#tales of arise beyond the dawn | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chromaticcs · 1 year ago

Text

Who is the father? Tales of Arise Edition

So Tales of Arise DLC has been annouced and I'm sure people are wondering (probably not), which Renan Lord is Nazamil related to?

(Yes, I'm aware I'm pretty late to the party on this, Reddit has already talked a bit about it, but I don't really care and shouting into the void is cathartic)

So here is a (rather long) anaylsis of who I think it has the highest chance of being and why.

MAJOR story spoilers and talks of unpleasant topics below: mentions of r*pe, slavery and the rest of the bs that happens when people procreate when there's a power inbalance: Mentions are rather clinical and there are no graphic details.

(Also if I've missed any warning tags, please let me know!)

Onwards! (Warning, long long read ahead, I've done a lot of thinking over this. Maybe too much :p )

So, let's start with trying to fit Nazamil into the Tales of Arise (ToA) timeline that will help us to determine who the father could be. We only have five (three, really) choices, as the developer did mention that it was a lord who oposed Alphen in ToA (so not Dohalim). Also within the translations I found of her profile, her father is the Renan lord and her mother was Dahnan (so not Almeidrea). Our top choices are Balseph, Ganabelt and Vholran. I will still be including Dohalim and Almeidrea, just because I want to and we can see whether or not it makes sense even if the developer didn't tell us the above.

Nazamil is a young-ish girl, bordering looking around Rinwell/Law's age, which is stated to be 14/16 respectively, according to ToA. She looks similiar to Rinwell, so around 14, which would be a fair assumption. Min age 14 at the beginning of Beyond the Dawn (BtD), minus two when ToA starts (since BtD is stated to take place about 1-2 years after the ending of ToA), so let's say Nazamil is 11/12 when ToA starts. Assumption one.

This implies that the lord would have had to been on Dahna during the last crown contest. This would also imply that the lord had been on Dahna for the last seventeen years (ten years from the last contest and seven for the contest that is going on in ToA). This immediately rules out Dohalim, due to his age being 28 (sourced from the wiki), and with the current contest having been running for 7 years already, he would have been 21 when it started, and at maximum 18 if he were to be Nazamil's parent. Which...is a pretty big assumption as the story in ToA also tells us that Dohalim was on Lenegis during the last crown contest with his whole backstory with his violin quartet.

That and a few other things I'll point out later, Dohalim is probably 99% not Nazamil's parent.

For the other four, Balseph had confirmed to be at least the lord for the last twenty-seven years, as Ganabelt comments early on in ToA that Balseph had lost the last two Crown Contests. So he's a possibility, as he would be at least forty-five (I'm making another assumption here that to become a lord, the candidate has to have a min age of eighteen. I'm using the age of 'adult' that is commonly portrayed in our world).

We know he was not the lord at the very least in the last Crown Contest, because the last 'sovereign' that won the constest was the previous Lord of Cyslodia. Of course they don't give much context for the Lords, in terms of whether it's possible for one to be lord of one one region one contest and then switch regions the next contest. There's no evidence to support that, so we'll assume that Ganabelt was not a lord in the last Crown Contest. Of course, this doesn't confirm or reject whether or not he was on Dahna during the last contest.

Ganabelt also has a relatively older look in the game, giving the impression of at least a mid-30s to mid-40s man. His voice actor in japanese does make him sound older, which I would personally push to early-40s to late-40s. But his english voice actor sounds like a snotty young noble, dropping him down to at minimum Dohalim's age to mid-30s.

This is very estimate and assumption heavy as there is nothing that hints to his age, other than looks and age. But I would put him as a safe bet for possibly being Nazamil's parent.

Almeidrea, well, I would estimate her age as being thirty to forty? Again, no exact numbers I can find, but if there was little information on Ganabelt, there's almost next to nothing about Almeidrea.

