Moonbot's 411 (Alternatively entitled as "app for rpg xxx")
[NAME] Most commonly goes by "Placido" (technically he's "Placido Ripresa"); his codename is “Aporia” and heaven knows what his original name was before his human self joined the old ppl bad end gang.
[CANON] The really bad spin-off of a spin-off featuring a world where everyone is obsessed with card games to the point where medical doctors battle viruses by defeating them in a children's card game Yuugiou 5D’s
[IMAGES]
But for a very basic tl;dr... Placido is more or less the insane robotic manifestation of the despair of some guy who came from 200 years in future who is then sent back to the past and we only find this out maybe in the last ten episodes of the whole fucking anime.
[CANON POINT] Episode 147.
… AND THEN APORIA DIES. (again)
After flinging his half-circle moon bar duel disk at Yuusei’s D-runner, Aporia dies for the third time (if we're tallying Placido's ripped-apart-in-half death as one), even though he's more or less a cybernetic body created by Z-ONE and instilled with artificial memories of his human self-the real Aporia currently being a corpse in a capsule floating around somewhere in the Ark Cradle. So then Aporia dies and the last thing he sees is Yuusei and the tearful Rua before he closes his eyes for one last time and then-BOOM. He gets pulled from canon right here.
If we want to take the anime standpoint and count alter egos as separate characters (C'MON WE ALL LOVE TO DO THAT), then Placido's story ends at episode 140 when he goes and fuses with his other selves and becomes Aporia. However, Placido is then Aporia. Placido = Aporia. They are technically the same person.
[GENDER] 100% synthetic robot. I mean... male.
[AGE] On the chronologically consistent timeline, Aporia lived 200 years in the future from the present day 5D's world and died as a human around 80~90 (in the future). Placido himself is the manifestation of the human Aporia as a young adult, and though the anime never pinpoints a specific age for him the way they did for the protagonists, Placido has the physical resemblance of a man in their early twenties, so I'm going to say he's 22.
[PERSONALITY]
99% of all Yu-gi-oh! villains follow the same theme: They dress inappropriately feminine, have a crazy laugh, and if they're attractive enough, their background story will reveal a Freudian excuse that moves them from the 'batshit insane evil' into the 'well-intentioned extremist' bin. If not, they become cannon fodder and get a whole paragraph stub dedicated to them on the wikia.
Enter Placido, the antagonistic big bad wannabe of season two. Initially, he follows down the same route as every other classy villain and does the whole gig-he plots, he verbalizes the destruction of the protagonist through means of vaguely ominous events-to-come, he laughs maniacally, etc. When Placido's not stalking watching Yuusei and the Signers-tachi from his big screen and making mysterious foreshadows to obscure things, he’s generally pretty serious, pretty apathetic and has a thick air of haughtiness hanging around him. As the plot begins to unfold, more of Placido's personality is revealed as are the interesting quirks that make up his character.
"This man doesn’t need the loser’s sympathy. If you tried to help him, he would have his pride hurt. That’s how a man of his caliber is.” ~Jose; episode 110
At the core, Placido is an embodiment of pride. For a good majority of the anime, his personality basically switches between bouts of extreme arrogance and irrational indigence, all coated with sinister laughter the way chocolate syrup covers an ice cream cone. Placido's prideful temperament has led him to be impatient, short-tempered and disrespectful which is evident in, like, virtually every single one of his interactions. He has a pretty low tolerance level for bullshit and a tendency to instigate fights over any small disagreement or taunt. Placido is also prone to shove his sword into the face of anyone who even hints to undermine his authority in compensation for god knows what. He's the kind of guy who his subordinates (note: he only has one) live in fear of.
Placido is a religious nutjob. He's convinced that his mission is rewrite the faulty history by delivering destruction onto Neo Domino City on behalf of his god's will. He's a gigantic misanthrope, both viewing humankind as inferior and holding an intense loathing for them as they were responsible for the ruined future his human counterpart lived in. I like to compare his beliefs to Calvinism, specifically predestination-the concept that a person's future is already predetermined by a higher force and that no matter how hard they try in life to change the outcome of their fate, escape from their destiny is impossible. Placido is obsessed with this concept, utterly convinced that human beings by themselves are incapable of preventing the apocalyptic future from occurring and that divine intervention is the only hope for mankind.
"All people will continue to dance with fate. It is a dance they haven't been able to stop since the beginning of time. Yuusei, have you seen a bee's dance before? That's right, a bee dances beautifully. Through that dance, they let their friends know of the honey's location. Of course, they don't dance of their own accord. In truth, they only carry out the mission assigned to them by fate. All humans can do is dance their dance of fate until they die! Now, dance a dance more beautiful than a bee's, Yuusei!" ~ Placido; episode 109
While we're on the subject of Yuusei... what spurred the moonbot to make crushing Yuusei the focal point in his life was Placido's failure to get over his pride and accept the fact a human had outdone him. Couple his misanthropy with being repeatedly robo-emasculated by Yuusei, who did everything from impeding the completion of the infinity circuit to brutally ravaging him in a duel, and you get a pretty good idea of why Placido was possessed on killing crabface to the point where it became neurotic stalking with undertones of homo-eroticism.
