I started drafting this like. over three years ago? Lol.

Anyway, I had seen some tweets a while back about how Giffca and Skrimir would be difficult to add to the gacha because powercreep dictates new units strong but Gallian culture dictates the king (in this case, it's supposed to still be Caineghis) is the strongest, and god forbid heroes be lore-inaccurate.

Putting aside established canon, since they don’t care about it, and putting aside ‘stats aren’t entirely diegetic’, which solves this ‘problem’ but is 1) unprovable and more importantly 2) a boring answer, I had arrived at the simple and elegant conclusion that Giffca, at the very least in their youth if not also in the present, is simply stronger than Caineghis.

Some history/context before I talk about Caineghis and Giffca’s experience. Most of what we know comes from the first few pages of Tellius Recollections Vol 1, so I’d recommend reading through those if you want to learn more (not that there's much more to be learned 😔).

On page 11 of Tellius Recollection Volume One, we’re told that Gallia is mostly “a collection of scattered tribal groups of various sizes” (Zarzi, the capital, is stated to be a city, and is probably where most of the Crimean immigrants (which make up a fifth of the country’s population) can be found), and that “from time to time, these groups acknowledge the most powerful of them all as king”.

So, Gallia has the strongest person become king. This is common knowledge and what has driven the concerned posts about the viability of Giffca and Skirmir in heroes, but it's always good to check to see if these things are stated in the text. I’ve touched on it before but this concept probably mostly comes from the country having to fight for its independence, and having a leader that can return from the battlefield alive and not have to be replaced every few months is generally a good idea.

In the roughly 300 years between when the peace treaty with Begnoin was signed following the end of the Second Gallian War and the formation of the Laguz Alliance, Gallia was not at war. Regardless of the exact amount, they had to have gone through a decent number of kings by the time the games roll around, and it would be expected for the King Selection Process to have drifted a little bit from its origins.

Among other things, this means that the exact reasons for the whole The Strongest Becomes King thing has started to fade from public consciousness. It’s a tradition, sure, and they’ll continue to carry it on, sure, but because the reason for the tradition went away it’s not like people fully remember why they’re doing it anymore. It’s become more of a spectacle or festival than a necessary part of the nation’s survival, so it’s a lot less serious than it used to be.

So, what is it? How do these cats strut their stuff and prove they’ve got it?

It’s probably wrestling. I’m open to it being some other combat sport thing so much as that it’s clear that it’s some kind of competition of physical strength, but I like the idea of it being wrestling over, say, mma or boxing because it’s something where 1) you use your whole body (where they show off all of what they’ve got) and 2) isn’t about breaking your opponent’s face open or otherwise knocking them unconscious (giving your next king brain damage is probably bad). It could be judo or something similar, I guess. Don’t really have that much of a preference so long as it fills those two conditions. Either way, it’s become a literal (non-lethal, all-in-good-fun) battle for the throne.

On paper, but I’ll get to that.

And when I likened it to a festival earlier? It has absolutely turned into a festival, because who doesn’t love to grab some good food with their friends and sit down and watch the most muscular people in Gallia rub their steamy, sweaty bodies together as they try to pin each other to the ground?

*ahem*

Everyone loves a good festival is what I’m saying. It happens a couple times in their lifetime, so since it’s not a life-or-death situation anymore, you might as well go all out.

The basic chain of events is

1) The current monarch announces their intent to step down in the near future

2) Whenever it’s next reasonably possible (ie. not in the middle of a war), the country shifts into festival mode

3) Zarzi hosts the competition, though people take the chance to celebrate all across the land

4) Someone wins and they do the whole ascend-to-the-throne ceremony stuff, though the previous monarch probably sticks around in an advisor role to make sure they can like. not burn everything down

“Okay but Skrimir is considered to be next in line for the throne during RD despite Caineghis retiring after RD???”

I think this is a reflection of things Caineghis and Giffca sought to change after their own experience, but I’ll get to that closer to the end.

Skrimir is well-known because he’s the king’s nephew, very popular, and his strength is readily apparent (remember: numbers aren’t real unless they suit the argument you’re trying to make). While people could (and will) try to beat him at Extreme Gallian Wrestling, basically nobody expects anyone to pose a serious threat to his chances at the throne. Which isn’t to say that he’s now suddenly literally the strongest person in Gallia (Giffca, for example, could totally still launch him into orbit), it’s just that none of the people who could beat him have any interest in the throne.

(Incidentally, this also addresses the concerns mentioned in the tweets that drove me to write this, but I'm not done quite yet)

On paper anyone can sign up for the wrestling competition, and a lot of people do, but in the years leading up to a monarch’s retirement there become clear favorites to win, and like how that happened with Skrimir, it likewise happened with Giffca and Caineghis.

