Aerta Ferham of Lacerta (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thevineintervention) wrote2012-10-07 07:49 am
thevineintervention) wrote2012-10-07 07:49 am
WERE ESSAY WERE ESSAY
IMMA BLORT ALL MY FEELINGS IN HERE AND NOT EDIT OR NUTHIN
OK BACKGROUND THAT I WILL TRY TO SUM UP esp because for folks that don't know Sabra at all. (Aerta is from the history of the world that the RP was set in, but was not really a character in the game herself.) She's from a country full of hedonist and hybrids. The story there is that everyone was banging gods so you have people who are a little bit tree or a little bit bird or a little bit river that kind of thing. She showed great promise as a healer and her brother showed great promise as a doctor from a young age, but their mom was dyyyyying so they tried to make a deal with some sketch high-up gods to save her but wound up getting cursed and she died anyway.
Aerta's curse was that her powers were ramped up to miraculous levels but she took a big ol hit to the free will and was basically a tool of Kolotha the Weaver, who is the goddess of fate. It wasn't like she was a doll with no feelings! Quite the contrary! But essentially she had a huge amount of power that she always had to play Mother May I with. Sometimes she was ordered to save hideous people. Far more often she was simply not allowed to save good, decent people. Sometimes she wasn't allowed to save the people she loved most. In these cases, it wasn't just that her powers wouldn't work, it was that her will was over-ridden. Also then the fucking world ended and everyone went to live in caves and it was awful and eventually she was eaten by the fucked up undying will of her planet and spent like a bajillion years in unending horror, while her brother was in a DIFFERNT horror and sometimes the would still share dreams and mentally torture each other by spreading the trauma around. IDK my bff Sabra.
Which, gaw. All of this sounds like a long list of why she should be misserable and trauma'd forever but actually she's kinda not! Like it's a backstory that makes her very adept at dealing with bullshit and circumstances where she cant have what she wants. She's used to not having what she wants! That's her default operating conditions! She's very very good at figuring out what she's allowed to have (by circumstances and divine authority) and dealing in those terms. Can't have your fiance, can flirt with every boy you meet. Can't always have free will, but hey the drugs are pretty good! Find out all the gods you trusted and believed in are short-sighted dicks that used humanity as pawns . . . eeeeeh that one still kind of applies I guess.
That all being said! There was one thing in Thusia that she just. Couldn't. Deal with. And that was that the world/forest itself disliked her. Being a hippie dippy mary sue from magical forest lands, she was used to herself as an extension of her environment and vice-versa. Feeling it all burned away from her by their dying star was fuckawful enough, but then being revived in a place where she was anathema to the natural world was just simply too much to bear. To be honest, she would have shacked up very willingly with the first nature god to make the offer, but none did. She even tried flirting with other priesthoods and gods to see if they could offer her something anything to address this emptiness. And Ygin was the first one to do so. :')
Now, as a side note, the way weredom works is not like. Teen Wolf style werewolves where it's your ~true self~ and you need to control your ~true form~ and sometimes you turn into a lizard but only if you're a huge bitch. This is rather something inside you that you fear, growing and feeding off your fears into its own entity. When Aerta had Gil and Chrys take down the dragon, she thought "Oh it's a fearsome thing." She didn't understand the situation really. But Aerta doesn't fear beasts or monsters. She never has. Oh, they can kill you, sure! And that's good to avoid. But something is going to kill her someday. That's p much a given.
What she fears is hope and power. Just dealing with having real actual total free will in Thusia is hard enough. She's played at having the will to even be picky about who she heals but no :') nope. Can't realy bring herself to turn down a single person no matter how much of a dick they are. (And when Gilgamesh is like. Third in line for ungreatful dickbags, you know there's been some shit.) But a dragon. A dragon doesn't give a fuck about your fate or greater order or balance or shit. It is wrathful, and greedy and short-sighted and so, so protective of it's things. It's not interested in holding your fucking head and giving you a sad smile and comforting you, it's going to go eat whatever the fuck made you sad because fuck your shit I'm a dragon. It's all those feelings that would have been healthy to have in reasonable doses, but that she was denied her whole life.
