#Steph's Wakfu musings

[stephobrien]

Qilby: “What makes you think I won’t get rid of you and dear Balthazar?”

Yugo: “The last time you were rid of me, I was in the Shukrute, and you literally knocked yourself out getting me back.”

[stephobrien]

Wakfu headcanon: Yugo trying to go to space with his portals is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

As in, he does it every lifetime.

After several failed attempts to dissuade him, Qilby decided that Yugo doing a swan dive from the stratosphere was just a fact of life. So he began to actively goad him into it, because if the cocky little knucklehead just HAD to get it out of his system, he might as well do it under adult supervision.

[stephobrien]

Back when the Eliatropes and Dragons were still on their home planet, I like to think Yugo and Adamai's adventurous nature and Qilby's desire for new experiences often resulted in them adventuring together.

As a result, Qilby knows all about Yugo's tendency to eat all the supplies within the first couple days, add several days' worth of detours to help random people, and only avoid starvation because the people the adventurers helped respond by feeding them.

Qilby probably also created his share of detours due to scientific curiosity and providing medical assistance to people who needed it.

And of course, Qilby learned that if the danger seemed too great, Yugo would try to leave him behind, so he would lag behind enough to let the kid think it worked, then roll his eyes and follow his cocky little brother.

This wealth of fond memories would have made it all the more painful when it was Yugo, one of the people who'd made life bearable for so long, who sealed Qilby away in the most unbearable place he could imagine. And it would help explain why, even after all that torment, Qilby hesitated to do the same to Yugo.

[stephobrien]

Wakfu fanfic writers:

"Qilby thinks Yugo is arrogant because Yugo was more arrogant in past lives than he is now."

Yugo, in his canon current life:

"My friends, all of whom are older and more experienced than me, have said they want to go to the Crimson Claw Archipelago and complete my quest with me.

"Clearly the correct response is to disable the ship and strand them on the ocean so that I, the only one qualified to decide who can manage this crisis, can handle the situation all by my 13-year-old self."

(Don't get me wrong, Yugo is a precious darling who just wanted to keep his friends from dying, but his method of 'protecting' them was pretty damn arrogant.

I like to think his past selves pulled exactly this kind of crap on Qilby at least a couple times. If Qilby had been in the Brotherhood's place on that ship, when Yugo disappeared after that conversation he probably would've rolled his eyes, activated his Wakfu vision, opened a portal, and hauled Yugo back onto the deck by his shirt before giving him A Look.)

[stephobrien]

Major Wakfu spoilers ahead…

As cruel and selfish as many of Qilby’s actions were, I still can’t hate the guy.

From what I understand (having only watched the cartoon and read an overview of IoW so far), his fall from grace was preceded by millennia of him serving his people while his mind slowly cracked beneath an ever-growing mountain of accumulated trauma, loneliness and grief, the overwhelming size and weight of which most people couldn’t even imagine, much less understand.

Going by the version of him we see in the cartoon, I think it is possible that part of his loss of connection to reality was self-inflicted.

I suspect he reached the point where his pain was so great that he’d do anything to escape it, but he didn’t want to believe he was sacrificing his people purely for his own sake, so he told himself he was leading his people out of stagnation and toward a great destiny, and he kept on telling himself that until his lie became more real to him than the truth.

To release that lie would be to drown himself in guilt, so the more guilt he accumulates, the more desperately he clings to the lie.

I can also see how the countless millennia would have worn down his ability to connect with and care about other people. How many trillions of people has he seen die? How many of them were patients who died right under his hands, while he struggled to save them?

How many times did he bond with his siblings – so deeply that even after millennia of estrangement and imprisonment, he would still rather endanger his own plans than get rid of them – and possibly even parent them when they died and were reborn… only for them to forget their love, their shared memories, all the good things he’d ever done for them, and the fact that he even existed?

How many times has he loved and lost, to the point where there’s only a barely-functional scar where the ability to bond with people he knows he’ll lose used to be? No wonder he’s so attached to Shinonome; his relationship with her probably is – or was, until she turned on him – the only one that didn’t hurt.

And that pain will keep growing for the foreseeable eternity, with no end or relief in sight.

I’m not saying his actions were justifiable. They were not.

But I still hope he gets a redemption arc, or that they at least find a more humane way to contain him long-term. If the innocent younger Qilby could receive millennia of undeserved pain, perhaps the guilty older Qilby can also receive undeserved mercy.

[stephobrien]

Wakfu spoilers ahead…

I wish Qilby had gone back to his original appearance in his final scene.

I feel like it would’ve hit different – and harder – if the person Yugo was forced to condemn to the Blank Dimension had worn the same familiar face as the person he’d met in the Sadida Kingdom… the person he’d known as a brother for millennia before he knew him as a traitor.