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synodiporia_ooc2014-01-27 01:49 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-01-27 01:49 pm
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Eridan Ampora (Hemostuck AU) ♒ Homestuck Part 1
NAME: Isabelle
AGE: 24
PLAYER JOURNAL: vibishan
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: shipoftheseus on plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED:
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Eridan Ampora
CANON: Homestuck (Hemostuck AU)
POINT IN CANON: Some time in the half-sweep between Lost Teeth Like White Jewels and With Ghosts Who Wait.
AGE: Almost eight sweeps - so, like 16ish.
APPEARANCE: Eridan’s a humanoid alien – thick grey skin, triple-tined earfins, gills on his torso, sharklike obviously carnivorous incredibly sharp dentition, backward-angled zigzag candy-cane corns, yellow claws and eye sclera, and purple blood and irises. He’s got black hair, usually gelled into a truly
stupidsplendid coif, with a purple streak dyed in the center. Unlike canon Eridan, he’s pretty ragged-looking, scuffed and scarred, with a bullet hole through one fin, and his dress still tends to vain and stylish but secondhand and much-mended. Unlike canon Eridan, he doesn’t wear glasses, even though he’s totally nearsighted. General Look.CANON HISTORY: wiki is here
CANON PERSONALITY: Canon Eridan is one of the most devisive characters in homestuck. He's a lonely, awkward, nerdy kid who covers over his insecurities with flashy dressing and ill-advised braggadachio; he starts off as pompous royalty and completely (understandably) goes to pieces when his world is destroyed, and the system that valued him with it, and his friends and romantic prospects unanimously stop putting up with his shit. He's dramatic, capable of real dedication (as seen in the implied years of working helping Feferi hunt prey for Gl'bgolyb, which protects the landdwellers he ostensibly hates, and even his wrongheaded campaign against the angels, which he pursues with a stalwart, dogged determination in the face of fear and severe difficulty) and occasional sweetness (admitting he was wrong and apologizing to Kanaya in one of the walkaround flashes). He feels like he's important and misunderstood and unappreciated, he wants romance and has no idea how to get it, and he's hurt and angry at being ignored and rejected by his entire peer group at once: all very relatable.
On the flip side, he's actually a pretty terrible person. He's completely bought into his society's prejudices and its celebration of violent conquest, to the point of openly genocidal ambitions, though he doesn't seem to act on these before the game destroys their world, and he is functionally thirteen. He's less the equivalent of a neo-nazi than the very callous reddit-style unsophisticated libertarian asshat who thinks the poor should be left to starve because bootstraps, without any understanding of what that means for actual people, including the people he knows. Still a profound failure of empathy, but not as actively malicious and hateful as we tend to associate with the word 'genocide'. He says he wants to kill all the landdwellers in the world, but they also make up most of his friends. He's like the kid who daydreams about blowing up his school because he's miserable, but never really tried to go through with it - until his world and worldview collapsed around him, and he snapped.
He's oblivious to social cues because he's hideously self-absorbed. He's arrogant, whiny, and entitled to the point of becoming extremely dangerous to the people around him when he doesn't get what he wants. He's petty, stubborn, carelessly destructive, and doesn't think before he acts. He destroys the matriorb - the only hope of rebuilding his wiped out species - attacks the (in his eyes, unworthy low-caste) boyfriend of the girl he has a crush on, and murders her and one of his other friends who tries to stop his rampage. When he gets to his planet in the medium and meets the angels, he launches immediately into a quest to wipe them out, and can't be dissuaded even though they clearly aren't meant to be game opponents.
