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caligulas_aquarium» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Kiva
Current AGE: 20
Personal JOURNAL:thesecondfinale
Player PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
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Current CHARACTERS: Gin Ichimaru
» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Eridan Ampora
Canon & MEDIUM: Homestuck | Webcomic
Canon PULL-POINT: [A6I3] Ministrife!!!
Character AGE: 13
Character ABILITIES: Any canon abilities that your character may already possess.
Character HISTORY: ok
So basically four kids play this wacky ass video game, which involves getting off of earth before it's blown apart by a shower of meteors directed at it by the game's final boss. While they're playing the game and trying to figure everything out, they're contacted by a group of aliens known as trolls, some trying to help, some trying to hinder, eridan trying to hit on them, etc.
The trolls had already finished their game and succeeded, but a character named Jack Noir who was empowered to high heaven by a glitch in the video game showed up and stopped them from getting their prize, which was to enter the new universe they had created during the course of their game session. At first they believe that the human kids are at fault for their prize having been taken from them, because the universe they had created was the universe the four human kids inhabit, but as it turns out it's birth was ultimately imperfect on account of one half of the frog breeding team(UNIVERSES IN HOMESTUCK ARE GIANT FROGS APPARENLY), Karkat, having rushed the creation of their frog, which ended up giving it cancer in the form of Jack Noir, the dude who tried to kill the trolls before, who was also intent on destroying everything, including the human kids' universe, the kids themselves and the trolls.
So now that we have a bit of background on the world, how integral and vital is Eridan to the story?
Unfortunately, not that much.
For much of the comic, Eridan is played off as a joke character, though not an especially harmless one. He belongs to the second highest caste of his planet's social ladder and, as a seadweller, believes he has to oppress and shun the lower castes, eventually declaring his intent to wipe out all of the landdwellers...somehow. But this ends up being a huge sham, really; he's friends with quite a few landdwelling trolls, such as Karkat and Kanaya. He explains this to his Moirail Feferi as such:
"consort[ing] wwith members of the enemy in a mannerly wway before wwipin them out
evven goin as far as growwin fond a some
its only civvilized"
S- oh, so you wanna know who Feferi is huh? OR WHAT A MOIRAIL IS HUH.
Well okay, to simplify it, Troll culture has four forms of romance, two relating to hate(black) and two related to love(red)(pity as it's known on their planet), with one black and red relationship being platonic and one red and one black relationship being concupiscent. Eridan and Feferi started off as Moirails, the platonic pity one, that sort of acts like best friends who tell each other everything. Oh and the calmer half pacifies the inherently violent half of the relationship so they don't end up destroying entire cities simply out of their sometimes uncontrollable anger, which gets worse the higher up on the social ladder you go, and since Eridan is the second highest spot possible...yeah, he's pretty messed up.
Feferi is another seadwelling troll in the highest spot on the social ladder, an heiress to the throne if she can kill the current empress in combat. Eridan and Feferi are implied to have known each other for a long time and sometime during their pity platonic relationship Eridan's feelings became pity concupiscent feelings and basically he wanted to be matesprits(lovers) with her instead.
So Eridan keeps going on about killing all the landdwellers, which Feferi calls out as bullshit and that it's all a bunch of dramatics he's known for and that he'd probably never kill his friends, and eventually we find out that he only kept playing the dangerous card so they'd stay associated in the hopes one day they could go from moirails(platonic pity) to matesprits. When the trolls finish getting off of their planet after they begin playing the game and their world is ravaged by meteors, he ends up deciding to admit his feelings to her. Unfortunately she does too; that she doesn't want to be moirails anymore cause it turns out babysitting this kid has been stressful and terrible. He gets a bit flustered and upset about this, but remarks that it's okay, because it kind of ties in with his declaration of less platonic feelings to her, only she says she's not interested. At this point he gets *really* upset about it and his emotions kind of fly out of control, so he essentially takes it with all the grace and dignity of a six year old throwing a tantrum.
He tries to talk to Karkat over it, but Karkat is overcome with grief over his friend Sollux having died while entering the medium, Sollux also having been Feferi's server player who got her off of the planet and in her words "saved her life." THIS IS IMPORTANT. So anyway Eridan starts talking to Gamzee, one of Karkat's closer friends, asking where he is. Gamzee tells Eridan about Sollux having died and he instantly realizes what a huge tool he was for thinking his meager emotional bullshit was important compared to Feferi having to deal with Sollux dying.
