HAHA actually this was more a break on delay from Dragonbear. March repressed like all his emotions related to the traumatic memory he regained, the game, and his feelings towards deco in general because if he acknowledged them, he wasn't sure he'd be able to cope, or not ruin his only friendships with his reaction.
Dragonbear was horrifying and enraging to March on several levels. Regardless of whether or not Dragon would have one day done it on his own, it came about due to an attack on Dragon from an allied team (Shell) and a team he was trying not to be aggressive at, even if he loathes that guy (Yosuke.) They attacked Celeste's guard dog in an attempt to permanently kill it, escaped through Celeste's portrait and left Celeste in the grip of a rampaging Dragon who theoretically might have taken it out on them...
And Celeste couldn't retaliate! Elaine protected Yosuke, the deal protected Mint. They had to lie down and take it, even when it turned out to be a lie, which is an uncomfortably helpless position that made March feel they'd more or less declared themselves easy victims. And he hates that feeling: March would rather fight a losing battle over and over again than bare his throat in the hopes of one day maybe getting some tiny pity-kindness. So he was already feeling inclined towards violence to establish that he (and Celeste) shouldn't be fucked with and not to attack them! Leave us alone!!
Then the game hit! And it was a terrible game for March psychologically, as it placed him in a situation with his worst trauma: Starvation. The only reason he held on as well as he did was he'd regained a mental/physical skill that actually helps him cope with being hungry, and if it had gone another round he would have melted down. They did pretty damn well in the game, with Cardinal and Celeste teaming up for a two-team wipe out, but he still died to a poor choice in the second round.
But worse still than dying in the game, he got to watch Canary not even play the game they'd caused and commit suicide, abandoning them all to it, and Shell being one of the survivors. The fact that Shell survived got his gall in a big way, because it just proved that it doesn't matter what you do if you're in the right color. Even though Mint caused it, and the last one, and Shell caused the flooding, they weren't wiped. March is not a proponent of the existence of 'justice' or 'fairness', but he's perfectly capable of blame and vengeance.
The result of that is he's heavily conflating Decollage with his homeworld, with its gang violence and strict rich/poor divide. He is also starting to give up faith that leaving Decollage /is/ possible, and is starting to believe this was a trap from the start: That they're just here for the portrait's entertainment, and there's no reason to let them leave. Ever. He also received the memory that's unbalanced him psychologically and is a minor clip of the death of someone important to him (who was alive here and what) by his hands while he's in the middle of getting mindraped, and the stress of Celeste's new members.
But he was trying SO HARD not to lash out and hit the people "Responsible" and related to them and basically go War of Terror on some Canaries because he knew if he did he would probably ruin his only friendships with his violence and his rage, but he had no other outlet for it because boy does not know healthy coping measures. So March decided to stop having emotions! He was doing his best to act normally and force down every emotion related to it, reduce it to just another game... Then Hatter decided to try and help fix that repression and basically smashed a hammer into the above issues until he went nuclear.
And then March blinded him and ran off and came home to Lark being gone and is now just being super :( at Shark because Shark is the last person he feels will put up with his existence and essentially. He's assumed he really is incapable of maintaining any friendships or anything because he's a horrible monster and might as well give up and get even crazier and practise his sociopathy until he stops caring.
SHELL would be amazing for teaching Naoki how to people and possibly might help their issues a bit by giving them a dedicated nuke, and she could be hopeless and :| while they :) around here. They would probably teach her NEUTRAL GOOD.
COPPER ROSE would be amazing for teaching Naoki everything horrible and self-destructive and violent and giving her a LAWFUL EVIL moral path.
I am actually not sure I would app one. I have two in mind, but both have huge problems.
One would be Hao Asakura from Shaman King! He's super-powerful, he'd be able to handle Deco's setting and tone a lot better. The problem is... He's given two explicit backstories, one in the series from a character who witnessed it and he confirms it as true and one as a bonus chapter where we see it first-hand, and they contradict each other massively. So it's just a sort of. okay how the fuck do I memloss that.
The other is Gentarou Kisaragi of Kamen Rider Fourze! He's a rare nice dumb guy who wouldn't be broken by Deco's setting, though I'm not sure how much fun he'd be to play in it. The main problem I have here is, he's a Kamen Rider so I'd want to play with him transforming, but... in order to transform he needs. Minimum of five items, maximum of forty-one, and also Friendship. And losing friendship also fucks his ability to transform. Which would be fun to play with once or twice but in a game like Deco it would happen all the time with the high turnover so it'd be hard. (Also I can't icon live-action worth a damn.)
CUSTOM COMMENTS ARE RELATED TO THE JOURNAL YOU'RE ON, NOT THE ONE YOU'RE VIEWING NOW
SO YOU DISABLE YOUR CUSTOM COMMENTS.
also he would pretty much have to end up on a team with neutrality or an alliance with Celeste to prevent March hitting unplayable levels of stress, because he wouldn't be able to attack that team or let Celeste hit them, but Celeste is a team without a policy of "our friends first". So he would destruct on his team very quickly if Julie was on Teal or Lilac or Byzantium or that sort of team. Cardinal, Copper Rose, Sage, etc would be more fine.
