Haranatavna
May. 16th, 2025 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocky41_7Rambling about my newest Tav (Durge flavor)
Haranatavna has always had problems with dissociative type behavior, but it reaches a peak in Act I of the game, beginning with Alfira's murder and culminating in the assault on the Emerald Grove. After Alfira's murder, Tav panics. She understands she's done something very wrong, and she did it without meaning to, and it will have serious consequences wrt her relationships with the others if they find out. She hides Alfira's body and spends the next several hours lying awake in her bedroll having a complete meltdown, cycling from fear to regret to rage with Alfira for coming there at all and putting her in that position.
Eventually, the way she calms herself down is by, essentially, convincing herself Alfira's not real, so it doesn't matter that Tav killed her. This allows her to protect herself from the emotional consequences of killing her, and it's a tactic she resorts to repeatedly throughout the first act. They're not real so the consequences aren't real and it doesn't even matter. They're NPCs and what happens to them is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, that level of depersonalization of the people around her eventually leads to massacring the Grove because she thinks it will get her help with her parasite, and the consequences of that are impossible to bury. She's then left with two options: 1. Continuing her dissociation from others, with the tacit understanding that something like the Grove massacre may well happen again, or something even worse; or 2. Accepting the truth that something is deeply and possibly incurably wrong with her and that she did do all those things and hurt all those people (and even enjoyed parts of it) and now she just has to live with that.
She wavers between these two things on their journey to the shadow lands until she eventually settles in the shallow end of option 2, leading to a brief but complete mental collapse after reaching the Last Light Inn, which her companions attribute to being faced with the shadow curse and the general exhaustion of their quest.
Throughout the rest of her journey, she continues to struggle with dissociative episodes, but going forward she makes a conscious effort to keep to some kind of morality, because she does not want to be enthralled to her curse any more than she wants to be enthralled to another individual.
Haranatavna's a berserker subclass of barbarian, so rage is part of it all, but hers is a very cold kind of rage. She's not the kind of person you can work up into a temper to get her to make mistakes. She gave her eye up to Aunt Ethel trying to solve the parasite problem, but her decision to kill Ethel--although strongly motivated by anger that she had paid a price and gotten nothing for it--was by all outward appearances made very calmly.
Part of that is her indifference to killing. It's a coin toss for her on whether or not to kill any given person, so while it doesn't take much to talk her into it, it also doesn't take much to talk her out of it. For her, it's an option like any other, not one that requires a given amount of anger for her to exercise.
Eventually, the way she calms herself down is by, essentially, convincing herself Alfira's not real, so it doesn't matter that Tav killed her. This allows her to protect herself from the emotional consequences of killing her, and it's a tactic she resorts to repeatedly throughout the first act. They're not real so the consequences aren't real and it doesn't even matter. They're NPCs and what happens to them is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, that level of depersonalization of the people around her eventually leads to massacring the Grove because she thinks it will get her help with her parasite, and the consequences of that are impossible to bury. She's then left with two options: 1. Continuing her dissociation from others, with the tacit understanding that something like the Grove massacre may well happen again, or something even worse; or 2. Accepting the truth that something is deeply and possibly incurably wrong with her and that she did do all those things and hurt all those people (and even enjoyed parts of it) and now she just has to live with that.
She wavers between these two things on their journey to the shadow lands until she eventually settles in the shallow end of option 2, leading to a brief but complete mental collapse after reaching the Last Light Inn, which her companions attribute to being faced with the shadow curse and the general exhaustion of their quest.
Throughout the rest of her journey, she continues to struggle with dissociative episodes, but going forward she makes a conscious effort to keep to some kind of morality, because she does not want to be enthralled to her curse any more than she wants to be enthralled to another individual.