#do y'all ever have brainworms so strong you're vibrating about it

[i-mybrunettelady]

thinking about nyra's relationship with divinity. it's always been famously difficult for me to write about because it's so nebulous; it exists, certainly, it has since she was a kid, but it's so not the traditional paladin-esque devotion to a god that it makes it hard to pinpoint.

then i started writing my zine fic where a lot of these ideas came to a head and it's finally dawned on me that her object of devotion is not a god, or even her patron goddess lyssa, it's herself. to quote my own writing on that:

But Nyra’s a different kind of beast altogether, half-way heroic, half-way self-serving.

power recognizes power kinda thing. i don't think she sees herself as their equals - not fully, anyway - but it speaks volumes on her ever solid view of herself and how she's the center of her own world, for better or for worse. i know i talk about her ego a lot but it's literally one of her most defining traits and it really does influence how she interacts with the world around her. like, the only thing that can enrage her to the point of incoherence (not any productive anger) is the treatment she's getting not matching the idea of how she should be treated in her own mind.

and this little point also neatly marries another one - she's a recovering self-loathing sufferer, and that produces a certain hyper awareness of herself as well. she holds herself accountable sometimes to an overwhelming degree, which is something that actual gods don't seem to do all that often and that for her means that she can never be a god, but does she have a potential to? does she aspire to something as close to that as a mortal can achieve? yes.

her faith's a twisted and strange thing but it's very dear to me nonetheless and also why did i write a tragic hero