Drow Lore 🕷️ Drow And Hostages
In relation to the story of half-drow Valas the Black Raven mentioned in Icewind Dale 2 - I found there an interesting information that may imply that drow (at least drow from Rilauven) sometimes use hostages in diplomacy.
🕷️ From Envoy To Hostage - in the Black Raven monastery founded by Valas there is a tradition that when the archimandrite (the leader of the order) receives a diplomatic invitation bidding him or her to leave the territory of the monastery, he or she can command the envoy who delivered the invitation to stay in the monastery as a "residing guest" - a hostage of sorts.
The envoy is obliged to remain in the monastery until the leader of the order returns, serving as a guarantor of good faith of the other side. Such residing guest / hostage is treated well and enjoys all the privileges of the guest of honour... at least as long as no treachery is involved.
This tradition is supposed to be old and …began by the drow, as explains one of the characters in game.
It is quite possible that the founder of the monastery borrowed this concept from drow culture - he grew up and spent several decades of his life in drow city, after all, serving in at least two Loth-sworn drow houses in Rilauven.
🕷️ Hostages In Drow Culture - matron mothers and their closest associates seem to rarely leave their cities - probably because for a noble drow, every invitation "from the outside" may be a potentially deadly trap. And rescuing an important member of noble family from the clutches of whoever (or whatever) captured them in the Underdark can be hard and not always successful.
(One of the first quests in Ust Natha in Baldur's Gate 2 can be an example of that.)
On the other hand, refusing a diplomatic invitation can be taken as an insult and have unpleasant consequences that both sides may want to avoid. Drow most likely have some diplomatic protocol for such situations.
The practice of giving and receiving hostages could be one of means of political communication at least in some drow cities - although probably mainly between houses or organizations of more or less equal power. In case of diplomatic invitations, I suppose that the more valuable the envoy / hostage is, the more safe the invited noble can feel... probably.
For more of my drow lore ramblings, feel free to check my pinned post 🕷️
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in defense of kabumisu……..
addressing things I see people say about why kabru being shipped w mithrun is ‘bad’ or why their canon relationship ‘doesn’t mean anything’ while also clearing up misconceptions of the characters some fans have
listen it keeps popping up and I just gotta do this or my brain will melt (if you don’t see it around then god I wish that were me)
there’s an age gap!- erm there’s also an age gap in farcille (ily), the most popular ship in the series...also chilchuck looks like a kid but a lot of fans recognize him as a dilf because of his relative age, so there should be no age gap discourse among adult characters because it feels so conditional tbh
kabru taking care of mithrun is racist!- marcille likes to take care of others as well. is that sexist, or just an aspect of her character?
kabru isn’t treated like a servant, waiting on mithrun hand and foot…I mean he gives mithrun a foot massage but no one told him to do all that lmfao
he's also not the only one to care for mithrun. pattadol is shown to worry for him and milsril was the one to start taking care mithrun in the first place after he…...y’know. speaking of which-
they probably met when kabru was a kid!- neither of them showed signs of recognizing each other the entire time mithrun was introduced nor when they were together.
and im pretty sure KABRU of all people would show some kind of recognition if they'd met before. it's kabru!!! the people person!!! mr. "i-noted-down-50+-characters-in-this-dude's-backstory-for-fun-and-actually-enjoy-social-gatherings"
you would think some kind of memory would come back to him especially after hearing mithrun’s backstory if milsril had even told kabru about him as a kid. but nope. it’s just fan speculation unless there's a side comic suggesting otherwise that i haven't seen
mithrun doesn't care about kabru, his shapeshift double looked like shit!- it's obviously because of mithrun's (then) lack of desires that it looked like that, but they really grow on each other
i think it's safe to assume it'd look more like kabru after they spent so much time together (also laios can barely even remember kabru's name..also saw his face multiple times and didn’t recognize him when they talked for the first time)
mithrun is racist!- he’s actually the least likely character to be racist since he lost his desires and that includes a desire for superiority over others. he even calls his past self out on that part of himself. the other elves in that side comic were being just as racist to shorter lived races but just didn’t use ‘outdated slurs’
(unfortunately literally every main character in dunmeshi is at least a lil prejudiced, but I believe it’s worldbuilding and a sign of the times rather than a reason ryoko kui is giving to hate each character)
taking care of others is a pain in the ass!- saying this as a reason kabru and mithrun shouldn't be together is basically saying disabled people shouldn't be allowed to have romantic relationships because they're a "burden"...if someone is actually willing to put in the work, then let them be.
that's not even all of their relationship, mithrun is the fighter of their duo and kabru would've been killed by the shapeshifter or something if he'd fallen down the hole on his own since he sucks at fighting monsters.
mithrun helps collect ingredients for cooking every time, too (barometz fruits and griffin egg). he pulls his weight and then some!! i feel like people forget that part of mithrun a lot somehow.
+senshi literally cooks for everyone all time. it's kind of an important aspect of the narrative.