Caineghis appealed more to the younger crowd, like Skrimir. He was hotheaded, passionate, and spoke to their hearts, and is described as having been somehow even less controllable than his nephew. We don’t really know much about Giffca in the past or the present 😩 but he’s shown to be very serious and grounded, which would likely have attracted the attention of Gallia’s ruling class instead.

“There’s a ruling class?” you may ask.

Perhaps that’s not the perfect term, but yes. In Chapter 9 of PoR, Caineghis mentions the “elder statesman” of Gallia being an obstacle to him offering Elincia his full support. Though still a monarch, Gallia’s king is evidently far from an autocrat, and there is some equivalent to a noble class (likely the leaders of the “scattered tribal groups”, though given what Gallians value, war heroes or their equivalent are probably included too) that maintains some amount of sway in the country’s politics.

That brief aside aside, I think the ruling class (king included) of contemporary Gallia, would generally agree that simply having the strongest person in Gallia become king would be both impractical for governance (letting literally anybody walk up and claim the throne sounds like a great way for your country to crash and burn) and very impractical to actually figure out. Are you going to test every single person in the country? How much time would that take? How many resources? It’d be like herding cats!

So, while random people can still join and throw down if they wanted in on the fun, I think that the outcome (read: intended victor) is a thing that the ruling class determines ahead of time, with the tournament used to settle any disagreements should they not be in majority support of any one individual. There’s no way they’d believe their country could survive if they let any random guy run it, so, while the matches weren’t outright rigged (they'd likely be choosing someone strong anyway, so there wasn't a huge need for match-fixing), the tourney was more of an exhibition match that served as a way for the new king to win the approval of the citizens and show that he had the strength they were looking for in a leader.

The intended outcome would also be an open secret among anyone who would make it close to the top, since any runners-up would be prime picks for advisors or similar positions (such as succeeding tribal leaders that are also looking to retire) and as a result, be recognized by those currently in power and approached about their future job prospects.

EDIT: I'm very smart and totally know how to both read and retain information from the two whole paragraphs TR1 gives us. They flat out say that Solhaut (Gallia's first king) was elected, which is more or less what I'm saying the ruling class still does. Gallia has never been genuinely threatened since its independence, so I don't think there's much of a reason for this system to have fallen out of practice.

With all that in mind, I can finally start getting to the point.

Between a younger Caineghis and a younger Giffca, it’s pretty clear to me that Giffca would be selected to be the next king. We don’t really know anything about him. At all. But that’s a clear step up from “worse than Skrimir”, so. Yeah. I think it’s fairly easy for us to envision his younger self to be something like a more grumpy or gruff Ranulf and the ruling class could easily see someone like that being able to grow into a good king capable of making good decisions and leading Gallia in a good direction.

Sounds pretty great, right? Well... I think that an adolescent Giffca noticed that the people around him were rolling out the red carpet for him to be next in line for the throne after the current king retired, and he just didn’t want any of that.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to serve Gallia, but couldn’t someone else sit on the throne? Being king sounded like it would suck. You’d have to sit around leading a country, you’d have no real vacation days to speak of, you'd become a target for entities that sought to harm Gallia… aside from living in the spotlight —if that was even something you wanted— there were no real perks to the job, especially in a country like Gallia where it gave you less power than it did basically anywhere else.

He liked his current job a lot (assistant to the head archivist, which he didn’t realize he was set up with so he could interact with a lot of ministers in preparation for his time on the throne (headcanon alert btw, though since I’m giving him any sort of characterization, I guess that should be a given :P)), and it’s not like anyone ever told him he had to win, had they? He did run a bit cooler than most Gallians, but he liked his freedom all the same.

And so, not realizing the ways in which he had been told to play along (not that anybody expected him not to, since he had never openly said anything close to “hey I don’t really want to do this”), he made it to the finals, put on a good show, and in front of the whole country, in front of their country’s patron (Dheginsea, who was invited as a guest of honor), he threw his match against Caineghis.

And why wouldn’t he? Caineghis was a naturally popular person, and he seemed plenty eager to lead (two traits Giffca sorely lacked), so he’d make a great king, and Giffca could go on with his life, and they’d both be happy.

...Right?

Problem was, Giffca and Caineghis had clashed plenty of times already (Caineghis was the second choice, so they crossed paths plenty of times) so on top of knowing what the plan was, Caineghis also knew that he shouldn’t be able to win against Giffca. They were fairly closely matched in raw strength, but Giffca was much smarter about the way he used it (not to mention that Caineghis was very prone to letting the blood rush to his head). He knew the throne was being forced upon him, and, while he was hotheaded, he had enough self-awareness to know that he wasn’t prepared for this job, which made it all the more baffling that Giffca, of all people, would think him fit for it.