But misguided as he may be, Placido holds a very genuine and firm conviction in that his actions are necessary and pro bono. He takes his job damn seriously, although being a bad guy in a children's anime, Placido's perseverance isn't emphasized as dramatically nor is it shown in a good light like with that of the protagonists. Yet his determination is so strong that he's actually able to throw his pride in the backseat every now and then if it means progressing his goals. This is seen when he masquerades as a butler to Lucciano and obediently obeys and serves the kid's demands without so much as a single flicker of annoyance. When Lucciano apologizes for assigning Placido to do such demeaning tasks, Placido actually dismisses it and says he doesn't mind at all; instead, he's curious to witness a Signer's power in action. And remember that this is Lucciano we are talking about here. Lucciano.
Apart from prideful to a fault and religious zeal, rashness seems to be another trait constantly paired with Placido, which in turn is attributed to his age by Jose. Dissatisfied with waiting around and letting the infinity circuit play out in its own pace, Placido openly refuses to follow the directions given to him and instead does his own thing. He's characterized (by Jose) as hasty, brash, argumentative, and lacking the foresight to think things through before rushing recklessly into action. While I'm not denying that to be true, the fact of the matter is that on the broad spectrum of things, Placido actually places more towards the 'patient' end than on the reverse end. He's not the "shoot first, ask questions later" type you see in most shonen anime. If anything, the majority of Placido's early cameos up to the initiation of his army of motorcycle robots plan consists of him people-watching like a total obsessive stalker and making one-liner commentaries for 30 odd-some episodes of continuous failing of back-handed schemes before he finally gets around to launching his big plan. Placido has proven to be both observant and analytical-perhaps not to the degree of his elder counterpart, but nevertheless he demonstrates himself to be a decent chessmaster and a pretty good sub-boss (until he gets upped by both gramps and Z-ONE). To some degree, he prefers brute force over analytical mind games, though again-it's all relative. He's far from someone who enjoys violence or random chaos and strife (unless he's in the center, controlling all of it) but simply gears more towards 'action' over 'words'.
The really odd bizarre thing about Placido is that he seems to demonstrate two sides to him. On one end of the spectrum, he comes off as dreadfully serious, nearly anti-social recluse with a near-tunnel vision focus and tenacious determination to accomplish his mission. Especially seen in his earlier appearances, Placido largerly seems to be a loner with an 'nobody understands me' emo complex; never mind the protagonist cast, he's isolated from his own villain group. Several times throughout the anime, he just tunes out Lucciano's yakking and Jose's admonishes, barely replying with a grunt before flouncing away, apparently not at all concerned of what the others think of him and not bothering to explain his thoughts. But though Placido often seems to come off as a dick, he's actually a rather dynamic person if the situation is in his favor as we've seen in episodes 106-110. He comes off as your stock villain littered with crazy sadistic laughs and snarky over-the-top arrogance. He's bold and aggressive, and throws the entire city into a whirlwind of chaos to elicit fuel for the infinity circuit.
It also should be noted that Placido isn't one of those robot characters who tries to seek humanity or tries to become a real boy. Having retained the painful memories of his so-called 'past life', Placido knows all too well what it's like to be human and has great despise for it. As much as he may identify with his mechanical body, the fact remains Placido/Aporia has spent far more time and experience as a human than as a robot. (Read: 80 years vs. something less than 8 months).
In the final stretch of the anime, the viewers are introduced to Placido back when he was still human as "Aporia" (or whatever his real name was) and from the five seconds of screen-time he gets, we can deduce that the human!Aporia wasn't always an asshole with a foot-long stick shoved up his tailpipe. He's shown to flash a genuine smile at his nameless lover, his expression warm and gentle, perhaps insinuating that at one point in his human life, Placido could have possibly been a romantic...
Post-death
So... Placido was still in the ongoing process of exacting revenge on Yuusei when he fused with the other two Emperors of Iliaster to become robot!Aporia in the final match of the WRGP. In all the episodes that followed, anything that happened to Aporiabot also influenced Placido in turn. So when Jack, Rua, and Ruka inspired robot!Aporia to rediscover the feeling of hope and when he died with the faith that Yuusei Fudou could change the future, those events shaped Placido as well. When Aporia died and split back into the three despairs, each of those despairs contained some of the new found hope that Yuusei and his friends instilled. But because Aporia never actually witnessed the final duel between Yuusei and Z-ONE, Placido had no idea of the duel's outcome or if the future was ever saved. This has transformed Placido's hatred for mankind not into hope, but rather doubt, the middle ground between hope and despair. No longer able to scorn humanity, yet unable to have complete faith in humans, Placido's outlook falls right between the two as aporetical-doubtful of mankind's uncertain future.
Being taken from his personal post-canon point, Placido's personality is slightly altered from that of how he acted in the anime. Nevertheless, his main personality traits still stand: prideful to a fault, authoritative as a dictator, and suffused with determination, resolve and the general seriousness of accomplishing his set goal.