"my feelins seem petty and meaninless noww
she had better things to wworry about than my ovverwwrought bullshit
like the dead guy wwho savved her"
Of course any chance of emotional growth is thrown out of the window when he goes to Sollux's planet in the game session and confronts Feferi and a newly revived Sollux(they have extra lives, thanks to video game mechanics.) who shortly afterwards duels him, but he's defeated by Sollux's exceptional psychic abilities and they just leave him here after it's all done.
Now that Feferi probably doesn't want to see him after having attacked her friend, Eridan starts to get desperate for company and his loneliness gets to him. He unfortunately also has the social sense of a six year old, and after a series of embarrassing romantic advances on several of the characters in the comic, he ends up alienating himself from most of the trolls(and two of the human kids, even) for being a huge douchebag.
While he's on his own planet in the game session, the land of wrath and angels, he takes out all of his frustration on the angels roaming his planet by slaughtering all of them, which is a bad move since a) the angels were consorts meant to advise, not be killed b) they were fast and angry as shit, so eridan essentially wasted his time killing incredibly powerful enemies for no reward.
Once the game ends poorly with Jack Noir destroying their chances of achieving the ultimate prize, the trolls are transported to the inside of a meteor in a space called the veil, which is when they begin contacting the human kids using the computers inside of the meteor. While they're there, Eridan contacts Rose after he sees her using magical abilities. Eridan has a huge interest in magic and wizards, the guy even collected wizard statues and piles of fake wands on his own planet, but alternian culture considers it fake and dumb, the kind of thing that if you believe in it you'd be ridiculed for it, so he takes this a step too far and even denies the fact he likes it altogether. He asks her to consider teaching his magic in exchange for information on alternian romance.
She blows up his computer in response.
At this stage he goes to the troll who spoke with Rose the most, Kanaya, and bothers her for rose's "magical secrets". So she takes him into the deeper part of the meteor and makes him a fake magic wand, and he buys right into it, thinking he's some kind of amazing science wizard. He contacts one of the other human kids, Jade, and offers to give her his old weapon Ahab's crosshairs, since she uses rifles as her main method of fighting too, and the crosshairs was one of the strongest(implied to be the strongest) weapon of it'd kind. Unfortunately he's overbearing and pushy about it, so she ends up dumping it in the trash. However we then find out that despite the inherent fakeness of Eridan's wand, his actual ability to use what appears to be magic is all too real, because similar to what Rose had done to him, he uses his powers to blow up Jade's computer she was using to talk to him.
Sooo finally he rushes to the computer room in the meteor to confront a bunch of people. He talks with Karkat, mostly about how he was so alone and friendless during the whole game session, and Karkat reminds him it was his fault for being overbearing, aggravating and a general nuisance. He talks to Kanaya about the matriorb, which is the key to reviving the troll race, and tells her that as the prince of hope(his game given title) he should be involved in all events pertaining to hope because it falls under his jurisdiction. He tells her not to hatch the orb until he's ready to come with her, so she reluctantly accepts and waits. Finally, he confronts Sollux and Feferi...and this is where things get messed up.
He tells Feferi that he's decided because their entire situation is hopeless, he's going to go join Jack Noir in a last ditch attempt to not die horribly and wants her to come with him. She tells him that his plan is both crazy and terrible on account of the fact it'd mean betraying all of the other trolls, and that she won't come with him. She then goes on to say that they can't let Eridan leave because it'll mean risking allowing him to lead Jack Noir straight to them, so Feferi and Sollux both decide they need to stop him. Unfortunately, now that his powers gained from being the Prince of Hope have manifested, he easily dispatches Sollux and kills Feferi when they attack him. When Kanaya sees this she seems intent on trying to stop him as well, but caught up in everything that's going on, he suddenly destroys the matriorb, enraging Kanaya, only to kill her as well, then he leaves the computer room so he can leave the meteor and find Jack.
Eventually he reaches the roof of the meteor, only to run into Vriska, another troll who he'd had past dealings with, and the two prepare to fight each other. However Gamzee also shows up, now having gone insane and killed two trolls himself before then, and they prepare themselves to have a showdown against each other. Before they can fight each other however, Kanaya shows up having revived from the dead in the form of a troll vampire, a rainbow drinker. She punches Vriska in the face, kicks Gamzee in the crotch and off of the meteor, then takes Eridan's wand, breaks it in half, then breaks him in half by bifurcating him at the waist with her chainsaw.
Eridan later shows up as one of Vriska's reinforcements called during Vriska and Meenah's ministrife, though they don't actually do any fighting. Instead he complains about the situation, is hit on by his descendent/ancestor(it's weird time shit) Cronus, and then asked out on a date, which Eridan begrudgingly accepts. At this point he'll show up in Exsilium.
Character PERSONALITY:
Eridan's kind of a complex motherfucker...but ultimately it all boils down to being a gigantic prick.
