Mithos Yggdrasil (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
antreegonist) wrote2011-01-26 10:27 pm
antreegonist) wrote2011-01-26 10:27 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Updated memory/skill log is here, but THAT IS NOT QUITE THE POINT OF THIS POST. The point of this post is to ramble until a) I get my thoughts on amnesiac Mithos together, and/or b) someone tells me to shut up.
So Mithos in Aather is still very much a blank slate! I purposely started him with a memory that contains nothing of his canon situation/personality; the other memory he's earned back is, by happy accident, the same. They give him a little to work with (he has to protect his Exsphere because it's dangerous to remove it; he comes from a place that has monsters too.) But he doesn't know who he was, and has to come to a fumbling understanding of who he is right now. Aather and the people/experiences he has in it are all that shape him at the moment! It's an important time for him, because sooner or later the strength of these Aatherventures will go up against some HELLA CRAZYMAKING MEMORIES, awww yeah.
PERSONALITY NOTES
- So who is he now? He's Faith! It's actually the most appropriate name I can think of for him ever, because faith defines the person he started out as! In canon, he's originally the hero. He originally has faith that people can change for the better; he has faith that he and his party can change the world and remove discrimination against half-elves through their actions; he is a believer in the hidden good in everyone and the potential to change for the better. Later that faith gets shattered horribly and he gives the world a gigantic FUCK YOU then becomes the villain for four thousand years, but without having lived the experiences that broke him he's regressed back to who he originally was. At his core he is a believer who wants to help all the things!
- He needs to be needed; he is a type who invests in other people and finds his purpose in helping them. He is a giver! Most of his startup stuff has wound up with him being Aather's fussy doctor figure for now and he is completely okay with this + all the Knight duties because it means he has jobs and reasons for being there. He goes crazy just sitting around idle! He can't do it.
- the inequality of Sterling vs. the other teams chafes him a lot, too, and right now he's juggling obeying the Persona's rule about keeping life hard for norms along with a real annoyance that the norms can't start out with the same amenities as the Knights. His quest system probably solidifes like so: if asked for important basic stuff (like soap!) his quests will be fairly easy and a little ridiculous (BUCKETS ON HEADS.) If asked for more frivolous stuff he'll give harder quests.
- Faith gets smacked around a lot since these are beginning days and he has no fighty skills back yet. That said, you will never see him complain about being in pain or beg off a task because of it. He will explain the problem so people get it, but he won't use it as an excuse. He always has to feel like he is pulling his weight one way or another, and that means no slacking! It's a strong personal drive and also a faith in himself to be able to pull through crap one way or another. He just has to figure out the right angle to work at something. Mithos with no memories is...amazingly self-confident. In canon, his optimism is impermanent and scrapes away very quickly, but in Aather it's being bolstered and reinforced. MORE ON THIS LATER.
- He's kind of a jesusy SAVE EVERYTHING type, but he's smart enough to learn when and who to apply it to. He's incredibly naive in a way--he actually went to negotiate with the monsters on his first trip out at dangertime, fff. Once he learns something/someone can't be reasoned with, though, he's perfectly willing to hurt and kill it if it poses a danger to himself or other folks.
- His other huge flaw is 'being unable to take back mistakes and admit that he's wrong,' and I'm honestly still thinking about how to convey this. It's not as simple as not saying sorry if he fucks up and hurts someone in a fight or something--he apologizes for things! It's just a very bull-ahead attitude thing. It's more like...once he's picked a principle he won't deviate from it anymore. Like if he firmly decided WERECAMELS ARE VICIOUS MINDLESS BRUTES and later it turned out they were sentient and ripping your face off was just their version of a joyful hello...he'd just go on thinking they were vicious mindless brutes. Change is hard.
- Sera already mentioned that Lloyd and Mithos have core personalities that are shockingly alike. Their being bros is the most hilarious thing, especially because Faith is beginning to count Fetch as a very stable positive point in his Aather experience. One day Fetch will get the memory of killing Faith or Faith will get the memory of being killed by Fetch, and they'll be torn between WHAT? and WE'RE ALREADY FRIENDS, NO TAKEBACKS!
SPEAKIN' OF MEMORIES...
- Mithos has four thousand years' worth of memories, but they can be split into three distinct sets.
SET A is from age 1 to about age 15--they're his memories of growing up as a shunned child, of getting kicked out of his village with his sister, of his journey to save the world and be a hero. It ends with the death of his sister and him going insane.
