tuesday de: camoflaged scars

[inlovewithwords]

With many thanks to Fi for the idea (which I have stolen wholesale):

What's something that your character does that seems normal but has a heartbreaking explanation?

Comments

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen makes a point of praying for the dead or providing at least some basic form of funerary rite whenever she encounters a human, ghoul, or supermutant corpse, or whenever she kills one in battle. This is partly basic human decency and partly the fact that she is firmly convinced she will die alone in the Wastes somewhere and can only hope that some passing traveler will offer a few final prayers for a dead stranger when her time comes.

Also, Ellen is ace, but got into a low-key romance with one of the Brotherhood scribes, and then proposed to him, because she was raised with the message that procreation is a civic duty and she wanted to make sure she at least had a crack at the prospect before something killed her.

[varadia]

Well, X keeps cats because when she was a kid in the Facility, they made her kill a lot of dogs as training exercises. They never made her kill cats. She also can't keep track of time because as a kid her training regimen was not scheduled for consistency (for her), and she spent most of her time in a windowless cell, so anything over her usual 22-minute mission clock is vague. She hates when people ask her how long it's been for anything. She has no idea! I mean she vaguely gets the difference between a day ago, months ago, and years ago, but like. One year vs 20 = ???? A week ago vs 6 months ago = ????? And her single-touch arm-pat is because at first she was terrified of breaking people if she touched them more or for longer.

Ysalwen's giant facial tattoo is a super-fuck-off to people who were afraid of her and avoided her and whispered about her when she was a kid in the Tower. She was like, fine, if you are afraid of battlemages I am going to WEAR THEIR TATTOO ON MY FACE. YEAH. So. That. Also she is very voluble and friendly and outgoing and kind in part because that's her personality, and in part because that is a great personality to have when you are trying to keep the people around you from wanting to kill you and actually doing it! And Liranan always comes into Milliways (and everywhere else) with Ysalwen because he makes her feel safer in this place that is full of SO MANY HUMANS. (Drunk human nobles killed her mom, it's why drunken humans -- especially ones with nobility markers -- also make her super-uncomfortable and wanting to be elsewhere.)

Sombra's super-cheerful and blasé nature is a lot due to the omnics destroying Dorado and killing a whole bunch of people (including her family) when she was a kid, and then no one came to help in recovery except corporations that made money on the backs of her neighbors' ruined lives. She's not big on emotional attachments, or on genuine emotion these days. Her cheerfulness and friendly helpfulness are coping tools she developed in the orphanage (I mean she was always a cheerful kid but these days she turns it up to eleven on purpose) to get stuff. She's not kidding that anyone can be hacked. You just have to know what they want to see!

[for_everyone]

Hera has a habit of eating very slowly and in very small amounts at a time, stemming from her experiences with food scarcity and at points near-starvation while she was a child. She'll also generally avoid situations where she'd be expected to dance or sing, acting too shy or claiming she's just not good at either. But the truth is she enjoys both, and in particular has ... um, a lovely voice, but she would almost never do either in non-Twi'lek spaces.

At a subconscious level, Kanan keeping his hair in that short ponytail was the closest he could get to the Padawan braid, reflecting his sense that he was always an unfinished apprentice. Even during those times when he was trying to forget as much of that part of his life as possible.

uh in other news our canon came back so






yeah we're handling it well.

[bjornwilde]

I haven't seen it yet and I am so worried.

[for_everyone]

um we will have comments for you when you do get a chance to watch it!

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka fights in a war and kills droids--which could be argued as being sentient--often. She is proud of her fighting skills and is in a command possession. She is fourteen.

Sabine, aside from being another child soldier, is about as trustful of authority as the next teen; maybe less trustful truth be told. Let's just say the Empire took advantage of a naive child and when she tried to speak out, she was exiled for her troubles. There's family mishaps in there as well.

ETA: Also, all that art and graffeti she does? Totally normal right? Not quite. It's her screaming at the Empire that she's still there and will not be silenced.

I'll have to ponder my other pups and come back later. I know at least Danny will have an answer for this.

[bjornwilde]

I'm having trouble finding words for Danny's answer. Best I can come up with is his complete acceptance of anything that isn't harmful to people. At first blush, this seems a Daoist acceptance of events/reality but deeper down it's because he knows nothing is permeant and will change. He is friendly to everyone but doesn't trust that the person will be in his life for very long.

There's also his lack of materialism. Again, it could be a symptom of his time in K'un Lun and the austerity or the Order of the Crane, but I think it's just he doesn't get the value of things having grown up in a very rich family. Things aren't expensive to him because his family could always afford them. This carries over with his current perceptions of cash and how readily he can get more by finding an underground fight or doing some labor.

