History TearJerker / Aurora2019

** Then, right before fully changing, Dainix tells Falst "I trust you" with a heartrending look on his face, clearly desperate to get out of the situation. There's so much to unpack there. Dainix cares about Falst, deeply, despite them having literally met earlier that afternoon, and he is relying on Falst to get them both out of this situation alive. Falst has probably never heard someone say that to him in his life because he's spent most of his life alone due to FantasticRacism, and up until this point he likely never internalized that his friends actually like and care about him.

* We see Kendal's full backstory in the first chapter, and much like other fantasy heroes' backstories, [[DoomedHometown it is not happy in the slightest]]: Chimeras have been assaulting anyone coming out of the city of Vash for a while now, in order to starve them out. Vash, the god and ruler of the city, intervenes in order to protect his people, only to learn that the chimeras were just a lure set up by the Collector, an unusual Life mage who collects and dissects souls. She then kills ''everyone'' in the city in order to severe Vash's ties with the outside world, then traps his soul in a magical knife and hides in the confines of the Caves. From Vash's bleeding body forms Kendal. Alinua is not wrong when she says that he was surrounded by nothing but death for his entire life in Chapter 2.

** Hearing Kendal try to calm Dainix down is just as heartwrenching. He realizes ''something'' is wrong but doesn't know what, and pleads for Dainix to stop attacking and then for the Arenamaster to stop the fight. Kendal isn't worried about his own safety, he's entirely focused on trying to calm Dainix down.
** After that fight, Dainix is completely broken down, and asks Taihram to kill him. Instead, Taihram helps him work through his issues, and Dainix is obviously very upset and guilty about attacking Kendal in the arena.

* Meanwhile, when Erin gets taken out by dragon form Tynan, Falst runs over and tries to save him, but gets knocked out by Erin's fireball before he can do anything. About a minute later, the Void Dragon takes over Erin, and Falst pulls himself together while still injured just to warn Alinua about it.

--> "No. I said I needed to kill it."

** The chimeric plague itself is bad -every chimeric carrier loses control of their magic as a young child and ends up dying and mutating everything around it horribly, and it's as tragic as it is horrifying. No wonder Alinua is so terrified.
** Then at the end of the golem fight, Alinua realizes she didn't want to die and starts crying.

* Also after Erin's introduction, Erin is reluctant to accept help from the others at first. He has good reasons for feeling that way, as almost no one is able to survive Void Dragon's power, but it still stings to hear him say it out loud.
* During chapter 7, Erin tries to get himself killed by cave crawlers just to stop the dragon from escaping. After being rescued, he's surprised that the group saved him and says that he didn't think he was going to survive. He honestly expected to die down there.
* In the second half of Chapter 8, Kendal is uncharacteristically angry and emotional while fighting the chimera. It's made very clear that his rage is an expression of his traumatic birth and the parallels the chimera attacking a small town have to the destruction of Vash, and that despite never asserting his personhood, he has kept feeling the negative emotions associated with the death of his city.

* Doctor Jolon is an absolute monster of a villain. He attempts to manipulate Falst into believing he has no other choice than to be a lab rat for him just to be human, calls him a monster to his face, manipulates the heroes into going after him and uses Falst as a scapegoat for all his crimes, and intends to do some eugenics by trying to undo the ferin "curse."
** As he's being dragged away, he attempts to manipulate Falst one last time -and Falst has this to say in response:

--> NO, I SAID I NEEDED TO KILL IT

** Hearing Kendal try to calm Dainix down is just as heartwrenching. He realizes SOMETHING is wrong but doesn't know what, and pleads for Dainix to stop attacking and then for the Arenamaster to stop the fight. Kendal isn't worried about his own safety, he's entirely focused on trying to calm Dainix down.

* Meanwhile, when Erin gets taken out by dragon form Tynan, Falst runs over and tries to save him, but gets knocked out by Erin's fireball before he can do anything. About a minute later, Void Dragon takes over Erin, and Falst pulls himself together while still injured just to warn Alinua about it.
** And then after that, after Tynan is curbstomped by Void Dragon, Dainix concludes that if Kendal and Alinua can stop him, Void Dragon will kill them after he's done with Tynan. The look on Falst's face says it all.