On his homeworld of Alternia, there's a caste system called the hemospectrum, which basss a troll's status and importance on their blood color. Eridan's color is somewhat close to Magenta, which is the second highest blood color on the scale just below the Empress and any potential heiresses. As a result of this, he was raised in a society that told him he was great. Amazing. Entitled to just do whatever he wants. This is definitely something he took on board, as on the surface Eridan is a brash and selfish character who tends to treat people however he wants regardless of how they respond or what they say, one of the main reasons many people dislike him. He even refers to Karkat, one of his closest friends, as an "assblood", essentially calling attention to his low blood color in a derogatory manner, a topic Karkat was exceptionally sensitive about. Even when speaking to people directly he easily falls back on a habit of referring to people in the form of insults, the only person spared from this being Feferi.
While he is capable of being polite or nice, it's a very fragile emotional state that he can easily be thrown out of by the simplest of things; if someone disagrees with him, insults him or even says something that MIGHT indicate something negative about him, he's guaranteed to flip his shit about it. Eridan is paranoid and defensive to a T, assuming that everyone is against him and insulting him most of the time, behind his back or to his face. He's quick to accuse people of doing things designed to belittle or mock him, taking everyone else's side against his and just generally being in opposition to everything he does. As a result of this, he can also be very hard to convince out of a particular way of thinking because he is very set in his ways. A general highblood mindset, one that is promoted and encouraged on Alternia, is that highbloods are always right and should never back down or relent when they decide to do something, so reasoning with him while possible is a very difficult undertaking.
However, Eridan is very much a perfect example of how flawed highblood upbringings are in the sense that, unlike other highbloods who come to realize their culture might not exactly be perfect, Eridan simply can't function too well outside of it. He based his entire worth on how much of a good example of his blood caste that he was; he acted the way he did based off of successful historical figures of his own caste to craft a persona that would make him appear to be exactly what society wanted him to be. According to the narration of the story, he was even a well respected member of the nautical aristocracy back on Alternia, but the moment he lost his status he lost everything. Since the other surviving trolls didn't value highblood mentality as he did, he simply couldn't understand why nobody else liked or respected him the way he was back on Alternia. He found his whole world turned upside down; nobody listened to him or associated with him(his fault), nobody respected him(his fault) and when he attempted to confront someone in a much lower spot on the spectrum in combat(Sollux) he lost. The natural order no longer meant a damn thing, and he didn't know what to do because of it. The only way he could behave is attempt to emulate the achievements that indicate worth on Alternia throughout the entire game session.
First, he tried to fill his quadrants. A quadrant is one of the four forms of relationships Trolls have, and Trolls are required to have both concupiscent quadrants filled by a certain age or they're killed for being incapable of contributing to the gene pool. So he goes on a series of misguided attempts at obtaining a Matesprit(concupiscent love) and Kismesis(concupiscent hate) partner, hitting on a total of eight people(two humans in an entirely different universe) and six trolls, some of them more than once, being rejected by all of them. Considering he's still holding onto the beliefs and ideals that troll society praise, this just acts as a huge blow to his already fragile ego. So what else do trolls do? Well, they conquer planets, and are feared throughout the universe for their incredible prowess at intergalactic warfare. So when Eridan arrives on his planet in their game session, the first thing he does is kill everything on it in order to conquer it, again just like trolls are supposed to do, but this earns him no respect either. At this point, he simply can't fathom why he's so disliked and scorned for his actions. They're things trolls do, they're all trolls, so why is it they look down on him for his behavior?
Yeah, he's really dumb, unfortunately.
So at the peak of his character arc he's faced with the imminent threat of death at the hands of an almost godlike wolf dude and he completely loses it. Eridan slowly falls onto a path of Nihilism over the course of the story but it's only at this point, seeing Jack's power as unstoppable and their demise an inevitability rather than a possibility, that he truly loses all hope. If he approaches Jack and is killed on sight, not even being allowed an opportunity to ask for an allegiance of some sort, does it really matter? Either he waits to die on the Meteor or takes a chance, no matter how small, at surviving. When he's even denied this he snaps, the troubled psyche of a child born with an already unstable mind bearing all of this over time that he simply couldn't handle it and lost it, murdering those closest to him and wiping out his race's only chance at re-population.
