(no subject)
So I was threading with Rolan yesterday and today, and he called Cielo out on one of his major weaknesses. And it made me want to essay a little.
I would say that Cielo's biggest weakness by far is the extent to which he defines himself by what other people say. If someone tells him he's failed (Heat, probably Mick too considering he's like that) or that Sera's going to destroy the world (Varin), or that that doesn't matter because they're comrades (Heat), or that he's less than human because he's a cannibal demon (Lokapala) or an AI (Lokapala and Karma Society), or that he's a kid (various people in camp), or that he's failed his comrade (Bat), well, he won't totally take what people he knows are assholes as gospel truth. I mean, honestly Cielo's not that dumb. But he does accept what people tell him to a surprisingly large degree, especially when it's from people he has no reason to listen to.
When it's something that's really bothering him and he knows that they're wrong, he'll get indignant about it. "Who decided you had to devour to survive, eh bro? Dese people aren't eating people, but it's still life, isn't it? Plants are okay? So if you're eating a different kind of life, that makes it okay?" …You have to admit that's an interesting point of view! (So I like that quote.) But it's not really an argument that defends Cielo. It attacks back and points out that the people attacking him aren't exactly coming from a position of absolute moral superiority, but it also does implicitly accept devouring people as not okay.
Admittedly, devouring people is kinda hard to defend, and he doesn't always accept what people tell him. When Gale starts talking about how Bat is strong and would make a better ally than Cielo (GEE THANKS GALE. LOVE YOU TOO MON), he defends himself by pointing out that "I totally saved Sera back dere!" But even that's more…pointing out that he's loyal to the tribe and not totally useless than it is saying "I'm strong." Cielo isn't the strongest member of the tribe. His stat points tend to distribute into agility and luck. He's weaker at magic than Argilla and Gale, he has the lowest strength of any of them, and his vitality stat's pretty low too. And in the first game, his weakness to ailments was infuriating. (It was a lot less bad in the second game. I suspect that if I were to look at the games' respective bestiaries, I'd find a lot fewer enemies who attack with ailments in the second game.) I mean, let's be honest here. He is a useful character for certain fights (cough Demifiend cough), and I find his high agility and luck seriously useful for getting more turns in battle and tend to use him a lot, especially at higher levels after I can equip him with Null Ailment, but he's better at support than causing and sustaining damage. And so, yeah, there is an element of truth to that and Cielo does accept that and also knows that it isn't the most important thing about him. (During his topping of Abaddon, he even uses his relative lack of strength as an additional way of topping.)
….Man my example of how Cielo doesn't always accept what people tell him turned into a paragraph on an example of how he does. UM. Go me? Or Cielo. I'm not sure whether I failed harder OOCly or ICly there.
This stems from a lot of things! One is that Cielo is…I want to call him more a follower than a leader, but it's not quite right. Cielo can lead quite well when he has to and is dealing with kids or people who see him as an authority figure. He can handle Fred and the Embryon showed no hesitation in leaving him to guard the base alone. (Admittedly he was unable to protect Sera when it got invaded, but no one doubted his ability to lead the unnamed members of the Embryon. Just, you know, his ability to repel an invading army led by someone stronger than him with less than ten people.) But he's submissive. He tends to accept people's authority over him pretty easily and without a challenge. He accepts first Gale and then Sera as his leaders without any hesitation whatsoever after Serph's little incident, and just…is very easy about other people being the leader and pretty much prefers not being the leader. And accepting what someone else tells you to do versus accepting what they tell you you are doesn't really require a terribly different mindset.
There's also the fact that Cielo's had his fundamental beliefs shaken a number of times, and that makes it easier for him to accept that yeah, he might be wrong again. He watched his world get fundamentally changed, his comrades fall desperately in love, a never-ending war end, his world destroyed, his leader betrayed, his comrades die. I can't think of a single belief that Cielo's had that he hasn't had to fundamentally question at some point during the DDS games. He's mostly stronger for it, I'd say. Cielo at the end of the Airport has grown substantially stronger and more complex than Cielo just before Coordinate 136. But, well, it's complicated. In a lot of ways, his beliefs have been made stronger because of that, because he's had to go through the process of questioning everything he's ever believed in and so he's had to define what's important to him and why the doubters are wrong. At the same time, he's been made aware of how thoroughly his beliefs can be shaken and that makes it easier to shake him at least a little temporarily.
