rpanons | [D] Mwah

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Temporary Change: To reduce the strain on Dreamwidth's servers new entries will go up when a post reaches 3,000. Please refrain from spamming so we can stretch these entries for a little longer. We don't need several threads soliciting photo evidence of body parts, and we already know that we only care about yaoi. Failure to comply will only result in deletions and butthurt. "People may notice site slowdown/cache error pages. We're working on fixing. You can help: finish posts at 3k comments, not 5k or more." - Dreamwidth@Twitter

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

Concerns?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sup anon! Feel free to hit me up any time, no hard feelins.

And I only just remembered this, but I do have a description/permissions post for his powers! It was a pretty recent thing though, since I'd had a similar post on his lj and just neglected transferring it over for a while there, so I hope that clears up any confusion you had about them.

Edited 2012-05-23 08:02 (UTC)

Ah, well, the thing about that post is that it only covers his hope recognition power - when the thread being discussed clearly shows he has at least one more power, to make his hopes into reality. That's what I'm talking about, the lack of information available to a player wanting to find out more about how Cape & Cowl specifically has shaped him. Nothing on his journal even explicitly mentions he's been humanized, for instance, which I think he has been according to a recent thread with Nygma? Let alone what he looks like. I do want to talk with you! Your technical writing skills are excellent. I just don't want to go off for ten paragraphs on how ridiculously wrong him kicking puppies is when it turns out that incident in another country (where he... killed... lots of people?) involved getting mauled by a rabid pack of them.

Well, there's the hope recognition and manipulation, the ability to swap between human and troll, and his canon white science stuff - a lot of those have been in implementation for a little over a year now and are pretty public knowledge in game, so I didn't really think more than the recognition/manipulation needed going into. As for the human thing, when a character in C&C dies, they come back without their powers - I thought it'd be neat to mix it up a little and have him come back stuck in his human form for a while. If there's been any confusion there, I apologize!

As for the killing and the "grimdark" thing, I believe my personal opinion on the character factors pretty heavily into my playstyle - Hussie has said Eridan is downright the most reprehensible character in the entire comic, and I agree with him. Eridan is a selfish boy from a culture that glorifies violence, and still manages to be passably more violent than his peers - "that ought to make some troll somewhere really sad" in reference to his orphaning, "the ocean was my killin cauldron" to Rose, murdering the denizens of his planet with absolutely no provocation, that kind of thing. When a problem is presented to him, he more or less always goes with violence to overcome it (again, the angels, and everything relating to Sollux). That carried into his first year or so in C&C, before his canon update to after murderstuck; he was undisciplined, prone to violence, and difficult to manage for anyone that bothered trying. As such, and effectively being fresh from "murder is a-ok!" troll culture, he continued to try and solve his problems with violence; he dueled with Sollux once, had an unmoirailed Gamzee help him kill him the second time, fought with Kanaya multiple times, and went over to Dolvania (the other country you mentioned) at Eddie's direction and did in fact kill a bunch of people over there (they were rebels trying to overthrow the Dolvanian crown, so you can see where he had some personal investment re: all the rebellions in troll history). He undoubtedly killed a few Crabhammers in the revenge of the nerds plot a while back.

Still, I don't want you to think I consider him just a static killing machine! He's had a good deal of growth in game, and after assassinating Mitchell Hundred in a convoluted and overall pretty shitty attempt to help Eddie out (considering his whole "kill the land dwellers my society rests on the back of!!" plot in canon, whether or not he would've gone through with it aside, he's probably not that good of a planner), he was lectured on how shitty a plan that was, how badly it had fucked Eddie over, and effectively stopped resorting to killing to solve his problems. In fact, there was a good five or six months between Hundred's murder and Karkat's death where Eridan did no killing whatsoever. Sure, he's quick to threaten violence when pressed, but it's more or less just posturing at this point. He's recognized that most humans cow down when he brings up his orphaning or his FLARP career, and milks it for all it's worth.

And I don't mean to sound rude, but there seems to be some confusion over the incident with Karkat; though Eridan did have violent thoughts during their confrontation, as someone who only somewhat recently started resisting the impulse to just murder whatever was causing him problems and move on, the killing was wholly accidental. It was actually the one thing Eridan did not want happening, and afterwards, he did feel pretty bad about the whole thing. He and Karkat may not be jamming feelings and broing around anymore, but right up until Eridan's freakout, he was still the one person willing to pay attention and try and talk sense into him. They still spoke in the City, even if it was combative. They weren't friends, but they weren't exactly enemies either. Eridan's powers are more or less hooked to his emotions, and while he has pretty good control over them, his argument with Karkat in Central Park was pretty emotional, and it ended badly (in fact, Karkat was the one who initially became aggressive - he probably meant nothing by that, but take it as you will). If I remember correctly, Eridan spoke with Death about the entire matter and mentioned that he felt badly about the entire situation.

He also swore off trying to take revenge for his own death, which I really think indicates the opposite of "grimdark murderstuck obsessed," as it's been called. He's effectively cut contact with Kanaya and Gamzee, two of the biggest factors for the dramatic troll drama that has been mentioned before, and has no designs on revenge for his death. He attempted to apologize to Karkat, in his own misguided way, for the former's death, and willingly turned himself in for a crime he admits to committing, however unintentionally. Eridan may be naturally violent (as a highblood troll) and not think things through, but I don't consider him a static character unwilling to learn from his mistakes; he's thirteen, he's a kid, he's going to make mistakes. Eddie's mentorship has effectively taught him ways of conflict resolution that, while not always exactly on the up-and-up, are not blind violence, has been a column of support through the time they've known each other (as have a host of other player characters), and Eridan is maturing for the effort.

...Not, of course, saying he's going to become a perfect flawless angel at some point in the future. From what I've personally taken from canon, Eridan may not by nature be an evil person - I don't believe anyone is born evil - but he is selfish, arrogant, and petty, whether those traits be by nurture or otherwise. He picks fights, he revels in violence, he still considers himself the one individual who gets final say in who gets to feel hope and who doesn't, he's a snotty mean brat and he doesn't feel regret for destroying the matriorb and effectively causing a second troll extinction because it didn't fit his idea for how things should go. But a person can be unsympathetic and cruel and still be likable, still sensible in how he conducts himself with all these things in mind, still successful, and that's what I'm going for. And honestly, the dark stuff isn't really that common at all for our cast - sure, there's angst and drama, but on a day to day basis I play Eridan's douchebaggery as more unintentionally comical than dead serious. Gamzee and Karkat lived in a swamp with a gigantic prissy dragon (who unintentionally gave Karkat his first flash of boob over mcdonald's, come on), Kanaya organized a fashion show, all that - we do plenty of non dramatic things. They just aren't as readily apparent as the drama without some digging.

I don't like drama drama drama all the time, and much as some people might disagree with me, I don't think the rest of my cast does either.

Again, this is all personal interpretation, so if you'd like to discuss your point of view with me and see if we can't reconcile them, I'd be more than happy to! And I don't mean to drown you in particular in tl;dr, anon, but these are issues that have been brought up multiple times. I'd like to clear them up now, if at all possible.

Edited 2012-05-23 20:42 (UTC)

[D] Mwah

no subject

no subject

no subject