Fanon Beliefs

[Somariel]

My headcanon says that the timespan for MKR 1 is a good bit longer than it appears to be in the manga.

The timeline I've developed basically goes as follows:

Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu arrive in Cephiro and meet Clef in early-to-mid morning of the first day. They spend most of the day on the griffin and reach Presea's house in the mid-to-late afternoon. They leave Presea in the late afternoon and meet Ferio and fight the bird monster not too long after that. They spend that night in the Forest of Silence, several miles from Presea's house.

Alcyone's second attack happens around noon of their second day in Cephiro and their camp that night is a few miles short of Eterna. They find the Escudo and receive their new weapons in the morning of the third day, spend most of the day traveling to the Shrine of Water and revive Selece in the late afternoon. They spend the night in the shrine and leave for the Shrine of Wind the next morning.

They reach the Shrine of Wind and revive Windam around noon of the fourth day, then spend that night about halfway to the Shrine of Fire, near the tip of that really narrow peninsula jutting out from the left-hand land mass. They reach the Shrine of Fire and revive Rayearth in the early afternoon of the fifth day, then spend most of the afternoon flying and battle Zagato and Emeraude in the late afternoon.

[Somariel]

So I was recently thinking about Emeraude and Zagato and Lantis and Ferio and ended up developing a somewhat detailed headcanon about their relationships and families and a bit of what they were like growing up and (in the case of the first three) learning magic. Some of it has actually been adopted from various things Down has posted, either in this thread or in Protecting You and some of her other works.

At the time Emeraude became the Pillar, she was 300, Zagato was 294, Lantis was 284, and Ferio was 8. Emeraude and Ferio's parents died in the chaos between the death of the previous Pillar and Emeraude's ascension to the post. Emeraude was only Pillar for ten years, so Ferio was 18 when she died.

Both Emeraude and Ferio's parents and Lantis and Zagato's parents were minor functionaries in the Pillar's Court, so all of them grew up in the Pillar's Palace.

Most mages either are granted magic once they are old enough to ask for it (they have to be at least fifteen before the request will be granted) or stumble into it as a means of surviving some sort of life-threatening danger, but Emeraude was one of those rare people who showed signs of being a strong mage at her birth and Clef gave her lessons in magic appropriate to her understanding from the time she could walk. Before she became Pillar, Clef had been slowly grooming her as his eventual successor.

Zagato received his magic from Clef when he was fifteen. Lantis, being only five, was denied the request for magic he had made at the same time and spent the next six years throwing himself into increasingly more dangerous situations in hopes of gaining magic that way until he finally succeeded after severely startling Zagato during a lesson in the offensive uses of lightning magic.

To this day, Clef is still uncertain as to whether Lantis gained magic entirely by instinctive survival in partially parrying the bolt Zagato accidentally cast at him or if his own desperate attempt to grant Lantis the magic he'd need to survive Zagato's startled blast succeeded. He remembers casting the spell to grant the magic, but does not remember feeling it take before Lantis was lying on the ground, twitching, in the center of a blackened circle

[Down]

I apparently never actually POSTED my reply to this (such an organised person, I am!) ahahhahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa oops but

I really really like the idea behind Lantis's gaining magic. I'd love to read it! Either at the time or post-canon looking back on it~

[Somariel]

I'll see what I can do about writing that, then, Down.

[Somariel]

So I've been thinking about things and this is the headcanon I've reached on what the level of general public knowledge about the Magic Knights and the situation between Emeraude and Zagato was at various points in the MKR canon.

Before and during MKR 1
The Magic Knights: There's this old, old, old legend about Magic Knights that save Cephiro, but except for those in the Pillar's inner circle, no one believes it's anything more than a legend.
Emeraude and Zagato: Zagato kidnapped Emeraude to make a power grab.

Post-MKR 1 through the end of MKR 2
The Magic Knights: The legend of the Magic Knights is true; the Pillar summons them from another world when Cephiro is in a crisis. I see Cephiro as having a recorded history going back at least a dozen millennia and every one to two millennia, whatever it is that drives the Pillar to summon the Magic Knights (since he or she can't pass on without their aid) causes enough of a public crisis that public awareness of the legend being true spikes, only to fade over time until the next public crisis.

Emeraude and Zagato: Emeraude died by accident in the course of the Magic Knights' rescue attempt. Zagato kidnapped Emeraude because he had fallen in love with her and her ignorance (or maybe disregard) of his feelings was driving him mad. I can see Clef feeling a need to do something to at least partially redeem Zagato's image and the others in the know going along with it out of respect for his grief. He wouldn't, however, want the general public to know that Emeraude had summoned the Magic Knights to kill her because she had fallen in love with Zagato. Even when he talks about making sure the next Pillar candidate knows the full truth, he gives no indication that he thinks it should become public knowledge.

Post-MKR 2
The full truth of both the legend and Emeraude and Zagato's situation becomes public knowledge. Now that the Pillar system has been abolished, there's no reason to keep either a secret anymore and every reason to tell the truth so as to avoid having to keep track of who knows what.

[Antoinette Veronica]

I also wanted to explore how much the commoners know.

No one has ever gone into this so I am over the moon to see your post!

I like your head canon that Clef wouldn't want  the public to know that Emeraude had summoned the Magic Knights to kill her because she had fallen in love with Zagato and he said Zagato kidnapped Emeraude because he went mad when Em would not return his feelings

Your head canon is really logical and it could be what happened.

[Somariel]

More headcanon! It seems insomnia is a great headcanon generator.