** After Dainix shuts down Void Dragon, he almost kills Erin, and Kendal has to stop Dainix.

* Falst's entire motivation for wanting to be human is also heartbreaking. Feeling so entirely isolated and dehumanized by the people around him to the point where he was willing to change his own body just to fit into society's standards of normal has a lot of parallels in the real world.

* In the second half of Chapter 8, Kendal is uncharacteristically angry and emotional while fighting the chimera. It's made very clear that his rage is an expression of his traumatic birth, and that despite never asserting his personhood, he has kept feeling the negative emotions associated with the death of his city.

* Doctor Jolon is an absolute monster of a villain. He attempts to manipulate Falst.

* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-22-20 1.22.20]] Everything about this page. Just... this page.

* [[1.22.20 https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-22-20]] Everything about this page. Just... this page.

* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-22-20]] Everything about this page. Just... this page.

** After that, Falst uses a lacrima to sneakily heal Dainix's shoulder because he feels guilty for accidentally clawing Dainix earlier.

--> '''Life:''' I NEEDED EYES THAT DID NOT HATE WHAT I HAVE BECOME

* Kendal is absolutely distraught in his dream sequence. He feels like a failure because he couldn't save Vash. The lost souls of the people of Vash don't think that's true and have to pull Kendal out of his HeroicBSOD, and special mention goes to a six year old child who is overjoyed simply because Kendal remembers him and his mom.

* Later, during the Tynan bossfight, Kendal continually puts everyone else's wellbeing over his own.

* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-19-32/ 1.19.32]]: Erin looks like he's freaking out as he analyzes Kendal's health to make sure he's not dead. If you look closely, his hands are shaking.

'''Comic:'''
* In the second half of Chapter 8, Kendal is uncharacteristically angry and emotional while fighting the chimera. It's made very clear that his rage is an expression of his traumatic birth, and that despite never asserting his personhood, he has kept feeling the negative emotions associated with the death of his city.
* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-8-18/ 1.8.18]]: After wrapping up the chimera with plants, Alinua softly touches its head and somberly apologizes to the creature for not knowing any other way to take away its suffering. She then, out of pity, drains the Life energy of the beast and releases it into the wild, [[MercyKill killing it]]. Half of the page is dedicated to a striking splash panel where Alinua is sitting, dejected, in front of the huge animal, who seems to be peacefully sleeping.
* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-10-29/ 1.10.29]]: After Jolon is dragged away by Gleicann, Falst solemnly asks Erin if he was lying to him when he said he could make him human. Erin, who's usually InnocentlyInsensitive, sympathizes with him and tactfully tells him why his plan wouldn't have worked. After this, Falst, dejected, tells him not to be sorry for him, calling his plan "a stupid idea".
* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-15-26/ 1.15.26]]: After Dainix is blackmailed into fighting Kendal in the Arena, the anger and guilt start tearing him apart, quite literally. His expression when he's facing Kendal is heart-breaking, and Kendal's response is just as bad.
** [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-15-34/ A few minutes into the fight]] and Dainix's physical deterioration gets even worse, until he seems to completely give up and falls to his knees in what looks like despair.
* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-19-4/ 1.19.4]]: Alinua, after trying her hardest to keep herself together, finally breaks down when Kendal is on death's door even as she's healing him. She's tearful, she desperately tells Kendal that he cannot do this to her, and she doesn't even react to Falst gently covering her up with a cape.
* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-19-32/ 1.19.32]]: Erin looks like he's freaking out as he analyzes Kendal's health to make sure he's not dead. If you look closely, his hands are shaking.
'''Main Characters' backstories:'''

