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insanitiny · 4 years

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it’s finally done! this has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but kept procrastinating on for various reasons.

may I present: a mixed canon-and-headcanon (mostly headcanon) family tree for some of my favourite mahjarrat! full-view the picture here, because it’s way too big for tumblr.

now for the important stuff - backstory, explanations and headcanons under the cut! I hope you’ve got a drink, because this is going to get lengthy.

General:

gendered terms such as “mother”, “father”, “daughter” and “son” are used here for the sake of shorthand. mahjarrat are a monosex species in my headcanon and as such had no concept of separating parents (or anyone) into such categories until after the move to gielinor.

you can assume that almost everyone on this chart has more relatives than are pictured, but they were excluded because they weren’t directly relevant (or haven’t been fleshed out and designed yet). notables will be mentioned in everyone’s individual sections.

mahjarrat children are born far more developed than human children; they can walk, talk, and cast magic (though not effectively) much sooner than you could expect of other races.

I really wanted to design outfits for Nabor and Trindine but it wasn’t to be. that’ll have to wait for the fullbody art.

Azzanadra:

azzanadra, as the oldest mahjarrat alive, was born an extremely long time ago. I don’t have a specific headcanon age for him, but it’s in the ballpark of two hundred thousand years. he’s old as balls. he was the middle of three children born to two tribe leaders who were very powerful, befitting their position in the tribe. their first child was temekel. there was a reasonable span of time between temekel’s birth and azzanadra’s - by human reckoning, temekel would have been in his late teens or early twenties when his brother arrived.

(not that human time even remotely means anything to a mahjarrat.)

temekel was in all senses a prodigy. he inherited his parents’ incredible strength and was deeply respected throughout the tribe. he quickly rose to a leadership position alongside his parents. while he was alive, his strength eclipsed even azzy’s.

temekel was thought to have died in tumeken’s deathbomb, but as we later found out, he persisted for some time afterward before being ended.

alotor was the youngest brother in azzanadra’s family, and his birth came with the loss of their mother. he was born during a downturn in mah’s dreams - she was too comatose in this period to sustain many mahjarrat births, and as such, the strain was too much and killed their mother shortly after she gave birth to alotor.

not long into alotor’s childhood, their father was lost to a chelon-mah raid; he was in fact killed by the chelon-mah tribe leader of the time. this left temekel and azzanadra to raise alotor alone, and the clan missing two valued protectors.

alotor was murdered by sliske long before he was even of ritual age. to a human’s grasp of time, he would have been about eight years old.

the brothers all had distinctive blue eyes and gems; their skintone varied but all shared the faint yellow tint. azzanadra’s eyes and gems did not become violet until he formed his bond with zaros.

akthanakos is azzanadra’s son. akthanakos was born during a particularly difficult time for the tribe; their numbers were dangerously low and mah’s dreams had been violent for some time, causing constant muspah onslaughts and catastrophes from freneskae’s environment. akthanakos was born out of a desire to bolster the tribe’s numbers; his mother was not someone azzanadra was personally invested in, but they needed children badly.

azzanadra named his son “undying” with a twofold meaning: as an expression of hope for akthanakos to live through such a harsh time, and in honour of alotor. alotor’s death was some time before akthanakos’ birth. this was all he had to do with akthanakos’ upbringing aside from the tribe’s semi-communal child-rearing methods; the arrangement with akthanakos’ mother was that azzanadra would make no claim to him.

azzanadra has had a total of five children over his life: one died on freneskae, and the remaining three died in tumeken’s deathbomb. akthanakos was the only survivor, and he spent the entire empire unaware of his true parentage. by this point azzy felt it had been too long to reconnect, and was also aware that making his connection to akthanakos public would only put his son in undue danger (political or otherwise). unfortunately, before he could change his mind, the betrayal happened and he was sealed. fortunately, after being released six thousand years later in the fifth age, he finally realised it was time to tell his son.

Wahisietel and Sliske

wahisietel and sliske are half-brothers, born to the same mother. they were both born into the chelon-mah tribe. wahisietel is the elder brother and is “pureblood” chelon-mah: his father and mother were both chelon-mah - in fact, wahi’s father is the one who lead the raid that killed azzanadra’s father. neither of them realised this until far, far down the line.

sliske was born not long after wahisietel, when wahi was more-or-less a toddler. in an extremely rare turn of events, he’s a hybrid: his father was a mahjarrat. how his mother and father met and why they didn’t just opt to kill each other on sight is a mystery for the ages, but both of them had a talent for shadow magic, which was a huge contributing factor to sliske being a savant in it.

sliske’s father left the picture pretty much immediately - he either returned to the mahjarrat or was caught by the chelon-mah. sliske was left to be raised by his mother alongside wahisietel.

unfortunately, it was never a safe situation for either of them. the chelon-mah are far more volatile than the mahjarrat, and culls were frequent. the boys were both safer and more at risk because of their position: their mother was partnered with the tribe leader, the strongest chelon-mah in the clan. in that way, they were safest from the others, but in the most danger from him.

