Monday DE

[bjornwilde]

 Tell us about someone who was influential to your character's development. 

ETA: This can be a person within canon, Milliways, meta as the player, or whatever inspires. Originally I had meant within canon and character POV, but run with it as you will.

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[student_of_impossibility]

In what is a startling break from the norm, I am not going to talk about the usual go-tos for Tavi and this question! Especially as the question was not most influential. So instead we're going with one inspired by a certain someone's place in Codex Alera!

One of the strong influences on Tavi is Varg, one of the highest-ranking Canim of the series. For those who don't know, Canim are the civilization of nine-foot somewhat-anthropomorphized wolves who wear armor and wield swords and terrifying crossbows and [spoiler]. They're really super cool and really scary in some ways and generally fantastic.

Varg teaches Tavi a lot about body language and how to handle crises in the moment in book two, and really cemented Tavi's baseline understanding that centuries of hostility does not mean you can't work together and make alliances and/or even peace. He also teaches Tavi some Canish, which is super helpful as Tavi never does learn any Marat languages in the course of the books and learning to actually think in a different language is good for expanding his frame of reference, especially one so different from Aleran (which is pretty close to English in some ways for really stupid reasons of Butcher didn't think things through before making a comment in book two).

Varg also teaches Tavi chess--well, ludus, which is totally chess. Actually I figure Tavi already knew the basics and wasn't bad, could probably beat a fair number of people. But Varg's had centuries playing it and is way, way better. Besides helping Tavi learn about diplomacy and how you meet a different race when thinking things through, it also teaches him a lot about strategy and tactics, both in the literal game sense and the rather more metaphorical sense that can be applied to politics, diplomacy, or the battlefield. Varg's lessons for Tavi will continue to prompt growth and shifts in perspective throughout the series.

And then Tavi promptly adapts those lessons to his own style. Then everyone gets headaches.

There's also so many other people, of course--most characters in the series, really, with Kitai, Gaius Sextus, Isana, and Bernard at the top of that list (... and, to be honest, Fidelias, but that is a complicated issue). But Varg is also one of them, and he is appropriate to discuss today.