Xenoposting 14.6.

[yvannairie]

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

“Van, why don’t you like Eunie/Ashera?” Oh, no, I adore Ashera. She’s like my second favourite Hero. She has some of the best elaborated-on motivations in the cast and I find the place where she’s in during the events of the game incredibly compelling and I think there’s delicious drama to be mined out of that which I would love to see more of.

Ashera, on the page, is very charismatic and competent, motivated and energised by challenge, and who is putting all that energy into trying to find ways to die without needing to kill herself. She is a hedonist hound held back by a nihilism-shaped collar around her neck, stopping her from getting loose, a collar full of bite and scratch marks where she’s spent lifetime after lifetime of trying to get it off, and has exhausted herself to the point where bitterly embracing her powerlessness is the only option left.

Ashera is sort of…. forced to be in the present, in a way she resents, because she wants so much more than that for herself but can’t see a way out. Which is an interesting contrast to Eunie, who stays centered in the present very deliberately. Eunie remains neutral, she remains unresponsive outside of Don’t Touch My Friends, she talks a lot but keeps herself at a safe distance and lets others take the lead unless nobody else steps up.

Ashera is potently positioned to move the potential energy in Eunie, who holds herself back to be a follower, and to either push her towards her own brand of nihilism and disregard for things such as principles and goals and ideals, or alternatively push her towards carpeing that diem a little harder, to really use the power at her disposal to do as she wills.

So I can very easily envision a kind of… Punnet square of plot, based on Ashera’s fantastic potential to be a bad influence on Eunie, whether or not you keep it strictly canon or adopt the more forgiving framing of being released from the cycle entirely, one that from Ashera’s perspective frames Eunie either as another worldly pleasure to chase that is, depending on what genre of Fucked Up her reasoning is, one that she can get but that will never satisfy her, or one that will forever be out of her reach due to the present they both occupy.

And I’m just… not really getting that.