#lathrine dawnseeker

[lathrine]

yall im so deep in the oc swamp, im a goner

[lathrine]

yall ive been sipping on that good good oc juice lately

[lathrine]

and they were boyfriends

[lathrine]

i never wanna post anything until its Done, but i dont really do finished pieces, so i just simply never post anything. so today im posting a couple of WIPs taking up my brain space!

anyways i have had so many iterations of this in my brain for the last two years, and it finally feels like its starting to coalesce into something Real.

i found the song around the same time i dropped WoW due to the ongoing horror show that is blizzard. whenever i step away from the game i determine the in-universe circumstances that would make Lathrine no longer active, and honestly mid-expansion Shadowlands gave me lots of good reasons lmao.

but Lathrine has been active military for a long time (i've played since before the opening of Ahn'Qiraj), and experienced a LOT of loss in that time-- both in terms of NPC loss, and in terms of people and characters i played with who are simply no longer around. and then, of course, in recent WoW history you have the War of Thorns, the burning of Teldrassil and genocide of the remaining night elf population. you have the alliance blatantly refusing to offer real humanitarian aid. you have the Night Warrior, and the rock-solid faith of the night elves being shaken to its core.

there's the discovery of the Ardenweald, the literal perfect afterlife the night elves are destined for. the realization that it is actively dying and taking all of the sleeping spirits (including the night elf deities) with it. the discovery that every night elf soul that died in the War of Thorns was sent to super hell. learning that Tyrande is losing to the Night Warrior and there is no cure for Elune's fury; that it will kill her.

(unless, of course, she chooses to stop being angry and hurt that something like 95% of her people were horribly murdered-- some by people they had JUST called allies-- less than four years ago. wanting revenge against those who advocate for and enact genocide is Bad, after all)

so! i started kicking around this concept of Lathrine retiring because she had lost faith in all of it-- in the Alliance, in hope for unification between the factions, in her leadership, in Elune. in herself. that was about when i found Bones in The Ocean, which had an instant impact on me and gave me direction: Lathrine succumbed to despair in the Maw, tried to kill herself, gained that last-second 'my misery is fixable' clarity and was, ultimately, saved by Hati (who is soulbound to her). and from there she retired. from there she went back to Azeroth and her hearthealer and her family. she left the military and found friends to move in with, somewhere far from the politics that see her as expendable. somewhere she can raise her children.

until very recently i still struggled with how the scene in the Maw looked, how everything went down. but recently i remembered the River of Souls, and how its filled with an absolutely unbearable misery which is not meant for the living.

now the scene goes: while on a quest, Lathrine gets stuck in the River of Souls. the weight of misery and anger and sorrow weighs her down, amplifying her own, until she is literally unable to escape. she is confronted-- real or imagined-- by the ghost of every loved one she has ever lost. every NPC she failed to save, every PC who vanished off the face of the earth. (the one in the sketch is Drakuru, whose questline has stuck with me for fourteen years.)

ultimately Lathrine is saved by Hati, who found a familiar paladin (Korian) and warlock (Fwoosh) questing nearby and who fished her out of the River. the Alliance military asks for her to be released back to active duty; her hearthealer just about has a conniption.

this is a VERY rough sketch, obvs. i want to finish this for the sake of finishing it, but my ultimate intention is to rough out the whole thing in an animation. so maybe i'll have that to share someday, too

[lathrine]

i kinda want to make like a whole comic for the Lathrine Dawnseeker Saga, which would really just be a slice-of-life episodic thing about a traumatized warhound taking her kids and dog and retiring to her friends' seaside estate. but until then, i hope y'all enjoy snippets of scenes