And then there's the fact that, well, the Embryon are young. They are not your typical five year olds! OBVIOUSLY. They're adults, in every way that's meaningful. But they're strangely naive and focused and a lot of that comes from their general inexperience with life. Their experiences consist of past life memories that are more about emotions than episodic or procedural memories, five years of constant warfare as an AI with minimal emotions, maybe a month of INTENSE LIFE EXPERIENCE in the game, and camp. By now, Cielo has spent a sixth of his life in camp. It's weird for him, because so much of his identity revolves around him and his comrades against the world and that's not the case in camp. It doesn't shake his identity fundamentally! I mean hell he's been turned into a demon cannibal, found out that he was an AI created by his comrade, modelled after a guy who got basically tortured to death by the preincarnation of another comrade, watched his world destroyed, and one of his comrades betray them. There is nothing camp could do to match DDS canon. Really. But it sometimes leaves him vaguely off-balance, as though a wall he'd spent his life pushing again had just disappeared like it never existed. …And that was a complete side-track. But basically as firmly as his identity has set in some ways, there's still a vast world of new experiences that could affect his identity out there. And Cielo has kind of realized after over a year of camp that there's still a lot he doesn't know about the world. And honestly, he's not really one to sit down and read up on it. (I'd assume he forced his way through "A Short History of the World" or the camp equivalent or something, but not much else.)
And I'm not going to bother doing a separate post for this! But in celebration of Cielo reaching
15,000 comments
I'm having an Anything Goes meme! Ask me about what Cielo thinks of your characters, why he did something in camp, just how covered the Embryon cabin is with orange paint, ask me for a horrible drabble or do whatever you want! Warning: Drabbles will probably be porny and terrifying because I am a horrible person.
I would say that Cielo's biggest weakness by far is the extent to which he defines himself by what other people say. If someone tells him he's failed (Heat, probably Mick too considering he's like that) or that Sera's going to destroy the world (Varin), or that that doesn't matter because they're comrades (Heat), or that he's less than human because he's a cannibal demon (Lokapala) or an AI (Lokapala and Karma Society), or that he's a kid (various people in camp), or that he's failed his comrade (Bat), well, he won't totally take what people he knows are assholes as gospel truth. I mean, honestly Cielo's not that dumb. But he does accept what people tell him to a surprisingly large degree, especially when it's from people he has no reason to listen to.
When it's something that's really bothering him and he knows that they're wrong, he'll get indignant about it. "Who decided you had to devour to survive, eh bro? Dese people aren't eating people, but it's still life, isn't it? Plants are okay? So if you're eating a different kind of life, that makes it okay?" …You have to admit that's an interesting point of view! (So I like that quote.) But it's not really an argument that defends Cielo. It attacks back and points out that the people attacking him aren't exactly coming from a position of absolute moral superiority, but it also does implicitly accept devouring people as not okay.
Admittedly, devouring people is kinda hard to defend, and he doesn't always accept what people tell him. When Gale starts talking about how Bat is strong and would make a better ally than Cielo (GEE THANKS GALE. LOVE YOU TOO MON), he defends himself by pointing out that "I totally saved Sera back dere!" But even that's more…pointing out that he's loyal to the tribe and not totally useless than it is saying "I'm strong." Cielo isn't the strongest member of the tribe. His stat points tend to distribute into agility and luck. He's weaker at magic than Argilla and Gale, he has the lowest strength of any of them, and his vitality stat's pretty low too. And in the first game, his weakness to ailments was infuriating. (It was a lot less bad in the second game. I suspect that if I were to look at the games' respective bestiaries, I'd find a lot fewer enemies who attack with ailments in the second game.) I mean, let's be honest here. He is a useful character for certain fights (cough Demifiend cough), and I find his high agility and luck seriously useful for getting more turns in battle and tend to use him a lot, especially at higher levels after I can equip him with Null Ailment, but he's better at support than causing and sustaining damage. And so, yeah, there is an element of truth to that and Cielo does accept that and also knows that it isn't the most important thing about him. (During his topping of Abaddon, he even uses his relative lack of strength as an additional way of topping.)
