TYETEL ZANAS

Name: “Starhunter” Tyetel Zanas

Trivia: Zanas’s surname Tyetel can be roughly translated to “star gatherer”, and is rumoured to be the reason Director Dernol originally thought of recruiting Zanas as TotES’s talent scout.

Nationality: Roete Archipelago

Role: spin-off main cast

Trivia: Zanas and Benio play out as Hano’s main rivals in Blood of the Johden (BotJ). But because of the secrecy kept around his actual role in the plot and its apparent difficulty causing Zanas to have no choice but to cast himself, there has been much speculation that it may contain major spoilers. For this reason, Zanas is the most closely followed and discussed character in the BotJ fandom. How much fuel Zanas himself has anonymously thrown to the headcanon fire, is currently still unknown.

Personality: gifted with talents aplenty, Zanas is used to always getting what he wants. But one step ahead of everyone else is also a very lonely place to be.

 

"But I'm not a stranger, am I?"

And now on to the fun facts.

Fun Fact #1

Zanas’s surname Tyetel is also used in the drama as his Johden battlename. As the story goes, young Zanas requested his first rifle from his father in order to “shoot down a star to take a better look at it”, thus earning himself the nickname of “star hunter”. Gossip among the set’s staff has it that this episode was inspired by Zanas’s real experience: as a child, having heard the saying “aim for the stars”, Zanas took it quite literally. Skeptical fans counter that Zanas would have never shared such an embarrassing memory, and the whole thing was made up by the Director as a play on Zanas’s surname.

Fun Fact #2

Around the set and the fandom, Zanas has become widely associated with the renewed popularity of the infamous Drunken Buck Song, to the point it has virtually become his character’s theme song. Of course, this is all much to Zanas’s own displeasure. It so happens that one day during rehearsals, Zanas started humming the tune, startling Frej who found his singing extremely creepy. Neither realized the cameras were rolling, but the Director decided to keep the scene, thinking it added to the character’s edginess.

Trivia: Despite having a catchy beat, the Drunken Buck Song is actually quite a sad song relaying Oren Lyon’s dying speech during the aftermath of his disastrous 4th month Campaign. The original lyrics are in elfarden, a language which nowadays hardly anybody except elfar can speak, so while the tune was maintained, every region made up new lyrics for it in their dialect. It’s said an elfar heard it sung in a tavern and, upon recognizing the melody but unable to understand the jumbled text, commented that the singer sounded “as drunk as a buck”, thus originating the song’s name. Johden delivered its own variation, probably one of the most terrible ones as the lyrics are supposed to be in elfen and not johdenden. The Johden use a very messy form of common that only vaguely resembles that spoken across the rest of the Empire, so what made Zanas’s singing so weird was that he didn’t actually understand the lyrics and was just imitating the sounds, randomly using the most similar johdenden words as they came to mind. To this day, he actually believes the song is about a dude who asked out his date for a fish-based dinner but got rejected.

Fun Fact #3

To the eyes of attentive fans, Zanas’s everyday outfit bears a striking resemblance with the costume he wore during the Light Festival episode. In the drama, the costume was supposed to have been lent to him by Benio for the festival, but in truth, they were Zanas’s real clothes. Right before the shooting, the costume that had been prepared for him was ruined in an accident, so Zanas suggested they just shoot with whatever he was wearing. While some critics were quick to comment on the anachronistic discrepancies of this outfit, it was a huge hit among the fans and marked the start of Zanas’s overnight popularity spike. He was nicknamed “Prince” and there were heated speculations he would turn out to be a long-lost royal heir by the drama’s end. Amidst tears of frustration and unpaid overtime, the dressmakers remade all Zanas’s costumes to match his character’s newfound sense of fashion.

 

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