If he was memloss, March would deny knowing him at all. Like flat out pretend not to recognize him, no relation. He'd get Celeste to hide their relationship while requesting them not to hit that team. This is because he feels Julie would be tainted with his reputation and take on a lot more damage by being "In the same gang/friends with March" instead of a blank slate. He's already aware that Celeste's rep is overwhelming enough to kill Dormouse's PR, Julie wouldn't stand a chance. He'd live in terror of Julie regaining memories of him that are negative and suddenly hating him, but resign himself to that almost immediately, and getting blamed for Dormouse being in the portrait is just assumed.
March, king of fucking up everything!
Skills loss he wouldn't be able to do the same WHO ARE YOU NOPE DON'T KNOW YOU FUCK OFF (/cry in corner) but he'd be very... @_@ all the time. WHAT IF JULIE IS THE TRAITOR no what if I'm the traitor WHAT IF HIS WISH IS A LIE WHAT DO I DO NOW I BET HE HATES ME AND BLAMES ME FOR DORMOUSE AND NOT WINNING AND I WANT ALICE AND TO GO HOME AND FOR THINGS TO BE ALLRIIIIGHT AND HE'S GOING TO TELL EVERYONE I'M WORTHLESS AND essentially interally self-destruct.
There's a game I was thinking about seeing if someone could help me work out a plausible way to run/what portrait I could use to run it that is basically a HIDEOUSLY AWFUL GAME built in v opposite directions to what's been done for trauma lately, I think - instead of how most traumagames have been death death reveal awful secrets death that I've seen so far anyway, a traumagame built around the idea of "a death of a thousand cuts".
A list of locations on the body, one knife per person, and "partner" teams - either swapped out between each round or kept the same, I haven't decided which would work better - sitting on opposite sides of a containing room, watching each other. The knives in little piles in the middle of the room. The list is like a deck of cards, each round each team member is dealt a part or selection of parts listed in descending value order (again, not sure which), for example "ear 20 pts toe 15 pts hand 10 pts" if the scoring method was what I went with. (I would be using the scoring method OOCly either way, actually.) None of the parts listed will be intended to result in a lethal blow until the last round, when options like heart and stomach and neck get added to the list. The larger the damaged area (or potentially fatal) the less it will be worth. It's not a game built primarily around murder, it's about the buildup of little violences/seeing where the threshold is for people's ragequit button or if they even have one, is it really better for them if they're rewarded for being "less" nasty but more targeted in their application? So I am also thinking of completely leaving the point totals out ICly except at the beginning and end of a round, but dropping enough hints - like, Try not to kill each other this time ..., idk - ICly via the portrait dialogue that attentive characters will pick up on it.
Carrying out an action gets the team whatever the option's point total is, having an action carried out on the team subtracts the value of that option from the team's total. Failing to carry out an action nets a penalty. The penalty applies even if it's because the opposite team resists their action long enough for the round to end, and teams will be allowed to resist when the action is made. They can also simply go over and kill the other team if they like but they will not earn any points for it and unless they also carry out their actions beforehand they will take a penalty for failing to complete their actions if so.
As I see it right now it would be a four round game, probably over a long weekend, so either starting the first round on Thursday with a big finish on Sunday or ... something. The first round has no penalty for refusal/failure, it's just a chance for teams to get a taste of what the game is going to be plus a chance to puzzle over the post-round point total and how that matches what they did in the round. The second round is like - suddenly you itch all over but no points are taken away - so, another chance to clue in to how the game works, maybe. The third round they get hit with whatever option's on their card (or the lowest-point-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total, and the fourth round a randomly-selected teammate of theirs gets hit with whatever option's on the card (or highest-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total.
Scoring would be ... idk. Everyone's point totals at the end would get tallied but I like scores to be more than just "who did the best murderjob" so ... whoever has the highest percentage difference between points earned versus points taken in either direction. In other words if a team loses more points than they earned they win, if they earned more points than they lost, they win. If someone's scores in both give and take categories are equal and they cancel each other out, that's also a win condition. The team who picked the highest-scoring options most often would win too (if either of these options overlaps with the ones above then it goes to the next team down on the list, obviously), the team who picked the lowest-scoring options most often would win too. I would ... like to have more creative options, if only because the appeal of a game like this is in the effect it has on the characters and having these be the win conditions feels a lot like it isn't rewarding the dynamics enough and is ... simply choosing the lazy option. But I'm bad at working out the scoring aspect of this stuff to begin with.
Thoughts ...?