You see the thing about Eridan is he really isn't very much like what a good Highblood should be. In response to recognizing his own shortcomings, he crafted a personality that would get him respect on Alternia, but he stuck to it so rigidly that in the end he completely forgot about his own faults and when faced with them had no idea how to react, because as society had been telling him he had none, and he bought into this entirely. He's an emotional timebomb, unable to manage his own feelings and properly moderate them as not to blow up whenever he's stressed or angered, and whenever confronted he simply attacks either verbally or literally in an actual combat scenario. Eridan never backs down and does brash, impulsive things that he was mentally conditioned not to regret, being reckless and dangerous to himself and others at all times. He doesn't let any instance of possible disrespect pass by unchecked because he simply couldn't allow it to happen lest he be thought of as soft, which is exactly why he snaps because of how he reads into things far too much. His paranoia was even fueled by the fact Highblood politics are all about betrayal and backstabbing in order to get to the top, so it was very difficult to actually think of others as trustworthy. In Alternian, the word "friendship" is even synonymous with "enemy". It's really messed up.
But the sad truth is that despite his behavior, Eridan needs company. He needs his friends. He is very much in need of company and his alienation, despite being self-inflicted, was a result of his own lack of self-awareness and upset him quite a bit. His loneliness disturbed him to the extent that he did actively take steps in order to improve his situation, but they didn't help at all and only worked to further drive everyone away. Eridan can be very well meaning and has good intentions...most of the time, but the problem is he decides things for other people he doesn't know too well and thinks it's what they want or need. While he does show some level of awareness on the part of other people, like recognizing Gamzee's belief in things just "working out" wouldn't help Karkat cope with Sollux's death, or that Kanaya's crush on Vriska was a lot redder than she let on, he never offers his help, rather he forces it on them, which is why people never accept because he's overbearing in his attempts.
It's also important to note that despite the traitorous actions of his behavior near the end of his arc, Eridan is very much loyal to his friends. He wouldn't have ever considered actually killing any of the landdwellers had Alternia not been destroyed simply because they were his friends. He even went out of his way to help Feferi feed her lusus, which if he hadn't, would have killed every land dwelling troll on the planet with a vast psychic shockwave. He even admitted it would have been an efficient way of killing off the land dwelling trolls, but that he never considered actually going through with it. He backed off when he felt Kanaya didn't want to enter an Ashen relationship with himself and Vriska, because she aspired to go from Moirails(platonic love) to Matesprits(concupsicent love) with Vriska and that an Ashen(platonic hate) arrangement would be a step backwards, a situation similar to his own with Feferi, and a surprising display of empathy you wouldn't think the kid has.
His defining moment in the story where he murders Feferi and Kanaya is a look into the more disturbing aspects of his psyche. Although he can cope with things for a limited amount of time by himself, ultimately if he takes on too much too soon with noone to help him deal with his rampant feelings, they become twisted and violent. His sadness turned to grief, his loneliness turned to hatred, and eventually it piled on so much that it drove him to an absolute sense of Nihilism. He needs structure in order to properly keep himself occupied, but without it he simply loses focus and explodes on everyone around him.
For all his boasting and idiocy, he was a competent tactician, a remarkable marksman and fairly strong for his age. He had a lot of promise and could have become someone great.
But he didn't.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: When Eridan was here before, he had a wand. It had evolved several times over the course of his time in Exsilium and I had planned for it to become a pair of wings similar to his god tier wings shown in canon, so once he returns he'll re-obtain his wand only for it to morph into a pair of organic wings grafted to his back almost instantly. The wings will act as a conduit for his Hope powers much like his Wand had, only he'll be able to direct it using his hands and fingers, allowing him greater control over his abilities.
Character INVENTORY: Eridan’s sylladex is never shown, but I tend to just have it work as a typical video game inventory system; he can store things into it and withdraw/deposit them whenever he needs to.
Coming into Exsilium, it won't have anything, because being dead tends to make you not really need anything, and his only two possessions his cape and his wand were discarded and snapped respectively.
So all he has is the clothing he's wearing.
» PREVIOUS GAME INFORMATION ( IF APPLICABLE )
Previous GAME(s): Exsilium!
Previous GAME SETTING(s): There's a war going on in future dystopia england and - wait I think you guys know this already.
Previous GAME CR: http://caligulas-aquarium.dreamwidth.org/9707.html His previous CR chart is here, along with everything he went through with them, how well he knows them, etc.
Your character's DEVELOPMENT: Over his year in Exsilium, he didn't actually change that much. Although he did grow a little in the sense it was easier for him to hold a conversation with people without snapping(barely), he's still the same old kid as he was from canon, because it'd take way more than a year for him to change in any notable way.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON: http://exsilium.dreamwidth.org/286937.html
Third PERSON: http://exsiliumlogs.dreamwidth.org/130290.html
http://exsiliumlogs.dreamwidth.org/114054.html
can provide more if necessary!
» ADDITIONAL NOTES
he's coming back with previous memories of his stay here and thats about it...