Except not.
You see, Placido doesn't have a 'goal' anymore. His goal was "let's save the world by smashing a floating castle into a city" and it failed, horribly-plus there's just something about being defeated three times, having everything you believed to be true thrown in your face, having your 'God' betray you, leaving the future you strove so desperately hard to change to the very same guy you hated and sought to kill, and then dying by the hands of a man you deemed an eternal friend. Experiencing those chain of events one right after the other... it does things to a person's way of perceiving the world.
Anyone who knew Placido before his final fusion into Aporia will know that there's clearly something different about him. Whereas he was firmly in the position of the predator throughout most of the anime, being removed from that position of power has rendered Placido far more uncertain. He's definitely more emotionally vulnerable than his canon counterpart, perhaps a bit more liable to lash out, and there's always this sense of repressed anger and bitterness or something that resembles guilt lying underneath it all.
The differences between them are quite subtle, with pre-death!Placido being more confident, bold, and sadistic while post-death!Placido leans more towards petulance and sarcasm, and gets easily flustered with his personality falling neatly in the TSUNDERE category. While he still retains his douchebag status, Placido generally doesn't look down on people anymore nor does he have some elevated perception of himself. His antagonism is tolerable at the very least and his conversations can actually last longer than plain bitching.
A complete and utterly useless side-note: The World Championship 2011 video game offers an alternative "what-if" scenario where the "post-canon" Placido is actually supportive of the future and discards his convictions of predestination in favor of the humanistic view that humans can shape their own fate. However, it should be taken into account that the video game strays off from the original ending, even if it's not by much.
[POWERS]
... woo-boy this shit's gonna be long.
As Placido is/was a villain and all, the crack-laden creators of 5D’s stockpiled on any number of deus ex machina powers to his character whenever they needed to drive the storyline along while adding an ominous backdrop to dramatize a particularly important episode. A perfect example of these powers is when Placido summons massive balls of purple thunder to strike down Neo Domino City-yes, APPARENTLY ROBOTS FROM THE FUTURE CAN CONTROL THE WEATHER TOO. The fact we never see him use this power after episode 110 only serves to prove my point.
Probably his most useful (yet under-recognized) powers is broad-spectrum technopathy AKA the ability to interact with and manipulate machines or electronics because the plot demands it. This ability of his most likely stems from the fact he is an android himself and probably has something to do with manipulating electrical currents insert sci-fi mumbo jumbo here. I also assume that Placido has some mechanical expertise partly because he's from the high-tech 2XXX future and partly because being a bot ergos one to know things about other bots this is my logic I am sticking to it. Nevertheless, moonbot's overarching umbrella technopathy lands him more in the realm of "technology is a synonym for magic" more-so than him having any solid or tangible grasp of engineering and computer programming the way the resident tech junkies of the anime do. The fact he goes and steals Yuusei and Bruno's programming to use for his army of motorcycle robots should speak for itself.
The anime was vague as fuck about the extent of his abilities, but for the most part it seems Placido can manipulate different forms of technology to varying degrees without any actual physical interaction with the machine in question. He demonstrates this ability several times throughout the anime, the most lucid case being when Placido activates a security guard robot to duel Yuusei. His technopathy was displayed as a power source to make defunct robots turn on the same way a puppeteer manipulates their marionette with strings. He's also shown to be able to monitor from a great distance a large number of machines at once, as seen with his Diablos-although, in that case, he was the one who built his special robots.
One of Placido's most awesome yet entirely useless features is that he can fuse with his... motorcycle to form this hybrid centaurbike body which is apparently dubbed as his "Ultimate Body". Yeah. I mean, people don't kid around when they summarize YGO 5D's as "card games on motorcycles" but Placido just takes it to the next level-he doesn't play a card game on a motorcycle, he plays a card game on himself. As far as I know, this transformation has no functional purpose outside of aforementioned card game. (Not that it really had much purpose during the card game either, other than to be needlessly dramatic and provide epic proportions of amusement to the watchers.) On an interesting side note, Dark Glass also dubs this transformation as Placido's "real form", though this is coming from a guy whose memories are this gigantic mindfuck so I wouldn't take his words to a grain of salt. Oh, and while we're on the subject of card games, Placido also possesses the ability to inflict real damage in a duel THIS IS MEGA USEFUL, NO?
Placido doesn't demonstrate any real swordsmanship ability outside of basic hack-and-slash usage and it's more of a character prop than an actual weapon (guys, this is Yu-gi-oh. People battle through CARD GAMES), but he seems to be pretty attached to the damned thing. His sword can multitask: It can be used (by anyone?) to open a space-warping portal that effectively allows said anyone to teleport from one place to another, it's the literal key to initiating Placido's awesome centaurbike transformation, and he can slap pieces of cardboard onto the green sheet of light that emerges from the sword's hilt. The space-warping portal is an iffy one though, because at least twice in the anime Placido just walks out of a portal without any evidence of using his sword to open one... or maybe the creators was too lazy to draw the sword in his hand. Either way, Jose and Lucciano are both capable of accessing portals without a medium, so it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to say Placido is probably capable of doing that too and just uses his sword to be all flashy about it.