Eridan in canon is a pathetic, tragic figure: a kid with a lot of potential who buys into and tries to live up to a terrible cultural ideal that encourages the very worst in him; who in fact pretends to be a lot more heartless than he is for the sake of that ideal until that pretending crystallizes into irrevocable actions; who never gets a chance to grow up and grow out of his worst mistakes because he can't adapt to not being on top of the heap, lashes out disastrously, and gets himself killed, to everyone else's vague relief.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: The Hemostuck AU takes the entire anarcho-militant society of canon Alternia and flips it upside down. Instead of the fuscia empress and blue-blooded nobility running down the rainbow of colors to peasant yellows, oranges, and rusts, Hemostuck has a rust-blooded Empress, yellow-green nobility, blue-blooded dockside gangs and rabble, and seadwellers as the scum at the bottom who are feared as wild subtroll monsters but not respected in the slightest. Gl'bgolyb - the small eldritch abomination whose genocidal singing keeps the lowbloods in line - no longer exists.
Instead of being ruled by a squabbling, long-lived, hyperviolent nautical aristocracy, Alternia is ruled by the short-lived, more even-tempered, cooperative, and psionically-powered warm bloods. The society is much more condensed and urban, and is run by merchants and bureaucrats rather than a single brutal capricious dictator, but it's still an expansionist military empire, based on skewed hypercapitalist meritocracy with instead of purely on blood color.
Eggs are laid in huge clutches every ten sweeps (about twenty-one years), leading to discretely segmented generations called cohorts. The first cohort
lives on the home planet, where they are raised by nurturing albino animals called lusii (as in canon) and by carapace servants and a few adults chosen by the reigning bureaucracy (unlike canon). They are expected to build a society, and everything about that society is geared toward getting everyone trained up to join the fleet in space and contribute to the growth of the Empire, and everyone who can't contribute, keep up, or hold their own gets themselves killed before Ascension day. It's a candy-colored libertarian fever dream by way of Neverland and steampunk with a heavy helping of the Red Queen hypothesis.
In this world, a lot of Eridan's core personality is, in fact, exactly the same: he's still got the same boneheaded tenacity in spite of all odds or sense, he's still vain and stylish and melodramatic and a bit femme, he's still an outrageous and kind of terrible flirt, he's still overinvested to an unhealthy degree with the people he cares about, he's still arrogant and brash and horribly awkward and insecure underneath, he still desperately wants to be loved. He's still a horrendous military history nerd. He still doesn't give a single frothy cuttleshit about 99% of the people he meets, and he still has a huge capacity for resentment and absolute fuck-everything burn-the-world violence.
But because he's been stomped on all his life, because he's been at the bottom of a cruel and arbitrary hierarchy instead of the top, he doesn't have the same utterly toxic Nice Guy entitlement that canon Eridan has. Instead of inflating his ego, the messages he's internalized have completely denigrated him, and instead of glorying violence, his society glorifies work, useful contribution (although it is still much more casually and constructively violent than human society). Instead of being self-absorbed, AU Eridan is pretty selfless, in the most basic sense, in having very little sense of self-worth except in terms of how he can make himself useful to other people. His canon selfishness becomes something more noble when it expands to include a few people close to him, for whose protection and prosperity he will absolutely put his neck on the line again and again. Furthermore, although he doesn't give a damn about most people he meets, he's capable of spontaneous empathy and sacrifice on behalf of complete strangers, because he knows what it's like to be helpless and hurt.
His love of fashion is no longer just about showing off, it's about refusing to let the world grind him down, and about proving himself sane, civilized enough to care about being presentable, is a form of self-defense against a world that sees seadwellers as more wild animal than troll. His relentless stubbornness and pride become defiant in the face of degradation rather than a hubristic means of degrading others. He's still a smartass, but he's also learned, through painful necessity, to adapt in ways his canon couterpart didn't. Eridan still isn't great at yielding or picking his battles - except when he does, because he can't fight his whole society and he has to get by.
