#so they're torturing him until he kills his own family 😌

[bisexual-ashe]

apparently my brain is currently fixated on a five whump idea where the entire fam has been kidnapped, but five isn't aware of this (they can see him but he can't see them kinda thing) and they get to watch him be tortured

and hey, maybe the kidnapper takes advantage of the fact that five doesn't know his family was caught too, maybe they tell him they abandonded him, or hate him

and over time it breaks him down and all the others can do is watch

[all-pacas]

★ ☯️ 🤍 and ☠️ for Ersa! Love your characterisation of her!

oh ersa my favorite character who we never get to talk to because the game decides to ignore her incredibly disney princess backstory in order to kill her off 😌

i'm currently in the process of rewriting one story and getting ready to post another about my girl help i'm obsessed HZD writers we need to talk

★ - sad headcanon: quoting the guidebook here on erend, but —

Erend and his sister Ersa grew up against an acrimonious background of familial strife, economic uncertainty, and drunken rage. As children are wont to do, they responded in completely different ways. Determined to seize control of the things that mattered most to her, Ersa used this trauma as fuel and fought hard for a better life. Erend, on the other hand, internalized the conflict, which metastasized into the central dilemma of his life: hatred of his father's failings, accompanied by the creeping fear that he is doomed to repeat them. This toxic combination threatens to transform his anxieties into self-fulfilling prophesies, resulting in depression, self-destructive impulsiveness, and excessive drinking. […] much of his confidence is due to his sister. Throughout his life, she has been there to influence him, guide him, and when necessary, kick him in the ass. […] He has relied on her strength without co-dependent rancor or resentment, except for a bit of pouting after she scolds him, [looking] up to her like the parent he wished he'd had.

And from Avad's entry in the same guidebook:

[Avad] is capable of making tough decisions, but he is too fundamentally decent to make ruthless ones, like ripe out the insurgency of which is 8-year-old half brother is the figurehead. Until recently, this lack of savage expediency (viewed by his enemies as a lack of backbone) was covered up by Ersa, the Oseram woman who served as the Captain of his Vanguard, also his advisor, lover, and friend. Her blunt counsel often gave him the will to do what was needed, and when it didn't, she went ahead and did it herself. This relationship brought strength to Avad, giving him an equal he knew he could trust — someone who admired his geniality, and whose steel he admired in turn.

and like, that's fucking sad, isn't it? ersa is someone who has spent her life coping so hard that she makes a living out of being competent, being the person who makes the hard decisions and gets things done, who everyone relies on and needs. and her brother adores her, that most of meridian admires her, that between this backstory and avad's not-at-all-ambiguous comment that it would be frowned upon were he to have married an oseram woman, ersa was well loved and admired, that she wasn't some martyr who no one appreciated: and yet. she's the one who does everything. she's the one who charges off alone without telling anyone, who leaves her brother behind at a time she knew she was heading into danger to protect him, who dies thinking not of herself or her brother or her lover, but of duty that must be done. and yes, they're all tied together, but she's put so much of herself into the role of that person that it's also kind of tragic: erend loves her dearly but puts a lot of weight onto her to take care of him, and it seems avad was in his own way doing the same thing. and it seems like she did it willingly and that control was her own coping mechanism, but it's also just really sad. does she even know how to put that aside? if in a world where she doesn't die, would she ever know how to step back, see a place for herself with her loved ones if they don't need her in that same way?

in an au where she lives, she's probably not coming out of her months of imprisonment and torture uninjured or unscathed. would she even know what to do, if she wasn't Captain anymore, if her brother didn't need her scolding him, if avad had grown a backbone? it isn't as if they would stop caring about her, but what would she do, in a world where she's no longer able to protect and control and be the best anymore? the thing about aus where ersa lives is that it kind of goes hand-in-hand with: but now she isn't needed anymore. and that's actually a good and necessary thing for erend, and avad, but it's clear that so much of her life has been about being the person you relied on. and i just see it being a huge crisis for her. i'm sure she would much prefer it over being fridged for no reason, can we seriously talk hzd writers, but it's still running off a cliff into a void and i find it fascinating and really, really sad.