Finally we have Vholran. Which I saw a source about him being around twenty-four at the start of ToA, cannot find the official source of that, but I'll assume him to be around Alphen's age. Alphen is said to be twenty-one, so I doubt Vholran is younger so I would put Vholran to be twenty to late-twenties at oldest. The issue is it's implied that he was only sent to Dahna during the current crown contest (less than seven years). The previous lord was killed by Vholran and the Rena on Lenegis seem to confirm that, in that Vholran wasn't choosen to be a lord, and that the kill happened during the time when the previous lord was already on Dahna.

So this would imply that Vholran would already have been turned into a Renan before procreating, which as implied by the previous part, would not fit our initial timeline of Nazamil having to be 12-13 at least. But he's still in the running, I'll explain later.

(Another side note: This of course assumes that Nazamil was birthed by 'normal' means, as in parents has some intercourse be it consensual or not. No test-tube, Renan magic bs, not yet at least)

Next, traits. We know nothing about her abilities, apart from being cursed with this mask thing, which doesn't seem to a hereditary thing in this case, whereas Shionne's thorns were hereditary (to some extent).

From my experience in playing videos games and character design (especially with JRPGs), we can usually use the hair and eye color to see who she might match the best. Nazamil has heterochromia, her left eye's yellow and the her right eye blue. Her hair, a silvery white.

We can then safely put Almeidrea down as unlikely to be Nazamil's parent, due to her having green eyes and red hair. It's not that she couldn't have birthed Nazamil, but I would say by character design-wise, it ain't giving off the same vibes. Nazamil's design just doesn't hint towards Almeidrea. Dohalim, likewise, same argument. Red hair and dark skin, doesn't fit Nazamil character look.

Then let's focus on the eyes, and the final three lords, Balseph has yellow eyes, Ganabelt blue and Vholran yellow as well. Vholran is the only one with his eye color called out in the wiki, but this may be due to him having more attention in the spotlight than other lords, as well as being a very major character in the plot of Arise.

So based off of eye color, it could be either three. The assumption here is that both eye colors come from her parents, as there seems to be nothing (yet) that points to her having one color that is from an event that happened after her birth.

Then hair color, it's obviously Ganabelt who matches with her the best, with Balseph having brown hair (his beard) and Vholran having black. But note that Vholran also is stated to have white tips, so let's give that a half-check instead of a complete match, especially since there's no way to tell if turning him into the sovereign did something to his hair.

(and if it did turn white, that would mean that the procedures to finish the sovereign-fication would have had to be done before Nazamil's birth, assuming that it's somewhat genetic, which is a fair assumption due to the genetic nature of the 'Renans' in general, which again, look at Vholran's timeline argument)

This doesn't completely knock out Balseph, though, but he is now a weaker candidate for Nazamil's parent.

So, now we have two possible people it could be, Vholran and Ganabelt. And if we look at the rest of Nazamil's character design, nothing seems to scream either of them directly. Color scheme wise, she doesn't fit either of them exactly, with her supporting a light blue, white and purple scheme. Ganabelt is more of a dark, navy blue, and white scheme, whereas Vholran is just blue and black.

Her dress also contains snowflake like patterns, seen more easily here, but that could hint to both Cyslodia being the land of ice and snow, or Vholran's water-based artes which are more ice than water.

Another part of character design is the character personality. Nazamil has a very closed off personality, the profile mentions that she has basically closed off her heart, and good at pretending to be indifferent and apathetic.

In my opinion, this is a bit hard to pin down. Because she's still a child, and has endured a lot of trauma (being hunted down, everyone hates her etc), the personality is a bit more up in the air. We could say that she's similar to Vholran because of the apathetic mask, the indifference, but it is specifically called out to be a mask. There is also the argument that Nazamil mentions about erasing differences, but I would not link that to either Vholran or Ganabelt.

The masking portion, it could be similiar to Ganabelt being good at tricking others, but in the end I am going to discard that bit about her personality, as there is too many factors to be able to get a clear read on who she's most similar too. Both are a draw for me.

Then finally, we get to motive. Vholran doesn't care so he's probably fine with taking an unwilling participant to bed, considering how he kidnapped Shionne in ToA and it was pointed out that he seemed to almost enjoy the struggle she was putting up during that scene.