[ceitfianna]

Cassian always keeps his hands visible in case he has to fire quickly, also to distract and look innocent, because there's always someone out to get you. He cooks and loves cooking because that's all he has left of his planet that he left when he was a child. Also if he's cooking on base then he's showing he cares but he doesn't have to get too close emotionally to anyone since people leave and die.

William's a light sleeper because he's used to listening to see how his brother's breathing.

Sameth feels safest with a sword in his hand because that means he's in the Old Kingdom.

Will S. automatically looks at someone and tries to place their class and what money they might be carrying on them.

Charles uses his telepathy to know how to best carry on a conversation with someone.

I'm not sure about the others at this point.

[cottoncandypink]

Wilford occasionally starts awkward little relationships with people who work under him. He started when he was starting to get his name out there, and wanted to appear somewhat normal, but intimacy and other people terrify him. Now he's at a point where eyes are constantly on him, and things are expected to happen, so he keeps up the illusion in the most typical way he knows how.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

The readiness with which Yamato agrees to help people is partly down to a deeply held belief that how much people like him is intrinsically tied to how useful he can be to them. His abandonment issues combined with him (as someone who's both mixed race and the child of divorcees, both of which are greeted with a pretty significant amount of hostility in early-Noughties Japan) being on one of the lowest societal rung mean that he's constantly aware that people might abandon him if he stops being useful.

Another one for Yamato: He has a very specific harmonica song that he plays a lot during 01 (and a few times in Tri), often to help relax the group. It's a very simple song that he learned when he was, like, three, and he knows other songs -- but it's also the song he played to stop Takeru crying when he was a baby, and it's thusly tied up in a lot of different feelings for him.

For Eden, his very overt reactions of excitement, enthusiasm, or distaste for things are partly the result of him over-acting emotions that he's incapable of feeling: He's not capable of enjoying or getting excited over anything, and he has no idea what the appropriate level of enthusiasm is when feigning those emotions.

[childofrebellion]

I think Cassian shares some of that issue with Yamato since he connected with the Rebellion so young. His entire identity is bound up in what am I doing for the Rebellion. He's getting better at not being as confused by people going I like you for but its hard.

[death_gone_mad]

So it took me a whole day of half thinking about this but oof, it made me realize something horrible about Amascut.

The reason why she lies about herself, the reason why she is almost always someone else and never herself and the reason her own personality has been difficult for me to pin down? She has a major fear of intimacy. Back when she was abandoned on the other end of the universe (and somehow she didn't develop a fear of abandonment; maybe there was already too much awful piled on her) she was left alone with a desperately lonely, hungry, and developmentally stunted elder god who herself was abandoned by her siblings, and even abandoned by her dreams/toys, leaving only nightmares made into reality. And Amascut was like a wonderous dream from another mind and there was no part of Amascut that wasn't exposed, that wasn't played with or tasted. Metaphorically and literally. Because, you know, elder god.

And then, Amascut somehow escapes and makes her way back home, in time to watch her father go up in a mushroom cloud in order to save their tiny part of the world while the rest of her family held her back from stopping him.

She presents facades to the world, because exposing any part of herself is painful.

[chanter1944]

Sariel prefers to be awake and working at night, rather than during local day. She can and does switch shifts if need be, but would really rather take the night shift, given the option. Being abducted from one's quarters, drugged and experimented on during one's local night cycle... will do that.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

If you trace back the reasons for most of the things Bastion does, you'll hit something sad sooner or later, the most obvious one being their friendship with Ganymede; what cemented that bond was that he stopped them from letting their combat programming carry them off on a suicidal murder spree in a major city. That's just canon, I have more!

(I could split hairs about how almost nothing they do is normal for a killer robot, but I'm fairly certain that's not what this DE was going for.)

They tend to indulge in small, whimsical things and put what they're doing on pause to satisfy their curiosity, to the point of possibly coming across as easily distracted. This isn't feigned and it's usually not forced, but it's something they do deliberately to keep themself engaged with the world around them instead of getting mired in thoughts of the past or worries about what could go wrong in the present.

[i_am_your_host]

Emcee often puts other people's needs before his own because he's used to being...well, used. He does genuinely take pleasure in making people happy, especially when he can do it on his own terms, it just comes from that slightly darker place.

Cassidy drinks and does drugs because it distracts him from his bloodlust. He became an addict because as a vampire he needs that constant sensory stimulation, which also ties into keeping his more dangerous addiction from manifesting. He knows that he's a danger to others and doesn't want to hurt anyone if he can help it.