☯ - likes/dislikes headcanon:

okay this one will be less long and meta and more to the point: when i was writing my big backstory fanfic i kept sneaking in a running joke that when there was food anywhere in the room her entire pov was zoomed in on it no matter what else was happening. she stops paying attention to anything else. so ersa never stops eating is a cherished and beloved headcanon of mine that you can never take away from me. i literally just wrote a scene where she's a little cranky to have to sit at a formal dinner but also let's have two full paragraphs on what she's eating.

dislikes: boats. as a joke in the same story i had her become ridiculously seasick the second she went out on a lake and i just think it's funny for some reason. she just doesn't like boats and it's canon until you can prove otherwise, and you can't.

♡ - romantic headcanon:

extrapolating a lot from npc dialogue, the game suggests there's an Oseram concept of "Bladewife," where you "shave your head and kiss the blade." we really don't see many women oseram who fight, and npc dialogue suggests there's a pretty large cultural pressure on women to marry and work for their husbands — petra also suggests she came to the Sundom because fuck that — so i tend to assume that "Bladewives" are called such because they're married not to a husband but to battle, and that ersa is/was one.

so, the way i wrote it, she can legally never marry, have children, inherit property or assets. and of course those are the laws of a country she no longer lives in and it's all much more ambiguous now that she's living in Meridian, but, you know.

she's had a handful of relationships in her life, very few even remotely serious: erend isn't clear what her "type" is, not that she'd necessarily be telling him, but also she's not following the rules of her own people, being a warrior and unmarried and in command of others. i imagine there were those who saw "buff cute girl" and "legally can't get married" and went "excellent, i can sleep with her and never be trapped in a relationship!", and that ersa got burned a time or two before she wised up to dating in her social circle (in my big backstory fanfic, she has a messy relationship with a man named Dorin with whom exactly that happened — they were quite serious until he abruptly got married and more or less ghosted her, which she wants to think of as not his fault but also resents. and Erend hates the dude.)

her relationship with avad, canon as it was, seems to have probably also been complicated: they kept it incredibly secret, probably because the carja would very much disapprove and the oseram would not be any better, and while there's no denying they were close (again: avad's word choice to aloy, we couldn't marry, like, you don't usually throw marry around as the word to explain your relationship if you're just fwb my dude)… it can't have been the easiest thing, either, considering how public both their lives were and how fragile the peace in meridian is. they probably spend as much time as they could together and alone, but while sneaking around in a secret affair is probably super fun and sexy for a while, i imagine after three years it starts to get a little rough. avad very publicly has no heirs, no successor, and until the end of the game he and meridian are in a position where if avad were to die, the next legal king would be itamen and the shadow carja. (dervhal came so close to letting helis just take over meridian and he didn't even know it) avad must be under some pressure to marry and have a kid, even for cynical political reasons, and imagine if you're his closest advisor and secret girlfriend and in the past you've already been dumped because you're not allowed to get married and whoops these answers keep getting long and angsty sorry not sorry

☠ - angry/violent headcanon

by the standards of her setting, ersa is only okay at hunting machines. like, she's fine. she is unlikely to die if stuck in the wilds for a week. but people like talanah and aloy would absolutely smoke her in any kind of contest: ersa's a little bit hindered by the fact that she's spent most of her life fighting in a unit of soldiers, with other men, and not asked to hunt independently.

that said, she is very, very good at fighting people. that's what she was trained to do, after all: defend oseram lands against the carja. in the sun ring, she straight up goes around murdering kestrels and saves the ravager she's supposed to be fighting for last. in that same hypothetical contest, if aloy was kept from using her traps and skills and just had to fight ersa hand-to-hand, ersa would probably win. that's just her skillset, you know?

ersa as confirmed by the comic is actually pretty short — she's like a full head smaller than erend, avad, and dervhal. this doesn't stop her from kicking the latter's ass into a hole and leaving him there i'm still not over this can't believe my girl was asked to kill him and was like eh good enough he's in a hole, nor does it stop her from her attempted carja murder spree in and before the sun ring. she's not like nill, just a fucking serial killer having some fun, but… she can fight and compensate her stature and strength. she's pretty fucking good at killing people.