#ziticore

[bestworstcase]

In fairy tales of remnant there's that story about how the two brothers began life as a single whole before splitting in half, so that could be what CC meant when he alluded to his maker.

ooh, good catch. the primordial dragon figures in a lot of my endgame theories (<- the brothers are broken and need to be healed through recombination, either literally or by spiritual reconciliation) but i hadn’t considered that he might have made something else before he sundered himself to become the brothers. it does dovetail thematically—the dragon divides himself out of loneliness, nothing hurts the girl who fell through the world more than the loneliness in her chest, the narrative understands the innermost core of all pain to be the feeling of being alone. so exploring that through the lens of the cat’s longing for a maker who no longer exists is potentially interesting, and brings the grief narrative full circle in a really interesting way.

if the cat’s maker was the primordial dragon, i think that does raise some fascinating questions about the lore. this would make the cat the oldest being in existence, older even than the brother gods. potentially that would give them a unique perspective on the creation of remnant itself—they would have been already quite old by the time the brothers settled enough to share their toys—and maybe reframe their curiosity in 9.4 as less about the origins of remnant and more about what the girls know? and then there’s the obvious question of whether the cat knows that their maker became the brothers through an act of self-destruction and how that possibly alters the nature of their goal, if so. (e.g., do they want to find their maker so they can demand an explanation, or is their intention to recover their maker by recombination of the brothers?)

& then in the broader scope, the myth describes the primordial dragon scouring “all the realms and all the worlds” in search of other beings, but finding none. he isn’t the creator of the cosmos itself but rather the first life and the first death, and through the act of self-annihilation he becomes the progenitor of all living things. the origin of the lifeless cosmos and the primordial dragon aren’t important except insofar as they develop the thematic conceit at the foundation of the story—the heart of all pain is loneliness, death begets life and the inception of creation is destruction, so forth—and they don’t need to have been real in the literal sense. but if they were and if the primordial dragon made something else before he destroyed himself to create the brothers, that’s… interesting? that’s interesting. it changes the thematic composition of the story in a major way.

it makes the cat… i think, maybe the expression of primordial loneliness—the desire for connection—possibly something like the cosmic heart. the mythical clean break becomes messy—the primordial dragon divides himself in half and is destroyed; the sum of what parts remain is lesser than the whole. something is lost, something needs to be given up—the bindings severed—and maybe that something is the cat. or even the ever after in its entirety, i do—i do love a cosmic whale fall, hfgshdjs.

metaphysics aside i think it necessitates that the cat be centrally involved in the resolution of the brothers, because they remember the whole that was sundered and want it back. once you introduce that into a story about broken gods passing their brokenness down you do have to commit to making it the narrative centerpiece, otherwise the whole thing unravels—this is where i’m skeptical, because i think it would be pretty tricky to handle without making the ozlem narrative ancillary to the primordial grief of this cat. not impossible but a heavier lift than i would want to deal with, if i were writing it.

i do think it’s potentially very very interesting though. depends on how interested they are in unfolding the primordial cosmological side of things (my impression so far is that they’re not, but i would be delighted to be proven wrong.)