sliske’s mother couldn’t dare claim him. there was no way he could ever pass as being the chief’s son; there was no family resemblance between them at all. so while their mother did her absolute best with him, he was largely left to what group child-rearing the chelon-mah had (not much).

it couldn’t last. suspicions rose higher and higher over time and their mother knew that she’d be found out sooner or later. not only would the chelon-mah kill her for crossbreeding, but they’d kill the children too.

it’s almost unheard of for a chelon-mah to care that much about the wellbeing of their children. chelon-mah children are only looked after in the most barebones manner necessary to keep them alive until they reach the age of independence - which essentially means “old enough that killing you won’t be a waste of resources”.

wahisietel and sliske’s mother cared enough. she cared enough, when the boys were still very young, to send them across freneskae and to find the mahjarrat tribe. they were dead men walking with the chelon-mah, and with the mahjarrat she at least had the sliver of hope that they’d be taken in - after all, the tribes did occasionally snipe children (and adults, in Hazeel’s case) from each other.

the boys made the gruelling trip across freneskae’s wastelands, and eventually they stumbled on the mahjarrat camp. it was a rocky transition, as wahisietel was visibly chelon-mah, and sliske was an anomaly - an aberration, frankly, to most of the mahjarrat present. but children are valued much more by the mahjarrat than they are by the chelon-mah, so the decision was made to bring the boys in.

their raising was a joint tribe effort, left in the hands of the leaders for the most part. at this point in time, that included temekel and azzanadra. both of the boys latched onto these two out of sheer terror and a desire not to be killed. thankfully, they both found their niches in the tribe - wahisietel for his level head and great all-around approach to magic, and sliske for his incredible prowess in shadow magic and the fact that even if you wanted to sacrifice him, you could just never fucking catch the bastard.

Nabor and Trindine

nabor and trindine are two of sliske’s children, born to the same mother. sliske had a number of children over the course of his life, most of which he chose to have nothing to do with. nabor and trindine are two rare exceptions, as they both inherited enough of his power to be interesting to him. they were both relatively young; born on freneskae not too long before the move to gielinor. the transition to the empire served to further cement their father’s favouritism: trindine joined the ranks of the praetorians with him and nabor was appointed to a high position in the church.

(even though sliske found his psychiatry work horrifically boring.)

nabor met his end at azzanadra’s hands and trindine was killed in the god wars.

What in the fuck is Khazard doing there?

this is a headcanon from aaaages ago, but lucky for me I’ve explained it already! see this post.

tl;dr: turns out you can’t breed with gods, so palkeera was left in the very awkward position of having promised a child to zamorak and being unable to conceive. wahisietel stepped forward in return for palkeera promising to vouch for his zamorakian faith, as he’d made the fake switch by this point.

(worked out pretty well.)

Miscellaneous:

azzanadra and wahisietel are partners. wahi’s had a crush the size of the moon on dear old azzy for a very long time. (sliske did as well, and in fact he and azzanadra had a short-lived fling during the empire, which was completely casual until sliske caught feelings like an idiot. it sputtered out pretty quickly after that for mostly-unrelated reasons.)

HOO WOAH thank you so much for reading all that!! this project has been in the works for a while, like I said, and this is basically just the outline of it all. I have so much headcanon for the alien space wizards… I love them… I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did!

all headcanon here is a joint effort between my partner and myself. I absolutely did not come up with all of this myself.

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insanitiny · 4 years

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Honestly, even though I’ll love WGS with all my heart til the day I die, I gotta say that The Chosen Commander is one of the best quests in this entire game and we don’t get many like it anymore. We see a character going through a struggle that we manage to help them with without the character dying for stupid shock value/”raising the stakes” bs. I love how it’s a character study. I love how Zanik is portrayed. I love how you get to know another character and establish a true, actual bond with her. I love how you get to see what she’s been through. I love how it’s about another character’s struggle for once. I love how you get to see that things that would be easy for you to deal with aren’t always so easy for others. I love the whole semi-cutscene where we sit down next to her and the quest won’t progress til we shut up and let HER do the talking and let her open up about her hardships at her own pace whenever she’s ready and just showing, just SHOWING that what people going through hard times need is a friend. Someone to vent to without being thrown away. She’s a living creature, not some toy you can discard if you don’t feel like playing with (because her struggles “ruin your mood” or whatever) A reliable shoulder to cry on. Someone to LISTEN rather than give them the stupid “oh you’ll be ok” cliches or the “Well you did something wrong so we don’t wanna see you or talk to you ever again” treatment. It’s such a powerful quest because it shows you that friendship is something worth fighting for even when your friend is struggling with their own demons. Hell, you help your friend fight against being possessed by a literal war god. Because she’s your friend and that’s what friends do, damnit! Truly, an Iconic piece of content. Zanik is worth it all and honestly I’d do it all over again for her as many times as it’ll take. I wish they’d make more characters like this, the game sorely needs them. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. TL;DR? The Chosen Commander is good. We need more quests like it.

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