Placido has also shown some very vague demonstration of physical strength in the anime. He was able to knock Bruno unconscious with a single punch to the gut, though it must be noted that at the time the derpface was experiencing some sort of emotional breakdown-plus, as the android Bruno may have just reacted to Placido's technopathy rather than the physical trauma. While Placido is nowhere close to Jose's level of strength (the man picked up a motorcycle and hurled it into the ocean with one arm) and is most certainly not a robot!ninja like Bruno, being a construct of metal and bolts puts him on a higher level of physical fortitude than the average human.
Other weird powers include... he's one of a handful of people who can harness the energy of a machine known as Infinity to create a wormhole through time and rewrite history to his choosing. LUCKILY, THIS ACTUALLY REQUIRES SAID MCGUFFIN MACHINE TO WORK, so we don't have to worry about Placido doing any loopy things to the timeline. He can also transform his external experience to resemble an illusion.
Lastly, as Aporia was a soldier or part of some informal resistance movement (many, many years... in the future), Placido probably has some knowledge of using military guns and how to blow up giant mechas with a bazooka.
tl;dr
he can manipulate electronics without even touching them
he can fuse with his motorcycle T-666 to become awesome Centaurbike-o and cause pain in a children's card game
he can go all organization XIII and create circular space-traveling portals
he can knock out blue-haired robots by punching them
his weakness include:
he's a villain.
[(post-canon!AU) RELATIONSHIPS]
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Hate ← Dislike ← It's complicated ← Ambivalent ← Neutral → You're okay → Nakama → Family → Love∞NAMELESS DARK-HAIRED LOVE INTEREST: She has been elevated to some saintly status. His rational half is telling him to move on, while his emotional half just can't let her go. After all, his very existence was created out of Aporia's despair of losing her.
∞∞YUUSEI: Oh Jesus. Yuusei. What to do with Yuusei. He'll never actually admit it, but Placido is rather protective of Yuusei when it comes to other people hurting him-partly because he still views Yuusei as his 'prey' or his rival at the very least-and partly because in his current timelline, Aporia died entrusting his hopes to the crabhead here. Yuusei is the key to Placido's changed future, so if not out of actual concern for the crabhead, Placido needs Yuusei to be alive for his own wants and gains.
∞∞Z-ONE: It's complicated. On one hand, there's GOD and "eternal friend". On the other, there's this... you sorta betrayed me and called me a 'defect'. In addition to acknowledging the friendship they shared in last few years of his human life, Placido also views Z-ONE as a father and creator. Placido/Aporia has already forgiven Z-ONE for his betrayal even before he died-yet it would be a lie to say he has fully come to terms with what Z-ONE has done to him. There's a part of Plaacido that can't fully let go the fact he was used like a chess piece by a man he deemed his God, and another part of him that finds such cruel irony that Aporia putting his hopes in the very same person Placido vowed to kill.
∞∞ANTINOMY: To some very minor degree, Placido still harbors feelings of rivalry towards his longtime friend. There's also the fact that, well, "Dark Glass" and "Placido" shouldn't have even met under natural circumstances. In the future timeline, the human!Antinomy would have had to be at least ten years older than the human!Aporia as Antinomy was in his twenties and had already become a pro duelist prior to the invasion of the Machine Emperors, whereas Aporia was only 10~13 when his parents were killed by aforementioned Emperors. If it wasn't for the fact that some robot fetus shrimp messed up the natural flow of time and artificially created circumstances where these two were robots with half-erased memories-the 20-something-year-old Antinomy would have known the prepubescent Aporia, or the "Lucciano" stage. The adult Aporia, or "Placido" would have never met Antinomy in the natural timeline. It's not that Placido doesn't recognize Aporia's friendship with Antinomy, it's just...
∞∞∞PARADOX: As these two characters have never met in the anime nor are we given a shred of interaction between the old versions of them, I'm going to be doing some considerable headcanon here. From what I can glean from the 30~40 minutes of screen time, Paradox seems to have a similar temperament to Placido, except where as Placido is more of the arrogant type, I suspect that Paradox might lean more towards the vanity side of the 'pride' domain. They probably would have a lot of bitchy, sarcastic arguments. Again is the fact that Paradox is probably older than him.
[MISCELLANEOUS]
[CANON] The really bad spin-off of a spin-off featuring a world where everyone is obsessed with card games to the point where medical doctors battle viruses by defeating them in a children's card game Yuugiou 5D’s
[IMAGES]
- Generic full-body character image
- Official lineart depicting moonboots and his potential nightmare fuel body -- I mean "Ultimate Body Placido"
- Non-fusion T-666 AKA how D-wheels are typically supposed to work
- SEBASTIAN MICHAELIS
- Human!Soldier!Aporia and his nameless love interest
But for a very basic tl;dr... Placido is more or less the insane robotic manifestation of the despair of some guy who came from 200 years in future who is then sent back to the past and we only find this out maybe in the last ten episodes of the whole fucking anime.
