HMD

[songoftimeandtimeagain]

Concrit? Compliments? Complaints? Lay 'em on me.

Comments

[secretsock]

Hi. I saw your plotting post for the Pitchforks and Salt event and I have to admit that I'm a little concerned. Even considering the reasons you laid out, having him actively try and get other monsters killed seems wildly OOC for Link. I understand that Link has a strong sense of justice and would understand if he simply refused to take part and hid away rather than helping people escape, but this seems like an enormous over-reaction. Surely at his canon point, after MM (where he literally comes up against a foe being forced to do terrible things by a god), he wouldn't be so unsympathetic as to take part in capturing and killing others?

[songoftimeandtimeagain]

Thanks for coming to me about that, I've had some doubts about how I'm handling him in this plot too, but his super extreme reaction is a) the product of a long build of things that have happened to him here and b) the event where he is going to realize that he is very in the wrong during the fallout. Let me lay out how I see his line of thinking working, and if that doesn't make sense to you I'll try my best to downplay/rework it a bit.

So let's start off with his infamous network post. As soon as he learned (first hand) that monsters come back when killed he knew the better option would be to eat monsters rather than humans. Preferably monsters who had no qualms about eating humans, (flesh eaters that aren't eating already dead people for example). For a bit he tried to do that but wasn't particularly successful at it. As much as he's a competent fighter, faeries aren't exactly the most combative monster in game, and he had a lot of trouble catching people in the act. So his first instinct to face the worst people head on didn't bear much fruit. So by now he feels ineffective, and without a guide telling him how to proceed he's confused and frustrated. He knows what he's doing isn't working, but sitting back and doing nothing isn't a choice he can live with.

Then there was the Rip it Out/Tear it Down event. During the first half, Link spent a lot of time talking to and agreeing with the Rotan extremists who wanted this to become mandatory for all monsters. During the second half Link saw bad things going down at the camp and rushed there intending to try and defend it. He, like everyone else was whipped into a frenzy by the fog and he wound up maiming/killing/eating several people. After the initial event, he stayed in the ruins, alternating between being in control and trying to get as far away from the towns as possible and also vomiting up the people meat he'd eaten, and going feral and snacking on corpses and heading towards town. He had to eventually be restrained and killed by a friend to prevent him from hurting anybody else. This produced a massive shift in his ideology. Before it was 'if you're a good person you'll be doing your best to minimize harm and so you don't pose a danger' now it was 'even good people pose a significant danger'. This either means that everybody was right and the murder is 100% inevitable and so nobody is really at fault, or it means that, regardless of intention, everybody is equally at fault. He hasn't really known what to do about this since then, but it definitely contributed to his choice to keep his accidental alliance to the fog god so that he had access to food. (Not super relevant to his ultimate 'assisting the hunters' plan, but just to be clear the other factor was that Hans also urged Link not to break his alliance, and Link is pretty susceptible to influence from people he trusts.)

Finally Link doesn't pay attention to the network so he doesn't know of the gloating and torture threats. So what he sees in the early part of the event he is going to interpret as Rotans using anti monster weapons to fight back against monsters. He won't even see them killing monsters, rather just taking them away, so he doesn't know about the pit. So with his newly skewed ideas that 'everybody is a danger' leading Rotan hunters who he agreed with during the Rip it Out event to monsters is a rash decision he makes. Ultimately he has plans to turn himself in to them once they've gotten everybody else, since he knows he's just as bad as any other monster at this point. As the event progresses I've got several people lined up to tell Link how shitty and fucked up and hypocritical this is, and by the end of the event he is going to be 100% regretting his actions and also no longer trusting his own decisions regarding what he should do.

There's also clearly a degree to which some of the OOC-ness comes from my inadequacy as a player and the difficulties of organizing his actions with other players. Ideally, I would love for him to be leading the hunters only to monsters he knows and already dislikes, Nos, Mugen, Stan, and Kaworu are the four currently he knows about. Unfortunately Kaworu dropped do to irl circumstances for the mun, and Nos, Stan, and Mugen already have plans for how/when they get captured. I wish I had more negative cr already in place for Link, but sadly this month has hit me pretty hard irl as well. What I may very well wind up doing is handwaving exactly who he gets captured, but limiting it to a few unspecified individuals that Link has seen killing civilians at some point, and then proceeding with the fallout from there.

[secretsock]

I think you're missing my point. I can understand the thought process that would lead a character to do this in theory and it's an interesting idea to explore, but it's not one that works with Link without being fundamentally OOC.

Your explanation suggests that Link is trying to punish monsters who have hurt the Rotans, but he's agreeing to work with people who are indiscriminately attacking everyone, regardless of their crimes. Yes, he doesn't know where monsters are being taken, but he can still see them taking any monster they find, even if they obviously only arrived in the last wave and therefore won't even have fed yet (including characters Link already has CR with, like Steven). Even a minute of conversation or observation would reveal that, though he cares, they don't. It doesn't matter if he's not personally taking part in capturing those particular monsters, he's willingly aligning himself with people who do.

Again, for another character, this would be fine. But this the kind of thing a holier-than-thou, zealous character might do, one with no concern for others at all and without any hope for the future. In your app you point out that, even though all his hard work is consistently undermined in MM, Link keeps trying to save as many people as possible- he has to compromise, but he never loses sight of the greater good of saving Termina. I don't understand how Link of all characters could think that what he's doing in-game is in any way preferable or helpful. What you're describing is so profoundly fatalistic, self-righteous and mean-spirited (three words I would never associated with Link, no matter how much development he's gone through) that I question whether the character you're playing now really bears any resemblance to Link anymore.

[songoftimeandtimeagain]

Hmm, okay. I've been working on the fundamental principle that Link is thinking of saving as many people as possible prioritizes people who don't fundamentally need to feed on others, but looking back over it I've got some jumps in his logic that you're right in saying he wouldn't make.

I joined Ryslig primarily because I was interested in exploring the tensions between Link's fairly black and white video game morality with more complicated situations, as well as figuring out exactly how and where his morality would actually just start falling apart. I got overzealous with that it seems, and I need to take a step back. Thanks for bringing this up, I'm gonna talk it over with my CR and see how we can adjust current plans to something more fitting.