OMG, You guys!

[beccastareyes]

So, I'm a Zel fan. (And in other news, the sky is blue, the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods.) So, I was rather pleased when this episode aired, due to the extended Zel flashback and Zel being the loveable bastard that he is.

It was interesting to see human Zel as an idealist helping Rezo because he thought someone needed to help fund the priest's miracles -- and that the desire to be stronger was to help those ideals, rather than for any other reason. Also liked seeing Zolf, Rodimus, Dilgear and Noonsa again, and get even a hint about how all of them interacted with Zel and Rezo. (It was painful to see Zel and Rezo at first, because I knew what was coming.)

It did bear out one of my theories about Zel. Notice that the transformation, while painful and disfiguring bothered Zel, but he was willing to take his comrades' good favor and the ability to do things like slice trees in half. It was only when he realized that Rezo had only done it to test the chimera-making process, not to grant Zel's wish to be stronger -- and that Rezo was generally doing horrible experiments on things to advance his cause. So not only a personal betrayal (that Rezo thought of Zel only as a guinea pig and errand boy, rather than as a student or son-figure), but realizing that he'd been working for a mad scientist instead of the pacifist healer he thought he'd been working for. I wonder if Zel would have ended up as less of a bitter and cynical misanthrope if only one of these had been true -- if he had discovered what Rezo had been up to before he was changed, would the betrayal have been less?

You know, Zel and Pocata both discovered that Rezo had used them for his own gain, but Zel freaked out and that was when he went all 'Rezo, you bastard!', while Pocata was all 'if that's what it takes to bring back Taforashia, then so be it'. Some of that could be because Zel had a much more personal relationship with Rezo, or that Rezo's cause of helping people was the only thing that Zel cared about above his own comfort, and Rezo trampled that by not being the saint Zel thought he was.

(It was also interesting that there were two refrains -- Rezo would do anything to see, and Zel would do anything to get his cure.)

I do want to see what Zel does after this season. Rezo pretty much said 'I don't know how to cure you, and it's not in the Claire Bible, which means your cure doesn't exist on this world -- and considering you're threatening to drown my soul-jar-thing, I have no reason to lie to you, unless I have a death wish', and Zel was all 'NO, IT'S NOT TRUE'! So, the 10,000 gold piece question is... Zel, you just find out from the Red Priest's mouth (or... you know what I mean) that your cure does not exist, and Rezo, who has read the Claire Bible and probably has forgotten more than most mages ever learn, knows of no way to fix you -- what do you do now?

Okay, besides go stop Pocata from bringing Rezo back to life, thus resolving plot threads.

Do you...?

A. Accept that Rezo is telling the truth and that he's right. This means that you're stuck as a chimera and all searching for a cure does is waste your time. This means a lot of hard soul-searching about what to do next, and trying not to think about how you tossed years of your life down the outhouse looking for something that never existed. On the other hand, as a result of that, you helped save the world several times, and are now close personal friends with royalty, so it wasn't completely pointless.

B. Rezo was lying -- maybe he did have a death wish as evidenced by the conflicting instructions, and he wanted you to drop him into the sea. Or it was part of his overly complicated plan to come back as evil octopus. Or something. But you're not gonna give up hope.

C. Rezo was telling the truth, but he's wrong. After all, he thought he could resurrect Shabranigdo and not die from it -- man was wrong at least once in his life. And who knows how much having a Dark Lord in your head effs up your judgement. This pretty much boils down to the same result as B.

Personally, I (not Zel) think the answer is A -- if it is possible, no one knows about it. So, the answer won't exist in sorcerers' notes and magical artifacts, but in someone hitting the lab and trying to find a way to reverse entropy. And it still might be the equivalent of trying to take scrambled eggs and turn them back into raw eggs within the shells. (Or worse, trying to do that with a cooked chicken.)

(Of note, in one of the fics I was writing, (the giant trilogy that hangs like an albatross around my neck until I finish it) -- Rezo is both correct and incorrect. There is a way to break Zel's body down into its component parts and remove one... the problem is is that the procedure is not designed to leave a living anything at the end of it, which simplifies the problem immensely. But Zel would object to being a human bloody smear on the floor.)

Also, I now have more icons for roleplaying! And we finally know what color human!Zel's real hair is. (Since the previous flashback had the funky lighting.)