SET B covers a 4000-year span in which he sets up all sorts of methods to Bring Sis Back. He turn people into soulless automatons in the name of equality, and manipulates people's religion and breeding. He floats in isolated ennui while fucking up the world for his own selfish reasons and losing the ability to care about killing people.
SET C is meeting Lloyd and the party, who overturn his stagnant system and offer him the chance to change things for the better; he's unable to change and gives way to them only by dying.
Each set covers a vastly different sort of life, so Mithos's memories can send him down this huge maze of fascinating paths! Likely he will get a sense of disconnect, too, once he starts trying to reconcile memories from all three periods. It is also possible he will try to deny his own crazy and not become that guy! Who knows.
- There is a possibility--like a 90% chance--that he will break at some point. Nearly all of of his memories are objectively bad and are in some way about PEOPLE BEING CYNICAL BITTER RACIST ASSHOLES or HIMSELF BEING A CYNICAL BITTER RACIST ASSHOLE or both. The amnesia regressed him to his strong core hero personality, but the cracks from his unknown experiences are already there.
On the other hand, Aather is giving him the chance to be in an environment where, gasp, everyone lives with each other and gets along pretty okay! So that preemptively offsets his issues and gives him a hell of a lot more people to care about than he ever had in canon (he latches much harder onto people than onto ideals/concepts.) So it will be interesting to see where that goes.
- I deliberately marked his sister's death for receiving later rather than sooner, because it's the thing that drives him over the edge and makes him lose faith completely. If he got it too early in Aather, it would just overwhelm everything and he'd be railroaded by it into the almost the exact same person he was in canon and gosh that would be unconflicted and boring.
- That said, getting betrayed by someone in Aather would start to crack him in a different way, even if he didn't have his memories :') Betrayal of his faith is such a huge deal for him.
PHYSICAL/AGE NOTES
- There is no getting around it, Mithos is four thousand years old while remaining very much a teenager. This applies now; this applies to his canon self; this will apply no matter how many memories he gets back at Aather. It's not an issue of his physical age, so much--it's that 4000 years ago he froze himself at a certain point and refused to change himself anymore (instead he made the world change to suit his vision, derp.) So he won't actually act more mature with his memories--it's more likely his attitude will regress.
- In canon his body is quite inhuman. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, he changes his age at will. In Aather, his body is human, but is not at all used to working at human standard. Hence he sleeps and eats relatively little right now, because he doesn't actually feel like he needs more than he gets. This will adjust.
So Mithos in Aather is still very much a blank slate! I purposely started him with a memory that contains nothing of his canon situation/personality; the other memory he's earned back is, by happy accident, the same. They give him a little to work with (he has to protect his Exsphere because it's dangerous to remove it; he comes from a place that has monsters too.) But he doesn't know who he was, and has to come to a fumbling understanding of who he is right now. Aather and the people/experiences he has in it are all that shape him at the moment! It's an important time for him, because sooner or later the strength of these Aatherventures will go up against some HELLA CRAZYMAKING MEMORIES, awww yeah.
PERSONALITY NOTES
- So who is he now? He's Faith! It's actually the most appropriate name I can think of for him ever, because faith defines the person he started out as! In canon, he's originally the hero. He originally has faith that people can change for the better; he has faith that he and his party can change the world and remove discrimination against half-elves through their actions; he is a believer in the hidden good in everyone and the potential to change for the better. Later that faith gets shattered horribly and he gives the world a gigantic FUCK YOU then becomes the villain for four thousand years, but without having lived the experiences that broke him he's regressed back to who he originally was. At his core he is a believer who wants to help all the things!
- He needs to be needed; he is a type who invests in other people and finds his purpose in helping them. He is a giver! Most of his startup stuff has wound up with him being Aather's fussy doctor figure for now and he is completely okay with this + all the Knight duties because it means he has jobs and reasons for being there. He goes crazy just sitting around idle! He can't do it.
- the inequality of Sterling vs. the other teams chafes him a lot, too, and right now he's juggling obeying the Persona's rule about keeping life hard for norms along with a real annoyance that the norms can't start out with the same amenities as the Knights. His quest system probably solidifes like so: if asked for important basic stuff (like soap!) his quests will be fairly easy and a little ridiculous (BUCKETS ON HEADS.) If asked for more frivolous stuff he'll give harder quests.