Another key difference in the Hemostuck universe is that fear and contempt for seadwellers - and their lack of power - has lead to cumulative environmental degradation of the seas, which are toxic from manufacturing runoff, sewage dumping, and in some cases deliberate poisoning, anoxic in huge swathes, and well on their way to ecological collapse. This has the effect of making seadwellers and their animal caretakers much more prone to sickness and madness, which simply reinforces their lack of worth and inhherent danger in the eyes of landdwellers. Consequently, Eridan's lusus/caretaker, seahorsedad, died when he was quite young, probably around 3 or 4 in human terms, leaving him orphaned. He and Feferi (who never had a lusus) ended up colonizing the same shipwreck, and decided to take care of each other.
He and Feferi are moirails, a form of nonsexual troll romance that involves nurturing, calming, and supporting each other, protecting each other, and being a comforting/stabilizing/conciliatory influence. (In canon, Feferi and Eridan begin as moirails but break up because Eridan wants to be matesprits - the sexual form of love - instead, and is an absolute entitled manipulative douchebag about it.) They love each other much more deeply and sincerely than canon, but it's still not very healthy: instead of being mismatched and uncommunicative, they're severely codependent. Because her exceptionally low fuschia blood makes her even more of a target than an ordinary seadweller, Eridan insists that Feferi never come to shore or interact with land-trolls at all, leaving her resentful, lonely, and restless.
Eridan himself goes to shore to sell cuttlefish that Feferi raises, do scutwork, and scape together enough cash to buy what necessities they can't scavenge or build themselves, including sopor, the expensive chemical that helps trolls sleep without constant terrible daymares (they're nocturnal). When he's around ten in human terms, a simple feelance body-dumping job turns into a chaotic mess filled with far too many chases and stabbings, and although terrified, he fervently pretends to be a collected hardboiled badass as hard as he can through the insanity that ensures, then has a small meltdown in Sollux's office when it takes then-apprentice spymaster a worryingly long time to locate a denomination of coinage small enough to give him his promised payment. He ends up hired long-term as an agent, and then archagent of Sollux's network, as well as his kismesis (troll romance beased on hate/rivalry/competition).
His life consists of being bilked and patronized by customs agents when he tries to sell Feferi's wares, getting attacked, assaulted, and humiliated for being a seatroll, performing seriously badass antics when necessary, raising the occasional terrifying flesh-eating zombie because the god of vengeance he only half believes in likes him a lot, and a lot of silly teenage romantic drama.
part 2
He's also considerably stronger than a human of his size. Feferi can just about benchpress a whale, and while he's not in her league, he could probably carry a car if he got a good grip on it. He's fast, agile, and has been getting in and out of serious fights for his life for years. He's used to carrying only a small clam knife, but he's also a good shot with a rifle. He's excellent at sewing thanks to years of mending and adjusting his own clothes, a pretty good carpenter, welder, electronic repairman/troubleshooter, and general handyman due to fixing up their shipwreck of a hive, a good sailor and a decent cook.
Lastly, as a favorite of the God of Light and Rain, if he kills someone by slicing open their abdomen and pulling their guts out, and he really needs it and the stars are right, they'll turn into a revenant: a mindless, fast-moving flesh-hungry zombie oozing corrosive black smoke and killing everyone they can reach until they are literally hacked to pieces.
INVENTORY; One titanium and topaz spade ring, one nickle and abalone diamond ring, assorted other cheap rings, one golden bee pin, one small clam-shucking dagger, two easily concealed switchblades, and one shank made out of a spoon. A well-used pocket sewing kit with two spare buttons. A palmhusk - basically a cheap, sturdy smartphone with some biotechnobabble fibrous elements that he mostly uses for texting.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Hemostuck trolls are Ken dolls instead of tentadick horrors, this is ficverse canon, I'm sure you are delighted to know it.
S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON:
[The taste of his mindvoice is a little bit alien, cool and slippery and indescribably violet, in a way that does and doesn't dovetail perfectly with liquid tenor, warbling velar consonants, and slouch-casual dockside diction. It's colder than usual today, raw like all of them are, filtered to a few people who went hunting with him down Moebius's hallways, a few people he trusts.]