1. Post MKR 2, Lantis doesn't want to resume his old position as Captain of the Palace Guard. (My headcanon says that after Hikaru abolished the Pillar system, the Pillar's Guard was renamed to 'the Palace Guard'.) He'd be perfectly happy to be Lafarga's second-in-command, maybe even to be a co-captain, but he does not want to be 100% in charge of the Palace Guard again.

2. When Hikaru starts having kids, Lantis gets called 'Papa' and Eagle gets called 'Dad'. I feel that 'Papa' is ever so slightly more familiar than 'Dad', so since I can't really see Eagle ever really, truly, 100% leaving Autozam and committing himself wholly to Cephiro, it makes sense for the kids to be somewhat more familiar with Lantis than with Eagle, since Eagle isn't present for a noticeable minority of the time. (I'm guessing it would usually total somewhere around three to four months out of every year, occasionally going as high as six months.)

3. All the kids of the pairings in the core group (Magic Knights, Cephirans, Caldina, Eagle) are so familiar with the people in the core group that they call everyone other than their parents 'Aunt' and 'Uncle'. Yes, even Clef. He finds it sort of odd at first, but ends up growing to like it. It starts with the Magic Knights' kids and spreads from them to the Calfarga and Cephiran kids. The H/L/E kids also call Geo and Zazu 'Uncle'.

4. During the period between Emeraude entering the water dungeon and summoning the Magic Knights, with the single exception of the trip to Presea's to drop off Mokona, Clef was pretty much hiding out in the Forest of Eleru to avoid having people importuning him to face Zagato. After the dust of the Legendary Battle settles, there are plenty of people who are (somewhat rightfully) royally pissed at him for doing so. When he gets confronted by any of these people, he generally counters with two arguments.

The first argument is that Zagato's desperation had made him even stronger than Clef and Clef wouldn't have been any more successful at defeating him than anyone before the Magic Knights was. If that isn't enough to mollify whoever is confronting him (the ones who aren't mollified generally ask how he could have been so certain of that without testing it), he will then go on to say that the day everything went to pieces, Emeraude had specifically charged him with aiding the Magic Knights if she was forced to summon them, so he absolutely could not take afford to take that chance, even if he wasn't entirely certain that Zagato had become stronger than him.

[Somariel]

C&P-ing from the thread on the Mashin's terms for the Magic Knights:

I've recently come to the conclusion that the formal titles of the Magic Knights would be 'the Magic Knight of [Mashin]', somewhat less formally - but still likely to be used in a formal situation - they would be '[Mashin's] Knight', and informally, they would be 'the Magic Knight of [Element]' or 'the [Element] Knight'.

No, I'm not coming up with headcanon that fits with the stories I've already written, not at all.

[suzanami]

So I've been thinking about things and this is the headcanon I've reached on what the level of general public knowledge about the Magic Knights and the situation between Emeraude and Zagato was at various points in the MKR canon.

SORRY this is a reply to a slightly old post but ahhHH I just wanted to say that your take on how much the population know about the legend of the Magic Knights and what happened with Emeraude is pretty close to mine!

I figure that there was a lot of confusion on the citizens' parts even after learning about the truth of what happened with Emeraude so there's an effort to present the Knights to the people, because the Council/whoever is concerned about the Knights being demonized (because even if you explain things to people, they still come to their own conclusions), and the girls are so damn charming that in getting to know them to some degree instead of just hearing of them, most citizens actually come to admire the girls for the sacrifices they made for this Other World.

...aaaand I might also be spewing my own fic all over the topic, too XD  I'm kind of scared to publish it eventually because so many people are set in so many of their own headcanons about the series that everyone will be like "NO THATS WRONG it would be this way instead" even though it cannot be wrong it's filling in the blanks but aahh other peoples' are better informed than mine

but yes, I think Clef was of course resigned to another Pillar and telling that Pillar about Emeraude's situation, but if the citizens knew, it'd be chaos.  thank goodness for Hikaru making that not an issue, because Clef is so glad to just make that whole situation public knowledge.

[Somariel]

So I've been thinking about things and this is the headcanon I've reached on what the level of general public knowledge about the Magic Knights and the situation between Emeraude and Zagato was at various points in the MKR canon.

SORRY this is a reply to a slightly old post but ahhHH I just wanted to say that your take on how much the population know about the legend of the Magic Knights and what happened with Emeraude is pretty close to mine!

I've had to spend a good deal of time thinking about this for a fic I'm working on that centers around Lantis' first days back in Cephiro after Emeraude and Zagato's deaths. It's great to know that other people agree with what I've come up with.

I figure that there was a lot of confusion on the citizens' parts even after learning about the truth of what happened with Emeraude so there's an effort to present the Knights to the people, because the Council/whoever is concerned about the Knights being demonized (because even if you explain things to people, they still come to their own conclusions), and the girls are so damn charming that in getting to know them to some degree instead of just hearing of them, most citizens actually come to admire the girls for the sacrifices they made for this Other World.

I totally agree that Clef and those who already know the Magic Knights would want to make sure that the general populace didn't blame them for what they were forced to do and that the best way to ensure that would be to make sure that the people get to meet them.

...aaaand I might also be spewing my own fic all over the topic, too XD  I'm kind of scared to publish it eventually because so many people are set in so many of their own headcanons about the series that everyone will be like "NO THATS WRONG it would be this way instead" even though it cannot be wrong it's filling in the blanks but aahh other peoples' are better informed than mine

I'd be more than happy to read it. I love seeing what other people have developed for their own headcanons.

but yes, I think Clef was of course resigned to another Pillar and telling that Pillar about Emeraude's situation, but if the citizens knew, it'd be chaos.  thank goodness for Hikaru making that not an issue, because Clef is so glad to just make that whole situation public knowledge.

Clef was definitely very glad to make the whole situation public knowledge.