Ganabelt is basically the snobby noble in the game, the one who represents the 'best' of Renan society, so I really doubt he would willingly touch a Dahnan in that manner with a ten-foot pole. Pure bloodline and all that bs.

Finally there are a few other factors here that may swing the vote to Vholran to being Nazamil's parent.

One, Vholran's face was the one that popped up in the trailer. In a not so subtle manner. They're bringing him back somehow and I would suspect that Nazamil is the tie-in somehow.

Two, people are very aware that Nazamil is half-Renan and half-Dahnan. In fact, they seem to have known from who she was from when she was born. Which puts the Ganabelt-as-Meneck as her parent theory as a bit weak as Meneck was only exposed as Ganabelt in ToA. Of course, trauma doesn't take long to develop and it could be actually that after the events of ToA that Nazamil gets hated on, since BtD is said to take place two years after ToA. Two years of being persucuted is more than enough to cause Nazamil's trauma.

Three, when Nazamil holds the mask up to her face in the trailer, it covers the blue eye, showing only the yellow one. It seems to emphasize that one, which lends more credence to Vholran being her parent.

Four, why would it be Ganabelt? And this has more to do with the story and how they setup Arise, but the other lords barely get a mention outside of their arcs. Balseph was there to setup the beginning. Ganabelt was there to develop Law's story and motive, and Almeidrea was literally just fodder for Rinwell's backstory. The three lords were very 2-dimensional, when compared to the main characters and Vholran, which would lead me to believe that they wouldn't make Nazamil's parent either of those three, unless they plan on expanding on the other lords (which wouldn't be a bad thing).

Five, in the exculsive first clip, the area where Nazamil is running through looks like Mahag Saar, note the windmill in the back and ruined buildings. So it wouldn't be a stretch to say that she used to be from Ganath Haros, but hard to tell.

But...In the same clip, when Nazamil uses astral energy, the eye that glows is the blue one. Which is Ganabelt's eye color. I would usually take that to mean that the eye that glows is the one that belonged to the Renan parent. But I will note that the glow in her eye mimics Vholran's Sovereign glow more than it does for the other Renans in the series, especially since it's in the right eye, where the sovereign crest resides in both Vholran and Alphen.

Then finally, in the pre-order trailer, we have this

Look at that crest behind her, it's not the sovereign crest, rather something different, but it appears in the same manner, which at this point, I am willing to call it as Vholran being her parent, but I'm not going to call it done and dusted.

Regardless, a good amount of the evidence does lean very heavily towards Vholran being Nazamil's parent, a close second being Ganabelt. If they pull a complete plot twist and it's Balseph, oh boi am I going to have fun with analysing that.

The one tiny minor issue that I have is the first point that I made in the very beginning. Vholran doesn't completely fit the timeline and with assumption that Nazamil is 12-13 at the start of ToA. And since it's implied that intercourse was involved, either Nazamil is younger or Vholran is older than I had assumed.

Of course this can easily explained away (as in why it doesn't fit nicely by the developers) by the fact that the DLC was (presumably) not planned when ToA came out. Most likely when they made ToA, they didn't have Nazamil's story out yet in any form, so ToA was made with the assumption that the story was finished, there wasn't more that was planned.

So is that it? Yeah, basically, until we get more information about Nazamil and BtD, we're still in a limbo. But the DLC is a little more than a month out (from time of posting this) so hopefully we'll get some more information (or maybe they'll just tell us, who knows, ToA did do a crap ton of info-dumping during the second half of the game)

Thanks for reading!

Sources: Official Annoucement Trailer Exclusive First Clip Pre-Order Trailer

#tales of arise #spoilers #tw rap3 #tw slavery #tales of arise dlc #beyond the dawn #tales of arise beyond the dawn #nazamil #ccsthoughts #theory #theory crafting #yes I have drawings to finish but I needed to scream into the void for a bit #because my irl friends don't have the time to listen to me talk about a niche game for an hour plus

4 notes · View notes