And it, at least in this stage of weredom, is not there to help her grow and accept herself and learn to be a better person. It's there to be a fucking dragon. Frankly, it's not self aware yet to have a good sense of her, but when it does it will probably think that she's a fairly useless half-wit pussy. This is not her Shadow.
SO OK THIS BRINGS US I GUESS TO THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND POOR CHOICES
(Oh, also as another note. The goddess who mindfucked her into submission, was Ptou's mom. She does not bear any particular grudge against him, but otoh, part of the mindfuck was that she wasn't capable of bearing a grudge against the gods. So. :'D)
So when she's healing Ptou here and she finds out it's Chrys, and that they are going to murder Chrys her instict isn't "quick turn into a dragon and save him." That would have required some... belief that she was capable of it. Some iota of hope or agency, which she just wasn't able to muster. If she had, she would have stayed in phase 1 and her hybrid from and been well. More-or-less in control. She at least would have set off to the woods and probably even held it together when Chrys really was dead.
But that's not the reaction she had! When she knew what was happening, her reaction was to fall on old habits and just shut her feelings down. This is how it is. Of course this is how it is. Good people get taken and there is no rhyme or reason or doing anything about it. Don't want to change things. Don't hope for a better outcome. Be dignified, be polite, do your job as a healer. So her words to Tempest, those were honestly her feelings! She was trying to pass on her warm regards to Ptou while Chrys got murdered in revenge because she didn't think she was capable of anything else.
However! In that vacuum where her feelings should be was an excellent place for that dragon to have some fucking feelings of it's own. In denying her own self, she gave that other self growing inside her free reign to take over. It hadn't been Aerta's plan to raise a hand to anyone! In fact, it was a very intentional and conscious choice not to fight that made her go berserk.
Needless to say she has no idea about any of this at all, and. Doesn't really even remotely understand how the dragon could have come out. How? That wouldn't be what I want! I would rather the violence have stopped! That couldn't have been me!
And if she's going to make it to phase three, she's going to need to grow a fucking backbone. We'll see how that goes!
I NOW OPEN THE FLOOR TO QUESTION MEME tho I am working so I'll be slow and also you are not required to read that hot mess up there to drop in a "do u liek me"
OK BACKGROUND THAT I WILL TRY TO SUM UP esp because for folks that don't know Sabra at all. (Aerta is from the history of the world that the RP was set in, but was not really a character in the game herself.) She's from a country full of hedonist and hybrids. The story there is that everyone was banging gods so you have people who are a little bit tree or a little bit bird or a little bit river that kind of thing. She showed great promise as a healer and her brother showed great promise as a doctor from a young age, but their mom was dyyyyying so they tried to make a deal with some sketch high-up gods to save her but wound up getting cursed and she died anyway.
Aerta's curse was that her powers were ramped up to miraculous levels but she took a big ol hit to the free will and was basically a tool of Kolotha the Weaver, who is the goddess of fate. It wasn't like she was a doll with no feelings! Quite the contrary! But essentially she had a huge amount of power that she always had to play Mother May I with. Sometimes she was ordered to save hideous people. Far more often she was simply not allowed to save good, decent people. Sometimes she wasn't allowed to save the people she loved most. In these cases, it wasn't just that her powers wouldn't work, it was that her will was over-ridden. Also then the fucking world ended and everyone went to live in caves and it was awful and eventually she was eaten by the fucked up undying will of her planet and spent like a bajillion years in unending horror, while her brother was in a DIFFERNT horror and sometimes the would still share dreams and mentally torture each other by spreading the trauma around. IDK my bff Sabra.
Which, gaw. All of this sounds like a long list of why she should be misserable and trauma'd forever but actually she's kinda not! Like it's a backstory that makes her very adept at dealing with bullshit and circumstances where she cant have what she wants. She's used to not having what she wants! That's her default operating conditions! She's very very good at figuring out what she's allowed to have (by circumstances and divine authority) and dealing in those terms. Can't have your fiance, can flirt with every boy you meet. Can't always have free will, but hey the drugs are pretty good! Find out all the gods you trusted and believed in are short-sighted dicks that used humanity as pawns . . . eeeeeh that one still kind of applies I guess.