If you had asked Caineghis, he honestly thought that Giffca was a great choice to be king, a far better one than he was. Giffca had everything Caineghis lacked and everything a king needed: he was intelligent, he spoke with clarity, he held is head high, and, until now, he was always just. He was firm in his convictions but knew when he needed to bend a little lest he break, and, in their only similarity, he clearly loved Gallia above all else, so... why? He couldn’t understand why Giffca would push the throne onto someone so unfitting for it. Caineghis knew he was hotheaded, he knew he couldn’t keep his cool, and, even before it was decided that it should be Giffca, he didn’t feel like he was the right person for the job.

They both believed themselves unfit for the throne, and Giffca had acted faster than Caineghis and was able to run away from it. Up until that point, Caineghis had honestly liked Giffca a lot, he held a lot of respect for him, and he... couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand why Giffca would go so far to avoid the throne. As he stood there, declared victor, declared king in front of the whole world, he knew he had lost to Giffca. At what, he didn’t know, but he had undeniably lost.

He couldn’t abdicate. He couldn’t walk away. And in the coming months, strangled by his own authority and responsibilities, he started to understand at least a little why Giffca hadn’t wanted this, but he was never able to understand why he didn’t just say so.

Giffca was able to escape notice in the bureaucratic mess around Caineghis’ sudden and unexpected ascent, but Caineghis never forgot. In the back of his mind, as he was busy with learning the ins and outs of being a monarch, he was always thinking of a way to find out why.

After a year or two, using Giffca’s second-place finish as a pretense, his authority as a king as a cudgel, and Giffca’s match-throwing as blackmail for good measure, Caineghis appointed Giffca as his right-hand man.

Their relationship from then on was rocky, to say the least. Giffca felt some guilt over what he did to Caineghis, but also felt that forcing him into a job he had been actively trying to avoid was excessive, and Caineghis still felt personally betrayed by Giffca’s actions during the finals match. They were civil with each other for the purposes of not sending the country they both loved so much down a path of destruction, but it took considerable time for them to come to understand each other and stop baring their fangs behind closed doors.

By the time they realized their anxieties about sitting on the throne (which is what lied at the core of their disputes) had been the same, they had both grown into their roles in the government very, very well, and while it still wasn’t something either could do alone, they weren’t really doing it alone anymore, were they?

Since the experience was so miserable for the two of them, it’s only natural that they resolved to do better for whoever was next (as we know, it ended up being Skrimir). I don’t think that they sought to completely upend the whole Fun Wrestling Get Together Festival thing, but with the benefit of hindsight they were able to see that most of their problems were caused by a lack of communication. They made sure that Skrimir actually 100% wanted to lead a country and, while they were at it, made sure Ranulf actually wanted to be his advisor/babysitter as well; they were openly given the freedom of choice instead of being expected to play along like good little kittens.

There wasn’t much beyond that that needed to be changed, though I think that it’s fair to assume that choosing to have Skrimir lead the military campaign in RD Act 3 was a way to have him prove his worth to those who cared (of course, this also included Caineghis and Giffca) before they progressed to the wrestling thing and couldn’t back out. It wasn’t necessarily as a way to manufacture a hero, but it’s not like it’d hurt for him to be one either, y’know?

I guess one last thing to talk about (since I’m in the general neighborhood of the topic) is how, like how the campaign in Act 3 was a humbling experience for Skrimir and a key point in his life where he realized he needed to change course one way or another, the shitshow surrounding Caineghis becoming king was an equally humbling experience for him (and eventually led to him becoming the kind of person capable of having “behaving rationally” listed as their talent in their Tellius Recollection Vol 1 profile).

It wasn’t as if his life was free of conflict before, but it’s easy to imagine that it was mostly smooth sailing. People liked him, he liked them back, and that usually stopped any problems before they started, but with Giffca throwing the match and everything that followed, Caineghis had hit a wall he couldn’t even begin to grasp the shape of.

I’ll repeat myself a little, but from Caineghis’ perspective, Giffca had done a total 180. The people of Gallia (and especially those who approached him) were generally a very straightforward bunch and whenever someone had a problem with Caineghis, they would use their words or their fists to figure it out. Giffca never gave him the chance, and that was a massive wakeup call.

Taking everything at face value got him into this situation, and if he hoped to stand up to those who (unlike Giffca) actually sought to bring harm to Gallia, he’d need to adapt to a world of deceit, lies, and half-truths. He had never needed to stop and analyze someone’s actions, words, or intentions to the degree which he had to with Giffca, but now that he was king, now that he was responsible for an entire nation of people, could he ever afford to be that careless again?