Player NAME: Kiva
Current AGE: 20
Personal JOURNAL:
thesecondfinalePlayer PLURK:
Current CHARACTERS: Gin Ichimaru
» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Eridan Ampora
Canon & MEDIUM: Homestuck | Webcomic
Canon PULL-POINT: [A6I3] Ministrife!!!
Character AGE: 13
Character ABILITIES: Any canon abilities that your character may already possess.
Character HISTORY: ok
So basically four kids play this wacky ass video game, which involves getting off of earth before it's blown apart by a shower of meteors directed at it by the game's final boss. While they're playing the game and trying to figure everything out, they're contacted by a group of aliens known as trolls, some trying to help, some trying to hinder, eridan trying to hit on them, etc.
The trolls had already finished their game and succeeded, but a character named Jack Noir who was empowered to high heaven by a glitch in the video game showed up and stopped them from getting their prize, which was to enter the new universe they had created during the course of their game session. At first they believe that the human kids are at fault for their prize having been taken from them, because the universe they had created was the universe the four human kids inhabit, but as it turns out it's birth was ultimately imperfect on account of one half of the frog breeding team(UNIVERSES IN HOMESTUCK ARE GIANT FROGS APPARENLY), Karkat, having rushed the creation of their frog, which ended up giving it cancer in the form of Jack Noir, the dude who tried to kill the trolls before, who was also intent on destroying everything, including the human kids' universe, the kids themselves and the trolls.
So now that we have a bit of background on the world, how integral and vital is Eridan to the story?
Unfortunately, not that much.
For much of the comic, Eridan is played off as a joke character, though not an especially harmless one. He belongs to the second highest caste of his planet's social ladder and, as a seadweller, believes he has to oppress and shun the lower castes, eventually declaring his intent to wipe out all of the landdwellers...somehow. But this ends up being a huge sham, really; he's friends with quite a few landdwelling trolls, such as Karkat and Kanaya. He explains this to his Moirail Feferi as such:
"consort[ing] wwith members of the enemy in a mannerly wway before wwipin them out
evven goin as far as growwin fond a some
its only civvilized"
S- oh, so you wanna know who Feferi is huh? OR WHAT A MOIRAIL IS HUH.
Well okay, to simplify it, Troll culture has four forms of romance, two relating to hate(black) and two related to love(red)(pity as it's known on their planet), with one black and red relationship being platonic and one red and one black relationship being concupiscent. Eridan and Feferi started off as Moirails, the platonic pity one, that sort of acts like best friends who tell each other everything. Oh and the calmer half pacifies the inherently violent half of the relationship so they don't end up destroying entire cities simply out of their sometimes uncontrollable anger, which gets worse the higher up on the social ladder you go, and since Eridan is the second highest spot possible...yeah, he's pretty messed up.
Feferi is another seadwelling troll in the highest spot on the social ladder, an heiress to the throne if she can kill the current empress in combat. Eridan and Feferi are implied to have known each other for a long time and sometime during their pity platonic relationship Eridan's feelings became pity concupiscent feelings and basically he wanted to be matesprits(lovers) with her instead.
So Eridan keeps going on about killing all the landdwellers, which Feferi calls out as bullshit and that it's all a bunch of dramatics he's known for and that he'd probably never kill his friends, and eventually we find out that he only kept playing the dangerous card so they'd stay associated in the hopes one day they could go from moirails(platonic pity) to matesprits. When the trolls finish getting off of their planet after they begin playing the game and their world is ravaged by meteors, he ends up deciding to admit his feelings to her. Unfortunately she does too; that she doesn't want to be moirails anymore cause it turns out babysitting this kid has been stressful and terrible. He gets a bit flustered and upset about this, but remarks that it's okay, because it kind of ties in with his declaration of less platonic feelings to her, only she says she's not interested. At this point he gets *really* upset about it and his emotions kind of fly out of control, so he essentially takes it with all the grace and dignity of a six year old throwing a tantrum.
He tries to talk to Karkat over it, but Karkat is overcome with grief over his friend Sollux having died while entering the medium, Sollux also having been Feferi's server player who got her off of the planet and in her words "saved her life." THIS IS IMPORTANT. So anyway Eridan starts talking to Gamzee, one of Karkat's closer friends, asking where he is. Gamzee tells Eridan about Sollux having died and he instantly realizes what a huge tool he was for thinking his meager emotional bullshit was important compared to Feferi having to deal with Sollux dying.