That all being said! There was one thing in Thusia that she just. Couldn't. Deal with. And that was that the world/forest itself disliked her. Being a hippie dippy mary sue from magical forest lands, she was used to herself as an extension of her environment and vice-versa. Feeling it all burned away from her by their dying star was fuckawful enough, but then being revived in a place where she was anathema to the natural world was just simply too much to bear. To be honest, she would have shacked up very willingly with the first nature god to make the offer, but none did. She even tried flirting with other priesthoods and gods to see if they could offer her something anything to address this emptiness. And Ygin was the first one to do so. :')
Now, as a side note, the way weredom works is not like. Teen Wolf style werewolves where it's your ~true self~ and you need to control your ~true form~ and sometimes you turn into a lizard but only if you're a huge bitch. This is rather something inside you that you fear, growing and feeding off your fears into its own entity. When Aerta had Gil and Chrys take down the dragon, she thought "Oh it's a fearsome thing." She didn't understand the situation really. But Aerta doesn't fear beasts or monsters. She never has. Oh, they can kill you, sure! And that's good to avoid. But something is going to kill her someday. That's p much a given.
What she fears is hope and power. Just dealing with having real actual total free will in Thusia is hard enough. She's played at having the will to even be picky about who she heals but no :') nope. Can't realy bring herself to turn down a single person no matter how much of a dick they are. (And when Gilgamesh is like. Third in line for ungreatful dickbags, you know there's been some shit.) But a dragon. A dragon doesn't give a fuck about your fate or greater order or balance or shit. It is wrathful, and greedy and short-sighted and so, so protective of it's things. It's not interested in holding your fucking head and giving you a sad smile and comforting you, it's going to go eat whatever the fuck made you sad because fuck your shit I'm a dragon. It's all those feelings that would have been healthy to have in reasonable doses, but that she was denied her whole life.
And it, at least in this stage of weredom, is not there to help her grow and accept herself and learn to be a better person. It's there to be a fucking dragon. Frankly, it's not self aware yet to have a good sense of her, but when it does it will probably think that she's a fairly useless half-wit pussy. This is not her Shadow.
SO OK THIS BRINGS US I GUESS TO THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND POOR CHOICES
(Oh, also as another note. The goddess who mindfucked her into submission, was Ptou's mom. She does not bear any particular grudge against him, but otoh, part of the mindfuck was that she wasn't capable of bearing a grudge against the gods. So. :'D)
So when she's healing Ptou here and she finds out it's Chrys, and that they are going to murder Chrys her instict isn't "quick turn into a dragon and save him." That would have required some... belief that she was capable of it. Some iota of hope or agency, which she just wasn't able to muster. If she had, she would have stayed in phase 1 and her hybrid from and been well. More-or-less in control. She at least would have set off to the woods and probably even held it together when Chrys really was dead.
But that's not the reaction she had! When she knew what was happening, her reaction was to fall on old habits and just shut her feelings down. This is how it is. Of course this is how it is. Good people get taken and there is no rhyme or reason or doing anything about it. Don't want to change things. Don't hope for a better outcome. Be dignified, be polite, do your job as a healer. So her words to Tempest, those were honestly her feelings! She was trying to pass on her warm regards to Ptou while Chrys got murdered in revenge because she didn't think she was capable of anything else.
However! In that vacuum where her feelings should be was an excellent place for that dragon to have some fucking feelings of it's own. In denying her own self, she gave that other self growing inside her free reign to take over. It hadn't been Aerta's plan to raise a hand to anyone! In fact, it was a very intentional and conscious choice not to fight that made her go berserk.
Needless to say she has no idea about any of this at all, and. Doesn't really even remotely understand how the dragon could have come out. How? That wouldn't be what I want! I would rather the violence have stopped! That couldn't have been me!
And if she's going to make it to phase three, she's going to need to grow a fucking backbone. We'll see how that goes!
I NOW OPEN THE FLOOR TO QUESTION MEME tho I am working so I'll be slow and also you are not required to read that hot mess up there to drop in a "do u liek me"