just so obsessed with the idea of revali silently loving link and pining so much for him, but holding back because he's already created this facade that he despises link, because zelda and mipha already loved him first, because why would link ever choose him? so revali keeps it all inside and tries to display his bitterness at unreciprocated love as jealousy and arrogance at the imbalance of their roles, and tries desperately to fall out of love with link.
but it's as though the little hylian won't let him.
link, who practically insists on staying by revali during battle, who stares at revali with that wide blue-eyed gaze, who naps peacefully with his head in revali's lap when they're alone. and revali should be ecstatic at how close they are, but it hurts more than anything. this isn't fair to him, to be so tantalizingly close to link but to never be able to have him more than this. it's so suffocating, revali doesn't think he can stand to do this any longer, or else it might kill him.
but he continues to let link do whatever he pleases; silently tagging along after revali to the archery range, sitting beside him at mealtimes and letting him sneak more bites from revali's plate as though revali doesn't see him, even going as far as to let link sleep with him in his hammock after what revali assumed to have been a very bad nightmare. no one says a single word when revali and link arrive late to breakfast, with link clinging sleepily to revali's wing and revali looking strangely peaceful.
try as he might (he's not trying at all), revali can't say no to link (and neither does he want to), so he supposes he might as well endure this suffering a little longer.
"why do you let me do all this?" link whispers to him once, in the dead of the night, wrapped around revali in his hammock. and revali is silent for a moment, trying to come up with some sort of answer that could defend his actions. but he can't.
"i don't know," he says simply. he can't tell link the truth.
"does it bother you?"
"do you think you'd still be in my bed practically choking me to death with how tightly you're wrapped around me if it did?" revali winces at how biting his words are, but link just hums and snuggles deeper into revali's neck. he doesn't stop link.
"if it bothered you, you'd tell me, right?" the little hylian murmurs.
revali thinks about it for a moment. and he decides, no, i wouldn't. if you wished to be warm, i'd let you use my body as fuel for a campfire.
"go to sleep," he says aloud instead, softly, gently. he couldn't tell link that either, and he probably never would be able to. he wouldn't ever have the chance. "we have battles to prepare for in the morning."
revali wraps his wings snug around the blond, and link practically purrs in content, dozing off immediately into the warmth. like this, the rito almost smiles. if burning himself alive was the only way to have link, even for just a moment that couldn't always be guaranteed, then revali would just have to make sure he stayed alight; to be the bonfire keeping link warm throughout the night.
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okay... idk at all if this has been discussed or that I'm just stating the obvious. I'm posting any way to get more feedback.
so. can we be sure that the last boat scene even happened (in the way we saw it at least)
yeah the letter was delivered to the intended recipients. the letter also did say 李相夷绝笔 lit. the final writing by li xiangyi. there's a brief exchange between him and the assumed "boatman" asking him where he was going. and we see he spat blood while writing yeah but:
llh/lxy's eyesight had been failing for some time.
Professional Letter Writers are a thing in the past in service to people who can't write their own letters (idk enough to verify the historical accuracy in this specific context though)
what has been bugging me since forever is the manner of speech of the letter. yeah it's different from their everyday speech, but that's actually perfectly fine since this is A Letter so I'm good with it being more formal. but... there's something I just can't quite pinpoint. especially with the use of the 君 jun pronoun by llh/lxy to refer to dfs when there could be other pronouns with less connotations of intimacy (and scholarly/imperial court system) implied and still conveyed cordiality, marking a shift in their relationship. (I'm not well versed with wuxia as a genre enough to know what are the conventions. someone else who does can say something though.)
whatever these put together means (eg. he may not have written the letter personally, or he wrote it in a different situation from what we saw, etc etc.) alongside:
this scene existed only as part of a visualisation as the letter content is revealed to the audience (or assumed to be fdb reading the letter to dfs & guests of the wedding spectators of the duel)
the boat lxy/llh jumped on is not the same as the one he was writing the letter on - the boatman is also not on it despite the conversation at the beginning, but lxy/llh's dressing and hairpin are the same as the ones before he jumped. (the boatman delivered the letter so he's real though.)
also as @wonderfulnonsense happened to have just pointed out in the tags left in my other post: it's in fact the same boat he took to go fight dfs at donghai 10 years ago. (edit: or maybe it isn't? as pointed out by anon.)
if we viewed whatever we perceived in this scene as imaginary (not what actually happened), then the reading of it being a metaphor for lxy/llh being on his way to enlightenment just makes sense. (the boat being a carrier on his spiritual transformations.) especially when you consider that 彼岸 the other shore is another concept in buddhism to represent enlightenment, alongside the motif of lotuses. (credits to @markiafc for the buddhism reading - edit: mark's meta here) and then, consider the beach ending... yeah.
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I couldn't stop thinking about an AU where Daniel resorts to gathering vitae again, this time to 'cure' Hazel, after his Brennenburg adventure💫, thoughts all mainly derived from this loadscreen text that tells us that Hazel is still in hospice care by the time the game's story began.
As much as I love Daniel, I don't think he really learned all that much from his experience even in the most charitable ending towards him in which he saves Agrippa. I can very, VERY easily see him slipping back into old ways if it meant saving Hazel. The most he seems to approach viewing torture as bad is when he realizes he himself no longer counts as an innocent so he can't justify killing others to save himself anymore. But killing no good, horrible, bad people to save HAZEL? Now, we're cooking with gas 😀 💀
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