"my feelins seem petty and meaninless noww
she had better things to wworry about than my ovverwwrought bullshit
like the dead guy wwho savved her"
Of course any chance of emotional growth is thrown out of the window when he goes to Sollux's planet in the game session and confronts Feferi and a newly revived Sollux(they have extra lives, thanks to video game mechanics.) who shortly afterwards duels him, but he's defeated by Sollux's exceptional psychic abilities and they just leave him here after it's all done.
Now that Feferi probably doesn't want to see him after having attacked her friend, Eridan starts to get desperate for company and his loneliness gets to him. He unfortunately also has the social sense of a six year old, and after a series of embarrassing romantic advances on several of the characters in the comic, he ends up alienating himself from most of the trolls(and two of the human kids, even) for being a huge douchebag.
While he's on his own planet in the game session, the land of wrath and angels, he takes out all of his frustration on the angels roaming his planet by slaughtering all of them, which is a bad move since a) the angels were consorts meant to advise, not be killed b) they were fast and angry as shit, so eridan essentially wasted his time killing incredibly powerful enemies for no reward.
Once the game ends poorly with Jack Noir destroying their chances of achieving the ultimate prize, the trolls are transported to the inside of a meteor in a space called the veil, which is when they begin contacting the human kids using the computers inside of the meteor. While they're there, Eridan contacts Rose after he sees her using magical abilities. Eridan has a huge interest in magic and wizards, the guy even collected wizard statues and piles of fake wands on his own planet, but alternian culture considers it fake and dumb, the kind of thing that if you believe in it you'd be ridiculed for it, so he takes this a step too far and even denies the fact he likes it altogether. He asks her to consider teaching his magic in exchange for information on alternian romance.
She blows up his computer in response.
At this stage he goes to the troll who spoke with Rose the most, Kanaya, and bothers her for rose's "magical secrets". So she takes him into the deeper part of the meteor and makes him a fake magic wand, and he buys right into it, thinking he's some kind of amazing science wizard. He contacts one of the other human kids, Jade, and offers to give her his old weapon Ahab's crosshairs, since she uses rifles as her main method of fighting too, and the crosshairs was one of the strongest(implied to be the strongest) weapon of it'd kind. Unfortunately he's overbearing and pushy about it, so she ends up dumping it in the trash. However we then find out that despite the inherent fakeness of Eridan's wand, his actual ability to use what appears to be magic is all too real, because similar to what Rose had done to him, he uses his powers to blow up Jade's computer she was using to talk to him.
Sooo finally he rushes to the computer room in the meteor to confront a bunch of people. He talks with Karkat, mostly about how he was so alone and friendless during the whole game session, and Karkat reminds him it was his fault for being overbearing, aggravating and a general nuisance. He talks to Kanaya about the matriorb, which is the key to reviving the troll race, and tells her that as the prince of hope(his game given title) he should be involved in all events pertaining to hope because it falls under his jurisdiction. He tells her not to hatch the orb until he's ready to come with her, so she reluctantly accepts and waits. Finally, he confronts Sollux and Feferi...and this is where things get messed up.
He tells Feferi that he's decided because their entire situation is hopeless, he's going to go join Jack Noir in a last ditch attempt to not die horribly and wants her to come with him. She tells him that his plan is both crazy and terrible on account of the fact it'd mean betraying all of the other trolls, and that she won't come with him. She then goes on to say that they can't let Eridan leave because it'll mean risking allowing him to lead Jack Noir straight to them, so Feferi and Sollux both decide they need to stop him. Unfortunately, now that his powers gained from being the Prince of Hope have manifested, he easily dispatches Sollux and kills Feferi when they attack him. When Kanaya sees this she seems intent on trying to stop him as well, but caught up in everything that's going on, he suddenly destroys the matriorb, enraging Kanaya, only to kill her as well, then he leaves the computer room so he can leave the meteor and find Jack.
Eventually he reaches the roof of the meteor, only to run into Vriska, another troll who he'd had past dealings with, and the two prepare to fight each other. However Gamzee also shows up, now having gone insane and killed two trolls himself before then, and they prepare themselves to have a showdown against each other. Before they can fight each other however, Kanaya shows up having revived from the dead in the form of a troll vampire, a rainbow drinker. She punches Vriska in the face, kicks Gamzee in the crotch and off of the meteor, then takes Eridan's wand, breaks it in half, then breaks him in half by bifurcating him at the waist with her chainsaw.
Eridan later shows up as one of Vriska's reinforcements called during Vriska and Meenah's ministrife, though they don't actually do any fighting. Instead he complains about the situation, is hit on by his descendent/ancestor(it's weird time shit) Cronus, and then asked out on a date, which Eridan begrudgingly accepts. At this point he'll show up in Exsilium.
Character PERSONALITY:
Eridan's kind of a complex motherfucker...but ultimately it all boils down to being a gigantic prick.