+also, while it is a popular fan thing I see around that kabru handfeeds mithrun, he literally never does lol this is mithrun using his own hands to eat:
also here we have him washing his own body
just saying because people like to treat mithrun like a baby even though the narrative respects him as a capable adult who also has special needs because of an accident. he’s captain for a reason
kabru hates taking care of mithrun!- not exactly, he was initially surprised and put off but got used to it quickly. i’m sure he’s grateful for all the times mithrun saved him from a monster and teleported them out of danger as well
he even starts doing “unnecessary” things for mithrun’s comfort and safety like when mithrun pushes himself too hard fighting, even after his mission to take care of him was complete when the canaries came back
here is even kabru resting while mithrun keeps watch (mithrun let him sleep for 5 hours before waking him up from the nightmare earlier, too):
there's nothing more to their relationship!- they actually have had a very tight and consistent dynamic since they met and they incite the most change within each other by the end.
kabru is the one who inspires mithrun to create new desires so he doesn't waste away, and mithrun is the first person we see kabru being genuine with and it leads him to be more honest with others by the end instead of tiptoeing around everyone all the time (that mask was also the reason some ppl initially disliked kabru…)
kabru’s relationship with mithrun is honestly so important for his character and vice versa, but it’s often disregarded because of one over exaggerated aspect of it (an aspect that isn’t even the first way they interact with each other) or because people want to just straight up ignore it for some reason 🥲🥲
kui dedicates many panels to them that don't particularly serve the narrative as a whole in order to demonstrate this and i think that's pretty significant
you're taking this too seriously!- as if i'm the first person in the world to be crazy about a ship or the characters 😭 i love analyzing text and it's upsetting to see them mischaracterized when kui lays out the characters so clearly and deliberately
also they end up touching each other like all the time and have the kind of canon validation most ppl can only dream of lol i feel so insane look at this:
and this is just when they're first getting to know each other cuz there's a fuckload more
kinda hard to explain how i don't actually need them to get married or whatever but i'd die on this hill for them and i enjoy their dynamic immensely
haha you thought you were reading ship discourse but it was actually a character analysis 🤪🤪🤪
also don’t somehow take this to mean I think anyone has to ship them, I just need everyone to understand these accusations kind of don’t make sense especially when they can also apply to other pairs or characters
bonus kabru just looking at mithrun:
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It's not like I've ever seen anyone here have any filter for what political messages they reblog, people just see someone talk about a situation in a way that makes them feel like they know who the villain is and press reblog, without question or applying any prior knowledge to their interpretation, especially if it's something that doesn't affect them personally, and especially if it goes against what they think most people believe so they can stick it to the man and feel like they know better. It's not something new and I usually don't hold it against anyone, I'm definitely guilty of it myself, but man does it feel more pervasive than ever now that every 5th post is taking a very confident stance on a war they only know from news and social media, all saying the same thing, enraged that anyone would ever claim otherwise. And it never hit so close to home for me, it was always someone else's problem for me too, someone I didn't know, but this time I got to spend a day wondering if a loved one was still alive, this time I get to be careful in public so I don't get killed for someone else's crimes.
Can we just all (myself included) think a little more, do a little more research before we decide what nuance does or does not exist? I promise you that you're not obligated to post about everything, you're not obligated to have an opinion on everything, and I promise you are going to be wrong sometimes.
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god just....11 tossing amy an apple (the apple) in a scene where he asks her to believe in him again and the “throwing an apple is a declaration of love” stuff, so the scene reads as him saying “I love you, believe in me.”
And then there’s the fact that he throws her the apple as a way of proving himself, so the scene is both “I love you, believe in me” and “believe in me because I love you”
And Then there’s amy’s apple necklace, a symbol of both her faith in 11 and his love for her, and the only time it shows up (if memory serves me correctly) is in a scene where she calls him back into existence, calls him back to her, by the force of her belief in him....and all of that ends up looping back to the Doctor laying out the things she needs to remember and putting his faith in her to bring him back (I found you in words, like you knew I would.)....so the apple becomes both a symbol of her faith and a symbol of his....and their love for each other is bound to that faith, emphasised over and over again:
BUT THEN!!! all that faith is unstable, Amy’s lying to him in the first scene, saying all the right words so he does what they ask him to...and for all his promises surrounding Demon’s Run, Amy never gets her baby back...the Let’s Kill Hitler scene is the TARDIS’s projection of Amy, echoing the lie she told him at the start of the series to give him the strength to not die....every interaction of faith that they have in S6 is warped and twisted.
All of this obviously coming to head in The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex. In TGWW, Amy falls back into trusting the Dr when he promises he can save both of them, only to have him shut her out and leave her for dead and in TGC, he asks her to abandon her faith in him. The declaration shifts from The Eleventh Hour’s “I love you, believe in me” to “I love you, stop believing in me”....and Amy does, at least momentarily...
Because they kill the Minotaur and get out of the labyrinth but the episode closes with the (deleted, but it’s so real to me) line “because you still love me” and a shot of Amy looking up out of a window (a shot that is almost definitely referencing the earlier scene, where a younger amy is depicted in her TEH clothes, looking out a window, despite the fact that the real version of her waits in a garden).....and if Amy’s love for the Dr is tied to her faith in him (a point emphasised by TGWW, where Amy loses her faith over the 36 years and announces that she hates the him) then 11 leaving her behind because she still loves him is read as him leaving her behind because she still believes in him.
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