Why-raven - The Blackest Night.

kevin hense

“She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one...” — Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

quiz: tragic horror character — yiuno.

That Which Cannot Be Known.

Oh, god. How did it come to this? To some extent, you’ve gone so far past your own idea of “human” that it must be kind of fun, right? Maybe, I’m not sure. As an artifact of cosmic horror, you’re wild, wacky and colorful. People are probably drawn to that, but you will never let them know you. The mystery intrigues for a while, but it’ll wear everyone down. It’ll wear you down, too. Who are you? Do you remember? Are you so far gone that you can’t go back? And maybe the most tragic thing of all—becoming so distorted in your identity, and for so long, that no matter how hard you want to return you can’t ever seem to figure it out. But you’ve learned a vast amount up in the stars, and people will work hard to get to know you. It doesn’t matter who you used to be. Sometimes, you should just start from scratch: give yourself a name, a birthday. Let someone celebrate these things with you.

link to quiz.

Oh, god. Where to begin?

The result is eerily spot-on, and I don’t want to run the risk of revealing too much of Yiuno’s backstory to spoil the fun about this character. However, the one thing I can say about him is: Yiuno’s life has been built on lies and deception for as long as he can remember.

Did that pique your interest?

According to canon, Vieras are only separated by gender when they reach puberty. Adult males will return to their settlement to collect those identified as boys, then they are taken out to the wild and are trained to become wardens. This means that once the young males leave their village, they can never return and be in contact with the females except during the mating season.

Yiuno has a twin sister, Yiuna; they grew up together and were extremely close—inseparable, even. When they both became adolescents, Yiuna didn’t want her only brother to be taken away from her, so she took the risk to hide Yiuno’s masculinity for as long as they could, using any means necessary. While it was certainly a feat that Yiuna managed to keep her brother’s gender a secret for almost three long summers, the elders eventually found out and they were trialed for breaking the tribal law… which ended with expulsion from their birthplace.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg to Yiuno’s darkly colorful past. As a Viera, his longevity also poses an identity issue: how can he explain his unusually long life and eternal youth to other Eorzean races, whose life expectancy is barely a scratch compared to his own? The only way is to be constantly on the move, creating new aliases, reappearing as new people with each identity change.

“Yiuno Reine” is definitely not his real name. Perhaps the current him isn’t even the real him.

Who is he, really?

It was a question he used to ask himself, when his own age became so disconnected with the passage of time. However, when Sora becomes a huge part of his current self, for the first time in his long, long life, time finally starts to move forward once more.

(Re-posting old quizzes to this main blog for archiving purposes.)

This one also forms an interesting comparison with another quiz I did here, where they both share similar premises, but the other was more generic and straightforward compared to this.

“Play is the mediator of the invisible and visible.”

— Dora M. Kalff