[CANON POINT] Episode 147.
… AND THEN APORIA DIES. (again)
After flinging his half-circle moon bar duel disk at Yuusei’s D-runner, Aporia dies for the third time (if we're tallying Placido's ripped-apart-in-half death as one), even though he's more or less a cybernetic body created by Z-ONE and instilled with artificial memories of his human self-the real Aporia currently being a corpse in a capsule floating around somewhere in the Ark Cradle. So then Aporia dies and the last thing he sees is Yuusei and the tearful Rua before he closes his eyes for one last time and then-BOOM. He gets pulled from canon right here.
If we want to take the anime standpoint and count alter egos as separate characters (C'MON WE ALL LOVE TO DO THAT), then Placido's story ends at episode 140 when he goes and fuses with his other selves and becomes Aporia. However, Placido is then Aporia. Placido = Aporia. They are technically the same person.
[GENDER] 100% synthetic robot. I mean... male.
[AGE] On the chronologically consistent timeline, Aporia lived 200 years in the future from the present day 5D's world and died as a human around 80~90 (in the future). Placido himself is the manifestation of the human Aporia as a young adult, and though the anime never pinpoints a specific age for him the way they did for the protagonists, Placido has the physical resemblance of a man in their early twenties, so I'm going to say he's 22.
[PERSONALITY]
99% of all Yu-gi-oh! villains follow the same theme: They dress inappropriately feminine, have a crazy laugh, and if they're attractive enough, their background story will reveal a Freudian excuse that moves them from the 'batshit insane evil' into the 'well-intentioned extremist' bin. If not, they become cannon fodder and get a whole paragraph stub dedicated to them on the wikia.
Enter Placido, the antagonistic big bad wannabe of season two. Initially, he follows down the same route as every other classy villain and does the whole gig-he plots, he verbalizes the destruction of the protagonist through means of vaguely ominous events-to-come, he laughs maniacally, etc. When Placido's not stalking watching Yuusei and the Signers-tachi from his big screen and making mysterious foreshadows to obscure things, he’s generally pretty serious, pretty apathetic and has a thick air of haughtiness hanging around him. As the plot begins to unfold, more of Placido's personality is revealed as are the interesting quirks that make up his character.
"This man doesn’t need the loser’s sympathy. If you tried to help him, he would have his pride hurt. That’s how a man of his caliber is.” ~Jose; episode 110
At the core, Placido is an embodiment of pride. For a good majority of the anime, his personality basically switches between bouts of extreme arrogance and irrational indigence, all coated with sinister laughter the way chocolate syrup covers an ice cream cone. Placido's prideful temperament has led him to be impatient, short-tempered and disrespectful which is evident in, like, virtually every single one of his interactions. He has a pretty low tolerance level for bullshit and a tendency to instigate fights over any small disagreement or taunt. Placido is also prone to shove his sword into the face of anyone who even hints to undermine his authority in compensation for god knows what. He's the kind of guy who his subordinates (note: he only has one) live in fear of.
Placido is a religious nutjob. He's convinced that his mission is rewrite the faulty history by delivering destruction onto Neo Domino City on behalf of his god's will. He's a gigantic misanthrope, both viewing humankind as inferior and holding an intense loathing for them as they were responsible for the ruined future his human counterpart lived in. I like to compare his beliefs to Calvinism, specifically predestination-the concept that a person's future is already predetermined by a higher force and that no matter how hard they try in life to change the outcome of their fate, escape from their destiny is impossible. Placido is obsessed with this concept, utterly convinced that human beings by themselves are incapable of preventing the apocalyptic future from occurring and that divine intervention is the only hope for mankind.
"All people will continue to dance with fate. It is a dance they haven't been able to stop since the beginning of time. Yuusei, have you seen a bee's dance before? That's right, a bee dances beautifully. Through that dance, they let their friends know of the honey's location. Of course, they don't dance of their own accord. In truth, they only carry out the mission assigned to them by fate. All humans can do is dance their dance of fate until they die! Now, dance a dance more beautiful than a bee's, Yuusei!" ~ Placido; episode 109
While we're on the subject of Yuusei... what spurred the moonbot to make crushing Yuusei the focal point in his life was Placido's failure to get over his pride and accept the fact a human had outdone him. Couple his misanthropy with being repeatedly robo-emasculated by Yuusei, who did everything from impeding the completion of the infinity circuit to brutally ravaging him in a duel, and you get a pretty good idea of why Placido was possessed on killing crabface to the point where it became neurotic stalking with undertones of homo-eroticism.
