#and also possibly provides a real explanation for the ruins and snow-buried villages and graveyards you find scattered around

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

also on the subject of things ive talked about in the past and will not be rehashing here no you figure it out, so we've pointed out before i think that the clans are like, weirdly small. like super small for being the sole inhabitants of the Whole of Hisui? and it's sort of implausible that they would be self sustaining? and we've also talked about the misc theories that there was some kind of war/natural disaster/widespread illness/etc that did a real number on them and was what led to the eventual peace (because they literally couldn't sustain not being at peace anymore).

and i guess this is kind of the obvious corollary to those thoughts but it's never really clicked for me which is that, yeah, of course they're smaller than they should be. they were probably formerly much bigger, but now like 80% of their population, or more, is gone.

which ups the stakes for adaman and irida from "struggling to guide my clan through a rough patch" to "i am the last leader of a dying civilization"