Emergency Canadian DE - Happy 4th of July!

[oldmancreed]

I have not asked permission to do this, so if I'm stepping on toes, please accept my apology in advance and feel free to delete this post!

Does your character feel like an outsider in their world? If so, where do they think they belong and how do they deal with not feeling accepted? If they don't, where do they fit in and how do they feel about that? Do they wish they didn't?

Comments

[iprotectyou]

Baze absolutely was not an outsider in Jedha, and he's practically an insider in Milliways, tending happy hours and acting as a member of Security. He's pleased with his lot.

Autor has always been an outsider in his world. He dealt with not being accepted by being abrasive and smug, which didn't much help him. Oddly, going to war helped with that, as he felt accepted by his brothers-in-arms. Milliways helped, too, especially Rae.

[exiled_heir_of_the_eighth]

(Oh, good one! Hard, but definitely good.)

Sahaal's definitely an outsider in his universe. Between his personal ten thousand year time skip, belonging to a faction liked by very few people and all but hated by much of that same faction, he doesn't really have many connections back in the 42nd Millennium. In fact, he feels more at home in Milliways than anywhere else.

Dealing with not being accepted for him is easy - he doesn't care. He feels that his own interpretation of his Legion's tactics and philosophy is correct, and he doesn't see any point in trying to placate others. If they don't want him, he doesn't want them.

[sdelmonte]

Poirot lived in another country the last 30 or so years of his life. So I would say he lived as an outsider, grappling with the language and the customs and even the religion. It was never a big problem, as he was accepted by many, but he never forgot his roots. (And he never stopped being annoyed when people called him French instead of Belgian.)

Swamp Thing is a swamp thing. He's practically the definition of outsides, no longer human and barely welcome by the Parliament of Trees.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: Definitely doesn't feel like an outsider. Sure, he's a little different, but he's part of his world and he loves it.

Lois: Yes and no, depends on the situation, really. But being an Army brat and always moving and never really getting a chance to settle and make friends has definitely kind of forced her to the outside...

Evelyn: Always. She's a mage, even if she's someplace she belongs locally, it's Thedas, she's never comfortable.

R2: Naw, he doesn't feel much like an outsider.

Anakin: NOPE HE IS NOT AN OUTSIDER AT ALL SEE HE KNOWS HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD AND HE IS A JEDI KNIGHT AND THE ORDER ACCEPTS HIM AND EVERYONE LIKES THE JEDI SO EVERYTHING IS FINE okay yeah no anakin doesn't fit in at all and it's going to be what gets used against him and like the entire galaxy so
Vader: what does he care

Tavi: He belongs with his family and friends, however occasionally eclectic they may be. To be honest, Tavi still doesn't always feel entirely like he fits in, just because after years of not--being furyless and all--he looks at things from a different perspective. But he's First Lord now, and with all the furycrafting power he never even dared dream of (but knew in his bones he should have), and he's a war hero... I don't know. He also knows being First Lord isn't exactly 'fitting in' with anything. He's not an outsider anymore, he knows that, but he doesn't think quite like other Alerans, much less Canim or Marat or Icemen, and he knows that too. But he's at peace with himself and his place now, and also has an Agenda to Fix the World so he's not really going to sit around thinking about questions like this, he has more productive things to do.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

They sure do feel like an outsider, to the point where being accepted in Milliways feels strange and disorienting. Their world has no known precedent for a Bastion unit who isn't indiscriminately murderous towards humans, although I feel like the mass termination order that went out on the surviving ones after humanity won the war makes this awfully self-reinforcing. There's no chance of reforming them if they're all dead.

Clearly there are still some Bastion units around after the war since Null Sector fields a few of them twenty-something years later in Uprising, but A, Null Sector is a violent omnic supremacist group so that wouldn't exactly change anyone's preconceptions, B, those are upgraded B73 models rather than E54s like Bastion (we don't know how those models are different, but canon has at least been consistent about not depicting any other E54s operating post-war), and C, canon doesn't specify whether Null Sector recruited the B73-NS Bastions or built them.

They don't feel like they belong anywhere. They don't expect to be welcomed even in places that accept humanoid, civilian omnics with open arms, and there aren't actually very many of those in their world. I think in the future they'll feel like they belong in Overwatch at least, because Overwatch is full of strange people who don't fit in anywhere else and aren't really any less deadly than Bastion is (although somewhat more disarmable), but first they have to get past the feeling that they're too dangerous to be trusted as much as they are and Overwatch made a mistake by placing that trust in them.

Milliways is another place where I could see them coming to feel less isolated and more included, for similar reasons. Nonhumans, patrons with bloody pasts, and patrons with a vast inherent capacity for destruction - many of them a lot more powerful than a mere combat droid - are all pretty common in the bar, and longtime patrons are used to that sort of company even if they themselves are ordinary humans.