- Faith gets smacked around a lot since these are beginning days and he has no fighty skills back yet. That said, you will never see him complain about being in pain or beg off a task because of it. He will explain the problem so people get it, but he won't use it as an excuse. He always has to feel like he is pulling his weight one way or another, and that means no slacking! It's a strong personal drive and also a faith in himself to be able to pull through crap one way or another. He just has to figure out the right angle to work at something. Mithos with no memories is...amazingly self-confident. In canon, his optimism is impermanent and scrapes away very quickly, but in Aather it's being bolstered and reinforced. MORE ON THIS LATER.
- He's kind of a jesusy SAVE EVERYTHING type, but he's smart enough to learn when and who to apply it to. He's incredibly naive in a way--he actually went to negotiate with the monsters on his first trip out at dangertime, fff. Once he learns something/someone can't be reasoned with, though, he's perfectly willing to hurt and kill it if it poses a danger to himself or other folks.
- His other huge flaw is 'being unable to take back mistakes and admit that he's wrong,' and I'm honestly still thinking about how to convey this. It's not as simple as not saying sorry if he fucks up and hurts someone in a fight or something--he apologizes for things! It's just a very bull-ahead attitude thing. It's more like...once he's picked a principle he won't deviate from it anymore. Like if he firmly decided WERECAMELS ARE VICIOUS MINDLESS BRUTES and later it turned out they were sentient and ripping your face off was just their version of a joyful hello...he'd just go on thinking they were vicious mindless brutes. Change is hard.
- Sera already mentioned that Lloyd and Mithos have core personalities that are shockingly alike. Their being bros is the most hilarious thing, especially because Faith is beginning to count Fetch as a very stable positive point in his Aather experience. One day Fetch will get the memory of killing Faith or Faith will get the memory of being killed by Fetch, and they'll be torn between WHAT? and WE'RE ALREADY FRIENDS, NO TAKEBACKS!
SPEAKIN' OF MEMORIES...
- Mithos has four thousand years' worth of memories, but they can be split into three distinct sets.
SET A is from age 1 to about age 15--they're his memories of growing up as a shunned child, of getting kicked out of his village with his sister, of his journey to save the world and be a hero. It ends with the death of his sister and him going insane.
SET B covers a 4000-year span in which he sets up all sorts of methods to Bring Sis Back. He turn people into soulless automatons in the name of equality, and manipulates people's religion and breeding. He floats in isolated ennui while fucking up the world for his own selfish reasons and losing the ability to care about killing people.
SET C is meeting Lloyd and the party, who overturn his stagnant system and offer him the chance to change things for the better; he's unable to change and gives way to them only by dying.
Each set covers a vastly different sort of life, so Mithos's memories can send him down this huge maze of fascinating paths! Likely he will get a sense of disconnect, too, once he starts trying to reconcile memories from all three periods. It is also possible he will try to deny his own crazy and not become that guy! Who knows.
- There is a possibility--like a 90% chance--that he will break at some point. Nearly all of of his memories are objectively bad and are in some way about PEOPLE BEING CYNICAL BITTER RACIST ASSHOLES or HIMSELF BEING A CYNICAL BITTER RACIST ASSHOLE or both. The amnesia regressed him to his strong core hero personality, but the cracks from his unknown experiences are already there.
On the other hand, Aather is giving him the chance to be in an environment where, gasp, everyone lives with each other and gets along pretty okay! So that preemptively offsets his issues and gives him a hell of a lot more people to care about than he ever had in canon (he latches much harder onto people than onto ideals/concepts.) So it will be interesting to see where that goes.
- I deliberately marked his sister's death for receiving later rather than sooner, because it's the thing that drives him over the edge and makes him lose faith completely. If he got it too early in Aather, it would just overwhelm everything and he'd be railroaded by it into the almost the exact same person he was in canon and gosh that would be unconflicted and boring.
- That said, getting betrayed by someone in Aather would start to crack him in a different way, even if he didn't have his memories :') Betrayal of his faith is such a huge deal for him.
PHYSICAL/AGE NOTES
- There is no getting around it, Mithos is four thousand years old while remaining very much a teenager. This applies now; this applies to his canon self; this will apply no matter how many memories he gets back at Aather. It's not an issue of his physical age, so much--it's that 4000 years ago he froze himself at a certain point and refused to change himself anymore (instead he made the world change to suit his vision, derp.) So he won't actually act more mature with his memories--it's more likely his attitude will regress.
- In canon his body is quite inhuman. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, he changes his age at will. In Aather, his body is human, but is not at all used to working at human standard. Hence he sleeps and eats relatively little right now, because he doesn't actually feel like he needs more than he gets. This will adjust.