Marriage and family names

[AmemeAmeklin]

An exception to this is Aymeric, whose surname is de Borel (so presumably his family name), yet he too was revealed during HW's story as also being illegitimate (although [...] Hence it's likely Aymeric was given his mother's name as a way of sweeping proof of Thordan's indiscretion under the rug.

Correction here: Aymeric was adopted by the Borel family, which consisted of an older couple who had been unable to bear children of their own. I believe at the moment he lives alone in the family mansion with an elderly retainer (seen during the dinner date) and, according to a source I have yet to find but hear about a lot, a very unfriendly cat.

It is not certain who his birth mother was, as far as I know.

[Iscah]

...and, according to a source I have yet to find but hear about a lot, a very unfriendly cat.

I’ve also only heard about his cat from other people mentioning it. I thought I’d read it in the lorebook a while ago, couldn’t find the information again when I went looking for it (nothing in his profile), but just came across it now while checking something else - and it wasn’t about Aymeric at all, but Reyner. So I guess what happened is that I vaguely remembered the line about someone owning a cat, saw people talking about Aymeric having a cat, and connected the two.

So unless there is an actual source elsewhere, there’s a chance that other people have done the same thing? And then enough others take their word for it, and suddenly everyone knows that Aymeric has a cat without a single canon source.

For that matter, it’s not clear that “cats” as we know them exist in the game, I think. Even the cute little minions are “coeurls” and the lorebook’s actual wording is that Reyner has “an elderly feline that he once kept in the hold of a warship”. So I doubt it was a full-size coeurl (though perhaps a chance it was a trained war beast) but still, it seems more likely they’re just avoiding the term “cat” even though I think the sentence would read better if they used it.

I also vaguely remember a quest item called a Lion Medal that was described as depicting “a legendary beast with a head that somewhat resembles a Miqo’te” which seemed clever at the time, but not so much when there are several other actual cat-like creatures in the world - including ones we’d already encountered at that point.