#and the weight of responsibility and largely thankless heroism

[thisisallthehattersfault]

Characters haunting their own narrative. A protagonist we don’t actually meet until four or five episodes in but who we hear of from damn near every mouth in the series. Their allies look out at the horizon and grit their teeth at their own troubles and reassure themselves like a prayer that they are coming, they’re coming, they’ll be here soon just hold out a little longer—

Their enemies look out at the destruction they have wrought and hold meetings to discuss the loss of men and territory and resources to this one person

People gather in bars and taverns and town halls and fountains to discuss the stranger who saved their lives or destroyed their businesses or liberated their people

We finally meet them when they arrive to help their friends, and the plot proper kicks off with everyone all together, we get to meet them and learn of them and see their personality, and eventually maybe we forget that they were introduced not as a person at all but as a ghost, a myth, a formless thing lurking around the edges of everything

(Sometimes they look so lost, fingers pressing to their pulse like they need the reminder their heart is beating. They confess to their closest friend that sometimes I’m not sure I’m real and their friend says sometimes I’m not sure either)

And in the end that character vanishes again, maybe dead or maybe something else, but they end the series the way they began: spoken of with a mix of love and terror, the ripples of their existence felt everywhere but they themselves nowhere to be seen, their ideals carried onward without them

Once someone they saved told them “you’re a hero! We’ll remember this forever!” And they smiled a small, sad, exhausted little smile and said it would be kinder to forget me.