But misguided as he may be, Placido holds a very genuine and firm conviction in that his actions are necessary and pro bono. He takes his job damn seriously, although being a bad guy in a children's anime, Placido's perseverance isn't emphasized as dramatically nor is it shown in a good light like with that of the protagonists. Yet his determination is so strong that he's actually able to throw his pride in the backseat every now and then if it means progressing his goals. This is seen when he masquerades as a butler to Lucciano and obediently obeys and serves the kid's demands without so much as a single flicker of annoyance. When Lucciano apologizes for assigning Placido to do such demeaning tasks, Placido actually dismisses it and says he doesn't mind at all; instead, he's curious to witness a Signer's power in action. And remember that this is Lucciano we are talking about here. Lucciano.
Apart from prideful to a fault and religious zeal, rashness seems to be another trait constantly paired with Placido, which in turn is attributed to his age by Jose. Dissatisfied with waiting around and letting the infinity circuit play out in its own pace, Placido openly refuses to follow the directions given to him and instead does his own thing. He's characterized (by Jose) as hasty, brash, argumentative, and lacking the foresight to think things through before rushing recklessly into action. While I'm not denying that to be true, the fact of the matter is that on the broad spectrum of things, Placido actually places more towards the 'patient' end than on the reverse end. He's not the "shoot first, ask questions later" type you see in most shonen anime. If anything, the majority of Placido's early cameos up to the initiation of his army of motorcycle robots plan consists of him people-watching like a total obsessive stalker and making one-liner commentaries for 30 odd-some episodes of continuous failing of back-handed schemes before he finally gets around to launching his big plan. Placido has proven to be both observant and analytical-perhaps not to the degree of his elder counterpart, but nevertheless he demonstrates himself to be a decent chessmaster and a pretty good sub-boss (until he gets upped by both gramps and Z-ONE). To some degree, he prefers brute force over analytical mind games, though again-it's all relative. He's far from someone who enjoys violence or random chaos and strife (unless he's in the center, controlling all of it) but simply gears more towards 'action' over 'words'.
The really odd bizarre thing about Placido is that he seems to demonstrate two sides to him. On one end of the spectrum, he comes off as dreadfully serious, nearly anti-social recluse with a near-tunnel vision focus and tenacious determination to accomplish his mission. Especially seen in his earlier appearances, Placido largerly seems to be a loner with an 'nobody understands me' emo complex; never mind the protagonist cast, he's isolated from his own villain group. Several times throughout the anime, he just tunes out Lucciano's yakking and Jose's admonishes, barely replying with a grunt before flouncing away, apparently not at all concerned of what the others think of him and not bothering to explain his thoughts. But though Placido often seems to come off as a dick, he's actually a rather dynamic person if the situation is in his favor as we've seen in episodes 106-110. He comes off as your stock villain littered with crazy sadistic laughs and snarky over-the-top arrogance. He's bold and aggressive, and throws the entire city into a whirlwind of chaos to elicit fuel for the infinity circuit.
It also should be noted that Placido isn't one of those robot characters who tries to seek humanity or tries to become a real boy. Having retained the painful memories of his so-called 'past life', Placido knows all too well what it's like to be human and has great despise for it. As much as he may identify with his mechanical body, the fact remains Placido/Aporia has spent far more time and experience as a human than as a robot. (Read: 80 years vs. something less than 8 months).
In the final stretch of the anime, the viewers are introduced to Placido back when he was still human as "Aporia" (or whatever his real name was) and from the five seconds of screen-time he gets, we can deduce that the human!Aporia wasn't always an asshole with a foot-long stick shoved up his tailpipe. He's shown to flash a genuine smile at his nameless lover, his expression warm and gentle, perhaps insinuating that at one point in his human life, Placido could have possibly been a romantic...
Post-death
So... Placido was still in the ongoing process of exacting revenge on Yuusei when he fused with the other two Emperors of Iliaster to become robot!Aporia in the final match of the WRGP. In all the episodes that followed, anything that happened to Aporiabot also influenced Placido in turn. So when Jack, Rua, and Ruka inspired robot!Aporia to rediscover the feeling of hope and when he died with the faith that Yuusei Fudou could change the future, those events shaped Placido as well. When Aporia died and split back into the three despairs, each of those despairs contained some of the new found hope that Yuusei and his friends instilled. But because Aporia never actually witnessed the final duel between Yuusei and Z-ONE, Placido had no idea of the duel's outcome or if the future was ever saved. This has transformed Placido's hatred for mankind not into hope, but rather doubt, the middle ground between hope and despair. No longer able to scorn humanity, yet unable to have complete faith in humans, Placido's outlook falls right between the two as aporetical-doubtful of mankind's uncertain future.
Being taken from his personal post-canon point, Placido's personality is slightly altered from that of how he acted in the anime. Nevertheless, his main personality traits still stand: prideful to a fault, authoritative as a dictator, and suffused with determination, resolve and the general seriousness of accomplishing his set goal.
Except not.
You see, Placido doesn't have a 'goal' anymore. His goal was "let's save the world by smashing a floating castle into a city" and it failed, horribly-plus there's just something about being defeated three times, having everything you believed to be true thrown in your face, having your 'God' betray you, leaving the future you strove so desperately hard to change to the very same guy you hated and sought to kill, and then dying by the hands of a man you deemed an eternal friend. Experiencing those chain of events one right after the other... it does things to a person's way of perceiving the world.