….Man my example of how Cielo doesn't always accept what people tell him turned into a paragraph on an example of how he does. UM. Go me? Or Cielo. I'm not sure whether I failed harder OOCly or ICly there.
This stems from a lot of things! One is that Cielo is…I want to call him more a follower than a leader, but it's not quite right. Cielo can lead quite well when he has to and is dealing with kids or people who see him as an authority figure. He can handle Fred and the Embryon showed no hesitation in leaving him to guard the base alone. (Admittedly he was unable to protect Sera when it got invaded, but no one doubted his ability to lead the unnamed members of the Embryon. Just, you know, his ability to repel an invading army led by someone stronger than him with less than ten people.) But he's submissive. He tends to accept people's authority over him pretty easily and without a challenge. He accepts first Gale and then Sera as his leaders without any hesitation whatsoever after Serph's little incident, and just…is very easy about other people being the leader and pretty much prefers not being the leader. And accepting what someone else tells you to do versus accepting what they tell you you are doesn't really require a terribly different mindset.
There's also the fact that Cielo's had his fundamental beliefs shaken a number of times, and that makes it easier for him to accept that yeah, he might be wrong again. He watched his world get fundamentally changed, his comrades fall desperately in love, a never-ending war end, his world destroyed, his leader betrayed, his comrades die. I can't think of a single belief that Cielo's had that he hasn't had to fundamentally question at some point during the DDS games. He's mostly stronger for it, I'd say. Cielo at the end of the Airport has grown substantially stronger and more complex than Cielo just before Coordinate 136. But, well, it's complicated. In a lot of ways, his beliefs have been made stronger because of that, because he's had to go through the process of questioning everything he's ever believed in and so he's had to define what's important to him and why the doubters are wrong. At the same time, he's been made aware of how thoroughly his beliefs can be shaken and that makes it easier to shake him at least a little temporarily.
And then there's the fact that, well, the Embryon are young. They are not your typical five year olds! OBVIOUSLY. They're adults, in every way that's meaningful. But they're strangely naive and focused and a lot of that comes from their general inexperience with life. Their experiences consist of past life memories that are more about emotions than episodic or procedural memories, five years of constant warfare as an AI with minimal emotions, maybe a month of INTENSE LIFE EXPERIENCE in the game, and camp. By now, Cielo has spent a sixth of his life in camp. It's weird for him, because so much of his identity revolves around him and his comrades against the world and that's not the case in camp. It doesn't shake his identity fundamentally! I mean hell he's been turned into a demon cannibal, found out that he was an AI created by his comrade, modelled after a guy who got basically tortured to death by the preincarnation of another comrade, watched his world destroyed, and one of his comrades betray them. There is nothing camp could do to match DDS canon. Really. But it sometimes leaves him vaguely off-balance, as though a wall he'd spent his life pushing again had just disappeared like it never existed. …And that was a complete side-track. But basically as firmly as his identity has set in some ways, there's still a vast world of new experiences that could affect his identity out there. And Cielo has kind of realized after over a year of camp that there's still a lot he doesn't know about the world. And honestly, he's not really one to sit down and read up on it. (I'd assume he forced his way through "A Short History of the World" or the camp equivalent or something, but not much else.)
And I'm not going to bother doing a separate post for this! But in celebration of Cielo reaching
15,000 comments
I'm having an Anything Goes meme! Ask me about what Cielo thinks of your characters, why he did something in camp, just how covered the Embryon cabin is with orange paint, ask me for a horrible drabble or do whatever you want! Warning: Drabbles will probably be porny and terrifying because I am a horrible person.