ALSO IS MARCH AN OC OR DOES HE ACTUALLY COME FROM SOMEWHERE
Aather seems pretty cool in his opinion but then you have Sabraather the musebox where the first game was DANGERBEAR and then you have the murdergallerylibrary.
basically he thinks he's like a cosmic plaything and he's not even that wrong when you consider canon
Umm... Well if I was paying more attention/if Sage was less Sage then she would be totally stepping up like this is my jam! And when she gets over herself not being the "better" person she thought she could be ("Violet" was to be nicer/kinder/more Good than "Nunnally" but...) she'll be down for doing stuff? She's uncertain how she feels about a lot of things, but protecting her team is The Issue, one she proooobably considers more important than the morals of whatever allies she might have. The difference between Violet's position and Mint's is that V respects her team more, so she's gonna listen to what they want? And in general they want to be gentle and fluffy, so whipping them into a secret bussing force is less likely? I mean, who knows, but I'm not holding my breath? That said, she is (and always has been) willing to use force as an option to end conflicts, but as softly as they got off in dragon bear she's more likely to end up trying to avoid too close an alliance with other teams (why be dragged into their conflicts?) or just trying to organize against portraits... I dunno, every time I think I'm headed one direction I end up being wrong, so...
So how much does March wanna catch Shells in a dark alley (alternately: is there something you'd like to do with my characters in the future? :)
it's only on march's/in march's journal style? eh whatever
Julie woooould not be memloss because that requires way too much thought about the rather nebulous DW stuff we wrote up a while back :'D HE WOULD DEFINITELY BE SKILL LOSS and he would also think deco is bullshit. But he would settle in decently enough, and then go try to punch March once he learned he was there and then make sure he stayed safe and NO DON'T STAB THAT GOD!! HONORARY BABYSITTER except he'd get fed up a lot and then come back because :T :T :T why are we friends :T!! but no really march he loves you...
THEN HE WOULD GET REALLY FRUSTRATED BY HIS LACK OF SKILLS BECAUSE IT WOULD NOT IN FACT BE ABLE TO PUNCH MARCH. or fix his/their implants. or hack things. THIS IS STUPID!! "this is stupid" would cover a lot of his feelings right up until murder started happening at which point it would be THIS IS REALLY STUPID BECAUSE I CAN'T DEFEND MYSELF, SHIT
I'd play it! Though I"m hopeless at mechanics so don't ask me for help, my idea of mechanics is puns and hey someone else do my maths for me okok.
MARCH IS AN OC he's from my Download Wonderland Cyberpunk Verse 'v' way back when a bunch of my friends designed OCs for the main cast for it, which is why he has castmates to be apped.
HM PROBABLY A MID RANKED TEAM? she's a laid back big sister type, so she'd be good on a team that wants someone who can handle all the trauma games and then make everyone sit down and learn to "Arr" and worship Grenth.
I WOULD LOVE TO DO DARK THINGS IN ALLEYWAYS WITH YOUR CHARACTERS but sob right now I can't because stupid March has lines and attacking Mint and/or breaking the Shell alliance. Without that, he would be attacking and murdering Shell's and dragging their corpses to Mint's doorstep like a psychotic alleycat.
SEE WHAT I BOUGHT YOU THIS IS BECAUSE OF YOU!!!
And Nunnally doesn't really present as a threat that he needs to put down because he might be sad but he's not little disabled girls might slap me, must kill them, sad just yet.
But I would love more CR with them once March is done crying in a corner because Mint can bypass a lot of his threats right now and he needs a friend (to ruin his relationship with immediately.)
NUNALLY (probably) WOULDN'T SLAP HIM I mean depending, I mean she might punch him with a golem but she might just think its better to hug it out who knows (like that would be any better)
Anyway I'd totally be cool with Mint and March as terribuddies; she is really pissed at him right now, but a lot of that is because he's making good points? Sadly(?) she isn't coming out of this emotionally crushed enough to be pro "stab me forever I deserve it" but physical and emotional violence in a relationship never hurt anybody, so...
Umm I wanna do something with the Shell-Celeste alliance--either test it and strengthen it, or break it and be done with it. Because so far Shell has been the shittiest ally and they should be called on it. Buuuut I'd rather keep it? Since Shell being super squishy is neither Mint's nor my style? But either way, I'd like some conflict and resolve...ment...here. I guess that is only tangentially with you but!! Also let's have a fight! It doesn't have to be right now and it can be any sort of battle from formal duel for Shark's hand to rap battle but really at some point Mint will once again want to test their difference in strength. (If it's consensual that isn't breaking any alliance, so!!) Uhh...I dunno! Planning is obviously not my strong suit but in general I wanna do *something* instead of just teasing at CR blue balls so I guess let's see what happens~~
What game are you most looking to play in (or run)?
Mary's game (no spoilers) next game I think is something I really want to play in!
I do also want to fuck with the Shell-Celeste alliance because I know March personally has a massive amount of resentment towards Shell but is holding back because by god does Celeste need the non-aggression. But the whole attacking Dragon and letting them almost get crushed when they knew Celeste had no one else (and would have died if Cardinal hadn't randomly picked them as a potential ally.)
and yes LET'S RUIN THE CR BLUE BALLS AND EVERYTHING it's mostly that I just don't want March to start it because boy starts so much drama and ruining their alliance would wreck his self-esteem even further into the abyss of ~everything I touch~
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