#oc:kitali

[catboxghost]

ok i saw someone talking about like. how the wol feels about everything going on, whether theyre having a good time or not being on this big adventure and i had some Thoughts, a lot of Thoughts, with regards to my wol and i need to write this down so it will stop bouncing around in my head (and i can finish endwalker)

spoilers for shadowbringers!!

at this point kitali is absolutely fucking miserable. just having a shit awful time. this is a psychological horror game to her. she had a pretty sweet life back in the steppe, doing fuckall, looking after her sheep. and then that was all ripped away from her by the empire, she lost her home and her family and was set adrift before coming to eorzea because it was the only place left to go. she ended up joining the scions because they had ostensibly similar goals to her, fighting back against the garleans and liberating the world, and possibly helping her find her mom and sister, which has been her goal for years by now. and so she gladly lets herself be turned into a weapon and be pointed at the nearest existential threat, and somehow finds herself able to overcome impossible odds again and again, much to her surprise. she even has a pretty good time for a little bit, and the scions really do become her friends. and then eventually she does find her mother and sister: her sister had been pressed into service as a maidservant at doma castle, and her mother married a wealthy imperial lord. she doesn't have to save either of them anymore. it's about at this point that she realizes just how badly she'd allowed herself to be manipulated and used. there's still two whole nations to liberate, but the resentment starts to simmer. post-stormblood she's kinda like "oh wow you guys aren't actually my friends, you're my employers" to the scions and the eorzean alliance. she can't really be mad at alphinaud because he's just a particularly idealistic kid whose desperation and naivete were also taken advantage of, but she's not a soldier, and she never wanted to be, and she's sick of being treated like one. and yet she will continue to be, because at this point fighting is all she knows. this becomes especially egregious in shadowbringers where the whole "living weapon" thing is placed front and center as every enemy she defeats literally starts to turn her into a monster; the more she fights, the worse she gets, and nobody can help her. this culminates in her having a big screaming sobbing breakdown in front of ghostbert and falling into a week-long depressive episode alone in her room. and this is before she starts throwing up blood from eating angels! (as an aside the whole g'raha/exarch "haha i was secretly manipulating you" thing hits so damn good in kitali's story, because he really did only ever know her as an unstoppable hero, and then she actually shows up as this shy, sad girl angry at the whole world, and now he's about to do the exact same thing to her that everyone else in her life did and make her go kill things he wants dead, and it makes him feel guilty!! and so at the end when he's about to make his big sacrifice, he's all like "aha yes, i used you the whole time, you were just another pawn to me" in hopes that she'll hate him, so that she won't try to stop him when he blows himself up. but it doesn't work because she wuvs him <3) post-shadowbringers she kind of starts to accept it, even internalize it, in a nihilistic sort of way. like "yknow what? fine. all i do is kill things. i am the hyper-lethal vector, the gun pointed at the head of the universe, hydaelyn's special little murder machine. my life doesn't belong to me anymore and apparently it never really did, so why fight it?" and so everything that happens in endwalker (so far) just kind of bounces right off of her. this does not improve her mood in any way.