time ago I played with the idea that they simply need to reacquaint themselves with each other. Date each other. Figure out if they're still compatible. Jumping from the trauma they'd both endured directly back into their marriage like nothing happened was like walking out on a pond in the winter before it was frozen all the way through. That shit can crack real fast. I do genuinely believe they can come back from this all with a strong, happy marriage--they just need to actually communicate for it to work. Which is the tragic hang-up for both of their characters, that they're not good at initiating that kind of necessary communication.

And, re: Yeza, I love the detail they added in the Nott the Brave Origins comic that Nott went back to Felderwin after escaping the goblins to try and reunite with him. He reacted as one might expect to a goblin after losing his wife to them--he was incredibly hostile and rallied others to run her out of town. The way this recontextualizes his reaction to Veth being a goblin cannot be overstated. Putting two and two together about who that goblin was that came into his house asking for him and Luc two years ago must have left him with an enormous sense of guilt, which I think it a great reasoning behind his passiveness toward Veth's actions outside of "Yeza is an NPC who needs to allow Veth, the PC, to continue doing PC things." Both of their guilt piles up and impedes them from actually talking about the things that could solve their issues. So yeah, Veth absolutely needs to decide if, as you say, "the life they currently share is what the woman she has become wants or merely something she feels obligated to stick with." Yeza, too, probably needs to figure that out for himself.

you say you think Veth should divorce, could you expand a bit on that if you don't mind? what do you see as a happy ending for her?

To be fair, "should divorce" is kind of a conditional statement. By which I mean, as it stands now, I more think Veth and Yeza need to have a serious conversation about their relationship and start having some open communication about what they both want, and then take things from there--which could end very happily for them! Or it could, theoretically, end in divorce. So, it really depends on how that hypothetical conversation might go that would determine if I actually think they need to get divorced. Tragically, that is much more nuanced and way less funny than just posting #BrenattosDivorceWatch2k24, so here we are.

As for what I think a happy ending for her would be...it's interesting, because I don't think she has an unhappy ending now. I think she is, largely, happy. I would call her ending an imperfect one, and I don't mean that in a bad way--all of Veth's potential endings were imperfect. That was the nature of her conflict in the later campaign, that no matter what she did she was losing in some aspect or another. If she keeps adventuring, she runs the risk of acting the absentee mother to Luc. If she goes home to her family, she's leaving her friends out in the cold and might not be there to help if they need her. Her story was about making a choice and living with the consequences of that choice, which was very much highlighted by her extra-marital feelings for Caleb.

And I don't mean lust here--Veth lusts a lot, famously for Sunbreaker Olomon, which she justified by saying "50/50 chance my husband's already dead, so" 😂. But I mean feelings for Caleb. And I think you'll find that the vast majority of Veth stans are, if not actively on #BrenattosDivorceWatch2k24, then at least more keyed into the marital issues between Veth and Yeza than your average watcher. Because in C2, Veth had what amounted to a long-term emotional affair with Caleb that pointedly did not resolve, and you largely see the general, non-Veth stan audiences fail to acknowledge or engage with that aspect of their relationship and how that, in turn, effected her relationship with Yeza. In c2e85, Veth first hedges that she "used" to have a crush on Caleb, to which Beau replies, "You know, I kind of got that vibe before, thought there might be that feeling." Then, after c2e97, Sam outright stated Veth was frustrated with Yeza and wasn't sure she was still in love with him at all on Talks. In the early 100s, the Veth playlist dropped and confirmed she had romantic feelings for Caleb. In c2e121, Veth and Caleb have an incredibly emotional one-on-one about guilt, how much they love each other, and how much they'll miss each other when Veth leaves, where Veth tells him, "I will always love you." In c2e126, Veth sees Astrid having a breakdown after talking to Caleb and says, "Well, wouldn't you [have a breakdown] if you wanted to be with this amazing young man, and couldn't be because of circumstances tearing you apart?" and then later that same episode tells Caleb "Nothing is more important than you" (to which my good friend, upon watching with me, immediately said, "Umm???? Veth, don't you have a husband and son???").

Then, in c2e129, Luc dies. And from then on out, Veth is wholly focused on finishing out this mission and finally, permanently returning home to her family. Not that this wasn't her goal before, but it's clear that a choice has been made at this point and she's sticking with it. She's choosing her family, which was really the only choice she could make. And a consequence of this decision is that those extra-marital feelings she harbored are never discussed, never confessed to anyone (and I don't mean to Caleb here, I mean, like, to a friend), and fundamentally never resolved.

I said this before somewhere, but I don't think it was a bad choice to avoid finding resolution to this sort of thing in the campaign. It's a bit of a sensitive, awkward topic to noodle around with in your TTRPG. But I do think that lack of resolution to either Veth's frustration with Yeza's easy acceptance of whatever she does or her extra-marital feelings in general led Veth to a place of wanting. Which was always what her story was about to begin with, so there's an interesting symmetry to starting and ending with her wanting something. It was easy to name what she wanted at the start of the campaign--her body back, her life back--and much more difficult to face the idea that you may not be completely satisfied with having all that returned to you, that there's still other things to want.

Though, I actually think the Wildemount Wildlings helped her strike a great balance between the things that she wanted, adventuring and homesteading, just that it was an impermanent solution. Because she's not going to willingly resolve any issues she has with Yeza (nor Yeza with her) because Veth is a terrible communicator who will never outright tell Yeza if she's feeling this way, and Yeza is too passive to really push her into talking, so they just dance around their issues, pretending not to see them while the issues just fester and get worse. That's why I'm a #BrenattosDivorce Truther. Because i HATE indecision and dawdling and staying in a situation where you're not completely happy when it does a disservice to yourself AND your partner and THIS is why I am always the first person in the group chat to say "BREAK UP WITH HIM."

So, yeah, personally? I'd just want that potential for conflict that exists between Veth and Yeza to come to some sort of head. That's my happy ending, vague as it is. But that's far from the only way she might get resolution. Or she might get no resolution, which is as imperfect an ending as any of her options, and I'm okay with that too.