On his homeworld of Alternia, there's a caste system called the hemospectrum, which basss a troll's status and importance on their blood color. Eridan's color is somewhat close to Magenta, which is the second highest blood color on the scale just below the Empress and any potential heiresses. As a result of this, he was raised in a society that told him he was great. Amazing. Entitled to just do whatever he wants. This is definitely something he took on board, as on the surface Eridan is a brash and selfish character who tends to treat people however he wants regardless of how they respond or what they say, one of the main reasons many people dislike him. He even refers to Karkat, one of his closest friends, as an "assblood", essentially calling attention to his low blood color in a derogatory manner, a topic Karkat was exceptionally sensitive about. Even when speaking to people directly he easily falls back on a habit of referring to people in the form of insults, the only person spared from this being Feferi.
While he is capable of being polite or nice, it's a very fragile emotional state that he can easily be thrown out of by the simplest of things; if someone disagrees with him, insults him or even says something that MIGHT indicate something negative about him, he's guaranteed to flip his shit about it. Eridan is paranoid and defensive to a T, assuming that everyone is against him and insulting him most of the time, behind his back or to his face. He's quick to accuse people of doing things designed to belittle or mock him, taking everyone else's side against his and just generally being in opposition to everything he does. As a result of this, he can also be very hard to convince out of a particular way of thinking because he is very set in his ways. A general highblood mindset, one that is promoted and encouraged on Alternia, is that highbloods are always right and should never back down or relent when they decide to do something, so reasoning with him while possible is a very difficult undertaking.
However, Eridan is very much a perfect example of how flawed highblood upbringings are in the sense that, unlike other highbloods who come to realize their culture might not exactly be perfect, Eridan simply can't function too well outside of it. He based his entire worth on how much of a good example of his blood caste that he was; he acted the way he did based off of successful historical figures of his own caste to craft a persona that would make him appear to be exactly what society wanted him to be. According to the narration of the story, he was even a well respected member of the nautical aristocracy back on Alternia, but the moment he lost his status he lost everything. Since the other surviving trolls didn't value highblood mentality as he did, he simply couldn't understand why nobody else liked or respected him the way he was back on Alternia. He found his whole world turned upside down; nobody listened to him or associated with him(his fault), nobody respected him(his fault) and when he attempted to confront someone in a much lower spot on the spectrum in combat(Sollux) he lost. The natural order no longer meant a damn thing, and he didn't know what to do because of it. The only way he could behave is attempt to emulate the achievements that indicate worth on Alternia throughout the entire game session.
First, he tried to fill his quadrants. A quadrant is one of the four forms of relationships Trolls have, and Trolls are required to have both concupiscent quadrants filled by a certain age or they're killed for being incapable of contributing to the gene pool. So he goes on a series of misguided attempts at obtaining a Matesprit(concupiscent love) and Kismesis(concupiscent hate) partner, hitting on a total of eight people(two humans in an entirely different universe) and six trolls, some of them more than once, being rejected by all of them. Considering he's still holding onto the beliefs and ideals that troll society praise, this just acts as a huge blow to his already fragile ego. So what else do trolls do? Well, they conquer planets, and are feared throughout the universe for their incredible prowess at intergalactic warfare. So when Eridan arrives on his planet in their game session, the first thing he does is kill everything on it in order to conquer it, again just like trolls are supposed to do, but this earns him no respect either. At this point, he simply can't fathom why he's so disliked and scorned for his actions. They're things trolls do, they're all trolls, so why is it they look down on him for his behavior?
Yeah, he's really dumb, unfortunately.
So at the peak of his character arc he's faced with the imminent threat of death at the hands of an almost godlike wolf dude and he completely loses it. Eridan slowly falls onto a path of Nihilism over the course of the story but it's only at this point, seeing Jack's power as unstoppable and their demise an inevitability rather than a possibility, that he truly loses all hope. If he approaches Jack and is killed on sight, not even being allowed an opportunity to ask for an allegiance of some sort, does it really matter? Either he waits to die on the Meteor or takes a chance, no matter how small, at surviving. When he's even denied this he snaps, the troubled psyche of a child born with an already unstable mind bearing all of this over time that he simply couldn't handle it and lost it, murdering those closest to him and wiping out his race's only chance at re-population.
