#gwyn really liked ifir

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Gwyn: in the years leading up to his death, how was your relationship with Ifir? Have you ever met his wife? If he talked about their children in detail, how does Eran compare to what you were expecting? (I love Eran! He's young, but I definitely see Ifir in him - bad and good aspects alike)

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Our relationship was one of cordial acceptance of one another, and respect for each other’s strengths, alongside profound awareness of each other’s weaknesses.

I met Ifir’s wife, Adali, in the Seelie Court, of course. She was significant to the Seelie Court, and it was inevitable that I’d meet her. The wife of Ifir, the War General? At the very least, I tried to gather intelligence from her, though she always understood exactly what I was doing, and was very evasive. She held my respect.

Ifir did not talk about his children a great deal. He was protective of them even before I played a bluff to convince him that I’d murdered his children in cold blood. After that, while we worked well together, he never softened towards genuine trust, nor did I ever expect him to. it isn’t something that particularly interested me, anyway.

As for Eran, he is about what I would expect in general, from Ifir and Adali’s offspring. I had wished that he had more competence in battle, but I can understand, I suppose, Ifir wishing to shelter him from that. It was just very different to my own upbringing.

[not-poignant]

Daily excerpt from today's writing, The Ice Plague #3, chapter 19:

‘I’ve been useless in battle the rest of the time.’ Eran cringed. ‘Sorry, this isn’t normally like me.’

‘This journey has bruised all of us,’ Gwyn said. ‘But Eran, Iliak and Ifir were raising you to be a soldier, that is their way as afrit. But they wanted you to be a chieftain first and foremost, that’s why you have the surname of Iliakambar and not Ifirambar, yes?’

Eran nodded, and Gwyn led them over to one of the neglected stalls right at the beginning of the market. Eran hoped that meant Gwyn wanted to look at everything, because Eran did too.

‘Iliak was by no means a pacifist, but nor was he as warring as Ifir,’ Gwyn said, ‘he was diplomatic and – honestly – not really a fighter like your father. He came to visit me during the Masque, and we talked about what to do regarding Ifir’s mutiny. I accepted his council. He was fair and wise; he did not think to lift a sword to me despite Ifir’s mixed loyalties. Sometimes, Eran – and I say this as someone who is a soldier and will always be a soldier in my heart – the world doesn’t need someone who is useful in battle. The world has been run by people with soldier’s hearts for far too long.’

[not-poignant]

I saw that Eran was “desperate for a father figure” and basically picked Gwyn. I laughed and started whispering “oh no oh no no no” remembering how shitty of a father Gwyn would be. (No offense Gwyn ILY. I think you make a great dog dad, though.)

Gwyn’s a great dog dad! :D

But yeah, Eran will latch onto a few father figures, Augus will be another perhaps? (Though I don’t think he’ll recognise that for a while).

Gwyn right now is sort of treating Eran like a new recruit to battle/war, which isn’t really fair on Eran, since he’s not. Like, Gwyn knows that Eran would like join Ifir’s army eventually, and can’t really separate Eran into ‘not quite there yet and has just lost everything.’

Gwyn also finds it hard to empathise with the concept of losing family (and has always struggled with it, which we’ve seen in the canon before), because for him, losing family has always been a theoretically amazing concept and one he wouldn’t say he ever consciously wished for, but like...subconsciously maybe envied people who lost everything in that manner.

*pets Gwyn*

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World-building question for you: How do you decide/research what kind of weapon a certain fae (or type of fae) would use? Like, for example: if you had a water- or ice-based fae who frequented a battlefield, how might you come up with a weapon for them? Is it one of those things where you prefer to know the character wielding it first? Or maybe the type where you eventually make it up as you go? (*is curious*)

I make it up as I go, a lot of the time.

Sometimes I work backwards, like, X character needs to be captured, so it needs to be X kind of fae, and I want them to have X elements in their personality, and therefore they might use X kind of weapon.

With weaponry, I also sometimes go to cultural research. For example Eran is part-Afrit, and Afrit are connected to Djinn which are many, many different types of being found all around the middle East. So I began researching weapons for him based on those locations. It was the same with Ifir’s weapon, and many of the other weapons of Gwyn’s team in The Court of Five Thrones.

I spent a lot of time researching ‘weapons of X country in X era’ and then going down the rabbit hole of what I liked vs. what I thought would suit the characters - I also get to cheat; my weapons in the fae realm don’t have to be made of weaker ‘human’ materials and they can be charmed to be particularly indestructible, etc. so I can use things that perhaps were only used for 6 months by humans before being discarded as ‘ineffective.’