Anyone who knew Placido before his final fusion into Aporia will know that there's clearly something different about him. Whereas he was firmly in the position of the predator throughout most of the anime, being removed from that position of power has rendered Placido far more uncertain. He's definitely more emotionally vulnerable than his canon counterpart, perhaps a bit more liable to lash out, and there's always this sense of repressed anger and bitterness or something that resembles guilt lying underneath it all.
The differences between them are quite subtle, with pre-death!Placido being more confident, bold, and sadistic while post-death!Placido leans more towards petulance and sarcasm, and gets easily flustered with his personality falling neatly in the TSUNDERE category. While he still retains his douchebag status, Placido generally doesn't look down on people anymore nor does he have some elevated perception of himself. His antagonism is tolerable at the very least and his conversations can actually last longer than plain bitching.
A complete and utterly useless side-note: The World Championship 2011 video game offers an alternative "what-if" scenario where the "post-canon" Placido is actually supportive of the future and discards his convictions of predestination in favor of the humanistic view that humans can shape their own fate. However, it should be taken into account that the video game strays off from the original ending, even if it's not by much.
[POWERS]
... woo-boy this shit's gonna be long.
As Placido is/was a villain and all, the crack-laden creators of 5D’s stockpiled on any number of deus ex machina powers to his character whenever they needed to drive the storyline along while adding an ominous backdrop to dramatize a particularly important episode. A perfect example of these powers is when Placido summons massive balls of purple thunder to strike down Neo Domino City-yes, APPARENTLY ROBOTS FROM THE FUTURE CAN CONTROL THE WEATHER TOO. The fact we never see him use this power after episode 110 only serves to prove my point.
Probably his most useful (yet under-recognized) powers is broad-spectrum technopathy AKA the ability to interact with and manipulate machines or electronics because the plot demands it. This ability of his most likely stems from the fact he is an android himself and probably has something to do with manipulating electrical currents insert sci-fi mumbo jumbo here. I also assume that Placido has some mechanical expertise partly because he's from the high-tech 2XXX future and partly because being a bot ergos one to know things about other bots this is my logic I am sticking to it. Nevertheless, moonbot's overarching umbrella technopathy lands him more in the realm of "technology is a synonym for magic" more-so than him having any solid or tangible grasp of engineering and computer programming the way the resident tech junkies of the anime do. The fact he goes and steals Yuusei and Bruno's programming to use for his army of motorcycle robots should speak for itself.
The anime was vague as fuck about the extent of his abilities, but for the most part it seems Placido can manipulate different forms of technology to varying degrees without any actual physical interaction with the machine in question. He demonstrates this ability several times throughout the anime, the most lucid case being when Placido activates a security guard robot to duel Yuusei. His technopathy was displayed as a power source to make defunct robots turn on the same way a puppeteer manipulates their marionette with strings. He's also shown to be able to monitor from a great distance a large number of machines at once, as seen with his Diablos-although, in that case, he was the one who built his special robots.
One of Placido's most awesome yet entirely useless features is that he can fuse with his... motorcycle to form this hybrid centaurbike body which is apparently dubbed as his "Ultimate Body". Yeah. I mean, people don't kid around when they summarize YGO 5D's as "card games on motorcycles" but Placido just takes it to the next level-he doesn't play a card game on a motorcycle, he plays a card game on himself. As far as I know, this transformation has no functional purpose outside of aforementioned card game. (Not that it really had much purpose during the card game either, other than to be needlessly dramatic and provide epic proportions of amusement to the watchers.) On an interesting side note, Dark Glass also dubs this transformation as Placido's "real form", though this is coming from a guy whose memories are this gigantic mindfuck so I wouldn't take his words to a grain of salt. Oh, and while we're on the subject of card games, Placido also possesses the ability to inflict real damage in a duel THIS IS MEGA USEFUL, NO?
Placido doesn't demonstrate any real swordsmanship ability outside of basic hack-and-slash usage and it's more of a character prop than an actual weapon (guys, this is Yu-gi-oh. People battle through CARD GAMES), but he seems to be pretty attached to the damned thing. His sword can multitask: It can be used (by anyone?) to open a space-warping portal that effectively allows said anyone to teleport from one place to another, it's the literal key to initiating Placido's awesome centaurbike transformation, and he can slap pieces of cardboard onto the green sheet of light that emerges from the sword's hilt. The space-warping portal is an iffy one though, because at least twice in the anime Placido just walks out of a portal without any evidence of using his sword to open one... or maybe the creators was too lazy to draw the sword in his hand. Either way, Jose and Lucciano are both capable of accessing portals without a medium, so it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to say Placido is probably capable of doing that too and just uses his sword to be all flashy about it.
Placido has also shown some very vague demonstration of physical strength in the anime. He was able to knock Bruno unconscious with a single punch to the gut, though it must be noted that at the time the derpface was experiencing some sort of emotional breakdown-plus, as the android Bruno may have just reacted to Placido's technopathy rather than the physical trauma. While Placido is nowhere close to Jose's level of strength (the man picked up a motorcycle and hurled it into the ocean with one arm) and is most certainly not a robot!ninja like Bruno, being a construct of metal and bolts puts him on a higher level of physical fortitude than the average human.
