#thank you nonny i do miss talking about my ocs and especially miss maty

[zahra-hydris]

v curious to know which job questlines you consider canon for maty & why (doh/l included) 👀

nonny I love this question and I love you for asking about my girl 💖

first, a confession: despite having all my crafting jobs at 80+ and two of my three gathering jobs at 89/90, i’ve probably completed like half of the questlines?

otherwise! pretty much all of them are canon for maty except for two. the first is the dragoon questline which is unique imo because it feels so very dated after a certain point in the msq (basically, post-heavensward).

considering maty only learns the job after endwalker (and after being enough of a shit to estinien that he challenges her to actually learn the job), the estinien-centred storyline is a) a HUGE time warp and character regression for estinien and b) doesn’t fit the friendship estinien and maty have by that point. i’m also not a huge fan of the ‘two azure dragoons’ thing tbh. I prefer to let estinien have that as his own thing (I love that, canonly, estinien is still a better dragoon than the wol).

the second job questline I consider non-canon for maty is the dancer one. part of this is because I connect her skills to her background (her parents taught her and her sister to ‘entertain’, including dancing, to attract a wealthy husband) and because I don’t see maty as willing to indulge gegeruju and randomly joining a dance troupe. instead, she asks lyna to show her how to turn her ‘useless’ dancing training into something more lethal.

another job questline that I kind of smudge a bit for maty is the paladin one... because it sucks. it’s so so bad and it makes zero sense and I kind of just block it out and pretend that maty’s paladin abilities come from her merging her magic with her new defensive skills (gained through the gladiator training).

some of the others that seem a bit... weird (warrior, white mage) I just see her as grudgingly persevering through (post-endwalker maty in the background of curious gorge’s romcom: remember two months ago when I was doing shit like saving the fucking universe).

but all of the others fit maty and her journey quite well (with some occasional tweaks), especially in the order I did them. the black mage and summoner storylines are fairly integral to her ARR development, with red mage a natural progression in her post-ARR journey and machinist following once she reaches ishgard (because she’s developed an interest in engineering from cid). she learns paladin and white mage after heavensward (so she can defend/heal/never feel so helpless as she did watching haurchefant die). I see her learning samurai during stormblood, though I do alter the story somewhat so it starts through her getting some training from hien and then seeking out a mentor to improve herself. she picks up dark knight after stormblood, when she’s at her lowest, and it absolutely SLAPPED at that point (an actual physical manifestation of all her rage, grief, and self-loathing she feels at that point and HOLY SHIT did I time that well).

she picks up dancer and gunbreaker during quiet moments in shadowbringers in an effort to add to her combat capacity, the weight of her task (and the exarch/g’raha’s expectations) bearing on her, learning initially from lyna and thancred respectively (before completing her gunbreaker training through the questline). all the others kind of fit in after shadowbringers or after endwalker (maty deciding to use her time productively). notably, she picks up reaper after endwalker as a way of working through her weird feelings regarding zenos’ death. it also feels like a way of returning to her black mage roots, messing about with the void again. it’s also these periods in which she really dives into her crafting and gathering, working through the little guild (and guildmaster) crises in these periods where the world’s not ending (fave one of these is still alchemist btw). sometimes, it’s a way to refocus herself and do something simple and productive after such high stress and traumatising events. for instance, she starts mining as a way to finally address her survivors guilt and feel connected with minfilia after shadowbringers.

#this got long lol #thank you nonny i do miss talking about my ocs and especially miss maty #mathilda fairclough