* Alinua's backstory, full stop. Her parents abandoned her because of a curse that she thought she was carrying. Since she's a cloud elf, that probably meant dropping her off the edge of the Archipelago Nimbus. She was later adopted by rural folks, but when she learned she was a carrier for the Chimeric Plague, she ran away and lived in exile as a 10-year old. For a whole decade, she had trouble controlling her magic, and believed herself to be dangerous to everyone around her, and when we meet her, she had fully accepted her imminent death for a long time.
* A few parts of Falst's backstory are still a mystery, but the glimpses we have are already bad enough to compete with the others. Firstly, as a predator Ferin, he was ostracized for almost his entire life, often violently, leading him to live alone in the woods. He also seems to have an awful case of AbusiveParents, since in the glimpses of his memories we see in the beginning of Chapter 15, we see the sentence "You will find your own way if you truly are my son", meaning he might have had to fend for himself since he was very young. It got so bad that, during his introduction, he was desperate to become human. [[spoiler:Chapter 21 reveals that when Falst was a little kid, his mom became afflicted with cave corruption. His dad left to find some means of helping while Falst was left to care for her as the sickness progressed. Eventually though, his mom turned into a cave crawler that then tried to eat him. Falst would get away and hide from his monstrously transformed mother, starving for days before his dad returned and promptly killed her.]]
* While she doesn't act like it, Tess' early life was miserable: When she was young, she was captured by slavers, then sold by them to Galen Ruunaser, an Aseran emissary and Erin's father. Along the way, she was mistreated so badly that she remained Unsparked, meaning her free will would have essentially been robbed from her for the rest of her life. Only Erin and his mom seemed to treat her well, as the rest of Aseran society wouldn't even deign acknowledge that she was a slave, and Galen wasn't a particularly benevolent master. Thankfully, she was Chosen by the Sky and left Asera after saying goodbye to Erin, who she still regards fondly.
* In Chapter 19, we finally learn Dainix's backstory. During a hunt, he and his companions in the Ravvan were ambushed Obsidian Ghouls, powerful monsters impervious to conventional weapons and fire magic. The ones that weren't killed on the spot were severely outmatched, and when a Ghoul closed the distance on him and cut out his eye, his pain, rage, and developing SurvivorsGuilt led to the awakening of his Crucible form. His uncontrollable transformation into a fire demon may have destroyed the Ghouls, but also a good part of his village was caught in the crossfire. The Demon form was deemed so dangerous that he was indirectly exiled from his village, and a bad run-in with some bandits and the law got him unfairly imprisoned for Zuurith's gladiator ring.

%%This page is by no means complete, so feel free to add to it!

* A lot of Falst's backstory is still mysterious, but the glimpses we have are already bad enough to compete with the others: As a predator Ferin, he was ostracized during his entire life, often violently, leading him to live his entire life alone in the woods. He also seems to have an awful case of AbusiveParents, since in the glimpses of his memories we see in the beginning of Chapter 15, we see the sentence "Find your own way if you truly are my son", meaning he might have had to fend for himself since he was very young. It got so bad that, during his introduction, he was desperate to become human.

* * [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-8-18/ 1.8.18]]: After wrapping up the chimera with plants, Alinua softly touches its head and somberly apologizes to the creature for not knowing any other way to take away its suffering. She then, out of pity, drains the Life energy of the beast and releases it into the wild, [[MercyKill killing it]]. Half of the page is dedicated to a striking splash panel where Alinua is sitting, dejected, in front of the huge animal, who seems to be peacefully sleeping.

* [[https://comicaurora.com/aurora/1-10-29/ 1.10.29]]: After Jolon is dragged away by Gleicann, Falst solemnly asks Erin if Joon was lying to him. Erin, who's usually InnocentlyInsensitive, sympathizes with him and tactfully tells him why his plan wouldn't have worked. After this, Falst, dejected, tells him not to be sorry for him, calling his plan "a stupid idea".

!Main Characters' backstories:

* Kendal spends the second chapter (and most of the story) processing the aftermath of what just happened to Vash and the existential crisis that comes with it.
* At the beginning of Chapter 3, Kendal fights a giant stone golem from his city, and we see how much his thoughts have been eating away at him in the last day or so since he started existing.
* Alinua's backstory, just full stop. Her parents abandoned her because of a curse that she thought she was carrying. For years, she had trouble controlling her magic, and believed herself to be dangerous to everyone around her.
* In Chapter 19, we finally learn Dainix's backstory. Dainix's uncontrollable transformation into a fire demon was so dangerous that he was indirectly exiled from his village, and a bad run-in with some bandits and the law got him unfairly imprisoned for Zuurith's gladiator ring.

Sad moments in ''Webcomic/{{Aurora|2019}}''.

'''Spoilers are off for moments pages. You have been warned!'''

%This page is by no means complete, so feel free to add to it!%