Well if that weren't a lark and a half through the Violet Sister's own flipping drydock dayterror. Some nights I am upright grateful to have a bright god of vengeance and secrets, woulda dedicated the whole heapin horrorshow to her if I knew where a building keeps its guts. And no, you hornless alien wigglers may not share, she don't give a microscopic krillshit aboat any a you, on account of you ain't seadwellers.
[He doesn't really want to talk about it any more than anyone else does - but he's too proud and too tactless not to be contrary as regards precisely that impulse. He is too fucking tired of chunks of his skin belonging to every-glubbin-body as wants to bite off a piece to let this be the thing that makes him curl up and lick his wounds in silence.]
Anyways, we got a bit of proper ocean on the other side a the castle made of air-filled expansible petroleum product sacs, an I need a fuckin swim. Anybody mind watchin my jacket? I ain't gettin that neon-spotted water in it for love nor money, and I damn well aint lettin it vanish neither, it's swag as fuck an I got most of the creepy red bloodstains out.
I'll owe you. A smooch or a song or a bit a sewwin or sparrin, you know I'm good for it.
[Under other circumstances, he might make a crack about being flippin irresistible, on account of how he absofuckinlutely is, but he doesn't have the heart for it tonight. He just wants to feel the cool cleansing tingle of salt in his gills. Next time, folks.]
THIRD PERSON: He never spent much time underwater back on Alternia - on account of the oceans being poisonous oily wrecks, slow sick deathtraps, and he is the sanest seadweller anyone's ever met and keen to keep it that way - but he still thinks in three dimensions plus rather than two, in depth and current, z-axis angles and the edge of an algal bloom's enticing anoxic near-invisible spiral arm reaching to catch the unsuspecting rather than the gravity-bound plain of terrestrial geography.
It takes him a lot less time to get used to the spacial configurations of liminal space than it does to the idea of not seeing Fef or Sol or Kar again for a good long while - he flatly refuses to imagine he might miss Ascension day, no matter what otherworldly forces are screwing him now - or how he's newest neighbors to so many glubbing mammals. He never bothers to try to orient himself to an up, just triangulates where he wants to go vis-a-vis what all he wants to keep a clear view of, and just which kinds of madness he is willing to leave at his back. He flips himself until he's content with where his eyes and fins and feet are facing, slices diagonally through the air with easy intent.
He gravitates to boats, always, no matter what style or era or planet of origin. He's in some kind of hadal-explorer saucer now, all synth-smooth space-age unscratchable hypercarbon, a little teacup shape just large enough to sit in, bobbing along on a magma ocean that is mostly made of bright red and gold silk scarves. He has the observation dome down, and occasionally reaches over the side to scoop out a scarf with a bit of nice embroidery, something Kanaya would have liked. They don't last, but it doesn't matter, as long as he keeps accumulating them, bits of soft pretty comfort.
He's been sleeping dry for a month without his moirail and it is straight up uncanny amazing that he hasn't gutted everyone yet. It helps that nowhere they go seems to have Alternia's pan-rattling ghost problems, but he's still twitching from daymares and aching for the cool thick sluice of sopor on his skin. He gets a flicknife and his needle out, slices up a few of the gold and coppery scarves just to hear that inimitable silk-shred sound, then starts stitching the tatters into a kind of herringbone pattern of glimmering interlocking diamonds. Something Gamzee would call miracles. Something the Premier himself would be proud to tie into a cravat. Something that would make a truly excellent garrote. Eridan loves his faithful little knives but sometimes you need clean and quiet. He makes sure the embroidered patterns match by motif - flowers, perfect, and bronze-on-brass vines not so far from tentacles on the next, the whorls similarly angled - as he lines them up. If it's got to be done - and sooner or later, he reckons, shit is going to go from nonsensical to outright vicious - no reason not to do the thing with style.
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