One of my favorite categories of taz headcanon is “random stuff lucretia forgot to erase”
The classic “elves in Faerun don’t echolocate”
The one where Magnus jumps up behind Davenport as part of rogue training and Davenport yells “Magnus, stop doing that!!!” 100% reflexively
A fic I read one time where Taako and Magnus got into some lengthy debate about Fantasy Iron Chef or Fantasy Survivor or something while a local with no concept of television listened in like “How?? Were you watching these people??? Guys??”
Magnus stripping naked in front of Lucretia doesn’t twig as weird to anyone in the room
Davenport can’t hold a conversation, but he can and will destroy you at any strategy game you put in front of him
Addendum: sometimes he and Merle play some sort of elaborately house ruled poker with a tarot deck and no one else can figure out what’s going on but they don’t seem to be improvising and they never actually discussed the house rules before implementing them?
Magnus punches a plate of cookies out of Avi’s hands because those have hazelnuts in them and don’t you know the Director is allergic?? (He didn’t know. Nobody knew. Merle and Taako knew)
Merle starts up some drinking song that nobody on this entire moon has ever heard before but Magnus jumps right in. Taako rolls his eyes but joins in on the chorus. The Director can correctly identify it within two lines.
Lydia and Edward actually have no freaking clue what Dupree is (malformed dragon?) but Merle and Magnus are just “ah yes. A t-rex”
Barry Bluejeans is a fighter but that one mission involving a necromancer he recognized the ritual immediately and made fun of the guy for using an inefficient circle.
Leon learns to regret ever letting him into his office Taako regrets nothing ever (based on that post which is probably buried in my likes and will never be found.)
OOF! OOF! how does FIFTEEN POINTS of DAMAGE TASTE?!
jesus a year later and i’m still floored by attention this got
ty everyone for sharing and leaving sweet comments 🙏 i’m going into my senior year of animation which means my school-provided toonboom licence is done n gone some time next year. if you wanna give me a hand snagging a perpetual licence so i can keep making horseshit like this i got a ko-fi to take donations!
A while back I remember seeing a post about Taako and Lucretia’s relationship post-canon, basically about how op (and several commentators) thought that the idea of them never reconciling was stupid and shitty and Taako eventually forgiving her was the only real right option.
I’m exaggerating a bit, but that’s the crux, and it’s been low-key bothering me since cause I feel like that attitude does a disservice to both their characters.
Firstly I think a lot of people overestimate how petty Taako actually would be in this situation. Yeah, Taako is in general petty as hell, but he’s also very non-confrontational and, you know, a bit of a coward. He’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna risk a fight he can’t win, and poking at his feelings re:Madame Director is a losing battle. Confronting Lucretia means opening himself up to vulnerability and Serious Conversations About His Feelings, and I think he’s far more likely to stonewall her than be snide.
Like, even during the finale, when the wound was freshest and the stakes were highest, Taako’s not really all that snarky with her. He scoffs at the group hug and gets a bit miffed when Jeffandrew calls her powerful, but he never insults or provokes her. When she asked him to listen, he listened, and when he proposed his third option, it’s based on Lucretia’s plan. Taako worked with Lucretia constructively and without complaint all through the Apocalypse. I don’t see why fandom insists he’d purposefully antagonize her after it, especially since just not engaging with her would be easier.
And then secondly, a lot of the fics I’ve seen that deal with Taako and Lucretia ‘working through there differences’ kinda conflate the two sides of the conflict. Lucretia lied and stole his memories and sent him out on dangerous missions knowing he’d forgotten the skills she took from him and Taako…. was mean to her at family functions? Those aren’t equatable grievances.
Taako not wanting to forgive someone who violated his trust shouldn’t be put on the same level as Lucretia violating his trust in the first place, even if he was being overtly petty about it. If Lucretia’s presence is that triggering for Taako than the onus should be on Lucretia to stay away from him.
Yeah, that means the family is probably gonna have to find some creative solutions to spend time with both of them, but hey, that’s a story. And I refuse to except that a story about creating and respecting boundaries is inherently less valuable then “Everyone has to forgive Lucretia because she had good intentions and she’s trying real hard”.
One really interesting thing about the TAZ: Balance universe is that the skills you possess are very much linked to how you acquired those skills and especially the person who taught you them. We see this first when Merle loses his battle-axe proficiency, and along with that loses his memories of training with the battle-axe. And it’s presumably why, in losing their Starblaster memories, Magnus, Merle, and Taako go from incredibly proficient to level 1, even though normal logic would dictate that they should only lose the memories of how they learned their magic/fighting/clerical skills, not those skills themselves.
I think this plays really nicely into the theme of bonds being incredibly powerful forces, so much that losing these bonds means losing actual physical abilities that you learned from them. So much that Taako learning a cooking skill (how to make tacos) from somebody else literally helps save the world. Characters in the TAZ: Balance universe aren’t just sheets of paper with their abilities on them; they’re made up of the relationships they have with other people.
In The Stolen Century, the narrator says “Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives” — but it’s not just the capacity for love. It’s literally our ability to do anything that increases the more that we form bonds with peoople.
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