I mean, some of it is just personal choice. I prefer bow/arrow and sword-type battle in the fae realm, and so that’s what I generally focus on. I like that in the fae world, guns are considered terribly uncouth, which is why I love that the Nain Rouge only uses those (which I also came up with on the fly, and is not part of the Nain Rouge mythos - I just liked the contrast).

In Tradewinds, which isn’t yet published, I spent a lot of time researching the weapons of the characters - who are, aside from Udir, all POC and from Australia or South-East Asia. Some characters specifically moved away from weapons with cultural attachment and just went with what they preferred (Red uses push knives, as he is an assassin and they’re vicious and effective and banned in most countries in the human realm lol, and it had nothing to do with him being Indigenous Australian), but Kaulo, who is Malaysian and a white-bellied sea eagle shifter, has a mixed relationship re: being Malaysian and uses a bamboo blowgun and darts which both connects back to his sea eagle heritage and his specific trade-routes.

Very rarely, a type of fae will have a weapon attached to them. The elves have elfshot, and therefore the ellyllon and fie ellyllon could have that in The Court of Five Thrones. The rapier was commonly associated with several different eras of high class duelling, so I liked that as a weapon to represented the Raven Prince and his Unseelie Court. (It’s not really effective the rest of the time).

A lot of the time I go by the character. What do they want to use? What have they been raised around? What does their physique suit? Like, Gwyn primarily uses a sword because - in part - it’s associated with nobility and Knight-type mythology. Gwyn wouldn’t be caught dead using a rapier, unless there was literally nothing else to use including his body. (Sorry Augus, but it’s true).

Er, anyway, a rambling answer, because it’s always a little different depending on the character. Given I never write a book thinking ‘this will have a battle scene with these weapons’ (I can’t imagine doing this tbh), it’s always character dependent, sometimes it’s culturally dependent because of the character, and sometimes it’s not, again, because of the character.

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What a great new chapter!!! I really loved the call-back to Albion interrogating everyone with Unseelie connections during COFT. I wonder if Mikkel was any interested in Eran? He had no reason to suspect Eran's going to be important in the future (although he might've been interested in Eran bc of Ifir's mutiny) but still. Did Eran's complex issues about him not beeing a good enough Seelie remind Mikkel of Gwyn?

Hiya anon!

Mikkel was so done with this part of his job at this point, that Eran could have been the second coming of the fae version of Christ and I don’t think he would’ve given two shits, to be honest. Which is like, he was just so bitter by this point. Interrogating his own kind, because of the paranoia of the King, was, to him, an utter failure of what he held to be true Seelie principles, and he was already plenty jaded and cynical about what it meant to be Seelie.

But like, he really loved what being Seelie stood for, so much. It was something that gutted him to the extreme, having to see how rotten it was on the inside. So interrogating Eran for him would have been interpreted in an entirely self-focused way.

I think he mostly thought that Eran was a young man, who was kind of raw with his emotions, but ultimately proud to be the son of Ifir and Adali, even if he had issues about it (Mikkel has literally never read a single fae that hasn’t, at some point, had issues with their parents, unless they didn’t have parents at all).

I mean a lot of Eran’s issues are definitely also exacerbated and ‘louder’ because of what he’s lost. Everything looks a lot more glaring and feels more intense, and I suspect he’d Read a lot more ‘loudly’ to a Reader now in general.

I mean, what Eran remembers as traumatising, was - for Mikkel - just one of the thousands that he had to read without control, and one of the many he had to interrogate. So as much as I’d like to say that Eran registered for Mikkel, he really kind of didn’t, beyond Mikkel wanting to give Gwyn the heads up that this was happening and hating the situation.

(That being said, kind of like, ‘everything and nothing’ reminded Mikkel of Gwyn, in the same way it did re: Angelica as well. Like, for Mikkel, everyone was ‘the same.’ Everyone was a blur of highs and lows and mediocrity and everything in between. Everyone thought they were unique and no one was. Everyone felt their pain was the worst pain ever, but it was all just pain to him,

But Mikkel hadn’t really met anyone else like Gwyn, and he hadn’t met anyone else like Angelica. It wasn’t really that Gwyn is so unique, or that Angelica was so special, it was that Mikkel chose to love them.

And that changed things for him, and made everything remind him of those two, and ultimately, made him kind of obsessed re: how he could help them, because he knew he couldn’t help himself.

Oh look, I made myself sad).