Other weird powers include... he's one of a handful of people who can harness the energy of a machine known as Infinity to create a wormhole through time and rewrite history to his choosing. LUCKILY, THIS ACTUALLY REQUIRES SAID MCGUFFIN MACHINE TO WORK, so we don't have to worry about Placido doing any loopy things to the timeline. He can also transform his external experience to resemble an illusion.
Lastly, as Aporia was a soldier or part of some informal resistance movement (many, many years... in the future), Placido probably has some knowledge of using military guns and how to blow up giant mechas with a bazooka.
tl;dr
he can manipulate electronics without even touching them
he can fuse with his motorcycle T-666 to become awesome Centaurbike-o and cause pain in a children's card game
he can go all organization XIII and create circular space-traveling portals
he can knock out blue-haired robots by punching them
his weakness include:
he's a villain.
[(post-canon!AU) RELATIONSHIPS]
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Hate ← Dislike ← It's complicated ← Ambivalent ← Neutral → You're okay → Nakama → Family → Love∞NAMELESS DARK-HAIRED LOVE INTEREST: She has been elevated to some saintly status. His rational half is telling him to move on, while his emotional half just can't let her go. After all, his very existence was created out of Aporia's despair of losing her.
∞∞YUUSEI: Oh Jesus. Yuusei. What to do with Yuusei. He'll never actually admit it, but Placido is rather protective of Yuusei when it comes to other people hurting him-partly because he still views Yuusei as his 'prey' or his rival at the very least-and partly because in his current timelline, Aporia died entrusting his hopes to the crabhead here. Yuusei is the key to Placido's changed future, so if not out of actual concern for the crabhead, Placido needs Yuusei to be alive for his own wants and gains.
∞∞Z-ONE: It's complicated. On one hand, there's GOD and "eternal friend". On the other, there's this... you sorta betrayed me and called me a 'defect'. In addition to acknowledging the friendship they shared in last few years of his human life, Placido also views Z-ONE as a father and creator. Placido/Aporia has already forgiven Z-ONE for his betrayal even before he died-yet it would be a lie to say he has fully come to terms with what Z-ONE has done to him. There's a part of Plaacido that can't fully let go the fact he was used like a chess piece by a man he deemed his God, and another part of him that finds such cruel irony that Aporia putting his hopes in the very same person Placido vowed to kill.
∞∞ANTINOMY: To some very minor degree, Placido still harbors feelings of rivalry towards his longtime friend. There's also the fact that, well, "Dark Glass" and "Placido" shouldn't have even met under natural circumstances. In the future timeline, the human!Antinomy would have had to be at least ten years older than the human!Aporia as Antinomy was in his twenties and had already become a pro duelist prior to the invasion of the Machine Emperors, whereas Aporia was only 10~13 when his parents were killed by aforementioned Emperors. If it wasn't for the fact that some robot fetus shrimp messed up the natural flow of time and artificially created circumstances where these two were robots with half-erased memories-the 20-something-year-old Antinomy would have known the prepubescent Aporia, or the "Lucciano" stage. The adult Aporia, or "Placido" would have never met Antinomy in the natural timeline. It's not that Placido doesn't recognize Aporia's friendship with Antinomy, it's just...
∞∞∞PARADOX: As these two characters have never met in the anime nor are we given a shred of interaction between the old versions of them, I'm going to be doing some considerable headcanon here. From what I can glean from the 30~40 minutes of screen time, Paradox seems to have a similar temperament to Placido, except where as Placido is more of the arrogant type, I suspect that Paradox might lean more towards the vanity side of the 'pride' domain. They probably would have a lot of bitchy, sarcastic arguments. Again is the fact that Paradox is probably older than him.
[MISCELLANEOUS]
- This man out-lived the extinction of the entire world's population. He was one of the four remaining humans left alive on earth, and unlike his other survivor buddies Aporia somehow managed to survive 40 some odd years all on his own. It not only says something about his physical well-being but also his mental health and his intense willpower (or luck) to cling onto life. Natural selection? I could also throw in some NOZOMU crap in here.
- Like all the cool robots from the future, Placido is left-handed. This is made more noticeable as his scabbard hangs from his right side.
- It's implied in the anime that the three tenors possess the memories of the whole human!Aporia and not just the memories pertaining to the individual stages of his life they represented. Following that logic, Placido has all of Aporia's memories throughout his entire lifetime and up to his second death.
- His favorite food is strawberries. (Oh Tag Force 5, you're the best dating sims game ever)
- His formal education ended before his 13th birthday (assuming that little!Aporia attended to school to begin with) and was probably really busy surviving to learn stuff like... chemistry or thermodynamics.
- This and this comic most accurately displays how my theory of how Lucciano's red hair first turned grey, and was later cut off to the resemble the spiky do that is Placido's hair style.