You see the thing about Eridan is he really isn't very much like what a good Highblood should be. In response to recognizing his own shortcomings, he crafted a personality that would get him respect on Alternia, but he stuck to it so rigidly that in the end he completely forgot about his own faults and when faced with them had no idea how to react, because as society had been telling him he had none, and he bought into this entirely. He's an emotional timebomb, unable to manage his own feelings and properly moderate them as not to blow up whenever he's stressed or angered, and whenever confronted he simply attacks either verbally or literally in an actual combat scenario. Eridan never backs down and does brash, impulsive things that he was mentally conditioned not to regret, being reckless and dangerous to himself and others at all times. He doesn't let any instance of possible disrespect pass by unchecked because he simply couldn't allow it to happen lest he be thought of as soft, which is exactly why he snaps because of how he reads into things far too much. His paranoia was even fueled by the fact Highblood politics are all about betrayal and backstabbing in order to get to the top, so it was very difficult to actually think of others as trustworthy. In Alternian, the word "friendship" is even synonymous with "enemy". It's really messed up.
But the sad truth is that despite his behavior, Eridan needs company. He needs his friends. He is very much in need of company and his alienation, despite being self-inflicted, was a result of his own lack of self-awareness and upset him quite a bit. His loneliness disturbed him to the extent that he did actively take steps in order to improve his situation, but they didn't help at all and only worked to further drive everyone away. Eridan can be very well meaning and has good intentions...most of the time, but the problem is he decides things for other people he doesn't know too well and thinks it's what they want or need. While he does show some level of awareness on the part of other people, like recognizing Gamzee's belief in things just "working out" wouldn't help Karkat cope with Sollux's death, or that Kanaya's crush on Vriska was a lot redder than she let on, he never offers his help, rather he forces it on them, which is why people never accept because he's overbearing in his attempts.
It's also important to note that despite the traitorous actions of his behavior near the end of his arc, Eridan is very much loyal to his friends. He wouldn't have ever considered actually killing any of the landdwellers had Alternia not been destroyed simply because they were his friends. He even went out of his way to help Feferi feed her lusus, which if he hadn't, would have killed every land dwelling troll on the planet with a vast psychic shockwave. He even admitted it would have been an efficient way of killing off the land dwelling trolls, but that he never considered actually going through with it. He backed off when he felt Kanaya didn't want to enter an Ashen relationship with himself and Vriska, because she aspired to go from Moirails(platonic love) to Matesprits(concupsicent love) with Vriska and that an Ashen(platonic hate) arrangement would be a step backwards, a situation similar to his own with Feferi, and a surprising display of empathy you wouldn't think the kid has.
His defining moment in the story where he murders Feferi and Kanaya is a look into the more disturbing aspects of his psyche. Although he can cope with things for a limited amount of time by himself, ultimately if he takes on too much too soon with noone to help him deal with his rampant feelings, they become twisted and violent. His sadness turned to grief, his loneliness turned to hatred, and eventually it piled on so much that it drove him to an absolute sense of Nihilism. He needs structure in order to properly keep himself occupied, but without it he simply loses focus and explodes on everyone around him.
For all his boasting and idiocy, he was a competent tactician, a remarkable marksman and fairly strong for his age. He had a lot of promise and could have become someone great.
But he didn't.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: When Eridan was here before, he had a wand. It had evolved several times over the course of his time in Exsilium and I had planned for it to become a pair of wings similar to his god tier wings shown in canon, so once he returns he'll re-obtain his wand only for it to morph into a pair of organic wings grafted to his back almost instantly. The wings will act as a conduit for his Hope powers much like his Wand had, only he'll be able to direct it using his hands and fingers, allowing him greater control over his abilities.
Character INVENTORY: Eridan’s sylladex is never shown, but I tend to just have it work as a typical video game inventory system; he can store things into it and withdraw/deposit them whenever he needs to.
Coming into Exsilium, it won't have anything, because being dead tends to make you not really need anything, and his only two possessions his cape and his wand were discarded and snapped respectively.
So all he has is the clothing he's wearing.
» PREVIOUS GAME INFORMATION ( IF APPLICABLE )
Previous GAME(s): Exsilium!
Previous GAME SETTING(s): There's a war going on in future dystopia england and - wait I think you guys know this already.
Previous GAME CR: http://caligulas-aquarium.dreamwidth.org/9707.html His previous CR chart is here, along with everything he went through with them, how well he knows them, etc.
Your character's DEVELOPMENT: Over his year in Exsilium, he didn't actually change that much. Although he did grow a little in the sense it was easier for him to hold a conversation with people without snapping(barely), he's still the same old kid as he was from canon, because it'd take way more than a year for him to change in any notable way.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON: http://exsilium.dreamwidth.org/286937.html
Third PERSON: http://exsiliumlogs.dreamwidth.org/130290.html
http://exsiliumlogs.dreamwidth.org/114054.html
can provide more if necessary!
» ADDITIONAL NOTES
he's coming back with previous memories of his stay here and thats about it...
